Initially, the Kaibil Centre was located on two estates, El Infierno ("Hell") and La Pólvora ("Gunpowder") in the municipality of Melchor de Mencos, Petén department.

This includes aerial operations, day and night navigation, camp setup and security, evasion, escape, interventions and ambushes.

During the last stage, they are trained to eat "anything that moves", including snakes and ants, as well as roots, to collect dew drops from leaves, as well as how to execute annihilation attacks, intelligence maneuvers, and penetration into enemy territory.

During this stage, candidates must patrol through thorn-filled brush wearing nothing but underwear, roll around in thorns to fortify the body to pain,[3] and spend two days in neck-deep water without sleeping in extreme tropical heat.

As part of the course's finishing ritual, every recruit must drink "Bomb", a mix of tequila, whisky, rum, beer, water and gunpowder, served in a bamboo glass with a bayonet tied to it.

In February 1999, the Commission for Historical Clarification (Comisión para el Esclaracimiento Histórico, CEH), the truth and reconciliation body established under United Nations auspices by the 1996 Peace Accords that brought an end to the country's 35-year-long Civil War, called attention to the brutalising nature of the training conducted by the Kaibil Centre in its final report, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio ("Guatemala: Memory of Silence"): The substantiation of the degrading contents of the training of the Army's special counter insurgency force, known as Kaibiles, has drawn the particular attention of the CEH.

The extreme cruelty of these training methods, according to testimony available to the CEH, was then put into practice in a range of operations carried out by these troops, confirming one point of their decalogue: "The Kaibil is a killing machine.

However, under the terms of the Peace Accords, the army was to have been restricted to defence from external attack, which would preclude involvement in the sort of domestic police actions proposed by President Arzú.

The Kaibiles' record and reputation led the Roman Catholic Church's Interdiocese Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory (Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, REMHI) to recommend that the group be disbanded in its April 1998 report, "Guatemala: Never Again" (Guatemala: Nunca Más).

According to Jane's Intelligence Review "The army has refused to disband the Special Forces Training and Operations Centre, housed at El Infierno, in the vicinity of Poptún, Petén."

On 23 January 2006, a unit of 80 Kaibiles failed in an attempt to capture Vincent Otti, the deputy commander of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army, in Congo's Garamba National Park.

[12] The first version of this article was modified and edited from Guatemala: Kaibiles and the Massacre at Las Dos Erres, a public domain information request response document of the U.S.