I helped send my adoptive father to jail for 5,000 years

[Glasgow]

Thirty-six years after surviving one of the worst army massacres in Guatemala's civil war, Ramiro Osorio Cristales stood up in court last month to give evidence against one of the killers. But the man on trial, a former soldier called Santos López, was not just accused of the murder of Osorio's family and neighbours, he was also his adoptive father.

"Was I still afraid of him? Yes, I was," the 41-year-old Osorio says. "But I had to speak out against him. I wanted to be the voice of those who cannot be here."

Osorio's ordeal began in the early hours of 6 December 1982. Then five years old, he was at home asleep with his mother, father and six siblings when López and about 50 other members of Guatemala's US-trained special operations unit, known as the Kaibiles, entered their village.

The elite anti-guerrilla troops had been sent to the impoverished Mayan settlement in Guatemala's remote northern jungle after a rebel attack on an army convoy that killed 21 soldiers.

Dressed up as guerrillas in order to divert blame from the army, the Kaibiles went house to house, hammering on each flimsy wooden door, screaming at those inside to open up. When Osorio's petrified father obeyed, the soldiers grabbed him and tied him up with a rope. They strung the other end of the rope around Osorio's mother's neck and marched the whole family to the village square. All the women and younger children were herded into the church, while the men and older children were taken to the school.

Osorio remembers hearing the screaming and shouting as the soldiers interrogated and beat the men. One by one they were shot dead, their bodies piled into the village well.

"When they had finished with the men, they came for the women and children," Osorio says.

The name of the village, Dos Erres, is now synonymous with the massacre, in which about 200 died.

Overall, more than 200,000 people died during the conflict between the Guatemalan military and Marxist guerrillas. Many were indigenous Mayan civilians, who were accused by the army of sympathising with the rebels. Since war ended in 1996, a small number of officers and lower-ranking soldiers have been prosecuted by Guatemala's civilian authorities. López was the sixth former Kaibil to be put on trial for the massacre in Dos Erres.

When he gave evidence in court Osorio was allowed a psychologist at his side to help him.

He identified López as one of the soldiers who grabbed his mother and dragged her by her hair from the church. Osorio and his brothers held desperately on to her legs, screaming uncontrollably. She begged them not to hurt her children. One of the soldiers then picked up his baby sister, "dangling her by her legs, like a chicken". He took her outside and smashed her against a tree "so that she would stop crying".

Osorio said he didn't see what happened to his mother or his other brothers. Eventually, exhausted from crying, he fell asleep and when he woke he was alone except for two other small children. When they left the now deserted village, the soldiers took with them Osorio and one of the other infants, a three-year-old named Oscar.