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Ex-soldiers arrested for Guatemalan massacre
Two former Guatemalan soldiers have been arrested in the 1982 massacre of more than 200 villagers during the country's civil war, a human rights activist said Friday.
Aura Farfan of the Association of Missing Relatives of Guatemala says two former sergeants who belonged to a military squad commanded by soldiers trained by the United States were arrested last week. During the massacre, the squad, known as the Kaibiles, raped women and girls, and ripped fetuses from the bodies of pregnant women. A United Nations-backed Truth Commission also found soldiers threw babies against trees and walls and tossed their bodies into a well.
She identified them as Manuel Pop Sun and Reyes Collin Gualip. They are the first to be arrested in the killings of more than 200 civilians, including dozens of children, in the village of Dos Erres in the country's northern Peten region.
Farfan's organization, which legally represents relatives of people who went missing during the conflict, said the former sergeants were among 17 soldiers in the army's elite Kaibiles unit blamed for the bloodshed.
The massacre was one of hundreds that occurred during Guatemala's 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996. Some 240,000 people, mostly Mayan Indians, vanished or died.
Few authorities have faced justice for human rights violations carried out during the conflict. Many of them attended the US Army School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, infamous for training a host of Latin American dictators and notorious rights abusers, including the commanders of the massacre in Dos Erres.