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procedure was cancelled due to pressure from the Army, as de León Carpio himself
later said.
In order to allow matters to calm down, she traveled to Mexico where she talked to
Santiago Cabrera López, who told her about the Guatemalan Army's practice of
separating certain prisoners and not killing them immediately, but rather torturing
them in order to “break them psychologically” and later forcing them to work for the
Army as informers. Cabrera also told her that he had seen Bámaca Velásquez with
signs of torture in two military detachments.
She then returned to Guatemala to continue with the exhumation formalities and, to
this end, she engaged a United States forensic expert, met with the Guatemalan
forensic team and produced a certificate of her civil status, in which she appeared as
married. She traveled to Retalhuleu to continue examining the files and learned
that both de León Carpio and the local judge had received death threats.
In the case file, she found information on the removal by the Magistrate of a corpse
dressed in the URNG uniform from the Ixcucua River on March 13, 1992, , and was
surprised by the fact that the report was so detailed that it stated that the body did
not have any moles or scars. This description, which did not correspond to the body
of Bámaca Velásquez, made her doubt the truth of the report.
The information contained in the Magistrate's file was totally different from the report
of the autopsy performed on corpse XX by the coroner's office in Retalhuleu, because
the physical appearance, age, height and cause of death were different. Based on
this information, she concluded that Bámaca Velásquez had been captured alive and
then transferred to a military base in order to torture him and oblige him to provide
information. She also became convinced that the Army had invented a “deception” to
cover up the situation, by burying a person that they killed near the river, but
sending the URNG the description of Comandante Everardo, and that the Attorney
General knew that Bámaca Velásquez was not in the grave when he cancelled the
exhumation in Retalhuleu.
In August 1993, the exhumation in Retalhuleu was finally carried out in the presence
of Patricia Davis, the judge, the administrator of the cemetery, “people from the
Health Department”, an official from the Office of the Attorney General, members of
the press, the Guatemalan forensic team, the forensic expert Dr. Charney, members
of the Peace Brigade, the expert who had performed the first autopsy on the body in
1992 and a numerous group of unknown individuals. A helicopter flew over the site
and it was necessary to examine two other corpses that were buried, because the
graves were very close together. When they found the corresponding corpse,
examinations were carried out to determine its identify and the forensic experts
arrived at the conclusion that it was not Efraín Bámaca Velásquez. Following the
exhumation, she contacted the United States Embassy and the Guatemalan Ministry
of Defense, but did not obtain any information on the whereabouts of her husband.
Faced with the negative attitude of the Guatemalan authorities, she decided to begin
a hunger strike in front of a military installations, which continued for seven days.
On returning to Washington D.C., there was considerable interest in her case in the
highest political circles, and she even traveled to Geneva in 1994 to meet with
Mónica Pinto, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights for
Guatemala; all of which generated “considerable international pressure.”