10 the different villages and taking them along the road towards Plan de Sánchez. At 5 p.m., he returned to Plan de Sánchez and was able to observe how the Army had gathered all the people from the village and from other nearby villages, by force, into Rosa Manuel Jerónimo’s house. They separated the girls who were 15 to 20 years old from this group, and took them to Guillerma Grave Manuel’s house; they raped them; they broke their arms and legs, and then they killed them. Subsequently, they killed those in the larger group and then set fire to the house. The children were smashed against the floor, and then thrown into the flames together with their parents. At 8 p.m., he was able to enter his own home and saw that his wife and three of his children were dead. He found one of his daughters alive; she had managed to escape, because she was buried under the bodies of her two siblings. He fled with her, and they hid in the woods that night. Subsequently, they found two of his children who had hidden in the house of one of their next of kin. That day, approximately 280 people died. The massacre was committed by members of the Army, the PAC, the Judicial Police, and the military agents. At 9 a.m. on Monday, July 19, 1982, he returned to Plan de Sánchez and saw that there was still smoke coming from the homes that had been destroyed. He met Juan Manuel Jerónimo, who had lost his whole family, and they joined other survivors to put out the fire that was consuming the corpses. They found some bodies that had been burned and others that were carbonized. The bodies of most of the young women, who had been separated from the group, were naked. At 11 a.m., the military agents and the members of the PAC arrived with orders from the Army to bury the remains of the victims within two hours. No one could bury their next of kin according to their Mayan rites. Following the massacre, everything was destroyed or stolen by the Guatemalan Army. The witness was forced to hide in the wilds with his children for approximately five months, since he had lost his home and his belongings. The survivors hid in the wilds at night and, in the morning, they returned to Plan de Sánchez, taking turns to watch whether the Army was coming, so that they could flee. The time of forced displacement was a very difficult period of his life. His children became ill, owing to the climate conditions and to hunger. They did not receive medical care. They did not return to Plan de Sánchez because the military agent did not allow this; if someone tried to return, he ran the risk of being arrested, taken to the military detachment and executed. After he had spent two years in the wilds, an agent told him that if he joined the PAC he could live in Coxojabaj. This is how he began to patrol. In mid-1984, the military detachment authorized a group of around 15 families, all survivors of the massacre, to return to Plan de Sánchez. The Family Reunion Center program provided them with planks so that they could begin to rebuild their homes. Despite the poverty, before the massacre the inhabitants of the village lived in harmony and collaborated with each other. Afterwards, everything changed, and the level of poverty increased. The return to Plan de Sánchez was very hard, because it was difficult to reinitiate agricultural activities. He is currently growing coffee on his land and, as of 1990, he began to sell it. The State has not returned their belongings.