The US sentenced a former Guatemalan Elite Forces officer to ten years in a federal prison for covering up his role in an atrocity during his native country’s bloody civil war during the 1980s, in order to gain US citizenship. 

Jorge Sosa, also known as Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes, also lost his US citizenship in the hearing.  Prosecutors say he lied to immigration officials about his involvement in the 1982 mass killings at the Guatemalan farming village of Dos Erres – one of the worst atrocities in that country's 36-year civil war.

“Jorge Sosa helped orchestrate the ruthless massacre of innocent villagers, including dozens of young children, and then lied about his past to obtain refuge in the United States,” said federal prosecutor Mythili Raman.

At the time, Jorge Sosa was a commanding officer of a Guatemalan Army Special Forces unit known as the Kaibiles under US-backed fascist dictator Ephraim Rios Montt.  The Kaibilies, with the help of US agencies including the CIA, killed nearly everyone living in tiny Dos Erres.  In many cases the victims were beaten with sledgehammers before their bodies were dumped into wells. Many of the women and girls of the village were raped before they were murdered.  All in the name of battling supposed “Leftists”.

US Prosecutors don’t have jurisdiction over Guatemalan atrocities; therefore Sosa wasn’t charged with those crimes.  But he likely will face those charges when he is sent back to Guatemala at the end of his sentence, just like three previous Guatemalan ex-military men discovered by the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center of US Immigration Customs Enforcement in recent years.