Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala
In 1982, 250 men, women and children were massacred in the village of Dos Erres in Guatemala. Two little boys were spared, and were the keys to an investigation into the coverup and subsequent fallout:
“In the summer of 2000, Oscar was living near Boston when he received a perplexing letter.
“A cousin in Zacapa sent him a copy of an article published in a Guatemala City newspaper. It described Romero’s search for two young boys who had survived the massacre and had been raised by military families.
“‘AG Looks for Abducted of Dos Erres,’ the headline declared. ‘They Survived The Massacre.’
“The story went on to explain that prosecutors had identified both young men. Prosecutors believed that one of them, Oscar Ramírez Castañeda, was living somewhere in the United States. It was quite possible that he had been too young to remember anything about the massacre or his abduction by the lieutenant, the prosecutors said.
“The newspaper ran a family photo showing Oscar as an 8-year-old.”
‘God Help You. You’re on Dialysis.’
A change to the Social Security Act granted comprehensive coverage under Medicare to virtually anyone diagnosed with kidney failure, regardless of age or income. Taxpayers now spend more than $20 billion a year to care for those on dialysis — about $77,000 per patient, more, by some accounts, than any other nation. Yet the United States continues to have one of the industrialized world’s highest mortality rates for dialysis care. Even taking into account differences in patient characteristics, studies suggest that if our system performed as well as Italy’s, or France’s, or Japan’s, thousands fewer patients would die each year.