“WHY HAVEN’T WE KILLED HIM ALREADY?”
It was one of the few things Orlando León could hear his captors arguing about through the sound of rain pounding on a metal roof in Guatemala. From where he sat with his hands bound in front of him and a hood pulled over his head, he wondered the same thing: How was he still alive? And how long had he been sitting there?
A metallic taste filled Orlando’s mouth as blood dripped from the gums where his top four front teeth had once been. It was difficult to see anything through the hood, but Orlando knew he was in a cemetery. Before his kidnappers had shoved him inside a small building, he’d been able to make out the silhouettes of gravestones and crosses when flashes of lightning illuminated them against the dark backdrop of the jungle. Judging from other stories he’d heard about kidnappings in Guatemala, he figured his abductors had already dug an unmarked grave for him.
“What do you want from me?” Orlando asked.
“Shut up, you son of a bitch,” one of the captors said.
The other men inside the room continued arguing in hushed tones before appearing to come to an agreement. Orlando could hear them rustling around. “Use these,” one of them said amid the beeps of cell phones being turned off and on. “They could be tracking us.” Then, before using one from what Orlando presumed to be a bag full of burner phones, the men demanded a number from him.
Thousands of miles away in Aurora, Sylvia Galván Cedillo’s cell lit up with a call from an unknown number in Guatemala. It was October 19, 2014, and it had been almost 12 hours since relatives in Guatemala alerted her that a group of men had snatched her husband from the streets of his ancestral village of Aldea Zarzal. Since then, her house had sounded like an emergency call center. Sylvia and her daughter, 28-year-old Alondra León, tried to find out more about who Orlando had recently been in contact with. And her sons, Chris and Elvis León, then 27 and 30 years old, respectively, had reported the kidnapping to the Aurora Police Department—although, according to the family, Aurora PD failed to take a report once it heard the incident was in Guatemala. Officers instructed them to contact the FBI.
So, the family turned to other officials, including the FBI (who the family says advised them to file a report online but declined to get involved right away), as well as the Guatemalan consulate in Denver, Guatemala’s national police, and local police in the Zacapa region of Guatemala where Orlando had last been seen.
After Sylvia saw the unknown number on her screen, she answered uneasily.
“Call the police again and we’ll kill your husband,” a man said.
A jostling sound obscured the other end of the line before Sylvia heard a familiar voice. “Stop asking around about these guys,” Orlando said to his wife. “Just do what they say!”
Before hanging up, the callers said they’d be in touch. Now the León family felt even more unsettled. How had the kidnappers known they’d been calling police in Guatemala?
