63

 / The long road to justice

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In the 1970s, Tranquilino lived in the village of La Máquina, 
on the border between the southern departments of 
Suchitepéquez and Retalhuleu, where all he had was two 
hectares of land. Like many other peasants, he emigrated 
to Petén when he heard that the government was selling vast 
plots of land to anyone who was willing to toil away in the 
sweltering heat of the jungle.

In Dos Erres, Tranquilino had 19 hectares of land where 
he planted corn, beans and pineapple. Those were happy 
times. Although he says that when the massacre occurred he 
was visiting his in-laws in the town of La Gomera, in the 
eastern department of Escuintla, his neighbors in Dos Erres 
say that he was already a heavy drinker in those days, that he 
had become estranged from his wife and children, and that 
he habitually left home and wandered back to the southern 
coast where he found seasonal work as a farm laborer and 
spent the little money he earned on bottles of aguardiente. 

Tranquilino was working in La Gomera in January 1983, 
when he began to hear rumors of a massacre in a town called 
“Tres Erres” but he thought that it must be a different village. 
He held onto that belief until he arrived in Las Cruces, in 
April, and everyone told him that the massacre had really 
happened and that no one had survived. Tranquilino’s wife 
and nine children were dead. It took him four years to work 
up the courage to enter the village, where all he found was 
ashes and scorched earth in the place where his home had 
once stood.

In 2009, when the state compensated the victims of the 
Dos Erres massacre, following the IACHR’s verdict, a 
COPREDEH employee arrived at Las Cabezas in search of 
Tranquilino, but he was not at home. His sister, who also lived 
in the village at that time, said that he had died a few years