Activists from the department of El Quiché were joined by students from the University of San Carlos, the country’s flagship public university; together they had alerted members of the Spanish embassy ahead of time. It was supposed to be a nonviolent event, but when Lucas García learned of it he called for the immediate extermination of the participants. (“Take them out as you can,” he told his interior minister.) The police locked the building’s doors from the outside and attacked the structure with grenades and firebombs. Nearly everyone inside was killed: thirty-nine activists, embassy
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