Guatemalan ex-soldiers arrested, linked to 1982 massacre

[Judi Lynn]

Guatemalan ex-soldiers arrested, linked to 1982 massacre
AMY TAXIN
Last updated 12:16 14/03/2011

Nearly 30 years after an elite Guatemalan military force raped and slaughtered residents of a tiny village, US and Canadian authorities are closing in on some of the alleged perpetrators.

The arrest of four ex-soldiers in a little more than a year has raised hopes among advocates of victims' relatives that at least one might stand trial for the killings.

Human rights advocates are pinning their hopes on the prosecution of Jorge Sosa Orantes, who was arrested in January in Canada on US charges of lying on his citizenship application about his ties to the Guatemalan military.

In the United States, Sosa is only charged with immigration violations - not carrying out the 1982 massacre in the village of Dos Erres.

More:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/4766475/Guatemalan-ex-soldiers-arrested-linked-to-1982-massacre

[Judi Lynn]

1. "Declassified documents show that U.S. officials knew the Guatemalan Army was responsible......"

Ex-Kaibil Officer Connected to Dos Erres Massacre Arrested in Alberta, Canada
Declassified documents show that U.S. officials knew the Guatemalan Army was responsible for the 1982 mass murder
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 316
Updated - January 20, 2011
Originally Posted - May 7, 2010
By Kate Doyle, Jesse Franzblau, and Emily Willard

~snip~
On May 5, 2010, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Gilberto Jordan, 54, in Palm Beach County, Florida, based on a criminal complaint charging Jordán with lying to U.S. authorities about his service in the Guatemalan Army and his role in the 1982 Dos Erres massacre. The complaint alleged that Jordán, a naturalized American citizen, was part of the special counterinsurgency Kaibiles unit that carried out the massacre of hundreds of residents of the Dos Erres village located in the northwest Petén region. Jordán allegedly helped kill unarmed villagers with his own hands, including a baby he allegedly threw into the village well.

The massacre was part of the Guatemalan military's "scorched earth campaign" and was carried out by the Kaibiles ranger unit. The Kaibiles were specially trained soldiers who became notorious for their use of torture and brutal killing tactics. According to witness testimony, and corroborated through U.S. declassified archives, the Kaibiles entered the town of Dos Erres on the morning of December 6, 1982, and separated the men from women and children. They started torturing the men and raping the women and by the afternoon they had killed almost the entire community, including the children. Nearly the entire town was murdered, their bodies thrown into a well and left in nearby fields. The U.S. documents reveal that American officials deliberated over theories of how an entire town could just "disappear," and concluded that the Army was the only force capable of such an organized atrocity. More than 250 people are believed to have died in the massacre.

The Global Post news organization conducted an investigative report into the investigation of the Guatemalan soldiers living in the United States and cited declassified documents released to the National Security Archive's Guatemala Documentation Project under the Freedom of Information Act. These documents are part of a collection of files assembled by the Archive and turned over to Guatemala's truth commission investigators, who used the files in the writing of their ground-breaking report, "Guatemala: Memory of Silence."

The documents include U.S. Embassy cables that describe first-hand accounts by U.S. officials who traveled to the area of Dos Erres and witnessed the devastation left behind by the Kaibiles. Based on their observations and information obtained from sources during their trip, the American officials concluded "that the party most likely responsible for this incident is the Guatemalan Army."

More:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB316/index.htm

[Judi Lynn]

2. Reagan and Guatemala's Death Files

Reagan and Guatemala's Death Files
By Robert Parry
http://www.consortiumnews.com/052699a1.html

Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America. After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anticommunist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems. The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for the optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.

In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins" of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.

The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala. The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part from Ronald Reagan's White House.

Yet, as the world community moves to punish war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, no substantive discussion has occurred in the United States about facing up to this horrendous record of the 1980s. Rather than a debate about Reagan as a potential war criminal, the ailing ex-president is honored as a conservative icon with his name attached to Washington National Airport and with an active legislative push to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore. When the national news media does briefly acknowledge the barbarities of the 1980s in Central America, it is in the context of one-day stories about the little countries bravely facing up to their violent pasts. At times, the CIA is fingered abstractly as a bad supporting actor in the violent dramas. But never does the national press lay blame on individual American officials.

The grisly reality of Central America was most recently revisited on Feb. 25 when a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that occurred during a 34-year civil war. The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.

More:
http://www.converge.org.nz/lac/articles/news990610b.htm