Accused in Guatemalan massacre extradited to U.S.

[Judi Lynn]

Accused in Guatemalan massacre extradited to U.S.
By Jen Gerson, Postmedia News
September 2, 2011 8:55 PM

CALGARY — The former commander of an elite military unit accused of participating in the massacre of Guatemalan villagers was ordered Friday to be extradited to the U.S. to face perjury charges. Jorge Vinicio Orantes Sosa, who was arrested while visiting family in Lethbridge, Alta., earlier this year, is sought by Guatemalan authorities who accuse him of war crimes.

~snip~
Sosa was one of several commanding officers of a squad of "Kaibiles," an elite commando force accused of massacring the villagers of Dos Erres. A 60-person unit of fighters killed almost 200 people in what is considered one of the bloodiest events of the 36-year Guatemalan civil war.

In December 1982, the squad was sent to recover about 20 rifles believed to have been stolen from the military. During the raid, the commanding officers issued an order to kill the villagers. According to the American extradition case, the Guatemalan peasants were blindfolded, interrogated and killed by sledgehammer. Women and children were raped, and villagers were thrown into a well.

According to the U.S.'s witnesses, Sosa allegedly fired a 12-gauge shotgun into the well after hearing the wails of the villagers. He then dropped a grenade on the civilians.

More:
http://www.canada.com/news/Accused+Guatemalan+massacre+extradited/5346610/story.html

LBN:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4983594





Jorge Vinicio Orantes Sosa


Arrests of Guatemalans in U.S. accused of massacre: beginning of a new trend?

Yesterday the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Justice Department announced that they had arrested Gilberto Jordán, a former member of an elite army unit known as kaibiles, for lying on his immigration forms about his participation in a 1982 massacre. Two more former officials had also settled in the U.S. and are being sought. A fourth man, Santos Lopez Alonzo, pled guilty to illegally entering the country; he was fined $10 and is due to be deported.

The massacre, in a remote northern village known as the Dos Erres, was part of a campaign by the army against perceived opposition to military rule. While most of the victims of the military campaigns were Mayan, Dos Erres was a mixed settlement of recent immigrants to the zone. They had left insufficient land plots in the highlands to move to a settlement on the agricultural frontier, but in December 1982 they were targeted as potential guerrilla sympathizers. The army surrounded the town, rounded up the townspeople and divided them into groups of men and women. As Gilberto Jordán admitted to the authorities, he started the killing by throwing a baby down the town well, still alive. Next the women were raped, killed and thrown down the well, followed by the men. In all, there were 251 villagers killed. (credit for photo above right of clothing of children killed in the Dos Erres massacre)

Jordán had been living in the U.S. since 1999, and had become a naturalized citizen without mentioning his participation in the massacre in his application. The other two suspects are Jorge Vinicio Sosa-Orantes of Riverside, California, and Pedro Pimentel-Rios of Santa Ana, California. Sosa-Orantes was a lieutenant at the time. In the U.S. he worked as a martial arts instructor. Pimentel-Rios, accused by witnesses of raping young girls before killing them, moved to the U.S. after a career that included a stint at the U.S. School of the Americas.

More on the defendants can be found here. The Dos Erres massacre has become an emblematic case of Guatemala’s culture of impunity. It’s not that there’s a lack of evidence: two other elite soldiers confessed and provided eyewitness evidence in the case, and one survivor who, at age 5, witnessed his family’s murder before being taken as a domestic slave by López Alonzo. That man, Ramiro Cristales, has agreed to testify in the case and, along with the repentant soldiers, is now in hiding. The problem is that the case has languished in the Guatemalan courts for years. Every time there was any movement, lawyers for the defendants would file motions, called amparos, that had the effect of paralyzing the proceedings. One of the claims was that the case was covered by the country’s 1996 amnesty law.

More:
http://intlawgrrls.blogspot.com/2010/05/arrests-of-guatemalans-in-us-accused-of.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. It is truly difficult to even think about the Reagan horrors in LatAm

but this has to be the most difficult of all: The slaughter of TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND Mayan villagers by U.S. Army "School of the Americas"-trained butchers in Guatemala, and Reagan regime knowledge, complicity and encouragement of these horrors.

It is almost beyond belief what these killers did--throwing a living baby into a well, raping women and girls and throwing them into the well on top of the dying baby...

I think of Reagan's smiling actor's face, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick's snake-like arrogance, and all the malefactors of that era--and how they got away with it, so that this satanic evil re-visited U.S. policy, again and again, most notably with the Bushwhack wars and torture, through TODAY, and the murders occurring TODAY in U.S. client states, Honduras and Colombia.

This really and truly helps us understand how bad government secrecy is.

Smiling Reagan, with his little hand wave to all, such a good actor--as the baby goes down the well, and cries, and drowns, and dies from its injuries, and as the bodies of other innocents are piled upon it....

It is going to be very, very, VERY difficult for our society to recover from the evil that we, a supposed democracy, have permitted to be done in our name and with our resources and, often enough, at our government's instigation.

I don't know how this U.S. extradition fits in, but if the U.S. extraditions from Colombia are any guide, it is part of a cover-up--a way to keep such criminals out of the reach of prosecutors outside of this country who are not controlled by the U.S. and who might pressure or bargain with the prisoners to disclose U.S. connections to war crimes. I don't know for sure, in this case. Colombia was obvious--the criminal who was being protected and whose connections to the Bush Junta were being protected, Alvaro Uribe, did the extraditing, in collusion with the Bush-appointed U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Wm Brownfield, and over the vociferous objections of Colombian prosecutors. And that was done during Obama's tenure.

We need to know much more about this Guatemalan case to figure out if it is a coverup or a trend for the better (the U.S. helping to bring war criminals to justice). I strongly suspect a coverup--just like Colombia--the Democrats protecting heinous criminals, our own (we know who they are) and our puppets (Uribe and others). "We need to look forward not backward" on the crimes of the rich and powerful, as President Obama told us--and if we can't erase history--and Latin Americans are no longer compliant on this--then "we" need to give the appearance of lawfulness and accountability, in order for our corporate rulers and war profiteers to retain their "circle the wagons" area in Central America/the Caribbean and re-conquer South America, which has gone truly democratic and independent. I have NO illusions about Obama policy in LatAm because I've learned from experience to expect the worst from them. It's possible that someone in the Obama administration may actually be trying to do their jobs and this case is an exception. I am not hopeful.