[5] Ambassador Máximo Cajal y López, who had visited the Ixil and Kiche regions in the previous weeks, was holding a meeting with former vice president of Guatemala Eduardo Cáceres Lenhoff, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Adolfo Molina Orantes, and lawyer Mario Aguirre Godoy when the group entered the embassy.
President Fernando Romeo Lucas García, Guatemala City police chief Germán Chupina Barahona, and Minister of the Interior Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz met in the National Palace.
[8] As fire consumed the second floor and the demonstrators and captive staff of the embassy were burned alive, police refused pleas from bystanders to allow firefighters to combat the blaze.
Shortly thereafter a band of twenty armed men masked with bandanas, widely believed to be plainclothes members of the Judicial Police, entered the hospital and kidnapped Gregorio Yuja Xona.
Ambassador Cajal denied the claims of the Guatemalan government and Spain immediately terminated diplomatic relations with Guatemala, calling the action a violation of "the most elementary norms of international law.
Hundreds attended the funeral of the victims, and a new guerrilla group was formed commemorating the date, the Frente patriótico 31 de enero (Popular Front of January 31).
As a result, the embassy fire received dedicated attention in both of the country's two truth commissions, the UN-sponsored Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH) and the project for the Recovery of Historical Memory (REHMI), spearheaded by the Guatemalan Archdiocese.
[11] In 1999, Rigoberta Menchú filed a criminal complaint in Spain accusing former government officials of responsibility for the incident, including former Presidents Romeo Lucas García, Efraín Ríos Montt and Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores.
[13] On January 20, 2015, former SWAT police chief Pedro García Arredondo was sentenced to 40 years in prison for murder and crimes against humanity, for ordering that no one should be allowed to get out of the burning building alive.
[14] Prior to this conviction, Arredondo, who later became chief of the now-defunct National Police (Policía Nacional, PN), was already serving a 70 year prison sentence after being found guilty in 2012 of ordering the enforced disappearance of agronomy student Édgar Enrique Sáenz Calito during the country’s long-running internal armed conflict,[15] The names of those who died in the burning of the Spanish embassy are commemorated in Guatemala City's main square, along with other victims of the Guatemalan Civil War.