Thread: Immigration charges for accused commando

Dos Erres Massacre: Immigration charges for accused commando

ProPublica | Sep 23, 2012
by Sebastian Rotella

A former Guatemalan Army lieutenant was extradited Friday from Canada to stand trial in Southern California on federal charges related to the massacre of 250 people in a Guatemalan village in 1982, a case that has resulted in landmark human rights prosecutions in Guatemala and the United States.

U.S. federal officers took custody of Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes in Calgary Friday morning and were en route to Los Angeles, U.S. officials said. Sosa, 54, is the highest-ranking officer to have been arrested on charges alleging direct involvement in the massacre by a 20-man unit of elite commandos in the northern Guatemalan farming hamlet of Dos Erres.

In May, ProPublica reported the story of Oscar Alfredo Ramírez Castañeda, who learned only last year that he was a Dos Erres survivor. He had been abducted by a commander of the unit and raised by his family.

Sosa, a karate instructor who holds both U.S. and Canadian citizenship, fled his home in the Los Angeles area in mid-2010 as agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) closed in on him. He went to Mexico and then to Lethbridge in western Canada, where he has family, and was arrested in January of last year, according to U.S. and Canadian court documents. Last month, a Canadian appeals court ended his legal fight to avoid extradition to the United States.

Because U.S. courts do not have jurisdiction for the massacre, federal prosecutors indicted Sosa on charges of lying on immigration forms. He allegedly concealed his military service and involvement in Dos Erres on the forms when he obtained citizenship in 2008 and residency 10 years earlier, according to an indictment filed in 2010. The trial could start in about two months in federal court in Riverside, Calif.

In Dos Erres, Sosa allegedly oversaw the slaughter of men, women and children who were dumped in a well during a day-long frenzy of torture, rape and pillage, according to U.S. and Guatemalan court documents.

He allegedly fired his rifle and threw a grenade into a pile of living and dead victims in the well, according to the testimony in Guatemalan courts of two former soldiers who are now protected witnesses.

Sosa was a sub-lieutenant at the time, junior in rank only to three lieutenants in the squad of highly-trained commando instructors. Sosa denied guilt during a recent telephone interview with ProPublica from jail in Calgary. He said he was in another village doing a military public works project on the day of the massacre in December 1982. He described the charges against him as the product of a conspiracy.

The Dos Erres case was one of the worst of hundreds of massacres during Guatemala's 30-year civil war, which ended in 1996 and resulted in more than 200,000 deaths. In "Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala," ProPublica told the story through the odyssey of Oscar Ramírez Castañeda, now a 33-year-old father of four living in Boston. After a dogged investigation by Guatemalan prosecutors, Oscar learned last year that his life until that point had been based on a lie.

DNA tests proved that when Oscar was age 3 and living in the village, a commando lieutenant spared his life and abducted him after the unit killed the boy's mother and eight brothers and sisters. The lieutenant died in an accident months later, but his family raised Oscar as if he were one of their own. Oscar, an illegal immigrant who came to the United States in 1998, is now a father of four and works two full-time jobs.

After he learned that he was living proof the massacre, Oscar applied for political asylum. A decision is pending. He met in recent months with a prosecution team from the U.S. Department of Justice and is prepared to tell his story as a witness against Sosa, according to his lawyer, R. Scott Greathead.

"Oscar is ready to provide them with whatever assistance they need," said Greathead. "The Sosa prosecution is very significant. It represents an important law enforcement effort on the part of the U.S. government to punish human rights abusers who make false representations to the U.S. government to get asylum and citizenship."

A key eyewitness will likely be Santos Lopez Alonzo, a former member of the commando unit. Alonzo abducted and raised a 5-year-old boy from Dos Erres who, like Oscar, had survived the attack. Alonzo migrated illegally to Texas, where he was arrested in 2010 for illegal re-entry after deportation and offered to testify against other Dos Erres suspects, according to court documents. He was sentenced to time served and is in federal custody as a material witness, according to court documents.

The prosecution's approach to the Sosa case resembles the investigation of Gilberto Jordan, a former commando who was tracked down in Florida by ICE agents in 2010. Jordan confessed his role in the massacre and pleaded guilty to similar immigration charges. Jordan received the maximum 10-year sentence and is serving time in federal prison.

U.S. authorities deported to Guatemala another former commando who was arrested in California. He became one of five suspects in the case who were convicted by Guatemalan courts. Seven suspects, including the two senior officers in the unit, remain at large.

The suspects were first charged in Guatemala in 2000, but the case remained in limbo because of legal appeals and political resistance by the powerful armed forces. The hunt for the killers in Guatemala and the United States began in earnest in 2010 as the result of a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the appointment of Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, who has aggressively pursued war crimes and corruption.

Dos Erres is the first massacre of the civil war to result in convictions in Guatemala. It has become a test of the capacity of that nation's embattled justice system to confront impunity and lawlessness.

Prosecutors have also charged Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, Guatemala's former dictator, in the Dos Erres case.

Dos Erres Massacre: Immigration charges for accused commando | Alaska Dispatch

After he learned that he was living proof the massacre, Oscar applied for political asylum. A decision is pending. He met in recent months with a prosecution team from the U.S. Department of Justice and is prepared to tell his story as a witness against Sosa, according to his lawyer, R. Scott Greathead.

------------------------------------

Now THIS is one of the very few legitimate political asylum victims from Mexico or South America that you will ever see. Clear, cut, and dry. South America and Mexico are becoming more deadly even for their own citizens each day, and are rife for political and even violent revolution. Che Guevara was only a shadow of the bloodletting that will take place in these countries if nothing changes to stop it.

Jury finds ex-Guatemala army officer lied on US citizenship forms about role in 1982 massacre

Published October 02, 2013Associated Press

RIVERSIDE, CALIF. – After just a few hours of deliberations, a California jury convicted a former Guatemalan army officer of lying about his role in the massacre of at least 160 people more than 30 years ago on a U.S. citizenship application.

The federal jury found Jorge Sosa guilty Tuesday of making false statements and obtaining citizenship unlawfully. The 55-year-old former second lieutenant could face both a prison sentence and loss of his U.S. citizenship when he's sentenced Dec. 9.

The verdict followed a five-day trial that brought haunting testimony from Guatemala's 36-year civil war to a present-day courtroom in Riverside County, where Sosa previously lived and taught martial arts. While Sosa is not charged with war crimes, the case included accounts from former soldiers about how they brought men, women and children to the well in the village of Dos Erres to be killed, their bodies dumped inside.

"It was a significant case for our office, and I believe justice was done today," assistant U.S. attorney Jeannie Joseph said after the verdict was read.

Sosa listened to the verdict through a Spanish interpreter and appeared to take notes, as he did for much of the trial, without visible reaction.
His lawyer, Shashi Kewalramani, said Sosa would appeal.

"They were clearly swayed by what happened in Dos Erres, as any person would be," Kewalramani said of the jury. "It's difficult to divorce yourself from the background that's here."

Prosecutors said Sosa was a member of a special forces patrol that went to Dos Erres in December 1982 to search for weapons believed stolen by guerrillas. The weapons were never found and prosecutors say the patrol decided to kill the villagers after some of the soldiers began raping the women.

More than two decades later, Sosa failed to mention his military service or role in the massacre on his application to become an American citizen even though the paperwork inquired about affiliations and past crimes, prosecutors said.

Kewalramani said authorities knew Sosa was in the military because he told them about his service when he unsuccessfully sought asylum in 1985, and referred to this application when he later sought to naturalize. He said the case is about how Sosa, as a former soldier, answered the questions on his immigration forms, not the atrocities of war, which ought to be addressed in Guatemala.

During the trial, two former soldiers testified they saw Sosa standing near the well in Dos Erres where they were ordered to bring villagers to be killed and that he fired his rifle at the screaming, dying victims inside. One of the survivors of the massacre recounted the horror of watching soldiers bash small children into a tree and toss their bodies into the well and seeing his mother yanked from the family as she pleaded for her life.

Another survivor, Oscar Ramirez, was in court Tuesday to listen to the verdict. Ramirez's mother and eight siblings were massacred in Dos Erres, and he was taken from the village as a toddler by a soldier and raised by the soldier's family.

"The most important thing is they're doing justice for the victims," said Ramirez, who only learned two years ago through DNA testing that his family had been killed.

Sosa left Guatemala in 1985 and sought asylum in the United States, claiming he was fleeing Guatemalan guerrillas. When he was denied, he went to Canada, where he became a citizen. He later married an American and got a green card, and applied to naturalize in 2007.

Sosa is one of four former soldiers allegedly involved in the Dos Erres massacre who have been arrested by U.S. Homeland Security officials. One of them is serving time for lying on his naturalization application about the killings while another has been held as a material witness in the case against Sosa.

A fourth was deported from the U.S. and prosecuted in Guatemala. He is one of five former members of the special forces who have been sentenced there to more than 6,000 years in prison for the killings.

Guatemalan authorities say they hope Sosa will be extradited to face similar charges.

In 1994, Guatemala opened an investigation into the Dos Erres massacre, and several years later, authorities issued arrest warrants for more than a dozen former soldiers. But the cases languished until the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2009 ordered Guatemala to prosecute the perpetrators of the killings.

The following year, the U.S. — which had supported Guatemala's military governments during the country's civil war — arrested three former soldiers and searched Sosa's home before he left for Mexico and later Canada. He was arrested there and extradited to the U.S. last year.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/10/02...about-role-in/