
The massacre, in a remote northern village known as the Dos Erres, was part of a campaign by the army against perceived opposition to military rule. While most of the victims of the military campaigns were Mayan, Dos Erres was a mixed settlement of recent immigrants to the zone. They had left insufficient land plots in the highlands to move to a settlement on the agricultural frontier, but in December 1982 they were targeted as potential guerrilla sympathizers. The army surrounded the town, rounded up the townspeople and divided them into groups of men and women. As Gilberto Jordán admitted to the authorities, he started the killing by throwing a baby down the town well, still alive. Next the women were raped, killed and thrown down the well, followed by the men. In all, there were 251 villagers killed. (credit for photo above right of clothing of children killed in the Dos Erres massacre)
Jordán had been living in the U.S. since 1999, and had become a naturalized citizen without mentioning his participation in the massacre in his application. The other two suspects are Jorge Vinicio Sosa-Orantes of Riverside, California, and Pedro Pimentel-Rios of Santa Ana, California. Sosa-Orantes was a lieutenant at the time. In the U.S. he worked as a martial arts instructor. Pimentel-Rios, accused by witnesses of raping young girls before killing them, moved to the U.S. after a career that included a stint at the U.S. School of the Americas. More on the defendants can be found here. The Dos Erres massacre has become an emblematic case of Guatemala’s culture of im
Fed up, lawyers for family members of those killed went to the Inter-American Commission for help. The Commission found that Guatemala had violated the rights of the victims to redress and judicial process, and the Court, in 2010, agreed. It ordered the Guatemalan state to quit stalling and remove legal obstacles to prosecution, and to press forward with exhumations of the remains of the dead and other pre-trial procedures. In February, 2010, the Guatemalan Supreme Court held that the amnesty law did not apply, and that the lower courts should refuse to countenance any more dilatory motions and should get on with the business of amassing evidence and hearing the case. Since then, the Prosecutors’ office has announced that it is moving forward on the case, although a highly-contested process for election of the chief prosecutor may complicate things.
In this context, U.S. authorities have a number of choices for dealing with those arreste

Finally, U.S. authorities could charge the suspects with the underlying crimes and try them here. U.S. law provides jurisdiction for torture, genocide, slavery or recruitment of child soldiers when the offender is found in the U.S., no matter what his nationality or where the crime occurred. The section on torture was used to prosecute “Chuckie” Taylor, former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s son, who in 2009 was convicted and sentenced to 97 years in prison. It has not been more widely used because prosecutors have been loath to take on cases where the acts occurred prior to 1994, when the statute was enacted. As a matter of international law, this interpretation is incorrect: according to Article 15 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, there is no ex post facto problem when the behavior at issue has been criminalized in national or international law. Genocide, slavery and systematic torture have long been recognized as international crimes.
At this point, whether trial in Guatemala or in the U.S. is the best alternative depends on how seriously the Guatemalan prosecutors’ office seems to be in matching actions to their professed intentions to pros

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