the two bags on the bench. Several times that evening, we sat and spoke for a while. She told me she had been in the carceleta since Monday, without access to a shower, and she had just been awarded a judge’s order to go freshen up somewhere inside the courthouse. As she began to undo her beautiful fishtail braid, I asked her how she made it. “The other inmates did it for me,” she said.
It turns out the other inmates had taunted her when she first arrived, with remarks such as, “Well, look who’s in jail now! Baldetti’s dear friend!” But Carmen immediately set them straight, explaining that it was actually because of Guatemala’s former vice president Roxana Baldetti that she was in jail in the first place. If they’d really been friends, Carmen wouldn’t have been used as a scapegoat for crimes she didn’t commit. And her remarks and explanations paid off. When all the cards seemed to be stacked against her, the inmates believed she was telling the truth, so much so, that they went from taunting her to protecting her, even going as far as making sure she looked beautiful for her public hearings. I saw this with my own eyes the following morning when Carmen put her hair up in a simple ponytail and the inmates insisted on styling her hair with another beautiful braid before she left the holding cell to attend her hearing. The inmates later told me that they had even protected Carmen from some nasty reporters who had come by to aggravate her. They were very proud to recount how they had been showcased on the nightly news yelling at the reporters to leave Carmen alone.
At some time that evening, I remember seeing Carmen take out a toothbrush and some toothpaste.
“Would you mind sharing some toothpaste with me?” I asked as I extended one of my father’s interdental brushes, so small that it went undetected by the guards when they had searched me earlier.
“On that?” she asked.
“It’s all I have,” I responded.
She immediately pulled out a new regular-sized toothbrush from her supply bag and gave it to me. Moved by her generosity, I thanked her and asked her how she was holding up. She went on to tell me a bit about her family and friends, and how helpless she felt with such a high-profile case, where she felt she was being tried by the media rather than a jury of her peers. It certainly looked like an uphill battle for her, given that the public prosecutor, the CICIG (Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala—a relatively new commission in Guatemala backed by the UN and allegedly formed to combat corruption), the media, former president Otto Perez Molina, and former vice president Roxana Baldetti were all against her. She knew that Friday’s hearing was crucial and she was preparing herself for it, but behind the hope that she might go home the following day was a latent fear that her fate had already been decided.
Before we went to sleep, if one can call that sleep, Carmen handed me one of her coverlets. She said her friends had brought her two, the pretty woman who’d been released earlier had used one the night before, and now it was mine to use for the night. I placed the tiny pillow Vania had brought me under my head, used the borrowed coverlet as a sleeping mat, wrapped myself in my father’s jacket, and suddenly realized my sleeping arrangements weren’t as terrible as I had imagined. Not even the hundreds of baby cockroaches wandering about bothered me. My biggest problem was caused by the many mosquitoes biting my feet throughout the night. Never did I imagine that I was only beginning a journey that would turn into an ongoing and arduous battle for my freedom, with the hope that justice would finally prevail.
Chapter 2
The Beginning of the End
As I tried to sleep on the carceleta’s cold concrete bench, I could not help thinking of the journey that had somehow brought me there. My world collapsed on July 29, 2014. It had actually begun collapsing quite a while before that fateful day, but I was none the wiser.
How could I have not seen the storm that was heading my way?
—
On the morning of July 29, 2014, I woke up on the forty-sixth floor in our apartment overlooking Biscayne Bay, the Port of Miami, and South Beach, as I’d done on so many other mornings. I loved sleeping with the blinds open, falling asleep with a billion lights shining in the night, and opening my eyes the next day as the sun rose over the ocean on the horizon.
Miami was a familiar place to me; it was where I was born, and after being raised in Guatemala City, it is where I returned as a young woman to attend the University of Miami in Coral Gables, and it is the city I called home during the following seventeen years after graduation, where I became an adult. When I finally moved back to Guatemala in 2003, within weeks of my arrival, I found love. I was thirty-five years old, had been engaged twice before, but had never gotten married. Marriage had not been a goal in my life, but that suddenly changed.
My husband and I got married in 2008 and a year later, God blessed us with twins: a girl, Nina, and a boy, Fabián. I could not have been happier or felt more fortunate. My husband had been doing very well with his business endeavors, and every year seemed to bring more projects and more possibilities. He had managed to bring a forestry investment firm to Guatemala and began creating one of the largest teak plantations in the world. Every year, more trees were planted and his management revenues grew. He also had other plans; he seemed to never stand still.
That year, my husband had decided to run the IRONMAN race in Nice, France. As with his other interests in life, he prepared, training hard, and was ready to tackle what he’d set his mind to do. Since it was scheduled for the middle of the summer, we decided to bring the children along. We rented a small apartment in the center of Nice, packed our bags, and enjoyed a wonderful month-long vacation in the south of France. When we returned, my husband flew to Guatemala, while the kids and I made one last stop in Miami before continuing home. The children were to start school at the American School of Guatemala, the same school my husband and I had attended as children. Life seemed to be smiling in our direction, and there was no reason for me to think otherwise. Until that one day, when I woke up and realized that soon my life would never be the same again.
It must have been around 9 p.m. The children were already sleeping in their room, exhausted after another fun-filled summer day in Miami. As I sat on my bed watching TV, the phone rang. It was my husband calling me from Guatemala.
“I have something very important I need to tell you. Are you sitting down?” he asked. “I have gotten myself in deep financial troubles. I have been trying to get it all sorted out for a while now, and I was hoping to fix things before you ever found out, but it has become impossible. I needed you to hear it from me.”
I remember hearing something about his taking something he should not have, and in my ingenuity, I simply said, “Well, give it back.”
“It’s not possible,” he said, “I can’t say anything else about this over the phone. I’ll be back in Miami tomorrow.”
My entire life changed with those words. They were simple, but I knew my world would never be the same again. I hung up, still sitting on my bed, overlooking the magnificent bay, and suddenly felt as if my life were not mine, as if I was now in a movie and my life was happening to someone else—these things didn’t happen to people like me. And even though at that moment nothing had changed, everything was suddenly different. I was paralyzed, yet my brain was going a million miles an hour. My life was still intact, I was seemingly safe, but those words had changed everything. I did not understand what had just happened, or how I felt, and I did not have enough information to devise a plan or figure out a course of action. All I knew for sure was that I had to focus on the important things, what was left: Nina and Fabián. Yes, Nina and Fabián, and all that I could not see at
