Ex-Soldiers Sentenced to 6,000 Years

Guatemala City—A Guatemalan court, on Tuesday, convicted and sentenced four ex-soldiers to more than 6,000 years (each) in prison for their role in a massacre of 250 people during the nation’s civil war.

The trial is regarded as groundbreaking; not only as a result of the length of punishment, but because it was one of Guatemala’s first against the dictatorship-era’s military regime. Guatemala’s state-run news agency, AGN, described the judgment as an “historic sentence.”

“The sentence we heard today is only the beginning,” said Aura Farfan, director of the Association for Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared. 

The four men who stood trial—Reyes Guali, Danie Mendez, Manuel Sun and Carlos Carias, pleaded not guilty for their charges of crimes against humanity. “I have said several times that I am innocent, there is no solid proof,” Carias reiterated to various news outlets before the conviction.

Although adamant regarding their innocence, the four ex-soldiers were convicted for their role in 201 of the 250 killings that occurred during the 1982 massacre at the village of Dos Erres. The United Nations, the general enforcer of human rights, documented a total of 669 massacres in Guatemala, during the country’s 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996.

During the trial, 23 witnesses testified, including former soldiers. Survivors eerily depicted what they witnessed during the savage events. Villagers rehashed about the slayings of their families at the hands of the brutal army. But some justice was restored, when family members of victims bellowed as Judge Patricia Bustamante read the ex-solder’s fate.