Louisa Reynolds /

Pz

P

76

Epilogue

Dos Erres comes back to haunt Ríos Montt

Saúl Arévalo looked intently at the old man’s face. Ríos 
Montt, 86, was impeccably dress in a dark blue suit and 
matching tie. Elvia Luz Granados Rodríguez, the fourteen 
year old girl who had survived the massacre after her school 
teacher, Lesbia Tesucún, rewarded her hard work by taking 
her back home to Flores to spend the Christmas holidays 
was also there, as well as Esdras González Arreaga, whose 
little sisters had been killed during the massacre, and Raúl 
de Jesús Gómez Hernández, whose brother, Ramiro, had left 
home two days before the massacre and had never returned. 

Ríos Montt clasped his hands together on the table, touched 
his ear, rubbed his ankle, rubbed his chin, scribbled a few 
hasty notes in his notebook, grabbed a copy of the Penal 
Code, flicked through it, pointlessly, and then put back on 
the table, a quick sequence of movements that betrayed 
nervousness. 

His demeanor was rather different when he appeared be-
fore the same judge, Carol Patricia Flores, on January 26. 
On that occasion, he faced genocide charges against the Ma-
yan Ixil community in the highland department of Quiché, 
where 1,771 innocent civilians were exterminated during the 
bloodiest phase of the Guatemalan civil war.

Ríos Montt had turned himself in voluntarily when he found 
out that he was wanted for genocide charges and had ar-
rived in court with his head high, choosing to remain stand-
ing during the entire proceedings even though the judge told 
him, on several occasions, that he could sit down.