The answer to "Who knows who started the fire..." at the Spanish Embassy

Three and a half decades had to go by in order to achieve justice for a horrendous moment in the history of the country. At the time, television cameras recorded the burning of the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala and showed the agony the 37 people endured after being blocked from leaving. The official version offered by the State and other conservative actors was that a group of terrorists had committed suicide in an act of protest. [On January 19], a national court sentenced the police officer in charge of the operation; his goal was to guarantee that no one leave the diplomatic headquarters alive.

By Rodrigo Veliz Nómada
Translated by: NISGUA

Original article in Spanish can be found here.

[In 1980] a campesino organization, the Committee for Campesino Unity (CUC) and a group of students, the Robin García Student Front (FERG), took over the Spanish Embassy to call attention to the beginning of the massacres of entire communities in the highlands of Guatemala.

It was the time of military dictatorships, of guerrilla organizations, of mobilizations and massive marches, of political assassinations every day. These were the years of crisis, when groups - for good or bad - looked for change, while others sought to preserve the way things were through the use of terror. It was the last day of January 1980.

Neighbors and passerbys in zone 9 besieged the police and military, asking them why they were not lifting a finger to save the victims who were crying out. The faces of the police wearing civilian clothes and uniforms remained stone cold. The firefighters looked to break the blockade maintained by security forces. In the background, the cries came out of the top of the two-story building. Screams of agony. The occupants - campesinos, students, Spanish diplomats and other embassy staff - pleaded to be let out while they were being burned alive. For minutes, nobody was able to do anything. Some, out of a sense of helplessness. Others, because they were under direct orders not to do anything. The order was this: not even one person gets out alive.

For years, it was impossible to know who was responsible for the massacre. The intellectual authors backed the official truth provided by the dictatorship: the occupiers of the Spanish Embassy killed themselves in an act of protest. It had nothing to do with the State or its security forces, said the military. The most prestigious conservative historian, Jorge Luján Muñoz maintained for years that Gregorio Yujá Xona, the campesino who survived the burning, only to be killed one day later and left dead on the USAC campus, stated while in the hospital: "who knows who started the fire?" [Muñoz] expressed his position in books and during his testimony at the trial. With this, the truth about one of the biggest urban massacres in the history of Latin America was left in darkness.