Her brothers, Enrique and Homero, both followed their father's military footsteps and enlisted in the armed forces: Homero, a military doctor, was killed by guerrillas in 1984, while rescuing wounded army soldiers and attempting to put them aboard an army helicopter that was brought down by rebel weapons fire in El Petén; Enrique was chief of the Army General Staff before resigning his commission in September 2003 when charged with having embezzled Q30 million (€3.25m/US$3.75m). When she was 10 years old, her father renounced Catholicism and became an ordained minister in a Guatemalan offshoot of the Gospel Outreach Church.