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forced disappearance
'Justice Has Failed Us Here in Guatemala': A Family Fights for Accountability
More than 44 years have now passed since Guatemalan state forces abducted Luz Leticia; every day since, her sisters have fought to preserve the truth and dignity of her life while demanding answers.
Jul 12, 2026
Under the beating sun on the morning of June 21, Mirtala del Rosario Hernández Agustín joins families of the disappeared and members of organizations including the Association of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared in Guatemala, or FAMDEGUA, and Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence, or HIJOS, in Guatemala City’s Plaza de la Constitución to commemorate the National Day Against Enforced Disappearances.
“We dream of a different Guatemala, and we fight for it. We cannot sit back and cross our arms. We have a person detained and disappeared.” Mirtala’s voice carries across the plaza. Behind her sit more than 400 empty chairs, each bearing the portrait of someone forcibly disappeared during Guatemala’s 36-year internal armed conflict. “I am the sister of Luz Leticia Hernández Agustín,” she continues. “To have peace in my heart, to be able to say we’ve been heard, we need my sister's remains returned.”
More than 44 years have now passed since Guatemalan state forces abducted Luz Leticia on November 22, 1982. It was her 25th birthday. And it was the last time she was seen.
Yet her sisters, Marta and Mirtala, refused to let her vanish completely. Every day since, they have fought to preserve the truth and dignity of Luz Leticia’s life while demanding answers not only for her, but for the tens of thousands who were disappeared, tortured, and killed during Guatemala’s US-backed campaign of state terror and genocide.
No amount of political power can permanently shield perpetrators from the demands for truth and justice made by the people they sought, and ultimately failed, to erase.
Now, their case is finally being heard in court. Three days a week, the Hernández Agustín sisters climb the stairs to the fifth floor of Guatemala City’s Palace of Justice. They sit through hours of testimony and legal argument, filling notebooks with observations and listening for the answers that have eluded their family for decades. Some days sting with the reopening of old wounds. Others dissolve into procedural delays, technical difficulties, and bureaucratic legal wrangling. They often leave frustrated and exhausted.
Still, they return. They do so because this case is about more than one family’s pursuit of justice. At a time when the United States is escalating violence at home and abroad, and governments like Guatemala’s continue to subordinate themselves to the imperatives of that long-standing imperial project, this trial carries particular significance. Most recently, this has included expanded military cooperation with Washington targeting alleged drug cartels in the country, a justification the US has invoked to extrajudicially kill more than 210 people over the past nine months.
The trial has therefore become a testament to all those who refused the silence imposed upon them. It is proof that those marked for erasure can reclaim their place in history. Above all, it is a reminder that no amount of political power can permanently shield perpetrators from the demands for truth and justice made by the people they sought, and ultimately failed, to erase.
The Long Shadow of Empire in Guatemala
The Guatemala into which the Hernández Agustín sisters were born bore the unmistakable imprint of empire. It was a country of staggering inequality, where generations inherited the desiccated remains of a nation picked clean by the vultures of foreign capital. The promise of reform had long since been extinguished. Gone was the Democratic Spring, the brief decade from 1944 to 1954 when popularly elected governments sought to expand democracy and direct the country’s wealth toward its people rather than multinational corporations and the landed oligarchy.
That dream was crushed with the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz. The coup sought not simply to remove a government but to restore the deeply unequal social order whose foundations had been laid under the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. A pliant strongman who willingly auctioned off his country’s future to the highest bidder, Ubico granted sweeping concessions to US corporations while enriching himself. Under his rule, the Boston-based United Fruit Company became Guatemala’s largest landholder, acquiring more than 40% of its arable land and near-monopolistic control over not only its lucrative banana exports but also critical infrastructure, including the country's railroads and electrical network.
The threat posed by the Democratic Spring was not simply that it had challenged landowners and foreign corporations. It had shown workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities that collective action could transform society.
Ubico’s regime collapsed in 1944 with a popular uprising. Under elected Presidents Juan José Arévalo and then Árbenz, Guatemala embarked on an ambitious reform program. Building on Arévalo’s efforts, Árbenz expanded labor protections, social security, and universal suffrage while pursuing economic modernization that sought to transform Guatemala from what he referred to as “a semi-colonial dependency into an independent nation” and “a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.”
It was this challenge to entrenched economic power that placed Árbenz in the crosshairs of both Washington and Wall Street. The flash point was Decree 900, his sweeping agrarian reform. The measure authorized the expropriation of uncultivated large estates, including United Fruit’s vast holdings, for redistribution to hundreds of thousands of peasants. Remuneration would be based on the value the company itself had declared, a figure it had deliberately undervalued to reduce its tax burden. While the reform was rooted in economic nationalism and guaranteed compensation for the land, officials in Washington cast it as evidence of communist subversion.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles, both closely tied to United Fruit, orchestrated Árbenz’s overthrow. The coup ended Guatemala’s democratic experiment and ushered in decades of military rule, repression, and civil war.
A State Built on Terror
The dictatorship that emerged in the wake of the coup gave rise to a popular insurgency determined to reclaim the democratic aspirations that had been violently swept aside. It also ushered in a new era of repression. For Guatemala’s military rulers, the objective was to preserve their power. For their patrons in Washington, Guatemala became a Cold War proving ground, meant to demonstrate the consequences of challenging US political and economic power.
The threat posed by the Democratic Spring was not simply that it had challenged landowners and foreign corporations. It had shown workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities that collective action could transform society. That lesson had to be unlearned. In its place, they sought to teach another: that any attempt to remake Guatemala would be met with overwhelming violence. Terror became the principal pedagogy of the state.
From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala’s internal armed conflict claimed roughly 200,000 lives and left another 45,000 disappeared.
Repression failed to extinguish resistance. In 1960, dissident military officers launched an uprising against the regime. After it was crushed, many of its survivors retreated to the countryside, where they helped form the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), the first of several guerrilla organizations. The state responded with a brutal, US-backed counterinsurgency waged through roving death squads, systematic torture, forced disappearances, and indiscriminate targeting of suspected dissidents.
Rather than destroying the insurgency, the violence pushed it deeper into rural Guatemala, where Indigenous Maya communities and peasant organizers assumed an increasingly central role in new guerrilla organizations. By the late 1970s, the military had embraced a genocidal scorched-earth campaign, particularly against the Ixil Maya. Entire communities were treated as inherently subversive. The objective was no longer simply to defeat guerrillas but to destroy the social fabric that sustained Indigenous life.
Villages were razed. Thousands were massacred. Survivors were displaced or forced into tightly controlled “model villages” under a policy known as Palestinianization, where military authorities sought to erase Indigenous languages, traditions, religious practices, and communal life in the name of anti-communist pacification and national modernization.
From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala’s internal armed conflict claimed roughly 200,000 lives and left another 45,000 disappeared. The bloodiest paroxysm of violence came between 1981 and 1983, when security forces killed an estimated 100,000 people, overwhelmingly Indigenous Maya, in a genocidal campaign that journalist Vincent Bevins has referred to as “the largest bloodbath unleashed by the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere.” The atrocities unfolded with US training and the material and diplomatic backing of the Reagan administration, which viewed Guatemala as a critical front in its campaign against leftist movements across Latin America, alongside its support for the Contras in Nicaragua and allied security forces in El Salvador and Honduras.
The Disappearance of Luz Leticia
Luz Leticia Hernández Agustín, or Leti, as her sisters call her, was one of the many lives cut short by the Guatemalan state during this period of extreme violence. As the eldest sibling, she occupied an outsized place in her family’s life. Marta and Mirtala remember her as hardworking, intelligent, and deeply compassionate. In a household, and community, marked by intense economic precarity and hardship, she assumed responsibilities well beyond her years, helping care for her younger siblings and easing whatever burdens she could.
This experience shaped Leti’s politics. She came to understand that centuries of colonial conquest had produced enduring systems of racism, dispossession, and exploitation that were still being felt. “Leti could see all of that,” Marta explains. “All the deep-seated wrongs that have persisted for so long.” She imagined a different Guatemala, one where those structures no longer defined people's lives and where everyone, regardless of ethnicity or social standing, could live with dignity.
Leti’s sisters have never abandoned their search for truth and justice, nor their determination to affirm their sister’s existence.
Her commitment extended beyond her immediate family. As Mirtala recalled, Leti was motivated certainly “by her own experiences, and the way our parents lived,” but equally “by the suffering she witnessed among our people.” Despite all the evidence seemingly to the contrary, she never surrendered her belief that Guatemala could become a more just society. That conviction would draw her into the resistance. She joined Nuestro Movimiento (“Our Movement”), an underground organization affiliated with the Organization of People in Arms (ORPA).
In late 1982, Leti became involved in an effort to secure the release of a comrade, Ileana del Rosario Solares Castillo, who was illegally detained by the regime. On October 14, members of Nuestro Movimiento abducted Mario Ríos Montt, the nephew of General Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s de facto president who presided over the bloodiest phase of the genocide, for which he was convicted in 2013. The operation sought to force a prisoner exchange. Mario remained captive until November 21, when an intelligence unit, working alongside Israeli advisors, rescued him. In the process, Luz Leticia, Ana María López Rodríguez, María Cruz López Rodríguez, and Leandro Gabriel Calate Temu were all captured.
In that moment, Leti entered the opaque machinery of forced disappearance. She was taken into a clandestine detention system notorious for torture, sexual violence, and the systematic degradation of prisoners. Her family never saw or heard from her again.
The Struggle for Justice
Leti’s sisters have never abandoned their search for truth and justice, nor their determination to affirm their sister’s existence. In 2001, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) concluded that the Guatemalan state had violated the rights to life, liberty, humane treatment, judicial protection, and a fair trial of Ileana, Luz Leticia, and Ana María. It recommended that Guatemala locate the women’s remains, compensate their families, and identify and prosecute those responsible.
Five years later, the Guatemalan government offered the Hernández Agustín family an “amicable settlement agreement,” consisting of financial compensation without accountability and without the return of Luz Leticia's remains. They refused on principle.
In 2023, prosecutors indicted Juan Francisco Cifuentes Cano, the former commander of the National Police’s Fifth Corps Special Operations Reaction Battalion (BROE), on charges of crimes against humanity and enforced disappearance. After years of defense appeals aimed at delaying or derailing the proceedings, the long-awaited trial finally began on May 5.
Will we accept a world in which some have the right to kill and others the right to die, or insist on one governed by justice and accountability?
Justice, for them, means a broader reckoning with the collective trauma inflicted by enforced disappearance. The crime was designed to leave families trapped in cycles of hope and grief, producing what Marta described as the “strange sensation” that “[Leti] had died, yet was somehow still alive,” condemning them to “so much uncertainty, anxiety, and immense, constant stress.”
For Mirtala, that torment was central to the crime itself. “Enforced disappearance,” she explained, “is an act committed by the state against its own citizens, often in collusion with the very groups meant to guarantee the population's safety.” It extends far beyond the individual. “They don't just make the person disappear,” she said. “They do so in a way that instills terror and fear, and that is precisely what they have sought to do: to plunge us and our entire family into that terror.”
“It is a crime, an undeniable crime, but one committed in a sophisticated manner against our humanity,” she continued. The violence is directed not only at the disappeared but those left behind, condemning families to live with uncertainty while knowing their loved one is in the hands of the state. “It's agonizing to know that she's with these people.” “It’s powerlessness,” Mirtala said, “unable to do anything to pull [the disappeared] out of that cycle of violence and cruelty.”
Yet they have found meaning in the struggle. Their search for Leti has become inseparable from a broader fight over historical memory and for accountability. As Mirtala put it, it is a “story that reflects everything fractured in our country, all the underlying tensions and societal pain, and the struggles being waged on various fronts everywhere.”
Still, they approach that work with humility, believing that lasting change is built through small acts of collective resistance. “We are like an ant carrying a single grain of salt,” Mirtala explained. Yet she sees power even in the smallest acts. “This is how dust turns into sand, then into a gust of wind, and finally into a storm. We believe it will change many people’s perceptions.”
But this is not merely a struggle over memory. It is also a struggle over the present, over the ways impunity continues to shape Guatemala. In the decades since Leti’s disappearance, Guatemala has remained marked by stark inequality, corruption, violence, and rights abuses. The state continues to repress dissent, fueling recurring political crises rooted in its failure to meet the needs of its people. Mirtala sees in today’s situation the echoes of the violence that took her sister. “All these things,” she said, “they weigh on you, drop by drop, little by little.”
That is why pursuing Leti’s case has become about far more than one family’s search for justice. It is an act of resistance, a “vindication,” against a state that, as Mirtala put it, “has turned against its own people. Those who take power rob and take money from the people to enrich themselves" while the people “lack education, healthcare, food, and the chance for decent housing.” “To me,” she said, “it is a slap in the face, a punch to the gut of the state.”
The struggle has not been without risks. As documentary filmmaker Nancy Peckenham observed, “In Guatemala, to remember is dangerous.” Yet Mirtala and her sister remain resolute. “Sometimes I think about the risks,” Mirtala reflected, “but then I remember this isn’t just about asserting my sister’s rights. It is about the rights of thousands of people, both within Guatemala and abroad, because this is something suffered by all of us who lack power.”
Ultimately, she said, “that is what this has meant for us. It is a collective struggle.”
The case will continue through July. Its verdict will test not only Guatemala, but also whether we are doomed to live in a world, as the Trump administration architect of the United States’ ongoing nativist assault Stephen Miller put it, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Will we accept a world in which some have the right to kill and others the right to die, or insist on one governed by justice and accountability? The trial is one link in this broader struggle over whether a better world is possible: one free from the violence of impunity and imperialism, sustained by the conviction that those who commit atrocities will one day be held to account, from Guatemala to Venezuela, Palestine to Iran, and here in the United States.
All quotes from Marta and Mirtala Hernández Agustín are from a June 2026 speech and interview conducted by the authors and translated from Spanish.
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Cuts to Medicaid don’t only hurt the poor, disabled, or seniors—as my family and I learned, they hurt all of us.
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I was 13 years old. We’d just returned from Christmas vacation, and I was asleep in my room.
My mother tells me she heard a noise and found me in my bed, twisted up like a clam, frothing at the mouth. She was in shock. The paramedics came and took me to the ER. I don’t remember anything about it.
That night, I had a CT scan and an MRI. They found an abnormality in my brain called a cavernoma, and I needed surgery right away to correct it. Because it was a delicate operation, I needed not only a pediatric surgeon but a sub-specialist—a pediatric neurologist.
Little did my family know, there is a nationwide shortage of pediatric sub-specialists.
Medicaid and CHIP must be protected. Congress must invest in pediatric care so that no other children are told to wait months for necessary care.
The surgeon on-call that night assured us that I could be cured with surgery, but we needed to get it done as soon as possible to avoid another seizure and more damage. But when my mom called the hospital, they said the next available appointment was more than three months away due to a lack of pediatric neurosurgeons.
I was already isolating myself. Scared, missing school, I withdrew from sports and hid from my friends. At 13, you don’t want to be different, and you definitely don’t want anyone to know there’s something wrong with your brain. The depression and anxiety deepened. And I would have to go on like this for months?
My family was financially comfortable, we had private insurance, and we lived in Manhattan. Yet even someone as fortunate as I was had to wait because there’s a severe shortage of pediatric specialists.
What if it happens to a girl from a poor or middle class family without good insurance, or who lives farther away from good care? How long would her wait be? Would her family be able to afford it all?
Thankfully, I was lucky. I was able to get the surgery sooner before three months passed, and I’m cured now. But having gone through this experience, my mom and I wanted to find out the cause of the deficit in pediatric care—and how it can be fixed.
With the help of a bipartisan advocacy organization that works on these issues, First Focus On Children, we found out that most pediatric specialties are reimbursed largely through Medicaid and its state-tailored companion program, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
Half of the nation’s children receive health coverage through Medicaid or CHIP, and even children with private insurance rely on Medicaid when they need specialized care. So most pediatric specialists and sub-specialists have to rely on these government programs for reimbursement.
But unlike Medicare and private insurance, which reimburse adult and senior care specialists at much higher levels, Medicaid reimbursements are significantly smaller for pediatric care—though the doctors go through the same expensive training and have the same qualifications. Because of this, far fewer medical specialists go into pediatric care because it’s financially untenable.
As a result, there is a crisis in pediatric care. To make it worse, Congress’s partisan “Big Beautiful Bill” slashes almost $1 trillion from Medicaid over 10 years. At a time when we desperately need more investment in Medicaid, we are going in the opposite direction.
Cuts to Medicaid don’t only hurt the poor, disabled, or seniors—as my family and I learned, they hurt all of us. Healthcare in this country isn’t sufficiently serving those in need. If things continue this way, what will pediatric care look like for my own children one day?
We must do better. Medicaid and CHIP must be protected. Congress must invest in pediatric care so that no other children are told to wait months for necessary care. It’s not only about the “haves” and the “have-nots.” It’s about all of us.
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"Trump has turned Venezuela into an effective US colony," said one critic.
Jul 11, 2026
Some critics of the Trump administration are reacting with horror to revelations that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been serving as the de facto ruler of Venezuela.
According to a Saturday report in The New York Times, Rubio for the last several months has been acting informally as the "viceroy" of Venezuela ever since its recognized president, Nicolás Maduro, was abducted by the American military in January and brought to the US to face charges related to "narco-terrorism."
The Times' sources revealed that Rubio "effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources, and its government" and "is deeply involved in the country’s day-to-day operations," while maintaining regular contact with acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez.
Under current arrangements, the US Treasury Department takes in revenue from Venezuela's exports, including its petroleum, and then disperses the money back to the country through its private banks with strict conditions set by Rubio over what it can be spent on.
In explaining the system, the Times likened it to "parents handing out allowances to children," adding that it gives Rubio "immense leverage over... Rodríguez, who depends on the money to pay workers and prop up the national currency."
Elizabeth Saunders, professor of political science at Columbia University, described Rubio's power over Venezuela as "insane," as well as "derelict, unconscionable, and impeachable."
"The secretary of state's time is scarce, valuable, and not outsourcable," Saunders emphasized.
Orlando J. Pérez, professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas at Dallas, said the Times report made a mockery of Rubio's professed claims to want to bring democracy back to Venezuela.
"It appears Rubio has transformed from democracy promotion warrior," Pérez commented, "to transactional realpolitik operative!"
Kenneth Roth, former executive director at Human Rights Watch, wrote that US control over Venezuela appeared similar to the kind of imperial power wielded by European nations in the 19th Century.
"Trump has turned Venezuela into an effective US colony," said Roth, "with Marco Rubio as the viceroy and Washington controlling the country’s oil revenue and dictating major foreign and domestic policies. Democracy has been relegated to the distant future."
Bradley Simpson, historian at the University of Connecticut, also saw the current US arrangement with Venezuela as a return to overt imperialism.
"We are literally back in the Dollar Diplomacy days of the 1910s," Simpson wrote, "when the United States invaded countries and took over their financial systems and ran them as effective colonies. Flagrantly illegal, enormously corrupt. Where is the organization of American states or UN in denouncing this?"
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Machine Gun-Toting Israeli Settlers Detain Ro Khanna During Trip to Occupied West Bank
"These hoodlums come in with machine guns—M4, an American-made machine gun—and they detain us. They block off the road."
Jul 11, 2026
Rep. Ro Khanna this week was detained by a group of Israeli settlers whom he described as "hoodlums... with machine guns" while making a visit to a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank.
In an interview with Reuters published on Saturday, Khanna (D-Calif.) said he and his tour group were surrounded by armed settlers as they were traveling through the West Bank on Wednesday.
"We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed, they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it," said Khanna. "And these hoodlums come in with machine guns—M4, an American-made machine gun—and they detain us. They block off the road."
The California Democrat said that the settlers called in members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to help them deal with him and his group.
"The IDF is on their side," Khanna remarked, "not on the side of the Americans."
Cameron Kasky, an aide to Khanna, told Reuters that the group was held for over an hour before officials whom he believed to be police intervened and secured their release.
The IDF told Reuters that both military troops and police officers dispersed the settlers who had set up a roadblock near the small Palestinian village of Khirbet Zanuta.
Khanna wasn't the only American to have a run-in with Israeli settlers this week, as CNN reported that four settlers attacked groups of journalists, including CNN reporters and crew, who were traveling through an area north of the Palestinian city of Ramallah on Saturday.
As the journalists were driving, four settlers blocked off the road with their cars and began attacking the reporters' vehicles with wooden clubs and metal rods.
"The settlers then began to jump on the vehicle behind CNN's—carrying another group of journalists—and smashed the windshield of that vehicle," the network reported. "Another group of settlers tried to block a separate exit route before chasing the journalists towards the town of Sinjil."
Israeli police arrived on the scene and arrested four settlers who were allegedly responsible for the attacks, CNN reported.
"The Israel Police and the IDF view any manifestation of violence or causing damage to property very seriously," the Israeli officers said after the arrests, "especially when it concerns media personnel performing their work."
Israeli settlers for years have carried out violent attacks on Palestinians living in the West Bank, and witnesses have regularly described IDF soldiers at the scene either standing by as the attacks occur or even actively helping the attackers.
In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that claims about settler violence have been "blown up beyond belief," describing attacks as being carried out by a small number of "juvenile delinquents."
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