Louisa Reynolds /

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In 1979, Juan Pablo Arévalo dug a well in his land, unaware 
of the fact that he was digging his own grave. His son, Saúl 
Arévalo, 54, takes off his black rimmed spectacles, pushes 
them back to the nape of his neck and points to the place 
where the Arévalo well was located. Much to the community’s 
disappointment, water was never found there. In 1994, 
Fifteen years after the well was built, an Argentinean forensic 
anthropology team extracted one by one, from that same 
well, the remains of 162 inhabitants of Dos Erres, including 
Juan Pablo Arévalo and two of his sons.

Today, Dos Erres, a village in the municipality of Las Cruces, 
in Petén, Guatemala’s Northernmost department, where 
one of the civil war’s most brutal massacres occurred, is a 
vast grassland bordered by barbed wire, where cattle graze 
peacefully. The corn, bean, pineapple and peanut plantations 
have disappeared and at the spot where the path leading to 
the village used to be, there is now a white metallic gate that 
bears the words “Finca Los Conacastes. Private Property”.

The well where the bodies of Juan Pablo Arévalo, his family 
members, friends and neighbors were thrown into by Kaibil 
soldiers no longer exists. In its place, there are two tiny white 
crosses, placed discreetly in order to avoid being noticed 
and removed by the Mendoza family, which now owns these 
lands and is known as one of Guatemala’s most powerful 
drug clans. 

But despite the changes that Dos Erres has undergone over 
the years, Saúl remembers well the geography of the village