Gilberto Jordan, 54, a former Guatemalan soldier was sentenced to 10 years in prison for failing to reveal his participation in the 1982 killings of at least 162 villagers at Dos Erres during the de facto presidency of General Efraín Ríos Montt. Guatemalan Government soldiers allegedly killed nearly 200,000 indigenous and Mayan people as part of the Guatamalan Government's scorched earth policy.
Jordan was arrested in Florida in May, 2010 and charged with immigration offences, and pleaded guilty to lying on his naturalisation forms, which allowed him to become an American citizen in 1999.
Jordan is believed to have entered the US illegally through Mexico in 1985 before settling in Boca Raton, Florida, where he worked as a cook at a country club, BBC reported.
Jordan belonged to a Guatemalan special forces unit, known as the Kaibiles, which the prosecution said murdered the villagers at Dos Erres by shooting them, hitting them on the head with a hammer, or throwing them alive into a well.
In 2000, the Guatemalan government acknowledged responsibility for the killings, and promised to compensate the victims' families. The massacre was one of the most deadly incidents in the 36-year conflict between the Guatemalan army and left-wing guerrillas, which ended with a peace accord in 1996.
-
0 Responses to Guatemalan ex-soldier jailed in US for 1982 massacre