Guatemalan Court Sentences Ex-Police Chief for Murdering 37
teleSUR | January 19, 2015
A Guatemalan court found Pedro Garcia Arredondo guilty of murder, attempted murder, and crimes against humanity Monday for the massacre of 37 people at the Spanish embassy in Guatemala 35 years ago, EFE reports.
Garcia Arredondo, 69, is responsible for burning the victims of the massacre to death on Jan. 31, 1980, found the court after four months of hearings.
The tribunal outcome confirmed the long-held suspicions in the country that the fire was the result of a “clandestine police operation” and that the participants “prevented the Red Cross, emergency services, and journalists from entering” the building.
The former police chief was still trying to declare his innocence, but Judge Sara Yoc Yoc ruled that he gave the orders to burn down the embassy. According to her ruling, Garcia Arredondo “used the media to confirm the deaths of those inside the embassy.”
The security forces of Guatemala’s military regime at the time attacked the Spanish embassy after rural workers and students occupied it in protest to the dictatorship.
Among the 37 burned to death was Spanish Consul Jaime Ruiz del Arbol Soler and Vicente Menchu and Francisco Tum, the father and cousin, respectively, of 1992 Nobel Prize Winner Rigoberta Menchu. Menchu gave the first testimony against Garcia Arredondo in the case.
Just two people survived the fire, including the Spanish ambassador. The other, Guatemalan farmer Gregorio Yuja, subsequently disappeared and his body was found with evidence of torture three days after the fire in the rectory of the State University of San Carlos of Guatemala. Yuja has since become a symbol of the left-wing student movement.
Garcia Arredondo was first arrested in 2011 over the forced disappearance of a university student, also in 1980. He is three years into a 70 year sentence for that crime.
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Although this was a just legal decision, the length of time – 35 years – between the committing of war crimes and delivery of justice is far too long. Perhaps only God knows what crimes Arredondo committed or abetted in those 35 years, so war criminals must be punished immediately to produce the adequate deterrent to war criminals everywhere.
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