Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory And Justice In Guatemala, Chapter 7

(Editor’s note: This is the seventh of an eight part series)

By Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, and Ana Arana, Fundación MEPI

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.

“I’m going to tell you something,” she said. “Do you know that person, that young man on the screen?”

“No, I don’t know who that is,” Castañeda said.

“It’s your son.”

Castañeda was staggered. His reaction was more sad and bewildered than joyful. The group gathered around to comfort him. He downed a shot of liquor to clear his head.

The father peered in disbelief at the screen. He tried to compare the face of the grown man two thousand miles away with the chubby toddler he remembered. As the people around him watched, tears in their eyes, Castañeda addressed his son by his real name.

“Alfredito,” he said. “How are you?”

The conversation was emotional and uncomfortable. Oscar did not know what to say. Castañeda asked if Oscar remembered that he had been missing his front teeth when he was little. Oscar said he did remember that. Mainly, they spent a lot of time looking at each other.

Father and son spoke again by phone and Skype. Soon they were talking every day, getting to know each other, filling in three missing decades.

The lieutenant’s family was equally stunned. But there was no apparent rancor. They promptly invited Castañeda to visit them in Zacapa. They marveled at the resemblance between Castañeda and the man they knew as Oscar. Castañeda joined the Ramírez family for a festive outdoor meal. In photos the family sent to Oscar, his father looked years younger.

Castañeda had been destroyed by the loss of his family. After the massacre, he holed up in a shack in the jungle. He never remarried. He became an alcoholic. He drank as much as a person can.

“I thought I would drown my sorrows, but you can’t,” Castañeda said. “Sorrows can swim.”

Oscar’s deepening relationship with his father propelled him into a new world. He did a lot of thinking. Though talkative about some topics — work, soccer, life as an illegal immigrant — it took effort for him to open up about the miracles and traumas of the past year.

The one person he found easy to talk to was Ramiro, the other abducted survivor. They had long phone conversations. They asked unanswerable questions. Why did the soldiers spare them? What kind of man slaughters families, yet decides to save and raise a boy?

During the dictatorships in Argentina and El Salvador, abduction of infants from leftist families became an organized and sometimes profitable racket. On an ideological level, the kidnappers wanted to eliminate a generation of future subversives by giving or selling them to right-wing families.

In Guatemala, such crimes were more haphazard and opportunistic. Government investigators estimated the military had kidnapped more than 300 children during the civil war. In a poor and rural society, Ramiro’s story of forced labor and abuse tended to be typical.

Oscar’s experience stood out because he was treated with care and affection. Investigators think the lieutenant brought him home to please his mother because of her complaints about not him not giving her grandchildren.

Oscar sat at his kitchen table, examining the photo album. He returned, quietly and adamantly, to two facts. The lieutenant saved him. And the Ramírez family treated him as one of their own.

“He’s still a hero for me,” Oscar said. “I see him the same way I did before.”

And then: “He was in the army. And in the army they tell you things, and you have to do things. Especially in times of war. Even if someone doesn’t want to.”

For the investigators, Oscar had become a powerful new witness. He had to be protected. Peccerelli helped him find a high-powered American lawyer. R. Scott Greathead, a partner in the New York office of the firm Wiggin and Dana, had been active in human rights work across Latin America for three decades. Among other major cases, Greathead represented the families of U.S. nuns who were raped and murdered by Salvadoran soldiers in 1980.

Greathead and fellow pro bono lawyers in Boston filed a claim seeking political asylum in the United States for Oscar on the grounds that he would be a high-profile target if he had to return to Guatemala.

“There are people,” Oscar said, “who don’t want to dig up the past.”