Benedicto seems to relax a bit. He starts to tell me in a confidential tone, as if I know the story well, about the case of the soldier Romeo Vásquez, accused of the assassination of President Armas—involving Trujillo, president of the Dominican Republic. He tells me that—as everyone knew from press coverage at the time—this soldier kept a diary. He lets me see photocopies of the diary, with its good, albeit very cramped, handwriting. The notes repeatedly mention the arrival of a “great day” and a “new revolution.” Although many have questioned the authenticity of the dairy (including Norman Lewis in his article “Guatemala: The Mystery of the Murdered Dictator”), Tun believes that these circumstances determined Vázquez’s fate: to be chosen as the scapegoat by the plotters, likely extreme right-wing people, and not left-wing, as it was claimed at the time. They had masterminded a plot, supposedly an escape plan for the assassin. The soldier was betrayed (the door for his escape from the Presidential Palace was locked from the outside). When he found himself cornered, he shot himself under his chin, with the same rifle he had used to kill the president, according to ballistic tests done by Benedicto Senior. The son shows me photos of the soldier lying on the floor, his head blown apart, with the rifle between his legs.

He starts to talk of another case, the death of Mario Méndez Montenegro. The older Tun pronounced it a suicide (he again talks about the circumstances as if assuming that I know the case well—which flatters me.) “But the people above wanted him to change his pronouncement and say that it had been a homicide,” he tells me.

He explains that Méndez Montenegro, presidential candidate and former Police director, killed himself with a revolver. The weapon was a gift from a military man a few years before his death and the bullet that pierced his heart was also of military issue. These facts lent themselves to a hypothesis of political assassination, which was exploited by his supporters. But given the ballistic tests and other circumstances surrounding the death (which took place at his home, after an alcoholic crisis), Tun refused to change his ruling, in spite of the pressures he was subjected to when Mario’s brother, Julio César Méndez Montenegro, was elected president of the republic.

“This almost cost him a jail sentence,” he assures me. “Given the pressures, he submitted his resignation, but they did not accept it, and he had to continue to work at the Bureau for another three years, until he retired, following an accident.”

He comments that his father had an “iron constitution,” although at the end he suffered from chronic insomnia.