Nidia gave birth to two girls and a boy, smart and energetic kids who slid easily between English and Spanish. The family kept Oscar busy: church, swimming lessons, cookouts on the outdoor grill. He rose to assistant manager at the supermarket but lost the job in an immigration crackdown in 2009. He found new jobs as a supervisor: mornings at a cleaning company, evenings at a fast-food restaurant.
Oscar was polite and poised and spoke English well. Some of the regulars at the Mexican burrito place that he managed even mistook him for the owner.
Despite the precarious nature of life as an illegal immigrant, Oscar was healthy and putting food on the table. He considered himself a happy man.
The newspaper article had stirred doubts. But he came from a part of the world where mysteries abounded, where allegations and suspicions outnumbered facts.
As the years went on, he thought about the episode less and less.
Chapter 5: The Hunt Moves North
Frustrated that the Dos Erres case had ended up in limbo, Guatemalan activists sued their own government in international court.
The legal action resulted in public disclosure of the list of suspects. A few had died, but the rest were at large. And then help came from an unexpected quarter: a special unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Washington that tracks down war criminals.
The unit forwarded a lead to Jon Longo, an ICE agent in West Palm Beach, Fla. A compact Italian-American from Boston with a goatee, Longo, 39, had only two years on the job. But he had expe rience persuading criminals to talk. He held a master’s degree in psychology and had worked for eight years as a prison therapist.
Analysts at ICE headquarters suspected that one of the Kaibil commandos on the Dos Erres list, Gilberto Jordán, was living in Delray Beach, about a half-hour drive from Longo’s office. Jordán worked as a cook at two country clubs. Longo’s orders were to determine if he had taken part in the massacre and, if so, to build a case under U.S. law.
It wasn’t going to be a murder case. Because Jordán had become a U.S. citizen, he could not be deported to Guatemala for trial. Nor could he be prosecuted in U.S. courts for a crime committed many years earlier in a foreign country.
Longo focused instead on U.S. immigration statutes. Jordán, who was 53, had stated on naturalization forms that he hadn’t served in the military or committed crimes in Guatemala. If he had been in the army or participated in the Dos Erres attack, his statements would violate laws against lying to obtain citizenship. Longo wanted to approach the case as simply as possible. He asked himself: “How do I prove these crimes?”
The agent immersed himself in the case file, circling his target. Jordán had left Guatemala soon after the massacre and crossed into Arizona illegally. Thanks to the 1986 immigration amnesty, he became a legal resident. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 1999. He had three grown children—one of them a U.S. Marine and Iraq vet.
Longo obtained Jordán’s army file from the Guatemalan government and confirmed he had been a commando. Separately, agents in Houston caught another Dos Erres suspect: Alonzo, the squad’s baker, who had taken 5-year-old Ramiro. Alonzo had been deported once before. ICE charged him with breaking U.S. laws against re-entering the United States.
In early 2010, Agent Longo interviewed Alonzo about Dos Erres. He also questioned the repentant soldiers-turned-witnesses, Pinzón and Ibañez, who described Jordán’s actions during the massacre. By May, Longo was ready to arrest Jordán. But U.S. prosecutors told Longo he needed more proof that Jordán had participated in the massacre and lied about it. Without direct evidence, such as a confession, they would not indict.
Longo and his bosses decided to knock on Jordán’s door. It was a long shot. Murderers tend to confess more readily on television than in real-life. Especially veteran commandos versed in stealth and psychological warfare.
Longo planned carefully for the confrontation. He was dealing with a highly trained soldier who might own weapons. To help build rapport, Longo enlisted a Latino agent—a military special operations veteran—to approach Jordán with him.
As permitted by law, the ICE team concocted a ruse. Because Jordán had served in the presidential guard, they would tell him they were interested in the recent U.S. arrest of a former Guatemalan president accused of corruption. Then they would ask about Dos Erres. If Jordán refused to talk, they would have to walk away.
On the morning of the operation, Longo deployed agents to tail Jordán’s wife as she worked cleaning homes in the area. The agents planned to confront Jordán at work, but he called in sick. Wearing raid jackets, the agents went to his home in a modest, multiethnic subdivision with narrow streets. Jordán’s truck was parked in the driveway of his well-kept, one-story house, which sits behind a row of tropical trees. The garage door was open when the agents cruised by, but closed when they came back.
Longo called Jordán on his cell phone and identified himself. Jordán politely told him to come over. When the team knocked on his door, though, no one answered. Longo called again. No response. Minutes ticked by. The agents had their hands on their guns.
“We don’t have a warrant,” Longo thought. “He could be getting a cannon ready in there, for all we know.”
Longo directed the agents shadowing Jordán’s wife to stop her and explain the situation. She agreed to call her husband. He reacted like a hunted man.
“They are here to kill me,” Jordán told his wife.
“No, they are the Americans,” she said.
“They have guns,” he replied.
The tension subsided, and Jordán invited the agents into his home. He was short and stolid, with close-cropped gray hair and a lined face. He wore puttering-around clothes: baseball cap, T-shirt, jeans. They sat at a rustic wood kitchen table, photos of Jordán’s chil dren on the walls, and made small talk in Spanish and English. Soon his wife joined them.
Jordán agreed to answer questions, signing a Miranda form after Longo read him his rights. He admitted he had been a commando. He said he did not display military memorabilia in his house because his wife had heard of former soldiers attacked by Guatemalans with grudges against the military.
Longo had dealt with plenty of murderers in his career. Jordán didn’t have the look of a killer. Although calm and guarded, he seemed somewhat eager to talk. He’s throwing out breadcrumbs, Longo thought.
“I had problems in Guatemala,” Jordán said. “They say I did things. There was a massacre.”
“Where?” Longo asked.
“At a place called Dos Erres.”
Longo bided his time. The conversation eventually returned to the massacre. Jordán took a deep breath. He told the story of Dos Erres. He described the slaughter at the well.
“Todos (everyone),” Jordán said, making a gesture to depict victims falling into the well. He began to cry. He said: “I threw a baby into the well.”
Jordán told the agents that he had wept as he killed the infant. He denied raping anyone. His wife listened morosely. She knew all about Dos Erres, Jordán explained.
“I knew this day would come,” Jordán said. He looked relieved. Longo felt Jordán had been dying to get it off his chest.
After about 45 minutes, Longo thanked Jordán for his candor. Heart pounding, he went out to the driveway and called a federal prosecutor to report Jordán’s admissions. The prosecutor knew Longo wanted to handcuff Jordán on the spot. She told him to hold off, saying she wanted to create a clear record that the confession was voluntary.
Tell him to come to your office tomorrow morning for a formal appointment, she said.
The next day, agents arrested Jordán when he showed up with a lawyer. Within weeks, he had agreed to plead guilty to concealing facts and willful misrepresentation on his immigration application.
Prosecutors pushed for the maximum sentence. At a hearing in a Florida courtroom, they called Ramiro Cristales, who had traveled from Canada, where he lived as a refugee. Longo expected Ramiro to be a shell of a man. Inste
ad, the 33-year-old Guatemalan impressed the agent with his courage and maturity.
In his testimony, Ramiro described commandos storming into the house where he lived with his parents and six siblings, and beating and terrorizing the family.
“We started praying because they was saying [to] us, if you believe in God, pray, because nobody will save you,” Ramiro testified.
Though it is not clear how precise his memories are, Ramiro told the court he spent most of the massacre in the church with the women and children. He said the soldiers threw his younger siblings in the well.
Jordán’s immigration crime rarely results in a prison term of more than six months. But U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch was disgusted by what he heard in court. He grew even angrier when Jordán’s lawyer argued that her client was not a danger to the community.
“After these allegations?” Judge Zloch demanded. “How many more does he have to commit after this incident? How many more heads have to be smashed in? How many more women need to be raped? How many more people shot? How many?”
In September 2010, the judge sentenced Jordán to the maximum possible term: 10 years in federal prison.
Across the United States, ICE investigators sifted the list of suspects for leads. Agents in Orange County, Calif., arrested Pimentel, the commando who had left for the U.S. military academy in Panama weeks after killing and raping at Dos Erres. In 1985, the U.S. military had awarded Pimentel an Army Commendation Medal for his service. He was found living illegally as a maintenance worker in the United States. Authorities deported him to Guatemala to stand trial.
Federal investigators learned that Sosa, the sub-lieutenant who had allegedly thrown a grenade into the well in Dos Erres, was a U.S. citizen and prominent martial arts instructor in Orange County. Sosa moved to Canada, where he was jailed pending extradition for trial in California on charges of falsifying his U.S. immigration application. Alonzo, Ramiro’s abductor, pleaded guilty in Houston. He agreed to testify against Sosa, his former superior officer.
Chapter 6: Cocorico2
The U.S. arrests helped jolt Romero’s investigation back to life.
The Guatemalan military had been more responsive to requests from U.S. authorities than its own prosecutors, turning over documents about the fugitive commandos caught by ICE. American investigators sent the material to counterparts in Guatemala, where Jordán’s confession and other evidence strengthened the cases against about a dozen suspects still at large.
The atmosphere in Guatemala had changed. In late 2010, a new attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz, was appointed by President ûlvaro Colom. Guatemala’s first female attorney general launched an unprecedented campaign against human rights abusers, charging former dictator Ríos Montt with genocide and crimes against humanity.
In addition, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica had ruled in favor of the lawsuit by Guatemalan activists, forcing Guatemala’s Supreme Court to order the Dos Erres prosecution to resume.
Fifteen years into the case, prosecutor Romero ordered a new round of arrests in 2011. Police were able to capture three of the commandos and Carias, the former local commander.
Investigators faced danger and hostility. A witness in another atrocity case was murdered. Military families in the Guatemala City neighborhoods where suspects lived threatened to lynch police who were hunting for war criminals. Col. Roberto Aníbal Rivera Martínez, the former lieutenant in charge of the Dos Erres unit, had escaped when the arrest team arrived at his home, which was equipped with a tunnel connected to another building. Prosecutors suspected that some of the fugitives were hiding on army bases or in areas dominated by the military.
During questioning in Guatemala City, a captured commando described the abduction of the two boys. The judge supervising the case ordered Romero to redouble her efforts to find Oscar. Years before, she had been thwarted by the resistance of Oscar’s family. The newspaper story about her investigation had not helped.
But once again, in May 2011, Romero returned to Zacapa, where Oscar had been raised. Again she sat down with Oscar’s uncle, the prominent doctor. During her previous visit, he had accused her of slandering the lieutenant’s honor with her questions about the boy. This time, the doctor was a bit more cooperative. He disclosed that Oscar was living in the United States and now had a family. He said he did not know their phone number.
“His wife’s nickname is La Flaca (The Skinny Girl),” the doctor said.
Armed with that lead, investigators located a merchant who helped them identify Nidia and track down her family in a nearby town. The prosecutor interviewed Nidia’s parents. They gave her Oscar’s email address, which incorporated the word Cocorico2. Romero realized that Oscar used the same nickname as Lt. Ramírez.
A few days later, after hearing about her visit, Oscar called Romero. She kept the conversation brief, not wanting to deliver a bombshell over the phone.
Then she sat down to compose an email. She struggled to find the best words to explain that his entire life had been based on a lie. Romero knew Oscar was an illegal immigrant. She imagined his existence far from home. She thought about the impact the email might have. How would he take the news? Would he need psychological counseling?
She pushed ahead. It had to be done. She began with the phrase: “You don’t know me.”
In the moments after he read her message in Framingham, Oscar whirled through convoluted thoughts and emotions. The prosecutor was claiming that he had lived a completely different life until the age of three. He found it hard to believe. He could summon no mental picture of Dos Erres. The people he knew as blood relatives in Zacapa had treated him as a full-fledged member of the family.
Then he thought back to the newspaper article about him and Ramiro from a decade before—the story that his relatives had dismissed as unthinkable. The doubts flooded back.
Oscar called Romero and agreed to take a DNA test. Last June 20, a Guatemalan human rights investigator named Fredy Peccerelli arrived in Framingham to collect the evidence that would determine Oscar’s true identity once and for all.
The two men hit it off. With his shaved head, weightlifter’s physique and Bensonhurst accent, Peccerelli seemed more like an action hero than a scientist and human rights crusader.
Born in Guatemala and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., the 41-year-old Peccerelli was one of the top forensic anthropologists in Latin America. His private, internationally funded Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation supported state investigations of atrocities and high-profile crimes, exhumed remains at massacre sites and clandestine cemeteries, and performed DNA tests at a state-of-the-art lab behind high walls in Guatemala City.
In 2010, Peccerelli’s foundation had analyzed the Dos Erres remains recovered years earlier by the Argentine team. The forensic investigators used sophisticated technology to take DNA from relatives of the victims and look for matches.
When they met, Peccerelli tried to imagine what Oscar had gone through as a boy. Had he seen his entire family being killed?
Peccerelli felt protective toward Oscar. The young man was wary at first. Peccerelli told him he knew what it was like to be an immigrant in the shadows. His father had been a lawyer in Guatemala, and when Peccerelli was a boy, the family had fled death threats by rushing to the United States.
Gradually, Oscar opened up, telling the story of his own clandestine odyssey from Guatemala. After the Guatemalan visitors took the DNA sample, Oscar and Nidia cooked a big meal for Peccerelli and a fellow investigator in the kitchen of their townhouse.
Peccerelli had spent years piecing together the secrets of shattered skeletons. Now, for the first time, he was face to face with living evidence. He had a rare chance to ask important questions. In past cases, children who had been abducted by soldiers had been raised abusively, like Ramiro, forced to sleep in barns and work 20 hours a day. Peccerelli was fascinated to hear about a firsthand experience.
“How did they treat you?” Peccerelli
asked Oscar.
“Where I was raised, I was raised well,” Oscar said in his serene, laconic way. “I wasn’t treated differently than any other kid.”
Peccerelli returned to Guatemala to complete the tests. He had the impression that Oscar was deeply curious, but also ambivalent.
At some level, he thought, Oscar hoped the whole thing might not be true.
Chapter 7: “Sorrows Can Swim”
Oscar waited about six weeks for the DNA results.
On Aug. 7, Peccerelli called from Guatemala City. He explained that the tests had conclusively ruled out one of the prosecution’s theories: that Oscar and the other abducted boy, Ramiro, might be brothers.
“Thank you,” Oscar said. “I’m not surprised.”
Peccerelli paused. There was more.
“We found your biological father,” he told Oscar. “He’s a gentleman named Tranquilino.”
Oscar turned to Nidia. He said the words he still found hard to believe: “They found my father.”
Tranquilino Castañeda had been a farmer in Dos Erres. He had escaped the massacre because he was working in the fields in another town. For nearly 30 years, he thought the commandos had killed his wife and all nine of his children.
Oscar was his youngest son: His real name was Alfredo Castañeda.
Peccerelli, Aura Elena Farfán and other investigators set up a video conversation between the two survivors.
Oscar saw his father appear on the computer screen. Castañeda was a lanky, rugged 70-year-old in a cowboy hat, his craggy face etched by decades of work, solitude and sadness.
Investigators had taken Castañeda’s DNA and talked to him for months without disclosing their suspicions about Oscar’s true identity. When they were certain and decided to tell Castañeda, they brought a doctor along just in case. One of the human rights investigators pulled Castañeda’s chair next to hers and leaned close.