Why Didn’t Police Believe Plett’s Story?

Roger Plett

There’s plenty more to this story, including how Plett managed to make his way back, and also the matter of his bulldozer operator who was also detained by Guatemalans and only just managed to escape by driving straight through the fire. We’ll have all that in Tuesday’s newscast. But here’s an amazing thing. The Police apparently didn’t believe Plett’s story when he was told to go in and make a formal report on Friday.

Roger Plett, Detained by Guatemalans

“When we went in to the police station to give the report, I started telling my story and after a while, the guy who was taking my story, he went out of the room. I waited a good while there and when he came back in, it’s like he didn’t want to hear my story anymore and he at first had put on my statement, Guatemalan military men. But he changed all of that and changed it to men in camouflage uniform. And the whole time after that, he was questioning me, trying to twist the story, trying to make me change the story. But I said the same story every time. Later when they took me into the room, Officer Guerra and a couple people from the O.E.A., the head Mister Rosado in there too. They had me tell the story to them again and they were checking to see if I would tell them the same story I had given in the statement. My story, they said, lined up perfectly with what I had told them at first, but they were having some kind of differences with Manuel Ayala story. And I asked them what they mean. And then they told me, do you know anything about that they could have set this whole thing up. I told them that is not true. They said well we have all the information from this cell phone here; we took it from Manuel Ayala. I told them show me the messages please. So they took the phone and they started reading the messages. And all the messages they read clearly says exactly what happened there, what I had told them was the truth, but somehow they were just saying that these messages proves that this is all a fabrication by us; that none of this actually happened. From there I told them that you guys are cowards; you guys are scared of the Guatemalans that is why you want to sweep this under the ground like nothing happened.”