MOVES TO STRIP GUNMAN OF CITIZENSHIP
Canada is moving to strip citizenship from a former Lethbridge resident accused of slaughtering villagers in Guatemala using a grenade, gun and sledgehammer more than three decades ago.
Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes concealed his brutal role in a 1982 massacre by the Guatemalan military when he obtained Canadian citizenship a decade later, the federal government says in newly filed court documents.
“It’s a massacre of the most horrible nature, even by historical standards. The children were tied up, bound and thrown into a well. That is how they died,” Aura Elena Farfan, who investigated the atrocity, said in 2011.
Sosa Orantes, 59, is now serving a 10-year sentence for immigration fraud in the United States, where he also held citizenship until it was revoked in 2014.
Orantes left Guatemala for California in 1985. After being denied asylum in the U.S., he visited the Canadian consulate in San Francisco to seek haven in Canada. He was granted refugee status, later becoming a permanent resident and citizen of Canada.
Sosa Orantes eventually moved to Lethbridge, where he taught martial arts for 20 years.
Canada has opted to strip citizenship in only a handful of modern-day war crimes cases.
The bloody, decades-long conflict between Guatemalan government forces and guerrillas intensified in the early 1980s.
The military junta began a ruthless campaign of destruction that wiped out 440 villages, killing more than 75,000 people and displacing more than 250,000, the Canadian government says in documents filed in Federal Court.
“Destruction of property, torture, sexual violence toward women and minors was widespread and systematic during these operations,” the court submission says.
Sosa Orantes was a senior member of a military special forces group that led a mission to the Guatemalan village of Las Dos Erres in December 1982 to interrogate inhabitants, after some military rifles were allegedly stolen during a guerrilla ambush of troops.
The military members killed at least 162 civilians, including 67 children. Women were raped and children were thrown into an 18-metre dry well.
“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 says.
“In other cases, victims were simply thrown into the well while they were still alive.”
At one point, Sosa Orantes fired his rifle into the well, then tossed in a grenade, the documents say, and mocked mocked subordinates “who showed any hesitation to commit the murders.”