Guatemala arrests four suspects of 1982 civil war massacre

[News_Editor]

Guatemala arrests four suspects of 1982 civil war massacre

2011-08-13 10:17:24 GMT+7 (ICT)

GUATEMALA CITY (BNO NEWS) -- Guatemalan police have arrested four men who were allegedly involved in the massacre of 268 peasants which was carried out in the village of Plan de Sánchez during Guatemala's civil war, officials said on Friday.

The suspects, who are being accused of murder and crimes against humanity, were identified as former military commissioner Lucas Tecú and former members of civilian self-defense patrols (PAC) Mario Julián Acoj, Eusebio Grave Galeano and Santos Rosales García.

The four men are being held in a preventive prison in the country's capital city of Guatemala and rendered their first statements to the court on Friday. Details of their statements were not immediately known.

The massacre occurred during one of the most violent phases of Guatemala's civil war, which pitted left-wing insurgents against the government and the armed forces.

In 1982, the post-military coup government headed at the time by General José Efraín Ríos Montt embarked on a military campaign that succeeded in breaking the insurgency but caused thousands of deaths and multiple human rights violations.

On July 18, 1982, the villagers of Plan de Sánchez came under attack by Army forces and members of a civil defense force who suspected they were supporting the left-wing rebels only because they had refused to join the civil defense groups set up to fight against the guerrilla.

The peasants had grenades thrown at them and those who tried to flee were shot. The 268 identified victims were mostly women and children, all of them members of the Achi indigenous group.

The survivors filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in 1996 but it was not until 2004 when Commission ordered monetary, non-monetary and symbolic forms of compensation for the survivors and the families of the victims.

However, the trial process for the Plan de Sánchez massacre, like many others carried out during Guatemala's civil war, was halted for several years due to the amnesty enjoyed by the military at the time. The four men are the first suspects to be arrested over the massacre in Plan de Sánchez.

The arrests come just over a week after four former Guatemalan soldiers were sentenced to 6,030 years in prison each for the 1982 massacre of 201 people in the village of Las Dos Erres in the northern province of Peten. In that instance, many of the girls and women were raped while those who were pregnant were forced to abort before being killed.

An estimated 200,000 people were killed in Guatemala's 36-year civil conflict, which ended in 1996 after a peace agreement was signed.

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