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Last month, 36 years after surviving one of the bloodiest military mbadacres of the civil war in Guatemala, Ramiro Osorio Cristales testified in court as a witness to one of the murderers. The man who was being tried, a former soldier named Santos Lopez, was accused of murdering Osorio's family and his neighbors.
But an important detail was striking. Lopez was Osorio's adoptive father. "If I'm still afraid of him?" "Yes, yes," Osorio said. "But I had to talk, I wanted to be the voice of those who could not be here."
The Osorio saga began in the early hours of December 6, 1982. At the age of five, he was sleeping with his mother and six siblings when Lopez and about 50 members of Kaibiles, a special military unit from Guatemala formed by the United States, entered the village where the family lived.
Anti-guerrilla elite troops were sent to the colony located in a forest area in the north of the country after the attack by rebels from an army convoy having killed 21 soldiers.
Dressed as guerrillas, to disguise the fact that it was an army mission, the Kaibiles knocked on the doors of every house shouting at the villagers' homes. # 39; open.
When Osorio's father obeyed, petrified by fear, the soldiers tied him with a rope. They pbaded the other end of the rope to Osorio's mother's neck and ran the family to the central square of the village.
All women and children were taken to a church, while men and older children were taken to the local school building. Osorio remembers shouting while the soldiers interrogate and beat the men. One by one, they were shot dead and their bodies piled in a ditch.
"When they finished dealing with men, they came after women and children," Osorio told the BBC radio show. About 200 people were killed during the mbadacre in the village of Dos Erres.
In total, more than 200 000 people died during the conflict between the Guatemalan army and Marxist-oriented guerrillas, many of whom were Indian civilians accused by the army. [19659013] Since the end of the war in 1996, some junior officers and soldiers have been indicted by the Guatemalan civil authorities. López was the sixth Kaibil to be tried for the Dos Erres Mbadacre
When he testified in court, Osorio was a psychologist to help you deal with the fear. He identified Lopez as one of the soldiers who dragged his mother out of the church by the hair. Osorio and his brothers clung to his legs, desperate, screaming savagely. She begged the soldiers to spare their children.
One of them took the little sister of Osorio "by the legs, like a chicken". The soldier took the baby outside and threw him against a tree, "so that he stopped crying".
Osorio said that he had not seen what had happened to his mother and other brothers. Finally, exhausted from crying, he slept and when he woke up, he was only accompanied by two other young children.
When they left the village, the soldiers took Osorio and one of the two children, a three-year-old boy named Oscar.
"When leaving the city, we could see bodies hanging in the trees, people without legs or heads, I recognized one of these bodies as my father's," says Osorio .
The three-day mbadacre at Dos Erres is considered the worst atrocity of Guatemala's civil war. It was eight months after a group of young army officers, led by General Efraín Ríos Montt, took power in the country by a coup of the military state, promising to crush the rebels and their supporters.
During the 17-month reign of Ríos Montt (he was himself overthrown by a coup in 1983), about 1,700 Indians of Mayan origin were killed by the army . Ríos Montt died in April 2018 at the age of 91 while he was being tried for genocide.
It is on the way back to the Kaibiles base that Lopez began to interest himself in Osorio, feeding the boy milk and beans in a tin can. Then the two boys – Osorio and Oscar – were dressed in small military uniforms, as if they were mascots. Lopez then told Osorio that he had decided to take her to live with her family in the south-east of the country.
Osorio says he is satisfied at first with the news, saying, "I am going to have a family again." But their hopes have collapsed. He says that Lopez made him work, beat him when he complained and sent him to school without breakfast.
"He would tell me that if I tried to run away, he would find me where I was and would kill me."
Osorio says that during his childhood he did not forget his biological parents, but he did not talk about it. When Lopez's mother-in-law asked the boy why he was crying so much, he replied, "I miss my mother."
Over the years, Osorio has felt increasingly desperate to escape the killer of his family. Meanwhile, Lopez insisted that he call him "father". It is only at the age of 22 that Osorio has escaped from his relationship with his adoptive father.
Ironically, he did so by joining the army, the same organization that had murdered his parents years ago. "I was very lost, I was not sure who I was," he says. "It was a very difficult decision, but I had to escape.Life was too difficult for them (adoptive parents)."
It was in 1998 and the civil war was over. The rebels formed their own political party. A civilian government was in power, even though the army remained a powerful force.
Osorio had the idea of asking a member of the military to help him find his biological family, but he was afraid to do so. The same year, however, representatives of the Attorney General's Office and a human rights organization knocked on the door of the Lopez family in search of Osorio. They investigated the atrocities of the war and learned that he and Oscar had survived the Dos Erres mbadacre.
Oscar, who called Oscar Ramírez Castañeda, was eventually located in the United States where he lived. Unlike Osorio, he led a happy life with the family of another military kaibil and ignored the story of his original family.
When he realized that he could be in danger if his superiors in the army were discovering his true identity, Osorio contacted the investigators, who helped him to get him there. asylum in Canada.
There, Osorio reflected on everything that happened. He says that he still feels gratitude to Lopez, despite the beatings and threats he received during his childhood. He even wrote him letters from Canada. But over time, Osorio realized that he had been stripped of his roots and identity.
"I had nothing of my past, so I had to build my future."
In 2016, Lopez was expelled from the United States where he lived illegally and was sent to Guatemala for trial.
Osorio was tortured while he doubted his return to Guatemala to testify. Eventually, he concluded that he had the duty to testify.
After presenting all the evidence, he appealed to the judges.
"It is time for justice for all those who are no longer here, who have lost their lives," he said in an overcrowded court. "But a light has been spared, I am this light and I ask you to send those who committed this crime in the dark."
On November 22, Lopez was sentenced to more than 5,000 years of imprisonment, or 30 years for each of the 171 deaths attributed to him, and another 30 years for the murder of a girl taken away from the village, then murdered.
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