25 Aug 2023 at 08:27
A retired colonel was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Thursday for involvement in a mass murder in the Guatemalan village of Rancho Bejuco. Forty years ago, 25 people were murdered there, including 17 children.
The colonel, Juan Ovalle Salazar, is said to have ordered the massacre because some residents of the mountain village had refused to participate in patrols. They were created by the army to keep the population under control during the civil war.
A total of nine suspects were charged. Eight of them were acquitted. They were members of the Army or the Civil Guard and would have been killed themselves if they had not followed the Colonel’s orders. The judge therefore found that a sentence was not justified.
The eighty-year-old colonel appeared in court, but did not speak. He has ten days to appeal, according to the judge. Ovalle also faces charges in connection with a mass murder in 1982 that killed 64 people.
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2023-08-25 06:27:39
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