Ex-Guatemalan soldier Jorge Sosa gets 10 years in U.S. jail for hiding his role in ‘ruthless massacr

[Judi Lynn]

Ex-Guatemalan soldier Jorge Sosa gets 10 years in U.S. jail for hiding his role in ‘ruthless massacre’
Stewart Bell | February 10, 2014 4:10 PM ET

A former Guatemalan military officer caught hiding in southern Alberta three years ago was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment on Monday for concealing his role in a 1982 massacre during the Central American nation’s civil war. Jorge Sosa, 55, will also be stripped of his U.S. citizenship, a federal judge in California ruled in a case that officials said demonstrated the determination to deny safe haven to war criminals and hold them to account.

Although he had fled to the United States and then to Lethbridge, Sosa was arrested in 2011 after being identified as a member of a Guatemalan special forces unit known as the Kaibiles, and an active participant in a slaughter.

In December 1982, Sosa and about 40 other special forces troops were sent to the village of Dos Erres to search for rifles stolen by guerrillas during an ambush. After finding no trace of the weapons, the soldiers began removing the villagers from their homes.

They then separated the men from the women and began raping some of the young girls, U.S. prosecutors said. To hide the rapes, the soldiers began killing the villagers by bludgeoning them with sledgehammers, shooting them and throwing them into a well.

More:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/02/10/jorge-sosa-sentenced/

[Judi Lynn]

1. How Ronald Reagan Made Genocide Possible in Guatemala

How Ronald Reagan Made Genocide Possible in Guatemala
By Benjy Hansen-Bundy April 15, 2013

The early 1980s were particularly violent in the Latin American theater of the Cold War. Smack in the middle of Guatemala's 36-year civil war which claimed 200,000 lives, Rios Montt edged out the winner of a sham election in a bloodless coup and began systematically repressing support for the Marxist opposition,as his forces raped women, burned villages, and murdered indigenous Mayan peasants.

From day one Reagan backed Rios Montt, feeding him millions first in jeeps and trucks, and then helicopter and plane parts, despite clearly articulated reports from both the CIA and international watchdogs that genocide was accumulating bodies in the ditches and gullies of Guatemala.

A cache of internal Guatemalan records from the time revealed the existence of Operation Sofia, which was the operation that led to the massacre of indigenous peasants. It was used by the 1999 UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission to classify the counterinsurgency campaign in the summer of 1982 as "acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people."

The horror described by independent human rights reporters on the ground is enough to turn your stomach: "We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads were destroyed."

More:
http://www.policymic.com/articles/34465/how-ronald-reagan-made-genocide-possible-in-guatemala