59

 / The long road to justice

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Ramiro was never included in family portraits and during 
birthday parties he was never allowed to join in and had to 
hold the piñata, while the other children grabbed the sweets. 
Ramiro got the leftovers, the hardest chores, the taunting 
and humiliating remarks, so that he would never forget that 
he was not part of the family. As he always arrived at school 
exhausted, he found it hard to pay attention in class and was 
a shy and taciturn pupil with hardly any friends.

His adoptive father was a heavy drinker and habitually 
downed glass after glass of aguardiente or “fiery water”, a 
strong alcoholic beverage obtained from the fermentation 
and distillation of sugar sweet musts. But no matter how 
much he drank he would never manage to erase from his 
mind the terrible memories of El Infierno nor the grueling 
tests that he had to endure in order to win the red beret 
worn by Kaibil soldiers nor the infants that he had thrown 
into well and whose faces he saw every time he looked at his 
own daughter. Those memories would haunt him years after 
leaving the army.   

López Alonso would return home, angry and drunk, and 
would lashed out against the boy with all his might when his 
wife complained that he had failed to do the tasks that he 
had been assigned. One day, when Ramiro was fourteen, he 
began to punch him and beat him with his rifle butt. He then 
grabbed a machete and cut off the tips of the fingers on his 
right hand.  

The boy cried out in pain, ran out of the house and collapsed, 
unconscious. The neighbors shook their heads and said: “He 
finally killed the boy”. Had it not been for a neighbor who 
took pity on him and took him to the nearest hospital, he 
probably would have been left there to bleed to death.