61

 / The long road to justice

Pz

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eyes, just as the guarumo branch had blossomed into a 
strong, healthy tree. 

Ramiro studied each of their faces trying in vain to 
remember them. Then, suddenly, a long, dark-skinned face 
took him back to the home where he had grown up until the 
age of five. “Uncle, uncle! Do you remember me?,” he cried, 
throwing his arms around the man’s neck. It was his uncle, 
Bernabé Cristales, who had lived with Ramiro’s parents for 
some time.

Bernabé Cristales says that he was overjoyed when he 
recognized the boy’s green eyes but at the same time he felt a 
deep sadness when he realized that he would never be able to 
embrace the sister and nephews that he had lost.

Ramiro’s joy was short-lived. A few days after being reunited 
with his family, he had to leave Guatemala and travel to 
Canada, where he was granted refugee status and still lives 
to this day. He arrived in a huge and impeccably clean city, 
where he never managed to get used to the freezing cold 
weather. He was finally safe from López Alonso but the price 
he had to pay was a bitter solitude. In that foreign city he 
was gripped by loneliness and three months later he became 
clinically depressed.

Ramiro took English lessons, managed to finish high school 
and currently works as a bricklayer, but he still feels like a fish 
out of water in the vast country where he was offered a new 
life.

In 2003 he briefly returned to Retalhuleu, to find a wife and 
marry and with the compensation money that he received 
from the State, he bought the farm in the municipality of 
San Sebastián, where he spent his unhappy childhood after 
López Alonso ran into debt and was forced to sell it.