Guatemala: Heartbreak and Hope

Two butterflies danced in the warm ari at the cave's entrance. Their pale yellow wings were shot
through with fine black bands.

Soft as whispers, delicate as dreams, they hovered untouched by the horror nearby.

The six dead lay just inside. All executed, shot in the head, then left to rot. Most were men in their late teens or just out of them. The youngest boy was 14. One was a girl, 18, her belly swollen with her unborn baby.

Hours earlier, more than a dozen uniformed men, with assault rifles and pistols, showed up outside the victims’Guatemala City homes. The captives were forced into vehicles with tinted windows.

Their bodies were discovered just after sunrise by somebody looking for a missing dog.

The cave, inside a sand pit on the outskirts of the city, was a popular dumping ground with the death squads that prowled the country during the 36-year civil war.

The 1996 peace accords were supposed to end this business of kidnappings and killings in the dark. It hasn’t worked out that way.

The murder rate in Guatemala is six times that of the United States, when adjusted for population.

More than 4,300 Guatemalans were killed in 2004. The murders found in the cave Jan. 14 were part of the bloody christening of 2005.

Cocaine, and the business of cocaine, are behind much of the killing. A $30 gram of coke sold in Washington state likely cost a Guatemalan his life.

The connection to the killing, 3,000 miles away, really is as close as the nearest crack pipe or coffee table with stray crumbs of white powder.

Guatemala is the main staging area for cocaine traffickers smuggling drugs from South America into the U.S.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration estimates up to 70 percent of the cocaine entering the U.S. first moves through Guatemala. It arrives on airplanes flying one-way journeys into the jungles. It’s ferried along the coast by “go-fast” boats. It’s hidden in shipping containers.

Once on the ground, the drugs are routed to cities throughout the U.S. — to Los Angeles, Seattle, Everett.

Arrests for drug trafficking in Guatemala are rare. Arrests aren’t made in 95 percent of murders. Convictionsare rarer still.

Entrenched corruption in the Guatemalan government and a lack of workable laws have blunted that nation’s ability to respond.

The result is more violence, something Guatemalans have known for decades.

Part Two

The sign outside Juan Carlos Villacorta's office announces “zero tolerance” for corruption. His sad smile leaves little doubt how that’s working out.

As Guatemala’s vice minister for security, Villacorta helps oversee the 20,000-member national police force and Guatemala’s prisons.

Cocaine, for him, is a symptom of his nation’s illness. The biggest enemy, he said, is the greed and graft that distorts the legal system.

Corruption is such a problem that a former vice president marked the new year locked up in one of Villacorta’s jails, awaiting trial.

Corruption helps people in power live in air-conditioned villas with high-speed Internet access, and keeps others
in dirt-floor shacks, he explains.

Villacorta’s job, he admits, is impossible.

A lawyer by training, one day he’ll oversee the search of a ship believed to be carrying cocaine from Colombia.

The next he’ll be trying to head off a riot involving prisoners who don’t want to be locked up with people they say are Satan worshipers.

When a raid goes awry and police kill somebody — say nearly a dozen peasants, some armed with AK-47s — Villacorta gets calls from Guatemalan congressional leaders.

Not long ago, he picked up the phone and a judge from a mountain village was on the line, screaming “Get me out of here!”

The judge had locked himself inside his chambers. A mob outside wanted his head for refusing to jail a person they accused of witchcraft.

Villacorta is committed to his work by blood. Generations of his family have dedicated themselves to trying to lead Guatemala.

His father, Juan Vicente Villacorta, was a moderate politician at a time when the nation was divided into armed camps — government on the right, guerillas on the left.

Villacorta was only 25 when his father was assassinated en route to a 1993 political rally.

“We have a lot of wounds from the 40 years of war,” he said. “We are used to solving problems with violence.”

Crime in Guatemala is complex. There is the corruption. There is the history of bloodshed from the war. The weak economy makes organized crime — auto theft, robbery, extortion, fraud, money laundering — a profitable career path.

A new wrinkle is the country’s emergence as one of the most important stops for international drug trafficking.

Cocaine, sent from Colombia in tons, is repackaged into smaller loads that can be smuggled through Mexico and into the U.S. by land, sea and air.

Drugs are now like currency in Guatemala, Villacorta said. Politicians and police, businessmen and gang members — those who help Colombian smugglers — are paid with cocaine.

It is sold to Guatemalans at about $3 for a gram of crack. They kill each other for the drugs and control of the trade.

“It’s all connected: the social degradation; the lack of businesses; the corrupt politicians who weaken the institutions,” he said. “It all equals a lot of drugs on the street at reasonable prices.”

Part Three

Guatemala is a narcotrafficker's paradise, just 1,300 miles from Medellin, Colombia.

Thick rain forest jungles cover the lowlands bordering Mexico, a favorite landing spot for one-way cocaine
flights from Colombia.

The rest of the country is corrugated by the Sierra Madres, the Cuchamatantes and other high mountains, including active volcanoes.

This is where descendants of the Maya live in hamlets separated by dirt roads. Only 60 percent of Guatemala’s 14 million people are fluent in Spanish. There are nearly two dozen different indigenous languages.

Most people — seven in every 10 — survive on less than $2 a day. Some find work in the United States or elsewhere. One-quarter of Guatemalan adults are supported with cash from family and friends abroad.

Others crowd into Guatemala City for work. They live in a chaos of congestion and come-ons.

Along the Calle de Purgatorio— the Street of Purgatory — peddlers block the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians to step into the roadway. After dark, streetwalkers totter about on spiky heels.

Drivers specialize in stomping the gas pedal as hard as they lay on their horns. Speed limits, lane markers and traffic lights are treated like advice from dim relatives. Blood-red buses with bald tires prowl at the top of the traffic food chain.

Traffic devours lives. When that happens, the bodies are taken to the city morgue, where Dr. Otto Donny Leon Oliva oversees the autopsies.

Here is what Oliva knows: In 2004, more people were shot to death in Guatemala City than were killed in traffic accidents.

He knows there were eight to 10 murders a day, most of the dead in their teens and early 20s. Many were the victims of drug violence. How many, Oliva can’t say.

Part Four

The dead wait outside the house of God.

At the Metropolitan Cathedral in the heart of Guatemala City, 12 brown marble columns bear their mute testament. Perez Mendez, Jobito.

Perez Mendez, Juan.

Perez Ortega, Jacinto.

The names once belonged to people. Now they are carved into the sides of stone pillars that support a wroughtiron fence. A banner draped over the metal bars beckoned pilgrims to visit the cathedral’s sanctuary, to walk past the dead and their pillars of stone.

Quiix, Cristina.

Quiix, Gregorio.

Quiix, Hilario.

The plaza just west of the church is popular with the poor. On Sundays, laughing children chase pigeons and devour sweet orange chunks of papaya sold by shouting vendors. Lovers cuddle. The delicious smell of roasting corn and fire-grilled chicken fills the air.

The plaza is crowded with people. Some sell goats. Others hawk votive candles or snapshots taken atop a family of white plastic ponies.

The Roman Catholic Church asks visitors to remember the men, women and children who were massacred, tortured and disappeared in the civil war.

Cux, Tomas.

Cux Caal, Pablo.

Cuxum, Francisco.

Most of the victims were descendants of the Maya.

Investigations by the church and the United Nations turned up witnesses who saw people shot, burned alive and tossed into mass graves. Killers saved bullets by grabbing children by their heels and swinging their heads into stone walls.

The church called the killings Guatemala’s Holocaust when it erected the memorial more than six years ago.

“The names etched here represent thousands of people who suffered grave violations of their intrinsic dignity as human beings,” the memorial says.

Tiu Castro, Jose.

Tiu Castro, Juan.

Tiu Castro, Julio.

Investigators link 90 percent of the slaughter to the military governments that controlled Guatemala during the war years.

That is a delicate, dangerous matter.

In 1998, Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi demanded justice. He released his own report blaming the military for the deaths. He was assassinated two days later.

His killers, as well as a handful of others responsible for the Guatemalan genocide, were brought to trial. Their convictions have almost all been overturned.

There is no memorial for the people dying from today’s drug crimes.

History complicates the ability of the U.S. and Guatemala to work together on today’s problems, including drugs.

The Central Intelligence Agency helped stage a coup in 1954 to fight a land reform movement U.S. politicians feared could open the door to communism.

The coup eased the way for military dictatorships and decades of repression. In the 1980s, the genocide was at its worst.

That’s when the U.S. supplied Guatemala’s government with weapons, and joined in dismissing the stories of terror and death as fiction from guerillas.

President Clinton in 1999 went to Guatemala and apologized for the coup and for the policies that contributed to Guatemala’s suffering.

Today, U.S. diplomats press Guatemalan leaders to support human rights and to investigate the killing and corruption connected to drug trafficking.

The killings at the cave were discovered the week Guatemalan President Oscar Berger marked his first year in office.

Newspaper polls showed a majority of Guatemalans back Berger but are concerned about the nation’s poverty and its struggle with crime.

People at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City are Berger believers.

Unlike his predecessors, Berger has moved forcefully to address government corruption and remove historical obstacles to democracy. One of his boldest moves so far has been reducing by half the size of the Guatemalan military.

Former FBI agent Raymond Campos has spent more than seven years working out of the embassy, trying to help Guatemalan police.

Many of the nation’s poorly trained police officers can barely read or write, let alone investigate narcotrafficking.

“What we are trying to do right now is really get down to basics,” Campos said.

It has been barely a decade since the country overhauled its penal code, dividing duties between police, prosecutors and the courts. Before then, judges went to the crime scenes, directed the removal of the victims’ bodies, then decided what evidence went to investigators.

Campos’ chief accomplishment has been to negotiate, encourage and cajole the national police to try using a standardized incident report form — just as a test — in one precinct.

Such forms at U.S. police departments provide the raw material for building cases. In Guatemala, paper trails are unknown, making it easy to drop cases or to make them disappear.

“That’s been the real Achilles heel of the operation,” Campos said.

Arrests are made in only 5 percent of criminal cases. Out of 250,000 criminal cases sent to prosecutors each year, only 2.7 percent see charges filed. Of those, only about 2 percent ever wind up being decided in court.

Against these numbers Guatemala’s justice system faces the most sophisticated and organized drug traffickers on earth.

“I got here in ’99. Nobody had even heard of crack,” said Mick Hogan, a regional adviser in the embassy’s narcotics affairs section.

A former special forces soldier, Hogan’s office walls are cluttered with awards and memorabilia from more than two decades following U.S. policy, including fighting narcotraffickers in Central and South America.

What he’s seeing in Guatemala now reminds him of the pattern that emerged in other countries — particularly Colombia — where drug trafficking created riches for the criminal few and suffering for the majority.

“Read the violence figures,” he said. “There is no doubt about it. It is all narcotics -related.”

The U.S. two years ago threatened to pull financial support for Guatemala’s anti-drug efforts, citing poor performance and rampant corruption.

Just before that, an elite police unit used torture and illegal wiretaps to build drug-trafficking cases. Members of the same unit also stole tons of the cocaine they’d seized, and put it back on the streets for the money.

The DEA also keeps tabs on the drug trafficking. Mike O’Brien has six agents for the entire country.

“I’ve been happy with the efforts Guatemala has put out to combat narcotrafficking,” O’Brien said. “It’s just with the resources they have, it is very hard.”

Guatemala’s new leaders face tremendous challenges, he said. They lack airworthy helicopters and other aircraft to chase smugglers. And investigators, by law, cannot conduct stings or try to trap traffickers into selling drugs. Also forbidden are plea bargains, the keystones to building conspiracy cases.

Well protected, and usually well connected, the biggest criminals walk free.

“It is very difficult for them to attack the heads of these organizations,” O’Brien said.

The U.S. also faces limitations.

It spends millions on Guatemalan social and economic programs, including a Latin American version of Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE.

Directly fighting narcotraffickers on Guatemalan soil is another matter.

Neither nation wants U.S. troops patrolling the jungle. The most military help comes from U.S. helicopters from neighboring Honduras that sometimes carry Guatemalan police on drug raids. In March, the U.S. lifted a 15-year ban on direct aid to Guatemala’s military. The ban was put in place because of Guatemala’s human rights abuses.

Meanwhile, drug pipelines bring suffering to both countries.

“Everybody’s fighting the war on drugs, and lives are being lost all the way down,” O’Brien said.

Part Five

The Maras are tattooed warriors, the most dangerous gang members in the Americas. They boast thousands of members in a half-dozen countries and are willing to use guns and torture to control those around them.

That’s the way the story plays in big U.S. newspapers and news magazines.

That story feels different on the ground in Guatemala.

Maras are a U.S. export, Guatemalan Attorney General Juan Luis Florido said.

During the war, many Guatemalan refugees brought their children to Los Angeles, moving into Latino neighborhoods claimed by gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha, White Fence and 18th Street.

The children were jumped into the street gangs. Felonies followed. The U.S. started deporting Guatemalan gangsters in the 1990s.

They returned to their homeland with “this new way of expressing their anger, their frustration over the lack of opportunities here,” Florido said.

Prosecutors have been hard-pressed to respond. Corruption is one problem, including among prosecutors, Florido said.

Unlike their counterparts in the U.S., Guatemalan prosecutors not only file charges and try cases, but also act as detectives, gathering evidence and performing the heavy lifting in criminal investigations.

When he took office about a year ago, Florido created a special team to gather forensic evidence at homicides. Better evidence should mean more prosecutions and more convictions, he said.

Florido doesn’t promise miracles.

With just 170 prosecutors for a nation of about 14 million, there simply aren’t enough lawyers to make the justice system work. (In Snohomish County, Wash., population about 630,000, 50 deputy prosecutors handle the most serious crimes.)

Drug traffickers and other organized crime groups use the maras “to create this violent atmosphere, not only to keep busy the institutions that should be able to fight them, but also to create fear,” Florido said.

“Remember, these organized crime institutions live from chaos.”

The attorney general said his job is to not only fight crime, but to give Guatemalans reason to hope.

“If we kill that capacity to dream, we are killing a generation,” he said.

Part Six

The face of crime in Guatemala is young and smooth.

That face often is marred by gang tattoos — on the forehead, chin or earlobes, any place a needle dipped in ink can pierce.

The median age in Guatemala is 18, half that of the U.S.

The country’s newspapers are full of stories about maras: shootouts, robberies, threats to kill bus drivers, even the murder of a man selling chickens from a bicycle.

Maras are loathed by everyone, including other criminals, said Fernando Maldonado, who runs a state jail and prison at the edge of Guatemala City.

Until a few months ago, Maldonado worked as a labor lawyer and notary public. He was hired to clean up corruption in the prison, which is patrolled by soldiers, their machine guns ready to mow down escapees.

Gang members are segregated from other prisoners. Some were decapitated during a riot not long ago at another lockup. The killers played soccer with the heads.

“Society no longer cares for them,” Maldonado said. “I think it is not only Guatemala, it is all Central America.”

U.S. society no longer cared for Roger Wellington Munoz, 29.

From age 8 to 27, Munoz lived near San Diego, going to shopping malls, hanging out with his homeboys and starting a family.

Deported to Guatemala about a year ago after serving time in U.S. prisons, he started off 2005 as Maldonado’s reluctant guest, accused of robbery and drug offenses.

Munoz’s stocky body is marked by his years as a gang member. His chest is scarred where doctors opened him up to repair a lung punctured in a knife fight. The name of his gang is tattooed on the back of his head — a display that in Guatemala makes him a target for vigilantes.

“Down here, people with tattoos have a bad reputation,” he said. “They think you are a murderer, a psycho, a rapist.”

U.S. law requires a presumption of innocence, a predictable legal system and humane incarceration.

In Guatemala, Munoz’s future is a mystery.

He could be freed instantly — for a price. Or he could, as the law provides, languish for up to two years waiting for a court date. Meantime, he lives in an open-air courtyard, improvising a shelter under plastic sheeting. Meals are tortillas, beans and hard-boiled eggs — little else unless he’s able and willing to pay.

Munoz’s jail sidekicks belong to rival gangs. Outside, they likely would be enemies. Inside, they only feel safe in numbers.

Hector Leonardo Lopez, 22, said he joined the maras out of curiosity. He was charged with selling marijuana.

Jorge Alberto Merino, 24, was being held for allegedly dealing in a lot of crack, which he claimed police planted on him. He also said his gang is not a criminal organization, but really more like a soccer club.

The warden rolled his eyes.

Part Seven

Death draws crowds.

Some Guatemalan parents bring children, even babies, to watch morgue workers collect bloody bodies. Nobody seems bothered when ice cream vendors push their carts up at a traffic fatality or funeral and start ringing their bells.

Dark humor abounds.

At the death cave where the bodies of six people waited, a young man amused friends by peeling off a narrow strip of crime scene tape. He pulled the plastic ribbon between his teeth, like dental floss.

Reporters threw pebbles at detectives’ backs. Laughter and jokes competed with grieving.

There also is little appreciation for protecting evidence.

Guatemalan police and prosecutors have only recently begun using blood spatters, bullet fragments and fingerprints to build cases.

“Here we never, ever worked with any kind of evidence at all,” said Dr. Marco Auerilio Peneda Colon, a dentist who oversees the nation’s largest crime lab.

“If you can’t resolve a case in three days here, forget it. In seven or eight years, you are never going to resolve it.”

As crime scene investigators arrived at the cave, a brace of bomberos, Guatemala’s volunteer firefighters, were kneeling near the bodies, posing.

A few paces away, a television reporter delivered a standup dispatch. When his report aired on the evening news, the bomberos were framed in the background, gravely hovering over the dead.

Juan Canesses, a lead crime scene investigator, emptied the area of journalists and firefighters.

“Every scene, every body, I always say to my people, ‘Work the scene as if it is one of your own family. Justice begins here,’” he said.

The six victims were carried out one at a time. The pregnant woman was first, placed in the back of a pickup truck going to the morgue.

Reporters pressed in, ignoring the crime scene tape. Others in the crowd followed. People who knew the dead sobbed and called their names. Others were strangers, their eyes roaming over the broken bodies.

“Here we have a culture of the cadaver,” said Jorge Donado, one of the investigating prosecutors. “Everybody wants to come and see.”

Part Eight

Slap. Scrape. Slap. Scrap.

The trowel moved quickly in the mason’s hands, sealing Jairo Borreyo into his tomb.  It took only minutes.

Each day brings hasty funerals for people who fall to gangs and narcotrafficking.

Borreyo, 22, was shot dead selling candy to passengers on a bus. The killer was avenging a cousin’s gangrelated death, police said. His bullets also claimed a bystander, a young man seated in the wrong place.

Borreyo was buried the next day at the Verbena cemetery, a collection of crypt galleries for the city’s poor and middle class. Tombs honeycomb the walls of tall, white adobe buildings festooned with wreaths of dead flowers.

The burial was quickly arranged in this place where the dead usually aren’t embalmed. The funeral party included his family, tattooed gang friends and solvent-sniffing drug addicts.

In death, as in life, people at the bottom of Guatemala’s social structure wait on others.

Borreyo’s mourners stood by his coffin for more than an hour, swarmed by biting flies and dust devils carrying bits of garbage.

They spent the hours before the funeral gathered near his brown wooden casket as it sat on a stage at a community center in another part of town.

They talked about his battles with drugs, street crime and faith. Less than a year before, Borreyo buried his girlfriend, who was murdered while pregnant with his child.

He cycled in and out of gang life. By most accounts he’d found Jesus — one foot in an evangelical church, the other in the streets.

Juan Carlos Lopez, 27, clutched a Bible in one hand and with the other stroked a photo of Borreyo taped on the coffin lid. The portrait was distorted and out of focus.

Lopez’s face has gang tattoos, a mix of Roman numerals and Arabic numbers that advertise his affiliation with 18th Street, South Side.

Lopez said he spent nine years with Borreyo, sharing the same drugs, grimy apartments and lack of opportunity.

“He was my family. I appreciated him. I miss him a lot,” he said, grinding tears from his eyes with a meaty fist.

A dozen young men and women, all Borreyo’s street friends, rested on mats strewn along one wall. Most were getting high on fumes from rags soaked in paint solvent.

A boy, 12, shambled about in a stupor. He trailed the stench of chemicals and unwashed clothes. The stink mixed with the scent of death rising from Borreyo’s coffin. The same smells hung over the cemetery.

The solvent addicts made a show of trying not to use their drugs, but gave in as the minutes ticked by. They pulled out small bottles of sweet-smelling liquid, soaked their rags and began sucking fumes.

Borreyo’s funeral procession moved in fits and starts down the dirt path leading to his crypt.

Funerals for three other people came first. Each ceremony was accompanied by the same dirge played over and over by a man with a trumpet. He couldn’t be hired for Borreyo’s funeral.

Someone there for Borreyo found two mariachi players carrying battered guitars. Their song dueled with the trumpeter’s dirge.

Finally it was Borreyo’s turn.

Wails of grief soared as workers used a forklift to raise his coffin to the opening of crypt 4802. Pallbearers slid him inside. The mourners wept as workmen moved in to seal him off from the world.

It took 3½ minutes to close Borreyo’s crypt with red bricks and plaster. In another eight minutes, the tomb’s entrance was smoothed over with adobe.

There was no priest. Almost in afterthought, one of Borreyo’s friends said a few words about faith in God’s mercy.

By then, the mourners were moving away, ears ringing with the sounds of weeping and the steady slap of the workman’s trowel.

Such funerals are why Carlos Toledo dedicates his life to trying to save Guatemala’s youth.

A 1991 winner of the Reebok Human Rights Award, Toledo runs Nuestros Derechos, or Our Rights. The organization provides children and young adults with food, clothing, legal help and shelter.

At the start of the year, he was helping a boy, 12, who is feral because his mother abandoned him in favor of her addictions.

The boy is friendly and likes nothing better than having somebody read him the newspaper. He can’t read.

Also living at Nuestros Derechos was a girl, about 14. She wears her bangs long to cover the dead eye where her grandmother stabbed her with a needle. The grandmother was punishing her after learning the girl was sexually molested by a relative.

Punishing victims, particularly when they are poor, has been Guatemala’s way for years, said Marco Antonio Castillo of Grupo Ceiba, which helps people living in the tough El Limon neighborhood.

“In the ’80s, if you were dead, it was assessed you were a guerilla,” Castillo said. “Today, if you die, you are assessed a victim of drug trafficking.”

Drug trafficking is responsible for an avalanche of violence, but Castillo suspects it also makes a convenient cover for killings that border on social cleansing.

It’s all about shifting blame. Name the problem, ignore the truth.

An estimated 6 million people in the U.S. reportedly used cocaine within the past year.

Toledo asks if people in the U.S. understand how their illegal drug use makes them appear elsewhere.

From Guatemala, he said, it seems that America’s drug war is all spin control.

How is it possible for tons of dope to slip across U.S. borders each year?

Why does the U.S. put so much energy into chasing drug traffickers abroad when the world’s largest market for illegal drugs is within its own borders?

Why are so many Americans using?

“The U.S. is a first-world country,” he said. “But with all the problems it has with drugs, it is also a Third World country.”

Part Nine

Some in Guatemala would rather disappear into the grave than not try to change the way things are.

When gangsters shot Estella Garcia’s teenage son dead before her eyes, she vowed to make the killers pay — in court.

She needed to get tortillas for Sunday dinner and Herbeth, 17, decided to tag along. Herbeth loved playing soccer. He studied hard, hoping to become an accountant.

As they walked, gang members mistook Herbeth for someone else. They passed once, then came back shooting. On the ground, Herbeth pleaded for his life. They shot him in the head.

When they rolled Herbeth over, one said, “This isn’t him.”

Garcia knew the killers, all young men from the neighborhood. She promised detectives she would testify.

Instead, a judge quietly set the killers free, ruling that in spite of the mother’s eyewitness testimony, there was no evidence.

Garcia only found out when she saw one of the killers in the street. She confronted the judge.

The woman in black robes told Garcia to be quiet. She reminded Garcia that it would be a small thing to make her disappear into prison.

“Thank God I didn’t lock you up,” the judge told her.

Garcia demanded that prosecutors do something, and they did right away.

The killers were tossed back into jail. Two weeks later, her phone rang with death threats. Her house was peppered with bullets. She didn’t flinch — in public.

After two years of struggle, her son’s killers were sentenced to 25 years in prison.

“I did it more than anything because of my pain,” Garcia said. “I knew my son was not involved with anything bad.”

Garcia’s story made headlines in Guatemala, where few have been willing to risk their own lives to challenge crime and corruption.

It was a costly victory. She no longer leaves home in the company of those she loves, fearful that if the gang members start shooting at her, the bullets may kill more innocents.

“I have to look out for the lives of my children,” Garcia said.

Newspaper editor Jose Rueben Zamora understands. He’s risked the safety of his own family pursing truth.

El Periodico is Guatemala’s leading newspaper for investigative reporting.

Zamora’s made a career out of exposing the institutional graft that helps to concentrate 50 percent of Guatemala’s wealth among 10 percent of the population.

In 1993, one of the war-era governments disbanded congress, banned demonstrations and generally suspended civil rights.

Zamora fought back by going to press each day with the text of his newspaper blacked out as protest.

When the six murders were found at the cave, he sent reporters to cover the story.

Unlike most of their colleagues, el Periodico’s journalists talked to the victims’ families. They learned that none of the dead had criminal records. They tracked down a key witness who watched the killers round up their victims. The kidnappers appeared to be wearing uniforms and claimed to be police.

Nobody from the government had asked what she saw.

Zamora has reported about the connections between narcotrafficking, organized crime and people who, until recently, have exercised iron-fisted control over Guatemala’s government.

In June 2003, those in power wanted to make Zamora stop. Gunmen claiming to be detectives forced their way into his home. They held the journalist and his family captive.

The invaders tortured Zamora. They put a gun to his head and three times pulled the trigger on an empty chamber, simulating his execution.

He begged to be taken into his garage, so his children wouldn’t have to watch him die. The gunmen eventually left, but not before telling the editor to stop publishing articles that angered their bosses.

Zamora sent his family to live in the U.S. for a while.

He then published stories identifying the people who had invaded his home and who he could prove ordered the attack.

Some of those he accused were part of the nation’s law enforcement apparatus. In February, a trial convened based on the journalists’ accusations. One man was convicted and sentenced to prison for 16 years.

Zamora worries for himself, his family and for his country.

After years of war, Guatemala is keeping itself weak and letting organized criminal groups become ever more ingrained into the society.

The journalist said he holds scant hope that the rule of law will triumph soon. Nothing would have happened in his case if he hadn’t taken matters into his own hands.

“I had to investigate this, identify the people and put it on the front page of the paper who was responsible,” Zamora said. “The only thing I didn’t have to do was arrest them.”

Zamora has his newspaper.

“What happens to the ordinary person with no resources?”

The cave's dead were taken to the morgue. They rested on gurneys, stowed in a room next to the autopsy theater. A 4-foot crucifix was on one wall, Jesus’ death depicted as bloody agony. At Christ’s feet were bouquets of plastic roses, one red, one pale yellow.

Weeping families came to identify the bodies, sobbing out names. A morgue worker, in flowing script, carefully added them to the thick book that records Guatemala City’s violent deaths.

One man’s aunt recognized reporters she saw at the cave. She nodded: It was OK to be there.

Sometimes there is power in bearing witness. Sometimes grief must be seen and smelled and touched for murder to become real.

Tell the world, the woman said. People are dying in Guatemala. People are dying and their killers are walking free.

Profile: Maria Ixcoy

GUATEMALA CITY — Her eyes darted here and there, searching the forest for signs of the trickster.

Hidden in the shadows, someone lobbed pine cones, one after another.

The girl pressed close to her sisters, only pretending to be afraid. Somebody was playing a prank. Who, she did not know.

A man stepped into the open.

“Papa! Papa!” the girls cried with joy. Then, as in all dreams, the moment passed.

For as long as she can recall, Maria Ixcoy has dreamed of the forest and the father she never knew.

Anastasio Ixcoy was a weaver who lived in a tiny hamlet near the city of Santa Cruz del Quiche in the central Guatemalan highlands. He died when Maria Ixcoy was 3, among the legions of people in his country swallowed by political violence. Now 27, his daughter can’t remember the sound of his voice, or the caress of his nimble fingers.

Instead, she has the dream.

The truth found Ixcoy one day as she struggled to build a life in Guatemala’s capital city. The dream, she realized, was a remnant of her father’s love.

He had played with her in the forest, not long before men with guns took him away.

Silence breeds cruelty. It seals lips and helps people disappear into graves nobody remembers. Silence infected Guatemalans during the civil war that played out for much of Ixcoy’s life. It continues today, as the country bleeds from new violence connected to drug trafficking, street crime and government corruption.

“The worst is, nobody talks about it, about the psychological effects the war has left on all of us — the great emptiness that it leaves in the family and the society,” Ixcoy said. “At times, I wish it was a dream.”

She was still just a child during the early 1980s when the military government controlling Guatemala launched La Violencia. The wave of politically motivated slaughter was the darkest chapter of a 36-year civil war that divided the country starting in 1960.

The government said the violence was necessary to contain communist guerillas. In truth, there was a darker agenda. An estimated 200,000 people were exterminated in what an independent United Nations commission determined was genocide aimed at the descendants of the Maya, the country’s most numerous — and poorest — population.

Today, Ixcoy has grown to be everything the killers tried to eradicate.

She is Mayan and proud. Like many university students in Latin America, she admires Che Guevara, the long-dead guerilla who in Guatemala is as much a symbol of self-determination as a purveyor of leftist politics. Although she stands just 4 feet 6 inches tall, about the height of a typical third-grade student in the U.S., Ixcoy’s dark chocolate eyes flash with strength.

She wants a country where people work together to repair the damage of the civil war. On her shoulder she carries a knotted wool handbag like those her father made. Woven into the front, in big red letters, is the word describing what she prizes most: justicia — justice.

Ixcoy has learned her father attempted to organize other Mayan families in his village to protest the dominion a wealthy few held over the poor. Those in power felt threatened. He was arrested by police. When he persisted, he was arrested by the Guatemalan military and beaten in front of his family.

Fearing for the safety of his pregnant wife and four children, Ixcoy’s father left for the anonymity of Guatemala City. That’s where he disappeared.

Maria Ixcoy grew up being told her father had been killed in a traffic accident. It was the type of lie that was routine during the war, when people feared that speaking about the evil around them was the surest way to bring killers to their door.

“In that time, everybody kept quiet,” she said. “They never told the truth, and that was a form of self protection.

With her father gone, Ixcoy began working at 4, watching over sheep and cattle.

At 10, she left her childhood home in the highlands to work as a maid in Guatemala City. Her mother didn’t support the move, but the family had little choice. There would be one less mouth to feed at home. Ixcoy could send home money to help support her younger siblings.

She arrived in the nation’s capital unable to read, write or speak Spanish. For four years, she worked in the homes of middle-class Guatemalans, mostly people who claimed some European ancestors. That made them different.

Each employer gave her a place to sleep. They all ordered her not to eat from their plates or drink from their cups. In some homes, she was threatened with physical and sexual abuse.

Life began changing at 14 when she took a job caring for three boys, ages 7 to 10. Their mother was more accepting of Mayans. She encouraged Ixcoy to spend her days off attending classes and studying.

Ixcoy was 22 when she completed her final examinations, earning the equivalency of a high school education in the United States. That’s something achieved by only two in 10 Guatemalan students. Her final research project focused on the peace accords that had ended Guatemala’s civil war in 1996.

By then, the war’s violence was a personal story.

The truth tapped on her shoulder one Sunday when she was 15.

“I think something magical happened,” Ixcoy said.

She was in the plaza in the city’s center, not far from the Metropolitan Cathedral and its genocide memorial. A Mayan woman whom Ixcoy didn’t know asked the name of her father.

Why? The stranger said Maria Ixcoy’s strong features reminded her of Anastasio Ixcoy, a man she’d once loved as a brother.

The woman then said she was there that night in 1980 when paramilitary killers led the weaver to his death. The woman’s brother also was killed that night.

Learning how her father really died was both a shock and a revelation.

Her mother always discouraged asking questions. She’d burned the weaver’s belongings, as if erasing evidence that he had ever lived would keep her children safe.

That secret family history called to Ixcoy. She needed to know the man who brought her into this world.

Without knowing her past, how could she understand her future?

The killers came in a pickup truck and a car with tinted windows. Ixcoy’s uncle and a cousin, then 15, were visiting her father in Guatemala City. They, too, were abducted.

The captives were jammed into a room, stripped of their belongings, beaten and questioned.

The teenage boy was let go. Ixcoy’s father and uncle were never seen again.

Relatives told Ixcoy how her cousin returned to the village and shared the news. He wanted to know why a man from the village was among those who came to get his dad and Ixcoy’s father.

Horrified and fearful, his family told him to shut up. He wouldn’t. A year later, at 16, he too disappeared.

The truth emerged by destroying the silence. She asked questions. She told her older sisters about the forest dream. They told her about the day in the woods, and the pine cones Anastasio Ixcoy had thrown.

In her mother’s house, forgotten in a corner, she found one of her father’s handwoven bags. Inside was the thread he’d used to make weavings. There also were a couple of photographs, the kind used for identification papers. They are the only surviving images of the weaver. She keeps a framed copy in her room.

Ixcoy is now taking college courses in education and sociology. She is a researcher for a human rights group. Her most rewarding work so far was the two years she spent as a street teacher, running classes for children who, like she once did, make their living at the margins of society.

Ixcoy draws strength from her father, from the dream he left her to fulfill.

“I feel he is always with me.”

Profile: Tono Godoy

GUATEMALA CITY — Tono Godoy could pick up his pistol. He could go to the homes of his brother’s killers. He could pull the trigger, again and again, punishing their sin with bullets.

Or he could listen to his little girl.

“No, papa! Don’t do it,” the 8-year-old begged through tears. “Don’t get involved in that again!"

His girl urged him to leave to God the business of blood for blood. She wanted him to try to be like his brother Oscar, the one who’d stayed clear of the gangs, and had spent months convincing Godoy that violence was no way to live.

Goodness wasn’t enough to keep his brother from being shot through the belly in the street near his mother’s home.

Godoy wrestled with his rage and pain. He’d promised Oscar he would try to change. He could be a killer, or he could be a father. He couldn’t be both.

Life or death?

It was up to him.

The colonia El Limon clings to the side of a steep ravine on the outskirts of Guatemala’s capital city. It was born from a refugee encampment that sprouted after an earthquake. Many of the homes have dirt floors and tin roofs. Only about half are connected to electricity or running water.

It is a place where young people grow up embracing a way of life most Guatemalans fear and few understand. Young men join street gangs called maras. Maras sell crack cocaine, rob, extort and kill.

The Department of Homeland Security recently launched a highly publicized crackdown on maras in the U.S. Some of the groups pose a grave threat because they are multinational criminal syndicates that traffic in people, drugs and weapons, federal officials say.

In El Limon, the maras seem to pose the greatest threat to each other.

El Limon’s children play soccer on a dusty field that is named for homicide. Las Cruces — the crosses — is a reference to the markers that sprout whenever murder victims are dumped on the pitch.

The mara that killed Godoy’s brother prowls at the top of the hill, just a few minutes’ walk up the narrow, twisting streets.

Every day, by force of will, Godoy turns his back on the killers. He heads down the hill. His path leads to a narrow cinderblock schoolhouse. There’s a small library in the basement. It is there Godoy nurtures the future — his own, and those around him.

The school is run by Grupo Ceiba, a nonprofit organization that sprouted first in El Limon and has since spread to other tough neighborhoods.

Godoy helps run the after-school program. Sometimes that means teaching computer skills. Sometimes that means explaining how to find books in the library. It often means making peace between the schoolboys, demonstrating with calm patience the power that comes from respect, starting with respect for yourself.

The boys and girls address Godoy as “teacher.” The new title is a source of pride and bewilderment for Godoy.

“How many people could believe that Tono would be here?” asked Julio Cesar Coyoy, a Grupo Ceiba teacher and its executive director. “The person who must believe it most is Tono.”

Grupo Ceiba started in 1989 with support from the Roman Catholic Church. It now stands on its own, funded in part with an international grant. When the children of El Limon weren’t getting educated, the people raised money and built them a school. For their parents, Grupo Ceiba launched a job-training program that teaches computer repair,Web page design, iron-working and candy making.

Many in Guatemala’s poor neighborhoods aim no higher than finding low-paying factory work, said Marco Antonio Castillo, Grupo Ceiba’s director general. Some can’t resist the lure of the easy money available through gangs and drug trafficking.

The best way to bring peace to the streets is by attacking Guatemala’s economic and social ills, Castillo said.

“I am not only working because of the violence of today,” he said. “I am working so the violence doesn’t repeat itself in 10 years.”

Until July, there were three Godoy boys in El Limon.

Tono Godoy, 22, spent nearly half his life running with gangs and wanted to change. Oscar Godoy, 19, had avoided the gang life and worked at Grupo Ceiba, doing the same job his older brother does now. The youngest brother, Ronny Godoy, 16, is a leader in the local White Fence gang.

Tono Godoy lives in a one-room corrugated steel shack. His wife keeps the earth floor carefully swept. The tattered dolls owned by their two daughters, ages 6 and 8, sit on a rough shelf. There’s a single bed, a print of Jesus on one wall and a black-and white TV powered by an extension cord.

Godoy’s mother lives in a nearby threeroom home that shelters three families, including Ronny, his wife and their toddler daughter. There are bullet holes in the front door. How they got there, no one recalls.

The night he died, Oscar had gone up the hill hoping to spend time with his girlfriend. There were two gunshots. He suddenly was pounding on the door.

“Mama! Mama,” he cried and fell inside, bleeding from bullets in his hand and stomach. The doctors couldn’t save him.

It shouldn’t be Oscar, Tono Godoy thought. Oscar had taken him to Grupo Ceiba. He’d shown him people who knew the way to a life outside of the maras.

They’d helped Tono land a construction job. He built houses and went home after work. He realized the mara had kept him from his children. Paola, his 8-year-old, loved having her daddy around.

He understood. His father had made a living washing trucks and buses. The man drank himself to death a decade before. There are some happy memories of working with his father, but Godoy said he can’t recall ever owning a toy.

Trouble came calling after Godoy’s father died. At first it was just punks who did little more than get into fistfights with rivals. Then a man named Francesco showed up in El Limon. He’d been deported from the United States. His skin was covered with gang tattoos. He loaned Tono cash to pay for family expenses, but the help came with a cost.

“He told me to do bad things. We would go together but he had me do them,” Godoy said.

Guns — and the money to buy them — followed. Both came to El Limon as a result of the cocaine trade taking root in Guatemala.

Almost overnight, straying into the wrong place could get you murdered.

When Oscar was killed, his brothers immediately began talking revenge. Ronny got his guns and told Tono Godoy to do the same.

Paola began wailing in fright when she saw her daddy looking for his gun. She begged him not to go back to the mara.

Godoy doesn’t have the words to explain what happened next. Rage. Grief. Love. The world began to spin. He heard himself speak: “What happened, happened. I’m not going to dirty my hands again.”

Then he fainted.

He awoke in the hospital. He knew he’d made the right choice. Somebody had to break the cycle of blood for blood.

Oscar’s body is now in a crypt in a rundown corner of the national cemetery near the heart of Guatemala City. It usually isn’t safe for his family to visit the tomb. Gang members responsible for the murder keep a lookout on the traffic leaving El Limon.

In January, the surviving Godoy brothers found a safe way to the cemetery, their first visit since the funeral. The air that day was filled with smoke from workers burning dried flowers collected from the graves. Oscar’s tomb was marked with a white Styrofoam cross, a broken arm swinging loose in the breeze.

“Sometimes I think it should be me here, not him,” Tono Godoy said.

The devil is always near, he said, trying to pull him back to his old ways. Still, each day he gets up and heads down the hill to Grupo Ceiba, quietly proving he can walk a new path.

He prays that someday his younger brother will follow.

Author's Note

I went to do journalism in Guatemala accompanied by an old friend.

I’d never been there. I don’t speak Spanish. Still, there was a familiar comfort in my queasiness — the feeling that always comes before knocking on the door, or picking up the phone, and asking somebody to share their pain.

It is a moment that can lead to the best and worst of this job. When a person is ready for the knock, there are tears of remembrance. If the timing is wrong, there is fresh hurt, sharpened by anger that their suffering has become the object of a stranger’s curiosity.

The journalists I admire most never find it easy knocking on the door, no matter how familiar they are navigating the terrain of grief.

In Guatemala, it seemed as if every door opened on somebody living with loss. Many had experienced the decades of civil war, political violence and genocide that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. More recent are the funerals for those lost to drug trafficking, government corruption, gangs and street crime.

Back in my safe, comfortable corner of the world, I am haunted by some of what those people helped me experience. The sounds of a crypt being walled shut on the body of a young man. The smell of funeral wreaths being burned in a cemetery. The cloud that passed over the face of a man who not only mourned murdered friends, but the disappearance of a place where people once passed in the street with a friendly “Buenas!”

I was fortunate on this trip to work with photojournalist Donna DeCesare, somebody who covers Guatemala and Latin America with uncommon compassion, knowledge and depth. She knew how to lead us to people who were ready to talk.

Some were people of courage who risk death in pursuit of justice. Others have taken responsibility for improving the world around them, armed with little more than a willingness to try. Some shared stories about the power of love; it’s ability to bridge space and time and even death, to find purchase in the hearts of the living.

Most made it clear they were glad for the chance to share what they know. Standing at the tomb of his slain brother, former gang member Tono Godoy spoke of healing. “These things stay guarded in your heart,” he said. “It’s better to let them out.”

Facts & Resources

Location: In northern Central America; roughly 42,000 square miles bordered by Mexico, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador.

Geography: Climate and terrain range from tropical jungle in the lowlands on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts, to temperate forests in the mountain ranges that cover much of the country. There are several active volcanoes.

People: The population is estimated at more than 14 million, the largest of any Central American nation. More than half its residents are descendants of the Maya. Many of the rest are Ladinos, people of mixed European and Mayan descent. Spanish is the official language, but about 40 percent of the population is raised speaking one of 20 different indigenous languages. The life expectancy is 65, a dozen years less than in the United States. The rate of adult illiteracy in Guatemala is 10 times that of the
U.S.

Principal industries: Sugar, textiles, furniture, chemicals, petroleum, mining, rubber and tourism.

Chief exports: Coffee, sugar, petroleum, clothing, bananas and cardamom.

Economy: One of Latin America’s poorest nations. More than half the population lives in poverty. One in five subsists on less than $1 U.S. a day.

Fast facts: Growing crime has led to U.S. government warnings against certain types of tourist travel. Stunning scenery and inexpensive hotels draw many visitors from the U.S. and Europe. Many Guatemala cities stand where Mayan villages once thrived. It is common for the same place to be referred to by its name on modern maps and its Mayan name.

A TROUBLED HISTORY

Guatemala originally was home to the Maya, who cultivated corn and built stone temples and sprawling cities. Spanish conquistadors invaded in the 1520s, establishing a colony that lasted nearly three centuries.

Guatemalans booted out Spain in 1821. Their history has since been a series of dictatorships and coups with occasional flashes of democratic government.

Much of the struggle historically has focused on control of the land. Major crops of coffee, sugarcane and bananas are produced on plantations, or finca. Historically, the farms were worked by peasants whose lives were strictly controlled by their employers.

Efforts at land reform caused some in the U.S. to fear a communist takeover and led to a U.S.-backed coup in 1954.

Guatemala was split by civil war from 1960 to 1996. Military governments battled with guerrillas. The violence included paramilitary death squads and massacres of civilians, mostly Mayans.

A key figure from the era of genocide is Rios Montt, who took power in 1982 and presided over a military government that investigators now blame for the most concentrated period of killing and torture. Montt eventually was turned out of office, but he and his supporters continue to flex their muscle.

Peace accords signed in 1996 led to a return of civil government. Alfonso Portillo was elected president in 1999. He was supported by Montt’s political party.

Portillo’s government collapsed in corruption after a series of scandals involving widespread graft, political violence and drug trafficking. In 2003, the U.S. temporarily withdrew anti-drug assistance to Guatemala, citing Portillo’s poor performance in the fight.

That same year, voters elected Oscar Berger, the current president. Berger has impressed U.S. officials with his attempts at reform, including reduction of the military and stepped up efforts to snare narcotraffickers.

ON THE WEB

For more information on Guatemala and the challenges faced by its people:

• Drug Enforcement Administration briefing paper: www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/intel/03002/ 03002.html
• Guatemala: Memory of silence. A report to the United Nations on the 36-year civil war and Guatemalan genocide: http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/ english/toc.htm
• United States Embassy in Guatemala. This site contains
  links to briefing papers on everything from the Guatemalan economy to human rights problems and the country’s struggle with narcotraffickers. http://usembassy.state.gov/guatemala

Groups active in improving conditions in Guatemala:

• Nuestros Derechos works to provide hope to Guatemalan street children. www.nuestrosderechos.org
• Grupo Ceiba works in Guatemala’s poorer neighborhoods to provide educational opportunity as an antidote to the spread of drugs and gangs: www.gruce.org
• Based in Woodstock, New York, Global Youth Connect conducts human rights study tours and organizes young people interested in working with people in parts of the world where there has been genocide. www.globalyouthconnect.org