Louisa Reynolds /

Pz

P

74

XXXI

After a heavy downpour of rain, the paper ornaments 
placed by mourners on the tombs of their loved ones in 
the cemetery of Las Cruces were reduced to a soggy and 
shapeless mess. In the middle of the cemetery, surrounded 
by a black fence, is the monument that honors the victims of 
the Dos Erres massacre: a small symbolic well and a white 
cross with the names of those who were slain engraved on its 
base. For now, this is all that their family members have, as 
they cannot build the monument in the exact spot where the 
Arévalo well was located as those lands now belong to the 
Mendoza family, who are known as one of Guatemala’s most 
powerful drug cartels.

However, the survivors of the Dos Erres massacre have not 
given up in their fight to claim back the land where the real 
well was located, says Sandra Juárez, the new psychologist 
appointed by the MSPAS to provide counseling services for 
war victims in the area. On December 15, last year, they 
handed former president Álvaro Colom a petition in which 
they demanded that the state should purchase the land where 
Dos Erres once stood and build a new U-shaped monument, 
where the niches containing the remains of the victims that 
have been found to this date can be placed on one side, with a 
row of empty niches with the names of those whose remains 
were never found can be placed on the opposite side.

The FAFG is currently racing against time in order to identify 
the victims whose bodies have been found by June this year. 
However, this is a complex and costly task – around US$400 
per victim – and sometimes the process must be repeated up 
to three times if the result is unsatisfactory. To this date, only 
two bodies have been identified.