I only ask that you bury me in the fosa común—the common grave—with the faceless and the nameless, without a headstone.

I would rather be with them than you.

And I am voiceless now, and invisible.

I am Pablo Mora.

3 The Cleansing

Wash me throughly from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin.

—Psalm 51

San Diego, California

October 2012

A thousand years ago, Keller learns, the Petén was one of the most densely populated areas on earth.

As a center of the Mayan civilization, the heavily forested lowlands—rain forest, jungle—held dozens of cities with stone temples and courtyards, and vast terraced fields irrigated with canals, and chinampas, floating farms on lakes.

Then it went into decline.

No one is sure why, whether it was drought, or disease, or invasion, but by the time Cortés arrived in the 1520s the rain forest had taken back most of the towns and the farms, and what people survived the spread of the foreign smallpox lived off slash-and-burn agriculture in isolated villages.

Still, it took the Spanish almost two hundred years to finally and fully subdue the Mayan descendants in the Petén and set up a system of colonization that made the white Spanish and their mestizo offspring the landowning masters, and the native Mayan “Indians” the landless peasants.

The system held for almost four hundred years, even as the new American imperialists of the United Fruit Company came into power in Guatemala. It wasn’t until 1944 that the “October Revolutionaries” launched liberal reforms and in 1952 put through Decree 900 that mandated the redistribution of the land.

The masters reacted.

The 2 percent of the population that owned 98 percent of the land weren’t about to see their position altered and with CIA backing staged a coup that overthrew the civilian government.

The left—a loose coalition of students, workers, and a few peasants from the countryside—formed “MR-13,” a guerrilla movement that started to fight the Guatemalan army and police. After five years of sporadic fighting, the United States sent in its army special forces—the Green Berets—to help combat the “communist guerrillas.”

What followed was called the “White Terror” as the “Special Commando Unit” and the paramilitary Mano Blanca—actually police and soldiers—committed thousands of “disappearances” against leftists in Guatemala City and out in the countryside. Guatemala’s president, Carlos Arana Osorio, in declaring a “state of siege” announced, “If it is necessary to turn the country into a graveyard in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate.”

Seven thousand people “disappeared” over the next three years.

The left responded, forming the CUC (Committee for Peasant Unity) in the south and east and the EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor) in the Mayan north, and the Guatemalan Civil War went on.

If ever there has been a greater misnomer than “Mexican drug problem,” “Guatemalan Civil War” has to be it. Certainly it was a one-sided civil war, mostly the disappearances and slaughter of a few poorly armed leftist guerrillas by a professional army and police forces well supplied with American weapons and training.

In 1978 the special forces, the Kaibiles, opened fire on an unarmed group of protestors in Panzos and killed 150. By 1980, 5,000 had been killed.

Keller made it a point to study the history of a particular Guatemalan village in the Petén—Dos Erres.

It’s one of tragedy.

In October 1982, EGP guerrillas ambushed an army convoy near Dos Erres, killed twenty-one soldiers, and took nineteen rifles.

On December 4, a unit of fifty-eight Kaibiles disguised as guerrillas flew into the area. Two days later, they walked into the village at 2:30 in the morning. They roused the people from their houses and separated the men from the women, putting all the men into the village schoolhouse, and the women and children into the church. Then they searched the village for the missing weapons. They didn’t find any because the EGP who ambushed the soldiers hadn’t come from Dos Erres.

It didn’t matter.

The Kaibiles announced that after they’d had breakfast, they were going to “vaccinate” the inhabitants of Dos Erres.

The Kaibiles went berserk.

They grabbed children by the ankles and swung their heads into tree trunks and walls. Not wanting to waste ammunition, they smashed the adult men’s heads with hammers. They ripped babies from pregnant women’s stomachs, and then, over the course of the next two days, raped the rest of the women before killing them and dumping their bodies on top of their families in the village well.

On the last morning of the slaughter, fifteen more Mayan peasants wandered into Dos Erres. Because the wells were too full, the Kaibiles drove them half a mile away before slaughtering all but two teenage girls whom they raped as they left the area, then strangled them.

The Guatemalan “Civil War” went on for fourteen more years after the massacre of Dos Erres. Over two hundred thousand people were killed, including forty to fifty thousand who “disappeared.” A million and a half people were displaced from their homes, another million emigrated, mostly to the United States.

But the suffering of the Petén goes on, this time by narco cartels wanting the area for its proximity to the border. The Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel were ready to go to war for the Petén until Barrera brought Ochoa to the peace table.

Now Keller studies the latest satellite photographs.

The clearing outside Dos Erres is fresh, a small rectangle hacked out of the rain forest. He counts the number of tents and the two small buildings, but doesn’t have to do a calculation as to how many Gente Nueva are there. He already knows—Barrera has told him he was bringing a hundred men.

His intel team has done a calculation as to the numbers of Zetas, based on the small houses, huts, and tents in Dos Erres, the number of vehicles, and whatever satellite imagery they could grab of the village itself. Their best estimate was two hundred Zetas, among them maybe two dozen former Kaibiles.

We’re bringing twenty men, Keller thinks.

All elite operatives.

Keller has gotten to know and like the team members during the long weeks of training. It’s hard to get to know these men—they’re quiet, reticent, don’t swap biographies. The general, unspoken rule is that the less they know about each other the better, but Keller has gleaned that John Downey, “D-1,” the team leader, was an army full colonel, a Ranger with combat experience in Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Late forties, built like a fire hydrant, short red hair, pug nose, and an easy air of command.

It’s the only name he’s allowed to know. The rest are just first names—Keller has no idea if any or all are real—or nicknames. What they have in common is that they’re all professional, efficient, athletic, and educated. Through conversation over meals and beers he’s learned that most have advanced degrees in history, sociology, or the hard sciences and most are at least bilingual, but can curse fluently in English, Spanish (Downey recruited only Spanish speakers), Arabic, Kurdish, Pashto, and Dari.

Keller feels that he knows Dos Erres as well as you can know a place you’ve never been. He’s studied satellite photos, maps, and video. When the team moved from Virginia to a private training camp at Sunshine Summit, in remote hills about seventy miles north of San Diego, they built a mockup of the village with PVC pipe and cords.