For several years, I thought that one of the gangs under the leadership of Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz, who at the time was minister of the Interior and is today a fugitive from justice and wanted by Interpol, was responsible for the kidnapping. However, about twelve or thirteen years later, we received information that made us change our minds, and we came up with a different hypothesis about the identity of the kidnappers. In 1994 I resettled in Guatemala after almost fifteen years of voluntary exile, and among the new friends I had, there were some ex-guerrilla fighters. One day, during a long conversation over drinks, one of them assured me that my mother’s kidnappers were members of an urban guerrilla group, short-lived and practically unknown, that carried the name “January 18th Movement,” and whose founder and ringleader, Eugenio Camposeco, died in an automobile accident in 1982. I must say that the possibility that my mother’s kidnappers were guerrillas and not policemen was unpleasant for me because, although I never had direct links with any of the revolutionary organizations, I sympathized with them and not with the government—and this fact made it unavoidable to recognize that, ideology aside, there were “natural enemies” among the ranks of the insurgents. And then, the day before my trip, one of my female friends, who was part of the “support team” for a guerrilla organization, told me that there was a rumor, among several archivists, that the reason I was there was that I was searching for the identity of my mother’s kidnappers, who might very well be employees at the Archive Recovery Project.

My suspension—I now wonder—was it not due to that?

Wednesday morning.

An unforgettable nightmare last night, returning from Oaxaca. B+ came to pick me up at the airport. She stayed with me a while and shortly after one o’clock (my flight had arrived close to midnight) she went home, half asleep, to go back to bed. I stayed up a while reading emails, then went to bed, too. A little while later, the phone rang. I got up to answer: nothing. I went back to bed and fell asleep.