Guatemala soldier gets 6,060-yr jail for massacre

A Guate-malan court sentenced a former special forces soldier to 6,060 years in prison on Monday for participating in a 1982 massacre that claimed 201 lives.

Pedro Pimentel, 55, was deported from Los Angeles, California, to Guatemala last year to face charges of murder and crimes against humanity and is the fifth soldier to be sentenced in the Central American nation for his role in the Las Dos Erres massacre at the height of the country’s brutal civil war.

The length of the sentence is largely symbolic because Guatemala’s laws only allow inmates to serve a maximum of 50 years.

A former soldier who took part in the massacre testified that Pimentel was among a group of some 20 soldiers ordered to the village in December 1982 to search for missing weapons. The soldiers then blindfolded, strangled and bludgeoned villagers and a newborn child to death with a sledgehammer before dumping them down a deep well.

Pimentel was given 30 years of prison for each victim killed in the attack and 30 years for crimes against humanity.

Now grey haired, Pimentel denied being present at the massacre, saying he left the area in November 1982 to prepare enrollment papers for the School of the Americas in Panama. The ruling comes as Guatemala seeks to clean up atrocities from the bloody 1960-1996 internal conflict in which nearly a quarter of a million people died or went missing.