Original subtitles

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.