By Maggie Jones Maggie Jones is a journalist and visiting assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. April 5 at 1:30 PM A few years ago, deep in Guatemala’s Highlands, where mist enshrouds the green hills, Francisco Caal Jalal told me about a long-ago massacre in his village, Pambach. It happened one June evening in 1982. Soldiers lined up about 70 blindfolded men and boys, face down, then beat, stabbed and hacked them with machetes.
Now, though, the curtain of impunity is descending once again. None of those arrested have been tried for the Coban killings. Conservatives in the Guatemalan Congress, including the military elite, have pushed numerous efforts to reverse human rights progress, including an amnesty bill that would free war criminals within 24 hours of being signed into law and prevent any future prosecutions of war crimes committed during the civil war.
Hours passed. Children were crying from hunger, from thirst, from fear. Outside, the soldiers tied several men to a tree and beat them. The commanders may have suspected that the men were guerrillas. Or, as the Catholic Church’s sweeping Recovery of Historical Memory Project points out, the military often tortured men in public to instill terror in their villages.Soldiers gathered all the men in a school around 2 p.m. and began choosing those between about the ages of 15 and 40.
That evening, as military vehicles pulled out and the air grew quiet and cold, Caal Jalal dragged, scooted and rolled his body away from the others, deeper into the woods. By the morning, though bleeding and weak, he was far enough away that when soldiers returned and began to load victims into trucks, some still alive and moaning, no one saw him.
When Caal Jalal arrived to meet me that morning, he sat down wearing a straw cowboy hat, his kind, worn face marked by soft brown eyes and a downturned mouth. His voice registered barely above a whisper. His hands were rough and gnarled like a farmer’s, though he was too broken to work much any longer.
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