Dos Erres

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Dos Erres is a village in the Petén department of Guatemala. The name, occasionally given as Las Dos Erres, literally means "2R's", originating from two brothers called Ruano who received the original land grant.

On 6 December 1982, during the de facto presidency of General Efraín Ríos Montt, over 200 people – including women, the elderly, and children – were massacred there by government forces as a part of the government's scorched earth policy, in which up to 200,000 indigenous and Mayan people died.

[edit] Dos Erres Massacre

In October 1982, guerrillas ambushed an army convoy near Palestina, in the vicinity of Dos Erres. They killed 21 soldiers and took 19 rifles. On 4 December, a contingent of 58 Kaibiles (the élite special forces commandos of the Guatemalan Army) was flown into the area. The following day, they received orders to disguise themselves as guerrillas, deploy to Dos Erres and kill the inhabitants, who were considered guerrilla sympathisers. Dressed as guerrillas, the Kaibiles arrived in the hamlet at 02:30 hrs on 6 December. They forced the inhabitants out of their homes, corralling the men in the schoolhouse and the women and children in the hamlet's two churches. A subsequent search uncovered no sign of weapons or guerrilla propaganda. At 06:00, officers consulted superiors by radio, then informed the commandos they would be "vaccinating" the inhabitants after breakfast.

In the early afternoon, the Kaibiles separated out the children, and began killing them. They bashed the smallest children's heads against walls and trees, and killed the older ones with hammer blows to the head. Their bodies were dumped in a well. Next, the commandos interrogated the men and women one by one, then shot or bashed them with the hammer, and dumped them in the well. They raped women and girls, and ripped the foetuses out of pregnant women. The massacre continued throughout 7 December. On the morning of 8 December, as the Kaibiles were preparing to leave, another 15 persons, among them children, arrived in the hamlet. With the well already full, they took the newcomers to a location half an hour away, then shot all but two of them. To maintain the pretence that they were a guerrilla column, they kept two teenaged girls for the next few days, raping them repeatedly and finally strangling them once they were no longer useful. (CEH, §31)

In 2000, President Alfonso Portillo admitted government responsibility for the massacre. He acknowledged the deaths of 226 victims at the hands of state agents, humbly asked for forgiveness on behalf of the state, and presented survivors' groups with a cheque totalling USD $1.82 million. [1]