Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom apologised for the 1982 Dos Erres massacre by government troops

(Credit: Guatemalan Government/Luis Echeverría, creative commons 2.0)

John has some sympathy for Pedro’s plight. “A lot of people got killed innocently in Guatemala. They would kill innocent people, just based on what an informant said. They’d abduct you and torture you.” He recalled that at that time in Melchor, the Guatemalan town across from Benque, “you had five or six bodies executed each morning, scattered around the town. And when Rios Montt sent jets to bomb the mountains, it was like an exodus. There were hundreds of people coming continuously into Belize who got UN protection.”

I asked John why Pedro was not eligible. “He would have qualified for asylum at that time,” John conceded. “But it was not in our best interests to keep him in Belize because he came as a Guatemalan army agent. If we gave him asylum Guatemala would say we were granting shelter to guerrillas.”

And so Pedro’s legal right to asylum was sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. In this shadow war of spy games, of agents, double agents and perhaps even triple agents, the priority was not to protect the source, but to prevent blowback. “I think the best option if you look at it from a political standpoint was to hand him over,” John maintained: to keep him would have angered the junta. “But the manner in which we handed over the man aggravated it and put a sentence on his life. That wasn’t in the best humanitarian way, and it wasn’t my decision.”

Finally, John turned to the vexed issue of the tape. “Pedro started to say how the army there was cruel, how they were burning villages and killing children, and all that was recorded,” John confirmed. In the end, it was a joint order from Belize and Britain to tell John and the Finco to hand back Pedro. “They told us to do the handover, to look for a Guatemalan army officer to come to Benque, and convince him there’s no guerilla base here by playing back the recording to rebut their allegation.”

I asked John if the British had really authorised this, or whether it was Belize alone. He repeatedly ruled out the latter scenario. “The British were still in charge of defence until 1993, the British went with me on patrol. The poor BDF did not even have the capability to confront rebels. There was no BDF intelligence officer to interrogate Pedro with me, it was the British Finco.”

With the fateful order now in motion, the same Kaibil came back to Benque to collect Pedro. The desperate man was waiting downstairs in the police barracks, unaware of what was about to unfold. He had been kept inside under close supervision whenever he was not out on patrol, and was effectively in custody. John and the Finco took the Kaibil upstairs and said they had followed Pedro’s information but found it to be baseless. “To prove it, we played the tape,” John said. “Part of the tape, just the part that said the Guatemalan military had set him up. And then we played a little part on the accusations of how they had killed people in Guatemala.”

“We just played three to five minutes, to confirm it to him. The expression on his face was shock. Immediately he asked what we were going to do with him. We said he’s yours, he’s your countryman, you brought him, you take him. Pedro cried like a baby when we handed him over to Guatemala. I was so moved but I couldn’t believe at that time that the army would turn back and kill him. The Kaibil wore civilian clothes and put him in a civilian vehicle. Pedro didn’t resist but he was broken by that time and lost control of himself. He was so afraid of the Kaibil that he just obeyed orders. That was it, they took him and I thought that was the end of that story.”

At this point in the plot, as I relay John’s testimony to Pedro’s widow in Arenal, she is weeping too. We are sat a few feet away from one another, on plastic chairs in this forsaken wooden shack, as Aide begins to comfort her adopted mother. Over 35 years after Pedro’s death, I was telling his widow the full story about the events leading up to her husband’s death and how it could have all been averted. No one from the British military had ever told her, or checked to see if she existed.

Pedro’s friend sat up from the hammock, and began to fit the rest of the story together. When Pedro disappeared in April 1983, he went to look for him in Benque and thought he saw a familiar face inside the police barracks. But the officers there denied holding him, so he went back to Arenal empty-handed. The next time they saw Pedro, he was in a Guatemalan prison. He had managed to send them a letter, and his widow and their son came for a short reunion. But Pedro, presumably under guard, did not mention his time with the British army to her. And in the precious twelve hours he spent back in Arenal before his assassination, he had not had time to tell her either.

The tape

On that fateful Sunday, when the police in Benque went up to Arenal to investigate this sudden murder, John tagged along. “The whole village was up in arms. I went there to see the body, and I recognised his face.” He said nothing to his uniformed colleagues, preferring to save his insight for a Special Branch report. “Our conclusion was that he was killed because he embarrassed the Kaibiles. And that was the end of it, case closed. No debrief.”

By now, John had far more tangible threats to address. Magana was in his custody and had revealed the entire FAR structure in Belize. Five days after Pedro’s death, Special Branch wrote another report outlining the Cristina network, which alarmed the British to such an extent that they began to divert more aid money to better furnish the Special Branch.

Meanwhile, Pedro’s widow was living in fear, terrified that the Kaibilies would come back for her. She burnt photos of Pedro to conceal their relationship, meaning that even today his two biological children do not have a photo of their father. When I came to Arenal, they were away working on a farm, but I have since heard they wanted to know if I had found a photo at Kew.

There were none at the archives, but there is someone else who might be able to help: the British army. After all, John says they photographed Pedro when he arrived in Benque. And then there is the question of what happened to the interview recording. “It was a British army tape,” John insisted. “I don’t recall sending any tape to Special Branch HQ in Belmopan. The British army took the tape. I didn’t have that type of special recorder. You could record for hours, they wired it in an adjacent room so Pedro didn’t know it was being taped.” If the tape still exists, it may be stored in a British army intelligence corps archive somewhere in England, along with the photos. A carbon copy of Pedro’s cries for asylum, a rare record of his voice and photos of his face that his children may never hear or see.

When I returned to England, I went back through the Kew files to see if there was anything else written down that would corroborate what John had said. Finally I found it. At the end of April 1983, less than a fortnight after Pedro was handed back, a meeting took place at the Belize Special Branch HQ. British diplomats and soldiers were also in attendance. The report reviewed the operation, naming the Kaibil who handed over Pedro as Hugo Vicente Hernandez Matzer, who used the cover name Lieutenant Romeo Sierra.

Special Branch said the ground patrol with Pedro lasted some 18 hours, and upon return to Benque Pedro had “confessed that the statement he had made earlier was totally false and made up entirely by GAF [Guatemalan armed forces] officers”. Crucially, the debriefing goes on to confirm that at least some of Pedro’s confession was relayed to the Kaibil: “Lieutenant Sierra when confronted with the retraction totally rejected all allegations of GAF involvement in any scheme to mislead the Belize authorities.”

The report also acknowledged that Pedro was working for the Guatemalan military “under duress” – in other words he was not a willing informant. Further reports say ‘Sierra’ appears to have been the one who ordered Pedro’s assassination weeks later. So the paperwork would strongly suggest that Pedro really was handed over to his killer, with his card clearly marked.

Shoman is adamant Pedro’s death could have been avoided. “We should not have co-operated with the perpetrators of genocide to carry that out against all the laws of humanity.” But it is certainly not the first time that Britain and its allies have been involved in handing someone over to a murderous dictatorship, as I know from my time working at the human rights charity Reprieve.

In recent years the charity’s work on the case of Libyan exile Abdul-Hakim Belhaj and his wife Fatima Boudchar has rocked Whitehall. At the height of the war on terror, British spies shared intelligence about the couple’s whereabouts with the CIA, who abducted them and rendered them to Colonel Gaddafi’s torture chambers – an act for which the UK government issued a belated apology and half a million pounds of compensation in 2018.

Such contrition was only obtained after years of litigation by the couple and sustained support from Reprieve. Whitehall’s reaction to Pedro’s case, when I have raised it as an independent journalist, has been much more muted. The Foreign Office has told me, “We do not comment on the papers of previous governments,” and the Ministry of Defence has never responded to my queries.

Their silence is ominous, given how much the UK military continues to rely on Belize as a training ground. A small British base remains in operation, attached to the country’s international airport, from where troops spill out into the surrounding countryside for live fire exercises.

When the MoD announced vague plans around New Year to build more military bases in the Caribbean after Brexit, it emerged that the department’s “focus is on developing our footprint in Belize”, according to emails disclosed to me through Freedom of Information processes. The Belize base will remain open for the next fourteen years at least, and the army is building a new water treatment plant at the barracks which will cost over half a million pounds.