The Brother I Never Was | Translation

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The following English translation was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence. 

[Daniel Alarcón]: A warning: this episode contains scenes of violence and discretion is advised. It is not suitable for children.

This is Radio Ambulante, I’m Daniel Alarcón.

On Thursday, April 18, 2024, Henry Choc woke up distressed. He was alone at his house, near the metalworking shop where he works, in San Andrés Itzapa, a small Mayan Kaqchikel town in central Guatemala. Nothing in the previous days had been different, but that morning something weighed on him.

[Henry Choc]: A feeling of desperation came over me, like a bad premonition. I grabbed the motorcycle and went up to see my children and I asked Mercedes how they were. Fine, everything’s fine.

[Daniel]: Mercedes is his ex-wife. They separated a few years ago, but Henry still goes to her house often to see their three children. And that day, although the children were fine, Mercedes told him something unusual.

[Henry]: According to what I heard, she told me that Eldin had a problem with the police, that they detained him. But I don’t know if he already sorted it out. Ah, really? I said. How strange, they haven’t called me.

[Daniel]: Eldin, Henry’s younger brother. Henry and Mercedes hadn’t received any call, neither from the Police nor from Eldin. So they thought that what the neighbors had told them about the police hadn’t been serious.

At that moment, Henry was 29 years old and Eldin was 28. They had grown up very close, but they didn’t see each other as often anymore. Henry spent almost all his time at work, a bit disconnected from the world, while Eldin traveled through different towns to make a living doing everything: selling clothes, working in construction or in the fields.

In recent years, Eldin had grown very close to Mercedes. He loved his nephews very much. And every time he returned to town, the first thing he did was go see them.

This is Mercedes.

[Mercedes Tahual]: What we liked was to play music, he would also chat with the kids, tease them. We never stayed bored or anything. We always did something.

[Henry Choc]: He took on the role of dad or grandfather to my children. He protected them, he defended them. If someone scolded the kids, well, he would get upset.

[Daniel]: He spoiled them endlessly.

Four days earlier, Henry had seen Eldin at Mercedes’s house. It had been a while since they’d talked. They greeted each other as always, with affection, and everything seemed normal… except for one thing that caught Henry’s attention.

[Henry]: Eldin told me that at some point he wanted to talk to me. About some things, he told me. He just said it like that, he didn’t give me much detail.

[Daniel]: But they didn’t set a date or place for that meeting, and Henry didn’t give it importance. His mind was on work, as it usually was.

The day after Mercedes told him that Eldin had had problems with the police, Henry didn’t go to work. It was Friday. He decided to take his oldest son to school, to distract himself. But when he arrived at the house, he found Mercedes worried. Again.

[Henry]: I haven’t heard anything from your brother. And what happened? Well, according to what I know, they were fighting, people said that they were fighting in the street and they detained them.

[Daniel]: Mercedes couldn’t give him more details. Eldin wasn’t answering calls or messages.

[Mercedes]: It has never happened that he didn’t come home…, he never leaves without letting us know or without him letting us know first or at least calling from a public phone or something.

[Daniel]: So Henry decided to find out for himself.

He took his son to school and then went to the police substation to ask if they knew what had happened to his brother.

He came across something strange: the building was cordoned off with yellow tape. Outside, several vehicles from the Prosecutor’s Office occupied the street. And among the people, he saw investigators entering and leaving the substation, taking notes, talking on the phone.

[Henry]: And I approached one of the investigators who was there. He asked me: how can we help you? And I told them that I needed information about a brother who had been detained the night before and I wanted to know which court they had transferred him to.

[Daniel]: The investigator didn’t respond. He asked him to wait. And he continued inspecting a red car, parked right in front of the substation. It wasn’t a car from the Prosecutor’s Office, but a private one.

[Henry]: And I felt scared and they asked me what are the physical characteristics, clothing and everything about my brother, his name, his age. They asked me for a copy of his DPI.

[Daniel]: DPI, Eldin’s identification card. Henry didn’t have it, but he did have some photos on his phone, and he showed them to the investigators. They asked him if he knew if his brother was with anyone. Henry said no, that he had no idea. Then, they showed him the red car.

[Henry]: I saw the blood stains, so right there I started to worry. According to what I thought, the first thing I thought was  what has my brother done.

[Daniel]: Henry didn’t understand. He thought it was impossible that the blood was Eldin’s. He wasn’t involved in dangerous things and he didn’t drive any car in town.

What had happened to his brother? What was coming would shake the community of San Andrés Itzapa… and would forever transform Henry. 

Journalist Carlos Kestler tells us the story. Here’s Carlos.

[Carlos Kestler]: After showing him the blood-stained car, the prosecutors didn’t give Henry much more information. They only asked him to go to the forensic office near town to try to identify a body. Supposedly it was someone who had been murdered the night before. The authorities had surrounded the building since dawn on Friday because, at that time, they received an anonymous report of the crime.

Henry went, still in denial that it could be his brother. There was a lot of activity in town due to the arrival of the authorities. It was clear that something serious had happened. When he arrived at the forensic office they showed him a photo of the body. He felt relieved. His premonition was correct: it wasn’t Eldin. But what he didn’t expect was to see, in that image, someone he did know.

[Henry]: When I’m looking, according to the little I had seen of Milton, I saw that it was him.

[Carlos]: Milton was a man in his 40s whom Henry had greeted a couple of times at his ex-wife Mercedes’s house during Eldin’s visits. He had met him at the beginning of the year, in January. He knew he was Salvadoran, that he lived in Canada and that, from time to time, he did business with Eldin in Guatemala. They were friends. Nothing more. Mercedes hadn’t told him much. And Henry didn’t think much about him. That Milton was the deceased confused him.

[Henry]: I said: what did my brother do?

The first rumor I heard on Thursday night and early morning was that they were fighting. And I thought he had done something to the other person.

[Carlos]: A few hours earlier, a hospital near San Andrés Itzapa confirmed that Milton bled to death after receiving multiple blows all over his body.

What had the town so agitated was that the prosecutors were investigating whether those assaults were done by the same police officers at the substation. They had already said that the last people to see Milton alive were two firefighters, who transferred him from the Police headquarters to the hospital.

But Henry’s attention was focused on the other question: where was Eldin? Nobody was giving him answers and his brother still wasn’t answering his phone.

It wasn’t until Friday afternoon that the investigators told Henry that they were declaring Eldin as missing. They advised him to file an official report with the Prosecutor’s Office.

[Henry]: They attended to me and we returned around 10 at night. Saturday begins the search for my brother.

[Carlos]: Mercedes feared the worst.

[Mercedes]: I felt a great fear, a great sorrow too about what happened. What happened and also the doubt about where he was.

[Carlos]: From thinking that Eldin could have hurt Milton, Henry began to fear something else: that they had also killed him.

With uncertainty, Henry, his other two younger brothers and other family members organized themselves to search for Eldin throughout San Andrés Itzapa.

Perhaps many of you have never heard of this place. It’s a town of narrow streets and low hills, with a center where cars often get stuck on a single lane.

There are no addresses or traffic lights; people orient themselves by the corner store, the pharmacy, any office.

On the outskirts of Itzapa, on the other hand, there’s a different atmosphere, a quieter one: trees, ravines, dirt roads. That’s where most of its 37 thousand inhabitants live.

The houses are small, humble. The vast majority of people, like Henry, get around by motorcycle, and the sound of engines is evident at all hours.

And it was among those streets, mountains and ravines, on motorcycles and walking the hills, where the Choc family searched for Eldin. They searched every corner, shouting his name over and over, hoping someone would respond.

[Henry]: The first day was the hardest… My family crying. I couldn’t… I didn’t know what to do. 

[Carlos]: As the older brother, Henry felt he had to console and support the others. He remembers one of his brothers almost breaking down. 

[Henry]: I just told my brother: Be strong, we have to prepare ourselves and search for our brother. He’s going to appear, he’s going to appear.

[Carlos]: During the search for Eldin, Mercedes had to stay home. Although she wanted to join Henry and the others, he asked her not to. They had to receive people who came with shows of support for the Choc family: flowers, prayers, food. That’s the custom in town when a family goes through a difficult situation. Mercedes focused on that.

[Mercedes]: Not being able to go made me feel, I don’t know, desperate, because we had no news here at the house. With that helplessness of not being able to go out, because I wanted to get involved in the search, I wanted to go out.

[Carlos]: Mercedes prayed with several of the town’s neighbors. It was her way of staying calm.

[Mercedes]: Inside, I cried out to God that please, that he would do his work, that Eldin would appear, that please we would find that he would give that light, that he would guide all those people. I asked and cried out to God and I had faith in God that they would have to find him. Alive or dead, but we needed to see where he was and find him.

[Carlos]: While trying to encourage his family and direct the search, Henry thought about Milton again. He couldn’t connect the dots: why had he been murdered, if it really was the police. Why was his body there, but his brother was missing.

But that same Saturday, he began to better understand what had happened.

That night, news started spreading throughout San Andrés Itzapa: after investigations, a judge had sent four police officers to prison. All suspects in the death of Milton and the disappearance of Eldin.

The police officers—two men and two women—had been detained the day before, when investigators arrived at the substation. But now they were going to be criminally charged.

[NEWS SOUNDBITE]

[Host]: In San Andrés Itzapa there is tension due to the disappearance of a 28-year-old young man and the death of a friend. Four agents from the National Civil Police are implicated in the case and the head of the substation is a fugitive.

[Carlos]: Before the judge, the four detainees acknowledged that on Thursday they had arrested Milton and Eldin, saying that they were drunk and causing a disturbance in the street, near a store. They also admitted that, once inside the substation, it was their boss who beat the two men hardest.

Henry couldn’t believe it. And neither could the people of Itzapa. Soon, the indignation overflowed: neighbors, relatives and community leaders began to demand justice for Milton and answers about Eldin.

[Henry]: When they heard that my brother was missing, many people who knew Eldin joined us.

[Carlos]: Some ladies from town began to organize a demonstration. And the truth is, it didn’t take much for everything to explode. By that time, the neighbors had been in tension with the public security agents for quite a while. For two years, they had filed dozens of complaints that local police were extorting and assaulting people. They published the complaints on social media and even went to the mayor, but nobody did anything. And that Saturday afternoon, neighbors began to protest in front of the mayor’s office and in front of the police substation. The Choc family didn’t go, they were planning how to search for Eldin more efficiently.

[Henry]: Many people had that kind of resentment, that anger, towards the police.

When we went to rest at home at midnight, around 2:00 AM, I heard the noise that they had burned down the substation.

[NEWS SOUNDBITE]

[Journalist]: According to reports, unknown persons burned this substation, this in response to the apparent lack of response and the indignation they have received from the police officers.

[Carlos]: That same Sunday morning, they received more support from the community. As the hours passed, new neighbors appeared wanting to help them: firefighters, ex-military and rescue dogs. According to Henry, they reached about 300 people.

[Henry]: At the house, Mercedes making bean breads, everything to give to people, because in a way, well, the support they gave us was unconditional, because they forgot, for sure, about their jobs, they forgot about their children, they forgot about their homes, everything.

[Carlos]: All for Eldin. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday passed without results. The rescuers, neighbors and the Choc family had gone around San Andrés Itzapa several times. They had even gone to places outside the municipality. The search rounds began at six in the morning and ended at nine at night. On Wednesday, Henry’s attitude finally changed.

[Henry]: Ending Wednesday, I told them… no more. I thank you very much for the support, but I think our efforts have reached a certain point where we can’t anymore.

[Carlos]: The next day, at the end of the afternoon, a week after everything started, he decided to go out to the street to talk to another group of rescuers who wanted to continue the search.

Mid-conversation, his cell phone rang. It was a message from a friend who forwarded him a post from a Facebook page. It was a report from the volunteer firefighters of Sacatepéquez, the territory right next to Chimaltenango, where San Andrés Itzapa is located.

[Henry]: That they had found an unidentified person’s body. I just told them: Look, excuse me, I have to go.

[Carlos]: Henry took the company car he worked for, and without telling his family, drove to where the firefighters were. It was a ravine outside San Andrés Itzapa, near another town.

[Henry]: A mountainous place, a lonely place. A dirt road. It wasn’t asphalt.

[Carlos]: He arrived around six in the afternoon.

[Henry]: When I arrived, the investigators were already there. They wouldn’t let me in. When I explained to them, I’ve been searching for my brother for a week and I’m almost sure it’s him.

[Carlos]: The prosecutors had closed off access to the ravine with security tape. As much as he insisted, they wouldn’t let him through. One police officer in particular prevented him.

[Henry]: Get out of here, he told me, you’re not allowed to be here. From the anger I had, I confronted him. I told him that he couldn’t kick me out of there, that despite what they did to my brother, they still had the nerve to kick me out and not let me see my brother.

[Carlos]: While Henry argued with the police officer, the neighbors of San Andrés Itzapa saw the same alert from the firefighters. It didn’t take long for about 500 neighbors to arrive at the place. The people pressed for a while, and finally the investigators let Henry approach the ravine, to the point where they were collecting the body.

There, he told them he needed to verify if it was his brother. The prosecutors gave him permission and took him close to the body. It was face up. They had already removed the blanket.

[Henry]: Many people ask me why did you do it or why were you the one who saw it and I wanted, in a way, to protect my family from seeing that.

[Carlos]: Standing, Henry observed the body from top to bottom. It had bruises, open wounds and torn clothes. They had cut off his right hand and some fingers from the left. It was brutal. He still can’t get that image out of his mind. And there he knew it: yes, it was Eldin.

Devastated, the next day, Henry went to the forensic office. He needed to confirm that the body he had seen the night before was truly Eldin’s. It was in such bad condition that they had to do tests to be 100% sure. And yes, the DNA test validated it.

[Henry]: I just told the doctor, give me five minutes in your office, alone. Okay, he told me. He allowed me to enter his office and I took five minutes and there I broke down. I broke down alone because I couldn’t, I could no longer bear or resist all that for eight or nine days we had been through.

[Carlos]: Like the search, Eldin’s burial was massive. Mercedes remembers it as the saddest day of her life…

[Mercedes]: It was the saddest day, I can say it like that, because it’s hard to accept. A person who has always been there at all times when I’ve needed him…

[Carlos]: Hundreds of people accompanied Eldin’s coffin to the cemetery of San Andrés Itzapa. The procession traveled through almost all the narrow streets of the town. Cries for justice were accompanied by ambulance sirens that joined the protest.

It was the women who set the tone of the march. Many walked with improvised signs, written with markers on cardboard and fabric. “Corrupt Police” and “No more Police abuse,” several of their signs said.

[ARCHIVE SOUNDBITE]

[Woman]: When they catch the killer we want him here in town!

[People]: YES!

[Carlos]: Some cried while raising the messages in the air, others shouted with rage, demanding that the death of Eldin and Milton not go unpunished.

[Henry]: Look, it’s incredible. When they received him here in town, the number of people that we didn’t even know where they came from. Well, the whole town, well, people from other places accompanied him until the end, until they left him in the cemetery.

[Carlos]: In the midst of the crowd, Henry thanked each person who approached him. Strangers hugged him, told him words of encouragement. But among so many shows of solidarity, there was one that puzzled him. Henry remembers a man, drunk, leaning towards Eldin’s coffin and talking to him as if they were conversing privately.

[Henry]: And he starts crying in my brother’s coffin and says to him: What happened, brother? If days ago I met you and you introduced me to your partner. And I’m like: What is he talking about?

[Carlos]: Henry didn’t want to take it seriously. He didn’t know of any partner for Eldin. But the man insisted. He leaned closer to the coffin, murmuring words to Eldin. Henry remembers hearing him say:

[Henry]: But if you introduced me to your partner, brother, how come? You told me he was your partner and you were very happy, why did you leave us?

[Carlos]: Very happy. When he heard the man, Henry realized that, in reality, he didn’t know anything about his brother.

And there was something that Eldin had never confessed to him, and that connected directly with his murder.

[Daniel]: Now a short break and we’ll be back.

We’re back on Radio Ambulante, here’s Carlos.

[Carlos]: After Eldin’s burial, life went on. There was an open legal process, but work and caring for the children returned to routine. As the weeks passed, Henry couldn’t stop thinking about what that drunk man said at the funeral. What partner? Was he referring to Milton? It seemed he was the person closest to Eldin in the days before his death.

But the mere idea of wondering something like that generated resistance in him.

In the town where he grew up with Eldin, San Pedro Carchá, about six hours from where they lived their last years, there were almost no openly gay men. And if they were Mayan, says Henry, it was even rarer.

[Henry]: The truth, according to what I remember from my childhood, in my youth, the topic wasn’t talked about because there was no idea about it.

[Carlos]:San Pedro Carchá is a municipality in central Guatemala, in the department of Alta Verapaz, the poorest in the country. The majority of its inhabitants are Mayan Q’eqchi’, like Henry and Eldin.

Henry remembers that in his family they almost never talked about homosexuality. Neither badly nor well. They didn’t know gay people and they didn’t use insults against them either. The biggest offense was the word “hueco,” which in Guatemala is used to mock homosexual men or anyone seen as weak. Henry repeated it often to joke with his friends, without thinking much about what he was saying. It was normal, what almost everyone in Carchá did.

Now, in some parts of town the topic of homosexuality did come up. In church, for example.

[Henry]: Everywhere there’s the Evangelical Church, Catholic Church. So always the life of the inhabitants was always like that, religious, with the mentality of man and woman.

[Carlos]: His parents went for years to the evangelical church and his grandmother to the Catholic one, where they were often taught to reject what deviated from God’s rule. He also heard similar things from his teachers, from his neighbors.

Besides, it was hard for Henry to think of his brother as a gay man. At parties and events, there were always women approaching Eldin. They did comment on that often in the family. It was celebrated.

[Henry]: So my brother Wildemar would just tell me, look, such and such a girl likes Eldin. Oh! Why doesn’t he pay attention to her? As we say in Guatemalan: and why doesn’t he give her a chance?

[Carlos]: The more he thought about it, the more doubts he had. So he decided to ask. He brought up the topic with family and friends. But no one told him anything clear: they didn’t know, how could he think that… things like that. But this rather fueled his suspicions.

The confirmation came from an unexpected person, much more distant from the Choc family’s life: a prosecutor from the Public Ministry. He was the one who told him, in the middle of a meeting about the criminal case against the police, that yes. Eldin was gay. And Milton was his boyfriend.

At first, the prosecutors knew little about the relationship between both men. Only after weeks of investigation did they confirm they were a couple, through interviews with neighbors, review of cameras and testimonies from more police officers.

According to the Prosecutor’s Office, on the day of the murders, Milton and Eldin were drinking beers at a store when an argument started between them. The Police received an anonymous complaint about a supposed “disturbance in the public road.”

Milton had only been in Guatemala for one day. He had traveled from Canada with a simple but exciting plan: he wanted to quote land prices in Itzapa to buy one, together with Eldin. He had spent the whole afternoon touring the town.

The first agents to arrive at the store after the complaint were two police officers: a man and a woman. They parked their motorcycle at the entrance, which faced right onto the street, and asked Milton and Eldin to show their identity documents. Milton, for some reason, didn’t want to. Eldin, nervous, asked him to hand over his passport and not to be “stubborn.”

Apparently, that word, “stubborn,” caused a misunderstanding: the police officer thought Eldin was insulting him. He got upset and started a struggle with Milton. To defend her partner, the other agent intervened and hit Milton with her helmet, in front of everyone in the store.

In seconds, the tension became chaos. Reinforcements arrived, they handcuffed Milton, and Eldin tried to escape, but they caught him a few blocks away. They took them both to the Itzapa substation.

The Prosecutor’s Office says the arrests were illegal.

[Noé Rivera]: Because the consumption of alcoholic beverages is not a crime and it’s not a misdemeanor either. So I say that this is an illegal detention because they had no cause.

[Carlos]: He is Noé Rivera, the prosecutor who leads the team handling the case. Additionally, his investigators say there was never any arrest warrant, and that the police officers didn’t report Milton and Eldin’s arrests to their headquarters, which is routine. The argument is that they were hiding them on purpose.

According to what the Prosecutor’s Office has investigated, inside the substation, the police officers, led by their chief, began to insult Milton and Eldin. They hit them on the head, stomach and other parts of the body, while they were handcuffed, unable to defend themselves, begging for mercy. Eldin was the one who pleaded the most. He did it several times, shouting Milton’s name. Seeing that the police weren’t calming down, he decided to reveal something that almost no one knew. He confessed to them that Milton was his boyfriend. It was his last resort, seeking to clarify the situation, out of desperation, for whatever reason…

The insults changed tone at that instant. The agents began shouting things at them like: “Learn to be a man” and “Faggots.”

The Prosecutor’s Office assures that the assaults became so brutal that, in a matter of minutes, Milton died. The chief, they say, sought to cover up what they had done. He called the firefighters and ordered them to transfer the body to a hospital and to say that Milton had suffered a traffic accident.

[Noé]: They try to minimize the situation. They coordinate with the firefighters and literally the firefighters take away a dead man. And the question is, can a firefighter take away a dead man? Never.

[Carlos]:The Public Ministry now accuses nine people of being behind the crime against Eldin and Milton. Seven police officers and two firefighters from San Andrés Itzapa. The firefighters are indicated as accomplices. Two agents face charges for not having done anything to stop the violence. And the remaining five—three men and two women—carry the most serious accusation: extrajudicial execution, that is, they’re accused of having murdered Eldin and Milton by abusing their power as police officers.

In September 2025, more than a year after the murders, one of the two accused firefighters confessed his guilt in the crime. Before a judge, he admitted that he helped cover up the homicides and agreed to collaborate with the Prosecutor’s Office in exchange for a reduced sentence.

Prosecutor Rivera says that, after disposing of Milton’s body, the substation chief opened his car and forced Eldin to get in. With the help of another agent, he took him to a village on the outskirts of San Andrés Itzapa. There, in the darkness, they strangled him and threw his body into a ravine. The prosecutors’ thesis is that, with a weapon, the police also cut off his right hand and some fingers from his left.

The police officer’s car was red. The same one Henry saw was stained with blood on Friday morning, when he thought his brother was missing and that he had done something to Milton.

[Noé] : And why do they go to that place and take him so far from the municipality where they are? Because what they’re going to do is be able to guarantee impunity.

[Carlos]: The head of the substation, Edy Vásquez Rabanales, escaped from San Andrés Itzapa the same night of the crime. Two months later, he was captured in Texas, United States. Today he is in prison in Guatemala and claims to be innocent.

The police high command did not protect him. In fact, the then Minister of the Interior of Guatemala called him a ‘coward’ on his official X social media account, where he also wrote that the other agents involved in the crime are ‘bad’ and acted in an ‘unjustifiable’ manner. 

The police deny everything. In the hearings, some said that Vásquez Rabanales was the one who gave the orders and the beatings, and that they didn’t report him out of fear of what he might do to them. Others defended themselves with the version that they weren’t on duty that night, that their job was just to do paperwork, not deal with detainees.

For prosecutor Rivera, a case like this is not isolated. It reveals something systematic.

[Noé]: I dare to assert that these National Civil Police officers were accustomed to abusing their power.

[Carlos]: They also maintain the theory that the police decided to capture Milton at the store because they wanted to steal the suitcase he was carrying. The prosecutors suspect that inside the bag, Milton had cash to buy the land with Eldin that we mentioned earlier. But for now, this is something they haven’t been able to prove.

In any case, the defense of the accused insists that at the establishment, Eldin and Milton were drunk. That they were the ones who started hitting the officers.

Prosecutor Rivera says this isn’t true, that witnesses say it was the other way around. That Eldin and Milton were calm and that it was the officers who attacked them first.

[Noé]: And in any case, if the victims had insulted the authority or attacked them, they also had the possibility of arresting them and taking them to a justice of the peace court.

[Carlos]: A justice of the peace court, that is, a minor tribunal where those alleged insults could have been resolved through mediation. But that didn’t happen. What happened was different: the violence escalated because Eldin and Milton were a homosexual couple. And that, the Prosecutor’s Office maintains, turns the case into a hate crime. A homophobic attack.

[Daniel]: A pause and we’ll be back.

We’re back on Radio Ambulante, here’s Carlos.

[Carlos]: For Henry, the months after Eldin’s burial have been difficult. He not only lost a brother, but also realized that he actually didn’t know an important part of his life. It’s a double grief.

[Henry]: I started kind of fighting with him, saying to him: why didn’t you tell me?

[Carlos]: Knowing that this secret was what ignited the violence at the substation hurts even more, because it indicates that Eldin kept it silent to protect himself. He didn’t feel safe in his town. And the fact that he didn’t tell him also confirms that he didn’t feel completely safe with his family. Maybe he didn’t fear violence, but he did fear rejection. Sometimes, Henry visits Eldin’s grave to seek comfort: he talks to him, vents, even allows himself to reproach him.

[Henry]: It’s true, I know myself, I told him, I’m angry and all, but why didn’t you talk to me? Why did you trust other people and not me?

[Carlos]: And despite the disconnection as adults, Henry always felt it was his duty to take care of Eldin. As he also takes care of his other siblings.

And he feels he failed him.

Of the entire family, Mercedes was the only one who knew in detail about Eldin’s sexual orientation.

[Mercedes]: From the beginning we had that trust as siblings, he always saw me as his sister.

[Carlos]: Eldin, little by little, revealed his sexual orientation to Mercedes. At first, he only mentioned that men invited him out or that he had “special” friends. Until one day, about six months before being murdered, he dared to tell her explicitly.

Mercedes remembers the words he used:

[Mercedes]: Look, I know I trust you. I’m homosexual and I’m telling you in confidence. Oh, okay, I said. I didn’t say anything else. That’s fine, I respect that and I’m not against it. And then he told me: Just don’t say anything yet, he told me.

[Carlos]: According to Mercedes, Eldin had no problem accepting his sexual orientation. He could talk about it without reservations with those who inspired his trust. But he was afraid of how some members of his family would react, like his brothers.

[Mercedes]: I’m a little worried, he tells me. I don’t know how they’ll take it, although I don’t think they’ll say anything, he said like that, but I’m not going to tell them yet, he tells me. Everything in its time. Oh, okay, that’s fine, relax, I told him. Anyway, no, they shouldn’t have to.

[Carlos]: Eldin believed the same, but it was something that kept him anxious. He had grown up in an environment where gay men are not well regarded. And he knew it was going to be news that could create conflict.

Anyway, that didn’t stop him from falling in love. He met Milton on Facebook, and at first they only talked there, at a distance. Mercedes never knew how many months they’d been together, but she realized they were boyfriends because of a ring that Eldin started wearing at the beginning of 2024. She already knew a little about Milton.

[Mercedes]: And that’s his ring, I say to him, give it to me, I said jokingly. And he laughs and tells me: Ah, it’s a gift. Oh, okay. Milton gave it to me. Ah, how nice! From there he made me understand that he was his partner and what plans they had at that moment.

[Carlos]: On the land they planned to buy together in San Andrés Itzapa, they wanted to grow fruits and export them to El Salvador. Milton had contacts there.

A beautiful dream. A dream that Eldin never felt capable of telling Henry about.

For a while, Henry reproached Mercedes for not having told him about Eldin’s sexual orientation.

[Mercedes]: It’s not that, I told him. In his time, he was going to tell you. And I respected that because he told me that you all had to know, but from him, not from me, I told him.

[Carlos]: Mercedes was sure of that: such an intimate truth only belonged to Eldin. Only he could choose when to reveal it to the rest of his family. She could only respect and protect him. Over the months, Henry realized that. And he started questioning things about his life, his way of being. Today, although it’s hard for him to accept, he knows why Eldin didn’t tell him anything.

[Henry]: I had that thinking or that mentality of not accepting. Maybe because of that way of thinking, he didn’t confess to me or didn’t trust me enough to tell me.

[Carlos]: Henry is clear about it. He knows he couldn’t have saved Eldin from what happened, that it was out of his control. But the relationship he had with his brother could have been different.

Henry felt he owed it to Eldin to be a better brother. And, against everything he’d been taught and against his own prejudices, he started approaching LGBTIQ+ people in San Andrés Itzapa. He was looking for clues, maybe someone who had known more about Eldin’s private life. He wanted to understand, even if just a little, what he felt. And also to process, even if it hurt, the fear he had lived with.

The difficult part was breaking the ice. He wasn’t friends with any gay person, he only knew of a young man he’d interacted with very little. But one afternoon, after work and without planning it, he ran into him at a store.

[Henry]: And we started talking because he knew my brother. And I asked him if he knew or if he met my brother, what he was like, and he told me yes, that he lived happily, that in his group, because they certainly sometimes have a meeting, they get together. So he told me that he lived well, he was happy. I don’t know why he never told you.

[Carlos]: That conversation was like opening a door that seemed sealed. A way to enter a world that Henry had never seen.

[Henry]: More than anything he told me about how they live, that they don’t hurt anyone, they’re people. So there little by little I had the opportunity to understand and comprehend.

[Carlos]: It was a way to stay by Eldin’s side, or rather to get even closer, even though he was no longer there.

[Henry]: I’ve managed to accept my brother as he was or as he was, because I couldn’t reject him or discriminate against him.

[Carlos]: Today, all members of the Choc family know that Eldin was gay. For some it was easy to accept; for others, it’s still a process.

[Mercedes]: Sometimes there are families that find it hard to accept, they always sometimes get carried away by what people will say. How ugly for the family’s reputation! But the truth is, reputation isn’t just about that, reputation is also in oneself.

[Carlos]: In how we treat others. Today, Henry understands that.

[Henry]: I think that each person is free, each person has the right to live their life as they decide. We have the freedom to live as we want.

There are many things Henry cannot control about what happened with Eldin. He can’t control the courts or the sentences. But he can decide about something else, one that is no less important: the way he looks at the world and at others. Eldin, after his death, taught him to do it without fear and without prejudice. Henry says that this way, with that lesson, he’s more like the brother that Eldin deserved. And it’s a way that Henry reconciles with the brother he was… and with the one he didn’t get to be.

[Daniel]: So far, of the nine people accused of the murder of Eldin and Milton, only the firefighter who confessed to covering up for the police has been sentenced. The other is expected to plead guilty in March 2026.

The trial against the seven officers is scheduled for mid-2026. Meanwhile, the head of the substation, Edy Vásquez Rabanales, was convicted in August 2025 in a separate criminal case for abuse of authority in San Andrés Itzapa.

In the last five years, Guatemala has recorded 27 cases of extrajudicial executions. On the other hand, organizations specializing in sexual and gender diversity point out that during that period, there were 166 homicides against the LGBTQ+ community.

Carlos Kestler is a Guatemalan journalist and works for Plaza Pública, where he did another report on police brutality in San Andrés Itzapa. We recommend reading it, it’s called “The Last Crime of Substation 73-15.”

We thank journalists Laura García, Lucía Reinoso and Josué Sac for their help in recording the interviews. Also the Technology Communication Laboratory of Rafael Landívar University, in Guatemala, for lending us their audio booth.

This story was edited by Camila Segura and Luis Fernando Vargas. Bruno Scelza did the fact-checking. Sound design is by Andrés Azpiri with music by Ana Tuirán, Rémy Lozano and Andrés.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Adriana Bernal, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Camilo Jiménez Santofimio, Germán Montoya, Samantha Proaño, Natalia Ramírez, Lina Rincón, Sara Selva Ortiz, David Trujillo, Elsa Liliana Ulloa and Mariana Zúñiga. 

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO.

Radio Ambulante is a podcast from Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed in Hindenburg PRO.

If you liked this episode and want us to continue doing independent journalism about Latin America, support us through Deambulantes, our membership program. Visit radioambulante.org/donar and help us continue narrating the region.

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.