Relatives embrace former military officer Reyes Collin Gualip, partially covered, after …A Guatemalan court on Wednesday sentenced four former Guatemalan army officers to 12,060-year prison sentences each for their role in the 1982 massacre of 201 people in the village of Dos Erres, during the country's long-running civil war.
"This court unanimously declared the accused as perpetrators of murder," the court said in its decision, according to a report in Agence France Press. "For this crime, a sentence of 30 years in prison for each victim comes to a total of 6,030 years."
On top of that sentence, the former officers each were sentenced to another 6,030 years in prison each for "crimes against humanity," meted out on the same 30-years-per-victim calculus.
In its sentencing pronouncement, the court said the convicts had "erased from the map" the village of Dos Erres, killing women, pregnant women, children and the elderly.
The four convicted men are Antonio Carlos Carias, Manuel Pop, Reyes Collin and Daniel Martinez. Guatemala has said it will hold a separate trial for Pedro Pimentel--another alleged member of their unit who was deported from the United States last month to face criminal charges in his home country.
Some 200,000 people are estimated to have been killed in Guatemala's 36-year civil war, which ran from 1960 to 1996. The United States sent CIA and military advisers to back the right-wing government forces accused of carrying out the vast majority of the killings and human rights abuses.
President Ronald Reagan in 1982 controversially visited the Guatemalan army chief, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, accused of ordering the massacre of the village of Dos Erres. At the time of his visit for which the men were sentenced today to lengthy prison terms, describing the human rights accusations against Rios Montt as a "bum rap."
Montt "currently has two open cases against him in Spain and Guatemala for crimes against humanity," the AFP reported. In view of the harsh sentences drawn by his senior officials advisers, Montt and his attorneys are probably hoping to avoid extradition to Spain. The Spanish justice system holds the standing record for longest jail sentence: 384,912 years. And that was for a postal worker's failure to deliver the mail.
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