Canada is moving to strip citizenship from a war criminal accused of mass slaughtering Indigenous villagers during Guatemala’s 1982 Dos Erres massacre, which occurred under the dictatorship of U.S.-backed General Efrain Rios Montt during the bloodiest years of the country’s 36-year civil war.
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According to the Canadian federal government, Guatemalan Army Lieutenant Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes concealed his brutal role in the massacre when he obtained Canadian citizenship in 1992.
He had claimed then that leftist guerilla forces in Guatemala were hunting him down. But he had actually been a member of the elite military death squad known as the Kaibiles that was responsible for murders at Dos Erres and many other gruesome massacres as part of Rios Montt's genocide against Indigenous people.
The Canadian federal government argued in a court filing that Sosa Orantes’ disclosure of his past with the Guatemalan Army would have made him inadmissible to Canada.
“The members of the special forces group killed their victims by hitting them on the head with a sledgehammer, by hitting their heads on a tree, by shooting them, or by slitting their throats,” the federal submission said, as reported by The Toronto Star.
“Destruction of property, torture, sexual violence towards women and minors was widespread and systematic during these operations,” it added.
Sosa Orantes is currently serving a 10-year sentence for immigration fraud in the United States, where he also held citizenship until it was revoked in 2014 for the same reason.
Sosa Orantes had first left Guatemala for California in 1985. When he was denied asylum in the United States, he visited the Canadian Consulate in San Francisco to seek asylum in Canada. He was granted refugee status there, and later became a permanent resident and citizen of Canada. In 2008, he attained U.S. citizenship after marrying a woman from the United States.
The bloody massacre at Dos Erres occurred in December 1982 at the height of the country's 36-year civil war, in an area that had been designated as a "red zone," meaning it was deemed as a place populated with "guerrilla sympathizers."
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The slaughter was part of Rios Montt's genocidal scorched-earth campaign against the country's Indigenous population. During the massacre, special operation Kaibiles troops forced residents out of their homes, separating men, women and children.
Not only did the Kaibiles use hammers to smash the children’s heads, they also raped all of the women and girls and ripped out fetuses from those who were pregnant. All of the men were immediately killed, shot execution style.
Most of the women were also murdered. Those who were spared were kidnapped, raped and strangled to death days later.
Witnesses say that Sosa Orantes played a monumental role in the massacre, in not only giving orders, but also killing people himself.
The war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996, was waged between the socialist Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity rebel army and the Guatemalan military government, which was backed by the United States, Israel and apartheid South Africa.
The armed conflict became synonymous with the U.S. government’s support for atrocities in a brutal campaign to stave off left-wing and communist movements in Latin America and the rest of the global south during the Cold War.