65

 / The long road to justice

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than in a vain attempt to black out, if only for a few hours, 

the searing pain that seized him when he remembered the 

faces of his nine children.

XXVIII

His youngest son was only three old when Tranquilino saw 
him for the last time, thirty years ago. “He had a strong 
personality. He would put his hand on his hip and scold his 
older brothers”, he remembers.

He gets up from the hammock, walks towards the old chest, 
opens it and lifts a cushion with a Spiderman print, under 
which he keeps a small photo album. He opens it and shows 
me the photograph of a young man with a long face and 
blue eyes, identical to his own.

“Father, these are your four grandchildren. Take care. We 
love you. December 2011”. These are the words scrawled 
with black ink at the back of the photograph.

Tranquilino says that he has no idea how FAMDEGUA 
managed to find his son. Aura Elena Farfán’s version is that 
when the IACHR delivered its verdict in favor of the victims 
of the Dos Erres massacre, the story of the children who 
survived, huddled together in a corner of the church, was 
published in the media.

Initially it was claimed that Ramiro Cristales and 
Tranquilino’s son were brothers. When Ramiro Cristales 
read the story he was deeply shocked and felt he had lost 
one of the most fundamental things that a human being can 
have: the certainty of who he was. Ovidio Ramírez Ramos, 
the Kaibil soldier who had raised him as his own son and 
had died six years later, was not his father. He was one of the 
men who had butchered his mother and eight siblings.