San Carlos during the Civil War

Is there a difference how the Guatemalan government treats their people depending on gender and race? In the novel The Tattooed Soldier by Hector Tobar there are three main characters with different perspectives. Two of the characters are a couple and the other a worker for the government. The couple is Antonio and Elena. The worker is Longoria who is a soldier. Elena in college was helping the rebels and Antonio was a revolutionary. In Guatemala there has been an increase in death rates because the government doesn’t do anything. The reasons why there is an increase of death rates is lynching, gangs, and revenge.

Elena was going to the Universidad de San Carlos during the civil war. She was an informant for the rebels. The rebels were a group of people who didn’t like the government’s idea of taking land from them. The rebels are citizens of Guatemala from small villages or people from the city. All the boyfriends that Elena had were revolutionaries. Her first boyfriend Ernesto was the one to introduce her to revolution and protest. After a while she wanted to change and date someone out of the movement. So she hooked up with Antonio. Elena was tired of the movements and wanted to rest for a while.

When Antonio and Elena moved together to a village they found out that the river water was getting polluted. Elena wanted to make aware why small infants were dying but Antonio stopped her to not get attention. Elena and Antonio moved away because the government was looking for them for rebelling against them. Antonio and Elena were both informants to the rebels. After the peace treaty was signed in Guatemala the people have been waiting for the dictator who led the entire operation to be sentenced or killed. The United States were doing the trail for him but they just gave him house arrest. He died on April 1, 2018 at age 91. So the Guatemalan people didn’t get their justice and some rebels started to follow the police to make sure they gave punishment to the criminals.

People started to do the same thing and follow them in big crowds. If the police officers let go the criminal the mob of people will lynch the person in brutal ways. The person was either stoned or burned. If the person was stoned they will make sure he/she was dead then cut open their stomach and fill it with rocks. Then they will throw the body into the river or lake. The only reason why people started to lynch people was because of the government not doing anything to the criminals. Some of the tactics they used to lynch were learned in the war from the military. During the war the military lynched people who were rebels or sometimes just to kill. The military used this tactic to scare people not to go against them. 

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