67

 / The long road to justice

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States not out of hardship but out of a desire to make his 
own way in life. A few months later, he was joined by his 
girlfriend and they got married.

Tranquilino was relieved to hear that his son hadn’t suffered 
the same fate as Ramiro Cristales and he says that he feels 
no resentment towards the soldier who adopted him and his 
family. “Why hate those people? I’m grateful to them for 
allowing my son to live”, he says.

As the boy was only three when the massacre occurred, he 
didn’t remember the day when he was led to the church 
with the women and other children, nor the faces of his 
biological parents. But somewhere in the deep recesses of 
his unconscious, random words, images, tiny fragments of a 
life that he had once lived that were too small to constitute 
memories as such, would suddenly come to surface and led 
him to ask strange questions when he was a child, such as 
“what’s cuso?” Cuso is the name given by the inhabitants of 
Petén to armadillo meat, a popular dish in that department.

With FAMDEGUA’s help, Tranquilino managed to obtain a 
visa to travel to the United States and meet face to face with 
the son whose voice he hears over the telephone week after 
week. He longs to embrace him, walk in the park with his 
family, play with his grandchildren, and grab hold of the few 
remaining threads of the life that was snatched away from 
him on December 7, 1982. But there’s one last obstacle that 
he must overcome: his son lives illegally in the United States 
and needs to apply for refugee status before Tranquilino can 
go out there and meet him. “I was told that by January it 
would all be sorted out, then they said February and I’m still 
waiting. I just hope to God I can make it…”, he says.