The Guatemalan Prosecutor’s Office requested this Thursday a sentence of 2,860 years in prison for a retired general for the extermination of indigenous people in the civil war (1960-1996), a second trial for genocide after the conviction of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt in 2013.
At the beginning of the conclusion phase of the trial, which opened on April 5, prosecutor Mercedes Morales asked the court that retired general Benedicto Lucas García be sentenced to 30 years in prison for genocide.
He also asked for 30 years for crimes against humanity and 2,800 years for the forced disappearance of 70 people. Despite the requested penalties, the law in Guatemala establishes that a person can only spend 50 years in prison.
“It is established that the intention of the accused was to destroy the Mayan Ixil ethnic people, whom [las Fuerzas Armadas] “They were considered an internal enemy” during the war, the prosecutor said about the former Chief of the Army Staff.
The 92-year-old soldier is being tried for his role in the massacres of more than 1,200 indigenous people accused of supporting guerrillas between 1978 and 1982, while his brother, President Romeo Lucas García, who died in Venezuela in 2006, governed.
Accused continues hearings from a hospital
During the seven months of the trial, military documents, forensic reports and the testimony of survivors, among other evidence, were presented. The court is expected to hand down the sentence next week.
The prosecutor added that in the military operations there was “viciousness” against the victims, including “children, the elderly and pregnant women.” “After executing them, or still alive in some cases, they were burned,” he indicated.
Lucas follows the hearings by videoconference from a military hospital in the capital and on Wednesday he wore a cap with the surname of the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump.
He is now serving a 58-year prison sentence imposed in 2018 for the forced disappearance of a young man and the rape and torture of his sister whose family was accused of being “subversive” in 1981.
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