43 He knew Julio Alberto Soto Bilbao, who was an Army Major and Operations and Training Officer, and whose function was to plan counterinsurgency operations. He got to know Simeón Cum Chutá in San Marcos, in 1992. There, the latter worked under him as Specialist or office worker, doing typing work; intelligence analysis was carried out by the officer, in this case the witness. He knew Julio Roberto Alpírez, Army Colonel, who was the third commander in Military Zone No. 18, in 1992. Alpírez's functions were to supervise the operation of the detachment and cleaning activities. In July 1992, he was mobilized with a small group of the Staff of Military Zone No. 18 to the “El Porvenir” property, located in San Marcos, responsible for a Task Force formed to confront the rebels in the Zone. He got to know Raúl Rodríguez Garrido in Military Zone No. 1316 in Mazatenango. The latter was a Specialist to whom he gave orders on a daily basis. Although he, personally, had not taken part in the capture of guerrillas during an armed encounter, should this situation arise, the Army proceeded to call the nearest authorities in order to hand them over and then “they claimed an amnesty.” During his time in Military Zone No. 18 in San Marcos, he got to know some “former rebels”, including Anastasia López Calvo and Santiago Cabrera López, who [...] were part of us, as they had given themselves up to the Army and carried out cleaning functions and ran errands in the detachment. Cabrera López was not at the Santa Ana Berlín military base. He was not afraid that these people in the military bases would take information to the guerrilla groups to which they had belonged and, also, he had never heard that any former combatant had been captured and then tortured to obtain information and, subsequently, maintained in military installations for “military intelligence” purposes. The Army considered that the former guerrillas who were working for them were a very imprecise source of information. In March 1992, a Task Force called Quetzal was formed; it was led by the then Colonel Ismael Segura Abularach. The purpose was to locate ORPA militants who were in the region. Members of the battalions from San Marcos and Military Zone No. 1715 of Quetzaltenango participated in this military undertaking. He took part in this mission in March that year because Colonel Aguirre Loarca was injured in the shoulder during an encounter with the guerrilla and the witness was called to relieve him. Colonel Conde Uriales was the Second Commander; he was an intelligence officer; Major Soto Bilbao was the logistics officer; Captain Aragón Cifuentes was the civilian affairs officer and there was also a personnel officer. As an intelligence officer he heard that there had been an encounter between the Quetzal Task Force and the Luis Ixmatá Front in March 1992. He received a radio communication that “a terrorist criminal [...] had been killed in combat” near a river in Nuevo San Carlos. When the situation had calmed down, following orders, he went in one of the three Army helicopters at Retalhuleu to inform the authorities that there had been an armed encounter and that a guerrilla had died, and he helped the Magistrate get to the place in question. He was able to see the corpse, near the Ixcucua River, and they removed it by helicopter as part of the judicial procedure. He was at the Santa Ana Berlín detachment after the encounter of March 12, 1992, and did not know whether Efraín Bámaca Velásquez had been captured at that time, nor did he know that members of ORPA had made declarations confirming this.