Guatemala massacre takes front stage at US trial
Guatemala massacre takes front stage at US trial
Sunday, September 29, 2013
RIVERSIDE, California: When the federal agents showed up at Jorge Sosa’s Southern California home, his wife was mystified. Later, an Internet search disclosed that her husband was allegedly implicated in the slaughter of 160 Guatemalan villagers during that nation’s decades-long civil war. Sosa fled the home and the couple later divorced but if the ex-special forces officer hoped to escape his past, he failed. On Thursday, two former soldiers in his unit wrapped up two days of gruesome testimony about the 1982 massacre in the hamlet of Dos Erres.
Sosa isn’t charged with war crimes but federal prosecutors contend he lied to conceal his past on his 2007 US citizenship application. If convicted, he could lose that citizenship and wind up in federal prison for up to 15 years. The trial was set to resume. A former sergeant, Cesar Franco Ibanez, recalled for jurors what one of the commanding officers of the unit sent to Dos Erres yelled at him as he took a woman to her death.
The officer said the task “was only for men,” Franco Ibanez, who is living outside Guatemala as a protected witness, said in Spanish through an interpreter. The remarks echoed testimony a day earlier by another former sergeant, Gilberto Jordan. After soldiers were ordered to kill everyone in the village, Jordan took a boy who was about 3 years old – the same age as his son – and sobbed as he walked toward a well to throw him in, Jordan recalled for the court.
In earlier testimony, the two men testified to killing people, seeing blindfolded women beaten with sledgehammers before being tossed into the well, and to seeing Sosa, then a second lieutenant, shooting a rifle into the well and hurling in a grenade. Sosa was living in the Riverside County community of Moreno Valley in 2010 when authorities searched his home in connection with the massacre.
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