President Rios Montt and I have had a useful exchange
of ideas on the problems of the region
and on our bilateral relations.
This is a very normal scene for an exhumation.
However, it's just as special as every other exhumation.
These are at least three people.
Three lives, three families.
We are here at the families' request
with their trust in what we're doing.
Many people come to the site with the hope
that they will be able to learn what really happened
to their loved ones.
The hope that the body of that loved one will be identified
and eventually given back to them
so that they can bury it properly in a dignified way.
Forensic Anthropology is the application
of physical anthropology techniques to a criminal setting.
To establish certain things like the age, the sex,
but most importantly what makes it actually forensic
is trying to understand how the person died.
Although the recollection of evidence serves the purpose
of justice, it serves the purpose of truth just as well.
After we recover the body, we have to analyze that body
and compare it to the information of the missing person
that was forcibly disappeared or extralegally executed.
And that's what happened here.
These communities were targeted as a strategy
to get rid of them.
We have about 2,000 bodies stored in these cardboard boxes.
The FAFG has conducted over
From all the investigations we carried out,
the Dos Erres investigation really stands out.
Usually we are looking to identify the dead,
but here we were looking for the living.
We were looking for Oscar.
If you talk to people who know about what happened here,
the Oscar story became kinda the poster child
of the past in Guatemala.
The Civil War in Guatemala was one of the longest civil wars
in Central America.
It started in the '50s
when they deposed a democratically elected president
that was basically engineered
with the help of the United States.
It was right on the heels of the Cuban revolution,
so everybody's thinking that Guatemala is gonna become Cuba.
The question before us all is can freedom
in the next generation conquer
or are the Communists going to be successful?
That's the great issue.
Jacobo Arbenz was the first elected leader
to be overthrown by the United States government.
And it created tremendous and very violent repercussions
inside the country that lasted for decades,
and in some senses still reverberate in Guatemala today.
The Guatemalan conflict stands out
for the sheer volume of deaths,
the brutality of the military,
the one-sidedness of the conflict,
basically the Guatemalan military against leftist guerillas.
And so the US does see in a Cold War prism,
so you have a US trained, US backed military.
We've been slow to understand that the defense
of the Caribbean and Central America
against Marxist/Leninist takeover is vital
to our national security in ways we're not accustomed
to thinking about.
What we can do is help to give them the skills and supplies
they need to do the job for themselves.
The US continued to support the Guatemalan military always
with this idea that the military was the best
and first bulwark against rising Communism in Latin America.
When Efrain Rios Montt took over in a coup
in March of 1982,
he basically brought in a new set of rules
of fighting the war.
By that time,
there were already red flags waving over Guatemala
about the human rights crisis
that was unfolding in the country.
There were already these mutilated bodies showing up
in the streets.
And it was very clear by July of 1982
that the peace had accelerated immensely under Rios Montt.
And that hundreds of villages were being razed
to the ground, and tens of thousands
of people were being killed.
That was the story of 1982.
And there was report after report coming out,
trying to get to the bottom of this.
Who was doing this, why.
With the White House sending people to say,
you know, it's the fog of war, it's very unclear,
the guerrillas are very violent.
They're very brutal.
We believe they're the ones doing the massacres.
We believe they're dressing up in military uniforms
and massacring people.
December 1982, Reagan and Rios Montt meet in person
for the first time.
Ladies and Gentleman,
the President of the Republic of Guatemala,
Efrain Rios Montt,
and the President of the United States of America.
Reagan is openly admiring of the head of state
of Guatemala and says that he thinks Rios Montt
has received a bum rap from human rights organizations
on the abuses that are taking place under his regime
and that he offers the best democratic alternative
that Guatemala could hope for.
I know that President Rios Montt is a man
of great personal integrity and commitment.
I have assured the President that the United States
is committed to support his efforts to restore democracy
and to address the root causes of this violent insurgency.
President Reagan made those comments about Rios Montt
on December 4th, 1982,
which was just two days before a unit
of Special Forces in Guatemala, the Kaibiles,
entered the village of Dos Erres.
Weeks before the Dos Erres massacre
there's an ambush carried out by leftist guerrillas
on the Guatemalan military,
and it's a victory for the guerillas,
and they are able to kill some soldiers
and make off with 20 or 21 rifles.
And that's seen as a humiliating defeat by the military,
and the order goes out that we need
to find the perpetrators of this ambush, recover the rifles,
and teach them a lesson.
The intelligence that comes in suggests
that this guerrilla unit that committed this ambush
may be somewhere in the vicinity of Dos Erres.
The rapid reaction force, this squad of twenty Kaibiles
with a support team of additional commandos is sent
to attack Dos Erres, find the guerrillas, find the rifles,
and punish those responsible.
This is one of several documents that we obtained
about the Dos Erres massacre.
This actually is a cable
that the US Embassy in Guatemala City sent
to the State Department in Washington
about the first intimations that something had happened
in Dos Erres in the Peten.
The cable is written in late December 1982,
so it's some weeks after the massacre has taken place.
Source said there have been three theories, all rumors,
concerning the incident in Dos Erres.
One, the army arrested all the inhabitants
and took them into the jungle.
Two, the army took the men to the army base in Poptun,
and the women and children to the army base in San Benito.
Three, the army killed everyone in the village,
dumped them into the well, and covered the well over.
Though no bodies have been found,
all the people have disappeared.
Parallel to the massacres that were taking place
in the countryside, the Guatemalan government also tried
to eliminate people that it perceived as a threat,
as an enemy of the state inside the cities.
We're talking about people in the universities,
the scholars, the students.
We're talking about lawyers, and journalists,
and artists, and writers.
And the way the government dealt with urban enemies was
to disappear them.
People were targeted, because they decided
to attempt to change the country.
The bodies were usually buried in clandestine locations,
sometimes on the same military bases
where they were tortured.
Those disappeared people grew
into an enormous population of the vanished.
By the end of the war,
the Truth Commission says there were
some 40,000 disappeared people.
I would say that the army inadvertently
and unintentionally created activists
whose beloved ones were disappeared,
taken away and who couldn't stand
not doing anything about it.
A lot of family members began
to get together and form organizations.
One of those organizations is FAMDEGUA,
Families of the Detained and the Disappeared of Guatemala.
FAMDEGUA was one of the first groups that went in
and tried to sort of document what happened
in the countryside at a time
when in Guatemala nobody dared to do it.
And they're lead by a very impressive woman
who is still today looking for her brother.
When FAMDEGUA learned of the massacre
at Dos Erres, they decided to investigate.
To help all the family members look for their missing.
The villagers had been told not to go in there,
and they were all terrified to go back
and try to dig through the rubble.
So the area remained a ghost town for more than a decade.
Forensic Anthropology allows you
to use very specific techniques to document evidence,
and then later reproduce this evidence in a court of law
to explain it to a judge, to explain it to the prosecutor,
to explain it to the family.
In the case of Dos Erres,
you have one of the earliest exhumations
ever done in Guatemala.
She's investigating this at a time where the powers
that committed these atrocities
are very much still active and strong.
And the military really hasn't been touched.
Many people felt that there would be justice.
That the worst of the worst would be brought to account.
But impunity in Guatemala is as intrinsic to that culture
as its volcanoes and its coffee.
It's powerful.
It's intransigent.
It's very hard to break.
Rios Montt decided in November of 1982 to use the Kaibiles
as this kind of mobile killing unit.
Through this policy,
Rios Montt really unleashes these commandos, the Kaibiles,
who are among the best-trained
and the most famously brutal in the hemisphere.
The Kaibil unit, very much modeled itself
on the US Special Forces.
They're designed to terrorize the populous.
Going into certain areas
where they feel the guerillas are the most active.
Particularly indigenous areas and this scorched-earth policy
of massacre, you know, as a tool of warfare.
She's actually on the radio
in these military controlled areas where there has been
so much killing and brutality appealing
to people who know about this to come forward.
And then she gets this incredible tip,
one of the soldiers who was involved
in the massacre wants to talk to her.
Fabio Pinzon is not a full-fledged Kaibil.
He's actually a cook.
He's always felt like within this elite, hard as nails group
that he was treated as an underling.
So he's breaking this incredible code of silence,
and that could get him killed.
So she's got this remarkable,
first hand confession from a soldier,
which in the annuls
of the Guatemalan dirty war is extremely rare.
Pinzon gives her investigation a jolt forward.
And he convinces another soldier,
and this guy who is an actual full-fledged Kaibil,
Cesar Ibanez, also to speak to her.
We welcome change and openness,
for we believe that freedom and security go together.
That the advance of human liberty can only strengthen
the cause of world peace.
Mr. Gorbachav, open this gate.
Mr. Gorbachav, tear down this wall.
The Guatemalan civil conflict went on for 36 years,
and it really only finally came to an end
in the mid 1990s for two reasons.
Number one, the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall fell,
and it didn't make as much sense to continue to fight,
or to back a war that was so centrally organized
around anti-Communism.
In December of 1996,
the government signed the final peace agreement,
which ended the war for, for good.
Finally, you had talks in Oslo, Norway that led
to the signing of an accord about human rights
that included the creation of a truth commission.
The Truth Commission had recommended
that the government take on the responsibility
of finding the disappeared, of identifying mass graves,
of exhuming bodies as part of its reparations
to affected communities.
But the government was not inclined
to participate at that level.
Sara Romero's a young, rookie prosecutor
who's assigned this case.
Her first year out of law school,
Sara Romero gets thrown this case I'm sure
because nobody else wanted to handle it.
She tries to start investigating what happened
in Dos Erres.
Her focus is getting the testimony of these two soldiers,
which is going to be absolutely crucial and unique.
The soldiers' testimony is very important for two reasons.
Number one, it's extremely rare to have soldiers confessing
to having participated in a massacre,
the actual participants to describe it.
Number two, they open the door
to an even more remarkable, powerful piece
of potential evidence, which is that they describe
that two little boys survive the massacre,
and were taken away by soldiers.
Sara Romero knows that she's got potentially rare
and powerful legal ammunition here,
where she can actually maybe build a case
against the military for the massacre,
so she needs to find these two boys.
Oscar has no memories whatsoever of Dos Erres.
As far as he knows, he's brought up by this family
and taught to revere this lieutenant who was his father.
You talk to people in that town,
he's someone who's seen as a heroic figure,
who died shortly after bringing Oscar back.
Sara Romero runs into a series of dead ends.
The family is not very helpful.
There's great resentment
that she could be investigating the Lieutenant
and suggesting that he's something other
than this heroic military man.
So Sara Romero goes out and does her detective work
and actually finds Santos Alonzo,
the Kaibil that took the other little boy from Dos Erres.
She doesn't have this high-powered squad
of cops accompanying her.
It's pretty much her and an assistant going out
to this remote, still dangerous area trying
to investigate this massacre.
She starts asking around, and the military starts hearing.
Oh, why does the prosecutor want to talk to Ramiro?
A lot of these kids who were abducted
by soldiers were brought back to homes often in rural areas.
And raised, not necessarily as part
of the family like Oscar was.
That's kind of unique.
They were raised almost as indentured servants.
Ramiro was raised in an abusive household.
His nightmare did not end with the Dos Erres massacre,
which he was old enough to remember.
Salome Hernandez and his brother have the epic misfortune
of arriving in the middle of this massacre,
and being grabbed and taken by the rest of these people.
But Salome is one of the few who manages
to escape and survive.
This is where things start to go bad.
One of the lieutenants the second in command,
Rosales Batres, rapes a woman.
And when he does that, other soldiers follow his lead.
This operation degenerates into barbarity.
This goes on for hours, so at some point in the morning,
some of the women who have been raped are forced
to feed the soldiers.
The morning sort of builds and the commanders are talking
to one another and they're on the radio back
to supervisors elsewhere,
but at some point the decision is made that they are going
to interrogate the villagers in the center of town.
Basically they start going into the school
and into the church and pulling out the men and the women
and children and taking them down to this well.
They have set themselves up by the well,
and the people are brought there,
and one of the first killed is a small child.
By the afternoon, the massacre is over,
250 people have been killed.
So the well is full,
and the village is littered with corpses.
And five survivors appear.
Five children, three girls, and two little boys.
And so for whatever reason the soldiers decide they're going
to take them with them.
They start the hike back out of the village.
The girls sadly meet a horrible fate.
They rape them and they kill them the next day.
But the boys they take back with them.
These little boys are relatively light skinned
and they have green eyes.
And that kinda makes them stand out in this region,
which is mostly indigenous.
This cable is dated December 31,
so it's just the day after the US Embassy organized
a flyover of the Dos Erres village.
This cable describes what the embassy officer saw
when they went to the region
where the massacre had taken place.
On December 30, three mission members
and a third country diplomat visited Poptun
and Las Cruces, El Peten in an attempt
to check an alleged massacre at Dos Erres.
Dos Erres consists of scattered houses and groups of houses.
They are all deserted and many have been burnt.
Army officials said guerrillas,
quote took the people away, unquote.
At this point, the helicopter pilot refused to touch down.
He did agree, however, to sweep low over the area.
There were no signs of life.
It is somewhat difficult to believe that the disappearance
and possible liquidation of hundreds of people so close
to Las Cruces could remain a mystery for weeks.
Based on information reported by source
and on site observations made on December 30,
the Embassy must conclude
that the party most likely responsible
for this incident is the Guatemalan army.
After reading these cables, you would think
that that would have led to, at a minimum,
a pronouncement on the part of the United States government
about what was happening in Guatemala.
And to the contrary.
It's simply, it sank like a stone.
You had a complicity by omission, a Reagan government
that was not willing to call out its allies
in the Guatemalan state.
Very shortly after this, in January of 1983,
the Reagan administration once again went back to Congress
to try to get a new aid package for the Guatemalan military.
That's how little the Reagan administration took
into account reports like this.
The US government by accepting this massacre happened
and the Scorched Earth campaign of Rios Montt
was a tacit participant of the massacres that continued.
The Dos Erres massacre is very distinct,
but at the same time, just like many others.
There are many things that we see over and over, the rape,
the sexual abuse of women and little girls.
The separation of the women from the men.
The length of detention to make sure
that people were tortured publicly
and all of these things happened at Dos Erres.
The Dos Erres Massacre was one of 629 massacres
that have been documented
by the UN sponsored Truth Commission.
There are an estimated 200,000 civilian
dead in Guatemala.
There are hundreds of other massacres
like this with great impunity.
These massacres are not quote unquote solved
and no one is ever punished.
If the government isn't ready,
and there's no political will to actually prosecute,
there will be no prosecution.
That's very common in Guatemala.
There's this crescendo of activity,
which you would expect to lend
to some kind of immediate resolution,
and instead, the case ends up in legal limbo
for almost another decade.
Around 2009, there is some progress with the case,
the Inter-American Court of Human Rights,
an external regional body, acting on legal actions filed
by FAMDEGUA rules in their favor and issues a judicial order
that Guatemala should pursue this case,
and it also makes public the list
of those commandos charged in Guatemala.
Now things come full circle and the US,
and Immigrations Customs and Enforcements
in particular has an interesting unit that they have set up
to pursue war criminals from all over the world.
And ICE starts going through its records and its documents,
and it identifies a number of the commandos
as long time US residents.
I received an investigative referral.
It was from the Human Rights War Crimes Unit
in Washington D.C.
They came across Gilberto Jordan's name
and knew that he was in the country.
That's one of the first things I wanted to do was just
to see where is the man living
that's been accused of these crimes.
You want to try to see what does this person do day to day,
what is their life like now?
He had a nice little home.
Appeared to have a nice family.
Mr. Jordan was working as a cook at a high-end country club.
At one point one of his fellow employees told me
he was the best employee there.
He's got three kids.
He's got a son who has himself joined US Military
as US citizen, and served in Iraq.
What I first did is
I get his application for naturalization.
This is the form you fill out
when you want to become a United States citizen.
ICE can't prosecute these guys for war crimes.
But in order to prosecute for immigration crimes
it essentially has to prove that they lied
when they got their citizenship or their residence.
And essentially build a miniature war crimes case
against them, even if it's just to convict them
of a crime as seemingly prosaic or mundane
as lying on your citizenship application.
On this form, they ask you specifically were you ever
in a foreign military.
Mr. Jordan had put no.
They asked if he had committed any crimes,
even for which he had not been charged.
He had put no.
So him being in the military is important,
but what is more important is
that I place him at that massacre.
It's a tricky thing.
He talks about it with the prosecutors,
and they tell him look,
we've got this information from Guatemala,
the Inter-American court all that,
but it's going to be very hard unless you get a confession.
One of the things I'm told is that a lot
of the killing started
when he threw an infant into the well.
I need Mr. Jordan to admit his role in the massacre.
The decision is made.
Let's go knock on his door and let's see what happens.
We go outside Mr. Jordan's house in the morning.
We go to the door and we're knocking on it.
We're armed.
I'm going to the house of someone who was highly trained.
He's a Special Forces soldier.
So, Mr. Jordan won't open the door.
We're a little nervous.
They stop his wife on the street
and they get his wife to call him.
And sure enough,
Jordan has been dreading this moment for years.
And Jordan says to her, they're here to kill me.
She goes, no they're the cops, it's okay,
you can open the door.
He says, they've got guns.
She says, yes but they're the cops,
it's okay, you can open up.
We sat down at his kitchen table and we started to talk.
We started with the military things.
Do you know so and so?
And he'd say "yeah oh I knew him.
"I worked underneath him, he was my commanding officer."
He's upset.
I can see he's visibly upset.
It's almost like he had been waiting, dreading,
but accepting that that moment was going to happen,
and someone was going to come and ask him about this.
He just starts talking about it.
Mr. Jordan breaks down and starts talking about the well.
So we asked him, you know, who went into the well.
And his response was todo, meaning all.
Everybody went into the well.
He described to us that he was crying,
he was upset at what was happening
and that he threw the baby into the well.
Gilberto Jordan pled guilty
to the crime of naturalization fraud.
He didn't fight it.
In the United States, all of the sudden,
one of the named Kaibiles is in jail for 10 years.
That was like an electric shock in Guatemala.
It made people believe that perhaps this could happen,
that there could be some justice in this case.
ICE generates evidence, they generate Jordan's confession.
So now you got a confession in the US legal system.
And they send all this information to Sara Romero.
Now, she's got even more ammunition.
The other critical catalyst
that pushed this case forward was the naming
in December of 2010 of Claudia Paz Y Paz
to be the attorney general of Guatemala.
Once Claudio Paz Y Paz was appointed as Attorney General,
one of the first things she did was empower the prosecutors
to resume the Dos Erres Investigation.
The other important factor of the case at this time was
that we developed DNA capacity in Guatemala.
So we decided to go and exhume the bodies for a second time
and try to identify by comparing the DNA profiles
of the skeletons with those DNA profiles of the families.
So Sara Romero now has an attorney general
who's supporting her,
she's got this information from the US.
She's got Pinzon and Ibanez.
She's got Ramiro's story.
So she's determined now to try again
despite all the time that's past to find Oscar.
And she goes back to talk to the doctor
who she'd talked to years earlier
and this time he's a little more helpful
and he tells her look, Oscar is in the United States.
I don't have a number for him, but I know he's married.
I'm trying to remember his wife's name.
Her nickname is La Flaca, the skinny one.
It's almost comical to think of a prosecutor going
into a pretty big town, Zacapa, and knocking on doors
and asking for La Flaca, and finding her.
How do you tell someone you're not who you think you are.
And your life up until now has been a lie.
So Oscar decides to go ahead and do the DNA test.
And Fredy Peccerelli comes up.
We had no idea that this would eventually lead us
to a little town outside of Boston.
I actually have to say that I was surprised
by everything about Oscar.
About his demeanor, about the way he looked.
He looked whiter than I expected.
He has very light eyes, almost green eyes.
He was very at ease.
He didn't look worried.
I think he still didn't believe it.
We took Oscar's DNA sample back to Guatemala,
to the DNA lab of the FAFG,
and we had to compare it to the sample of Ramiro,
the other boy.
And then also to all the families in Dos Erres.
About a month and a half, maybe two months went by,
and I got the results and the first thing I thought of is,
wow, we have to call him.
So, I called his home, and he answered.
I said Oscar we have the results.
Ramiro, the other boy, is not your brother.
And he said oh I knew that.
However, his DNA matched that of an older man
that was looking for his family among all the bones.
And that he was still alive,
so I told Oscar we found your father,
your biological father.
And he didn't say anything for a couple of seconds.
Tranquilino Castaneda, that day
of the Dos Erres massacre,
happened to be working in fields outside
of Dos Erres and he survived.
The next step is how are we gonna tell Tranquilino,
because he was looking for his family among the skeletons,
hopefully to be able to rebury the bodies.
But he was never looking for a living relative.
So we brought Tranquilino to the room,
and I had Oscar on a computer via the internet and I said,
"Oscar, this is Tranquilino.
"Tranquilino, this is Oscar."
And Aura Elena says to Tranquilino,
"Do you know who that is?
"That's your son."
Tranquilino calls Oscar
by the name he remembers was Alfredo, Alfredito
which is a diminutive.
What the Lieutenant had done, right, in sort of this act
of mercy that accompanies this act of brutality
is not only had he spared this boy,
but he preserves the name Alfredo Castaneda,
which is his real name.
So he's Oscar Alfredo Ramirez Castaneda.
After Tranquilino got a visa
from the United States government,
we made arrangements for him to fly up here, and meet Oscar.
Oscar's DNA profile matching Tranquilino
and proving that they were father and son,
thereby putting Oscar at the scene of the crime,
and having him now be living evidence of what happened.
That was all presented at two different trials in Guatemala.