Guatemala will pay $3 million to massacre victims

Guatemala's top human rights official has declared that the victims of one of the most shocking massacres in its country's history will be paid $3 million to compensate for their suffering in order to comply with a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. That ruling was made after concluding that the Guatemalan government failed to fully investigate a three-day raid in 1982 in Dos Erres, where more than 200 villagers were killed by a special forces unit whose commanders were trained by the United States military. In a new report, the court, under the Organization of American States, says the case against army officers responsible for the killings must still be fully resolved. 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. Among the school's most noteworthy graduates was brutal Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, whose military regime was in power at the time of the massacre. Montt often relied upon the Kaibiles, the most elite Guatemalan military unit, to conduct what has been described as genocide. Both Kaibiles commanders under Montt, Eduardo Arevalo Lacs, and its founder Pablo Nuila Hub, were also alumni of the US military school. In Dos Erres, it was the Kaibiles who conducted the massacre, as well as raped women and girls, and ripped fetuses from the bodies of pregnant women. A United Nations-backed Truth Commission found soldiers threw babies against trees and walls and tossed their bodies into a well.