7

 / The long road to justice

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and he points to the exact location where the churches – one 
Catholic and one Protestant – the school, his home and the 
homes of his neighbors, once stood. 

If today this is a remote place that can only be reached after 
an almost three hour bus ride from Flores, the departmental 
capital of Petén, to Las Cruces, plus a bumpy one hour ride 
in a pickup truck through the unpaved dirt road connecting 
Las Cruces with Dos Erres, in the early 1970s this village 
was the back of beyond, or to cite a typically Guatemalan 
phrase, it was “el lugar donde el Diablo dejó tirado el caite” 
or “the place where the Devil dropped his sandal”, a dense 
and fiercely hot tropical jungle that the first settlers had to 
battle against armed with little more than a machete.

In November 2011, Las Cruces became Guatemala’s 334th 
municipality, but back in those days it was part of the 
municipality of La Libertad, which is divided by two major 
highways that run from central Petén to the Western border 
with Mexico. New populations would usually spring up on 
either side of the road but Dos Erres, located in the heart of 
the jungle and miles away from the nearest highway, was the 
exception.

The name of the village, which means “The Two R’s” 
originates from the surnames of Federico Aquino Ruano and 
his cousin, Marco Reyes. Juan Pablo Arévalo and Federico 
Aquino Ruano or Don Lico as he was known by his neighbors, 
knew each other from the years when they lived in the village 
of La Máquina, in Retalhuleu. Don Lico was the founding 
patriarch of the promised land that he and his countrymen 
believed they had found in Dos Erres.In 1966, a government 
agency called Fomento y Desarrollo de Petén (FYDEP), 
had begun to colonize this area by bringing in immigrants