Louisa Reynolds /

Pz

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day, it holds weekly meetings in Saúl Arévalo’s home, the 
son of Juan Pablo Arévalo, the man who built the well that 
became his own grave.    

Healing the wounds of the past was a long and difficult 
process. Petén remains Guatemala’s most remote and 
ungovernable department and once the armed conflict was 
over, drug cartels replaced the army as an agent of terror.  In 
May 2011, when the Zetas drug cartel decapitated twenty 
nine farm laborers in the Los Cocos farm in La Libertad, 
the municipality that Las Cruces once belonged to before 
it became a municipality in its own right, many Dos Erres 
survivors felt they were reliving the horrors of the war. After 
the massacre, the government decreed a “state of siege” 
in Petén, which imposed curfews, army roadblocks and 
random searches in an effort to crack down on drug related 
violence. A year later, there is still a strong military presence 
throughout Petén.

A year before, in 2010, another incident had sown terror 
in Las Cruces: a female corpse with genital mutilations was 
found in the municipal garbage dump and a few days later 
a list of local women who would be slain by an anonymous 
hand appeared in the town square.

Domestic violence is a common problem and during the 
same year the daughters of two Dos Erres survivors were 
attacked. One was raped and another was bludgeoned to 
death by her husband in front of her two young children 
after she initiated legal proceedings against him for abuse. 

The counselor realized that she needed to expand her scope 
of action beyond treating the 64 survivors of the Dos Erres