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Man accused of war crimes by Guatemala ordered deported
Source: Associated Press
Updated 6:15 pm, Thursday, March 29, 2018
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A judge has ordered a man accused of war crimes and human rights violations while serving as a paramilitary commander during Guatemala's civil war to return to his native country.
The Providence Journal reports that a judge in Boston on Thursday rejected Juan Alicio Samayoa Cabrera's request to remain in the United States. The 67-year-old has lived in Providence, Rhode Island, for 25 years.
He's accused by the Guatemalan government of being involved in murders and other crimes against indigenous Mayans in the 1980s.
Samayoa's lawyer argues he'll be tortured if he returns to Guatemala. Several supporters had sent letters to the judge urging him to allow Samayoa to stay in the U.S.
Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/world/article/Man-accused-of-war-crimes-by-Guatemala-ordered-12792245.php
Older article:
After 25 years in US, alleged war criminal may finally face justice at home
PUTTING IT IN PERSPECTIVE Juan Samayoa Cabrera, a former paramilitary commander who public prosecutors in Guatemala want to stand trial for murder and manslaughter, was living in Providence until immigration agents arrested him in October.
Simon Montlake
Staff writer | @sjmontlake
NOVEMBER 27, 2017 PROVIDENCE, R.I.—When immigration agents arrived last month at a modest, three-story house here to detain an undocumented Guatemalan man, it was no ordinary arrest.
By most measures, Juan Samayoa Cabrera is a “bad hombre,” the declared target of President Trump’s effort to deport as many unauthorized immigrants as possible, in contrast to the Obama administration’s prioritization of those with criminal records.
The crimes that Mr. Samayoa allegedly committed didn’t take place in this New England city, where he’s lived for the past quarter-century, mostly in plain sight of US authorities. Samayoa was a paramilitary commander during the bloodiest phase of Guatemala’s civil war, when tens of thousands of civilians died at the hands of government forces. Public prosecutors in Guatemala want him to stand trial there for murder and manslaughter. And among Guatemalan migrants living here, his name still stirs anger and fear, particularly for relatives of the massacred.
“People would say, ‘This is the guy that murdered my family,’ ” says Lisa Maya Knauer, a sociologist and anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, who has studied Guatemalan migrants in New England.
More:
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2017/1127/After-25-years-in-US-alleged-war-criminal-may-finally-face-justice-at-home
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Guatemalan Slaughter Was Part of Reagan’s Hard Line
Greg Grandin
Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is the author of the forthcoming "Empire of Necessity."
UPDATED MAY 21, 2013, 1:54 PM
In 1966, the U.S. Army’s Handbook of Counterinsurgency Guidelines summarized the results of a war game waged in a fictitious country unmistakably modeled on Guatemala. The rules allowed players to use “selective terror” but prohibited “mass terror.” “Genocide,” the guidelines stipulated, was “not an alternative.”
A decade and a half later, genocide was indeed an option in Guatemala, supported materially and morally by Ronald Reagan’s White House. Reagan famously took a hard line in Central America, coming under strong criticism for supporting the contras in Nicaragua and financing counterinsurgency in El Salvador.
His administration’s actions in Guatemala are less well known, but even before his 1980 election, two retired generals, who played prominent roles in Reagan’s campaign, reportedly traveled to Central America and told Guatemalan officials that “Mr. Reagan recognizes that a good deal of dirty work has to be done.”
Once in office, Reagan, continued to supply munitions and training to the Guatemalan army, despite a ban on military aid imposed by the Carter administration (existing contracts were exempt from the ban). And economic aid continued to flow, increasing to $104 million in 1986, from $11 million in 1980, nearly all of it going to the rural western highlands, where the Mayan victims of the genocide lived.
More:
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/19/what-guilt-does-the-us-bear-in-guatemala/guatemalan-slaughter-was-part-of-reagans-hard-line
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Did Reagan Finance Genocide in Guatemala?
By SANTIAGO WILLS May 14, 2013
On Monday, a Guatemalan court ordered the country's government to apologize to the Ixil population for the crimes of José Efraín Ríos Montt, a dictator who was sentenced to 80 years in prison for his role in war crimes committed between 1982 and 1983.
The verdict concluded that the army, under the command of Ríos Montt, had engaged in a campaign of genocide against the Ixiles, a small Mayan ethnic group. In that sense, it finally offered an answer to the thousands of victims' families who had pleaded for justice since the 1980s.
The trial did not answer all questions, however. For example, it did not place much attention on the extent of U.S. involvement in Guatemala during the 17 months of Ríos Montt's regime. That's in spite of the fact that America reached out to the Central American country offering military aid to combat left-wing guerrillas.
"U.S. military and intelligence units worked closely with the Guatemalan army over the decades of Guatemala's civil war," said Geoff Thale, Central America Program Director at the Washington Office for Latin America (WOLA). "Direct U.S. military aid was suspended during the Carter Administration, but then restored by the Reagan Administration, whose Cold War worldview clearly prioritized the fight against insurgents and their civilian supporters over respect for human rights."
More:
http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/News/ronald-reagan-finance-genocide-guatemala/story?id=19179627
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