Guatemala Indicts Top Ex-Military Men for War Crimes and Rape
A family member holds an image of Marco Antonio Molina Theissen, kidnapped and disappeared in 1981 when he was 14 years old. | Photo: EFE
teleSUR | October 25, 2016
Marco Antonio Molina Theissen was kidnapped by the military in 1981 when he was 14 years old. His family never saw him again.
Guatemala made a new breakthrough Tuesday in the decades-old struggle for justice for historical crimes against humanity, including systematic rape, as a court indicted former military chief of staff Manuel Benedicto Lucas Garcia and four other high-ranking officials on a number of crimes linked to the 1981 kidnapping and disappearance of 14-year-old boy Marco Antonio Molina Theissen, including the torture and rape of his sister Emma Guadeloupe.
In the presence of Marco Antonio and Emma Guadeloupe’s mother, Emma Theissen de Molina, in the criminal court, Judge Victor Herrera Rios announced that all five former top military men were involved in crimes against humanity, forced disappearance, and aggravated rape.
Lucas Garcia, the brother of former dictator Romero Lucas Garcia and the four others accused — former commanders Francisco Luis Gordillo and Edilberto Letona and former military intelligence agents Hugo Ramiro Zaldaña and Manuel Antonio Callejas — have been in pre-trial detention since being arrested in January.
Initially, only four were linked to the case. Lucas Garcia — currently facing prosecution along with several other former military officers for the disappearance of at least 558 civilians between 1981 and 1988 — was added when additional charges were announced in August for charges related to his role overseeing counterinsurgency strategy at the time that Emma Guadeloupe was detained and Marco Antonio was disappeared.
In Tuesday’s hearing, the judge established that Lucas Garcia’s role as military chief of staff from 1978 to 1982 held him responsible for the actions of the military brigade under his command in Quetzaltenango, where Molina Theissen was kidnapped in 1981. In that year, Gordilla and Letona were first and second in command, respectively, of the Quetzaltenango army unit, while Zaldaña was the intelligence official to the chief of staff and Callejas was in charge of intelligence at the Quetzaltenango base.
The indictments in the Molina Theissen case are a step toward clarifying the historical truth in brutal crimes carried out at the hands of the military during Guatemala’s bloody 36-year civil war.
In 1981, Emma Guadeloupe, a young activist at the time with the Patriotic Worker Youth, was detained at a military checkpoint for being in possession of items deemed political propaganda. She had previously been detained, tortured and raped by the military officials five years earlier in an incident that saw her boyfriend and two other students killed at the hands of the army.
Intelligence agent Zaldaña, one of the five indicted, was in charge of the checkpoint where Emma Guadeloupe was arrested in 1981. The young leftist — following in the footsteps of other dissidents in her family targeted for speaking out against the military regime — was locked up at the military base in Quetzaltenango.
She managed to run away from the military base nine days later, but the army swiftly retaliated. Just days after her escape, suspected military intelligence agents dressed in plain clothes stormed the Thiessen Molina home, beating the mother and kidnapping 14-year-old Marco Antonio. The family never saw him again.
According to the Washington Office on Latin America, the Molina Theissen family’s attorney has warned that the high-ranking positions of the accused — along with the fact that some of them have been implicated in organized crime operations — raises a risk of witness intimidation and other forms of obstruction of justice in the case, leading him to urge authorities to deny the accused alternative measures.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Guatemalan state guilty in the Molina Theissen disappearance in 2004, opening the door to a decade-long investigation in hopes of prosecuting the masterminds behind the heinous crimes.
Earlier this year, a landmark sexual slavery trial in Guatemala sentenced two former soldiers to 120 and 240 years in jail and established that rape was systematically used by the military as a weapon of war under the dictatorships. It was the first case of wartime sexual abuse prosecuted in the Central American country, raising hopes among human rights defenders that it could set a precedent for other cases of systematic rape.
The five accused will continue to be held in preventative detention.
No comments yet.
Featured Video
China’s “eyes” and Iran’s “fist”: Iran dumped GPS for Beidou, and won the war
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
The Manual Behind the Mandates
An Essay on Paul Offit’s Bad Faith
Lies are Unbekoming | July 14, 2026
In June and October 1998, Paul Offit sat on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and voted twice in favor of Wyeth-Lederle’s RotaShield rotavirus vaccine: on June 25 to recommend it for routine childhood use, and on October 22 to add it to the federal Vaccines for Children Program.¹ Offit’s own rotavirus vaccine, developed at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in partnership with Merck, was under development at the time. On October 22, 1999, exactly a year after his second vote, ACIP rescinded the RotaShield recommendation after CDC identified an elevated rate of intussusception in vaccinated infants. Intussusception is a bowel condition in which one segment of intestine telescopes into another and cuts off its own blood supply; without emergency intervention, it kills. The surveillance data at the point of withdrawal included hospitalizations and infant deaths. Offit abstained from the withdrawal vote.² Seven years later, Merck’s RotaTeq, which Offit co-invented, received ACIP recommendation for the same schedule slot. The patent sale netted him at least six million dollars by his own account, with other public estimates running higher.³
In June 2000, the United States House Committee on Government Reform published Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Policy Making. The report named Offit specifically. It concluded that “conflict of interest rules employed by the FDA and the CDC have been weak, enforcement has been lax, and committee members with substantial ties to pharmaceutical companies have been given waivers to participate in committee proceedings.”⁴
In March 2015, Basic Books published Offit’s Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine. The book accuses religious parents of moral failure. It calls for the elimination of religious exemption from vaccination law. It endorses criminal prosecution of parents who withhold pharmaceutical products from their children on religious grounds, including, under the Oregon sentencing guidelines Offit presents as a model, terms of up to twenty-five years in prison.⁵ … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Yemen to confront Saudi blockade militarily, official to Al Mayadeen
- Preparing for Regional Escalation: Iran Appears to Be Pre-Empting the US’ Attack Strategy
- Sitting ducks: Why the US security umbrella no longer protects the Gulf?
- Iran’s World Cup ordeal was a dress rehearsal for renewed war
- Iran calls on UN rights chief to condemn US attacks on civilian infrastructure
- Intl shipping firms shun US-controlled Hormuz corridor over failure to protect vessels
- Iran warned Vance that Kushner, Witkoff used peace talks as cover for insider trading: Report
- The Saudis Back Down
- Rahm & Bibi: Opposing Pillars of Jewish Thought
- China to ‘firmly defend’ its companies against US tariffs on Russian energy buyers
- If Americans Knew
- Iran Sent Message to JD Vance Warning that Kushner and Witkoff Were “Abusing” Their Inside Access to Negotiations
- Inside the Pentagon Plan to Stitch Israel Into American Defense
- Rep. Ro Khanna: ‘Israel Has Lost Americans Under 50. Bibi Netanyahu Has Antagonized an Entire Generation’
- ‘They want to break our will’: Gaza flotilla activist tells of rape in Israeli detention
- The not-so-secret Israeli strategy: This is the real Gaza plan
- Israel’s methodology in Gaza: “calculated chaos” – Daily Update
- Senators Block $1.15 Trillion Pentagon Bill Over Trump’s Illegal Iran War, Israel Integration
- Tucker Carlson’s left-right, third party dream
- Family Wiped Out, Police Targeted: Israel’s Genocide Claims 16 More Lives
- Dead or Detained? Families in Gaza Search for Their Loved Ones
- No Tricks Zone
- Munich’s First-Ever Green Party Mayor Declares First Ever City Water Use Restrictions… Fines Up to 50,000 €!
- Experimental Lab Research: The Climate Sensitivity To A 400-Fold Increase In CO2 Is 0.1°C
- Fatal Snobbery: In France, It’s Better To Die From A Heatwave Than To Do As Americans
- New Study: NASA’s Models Wildly Underestimate The Capacity Of Clouds To Alter Solar Radiation
- Polar Freezeover: Western Arctic Early July Sea Ice Exceeds 1980s Average
- Doing The Opposite: Studies Show Gigantic Wind Farms Significantly Warm The Night
- 120 Years Of Shortwave And Longwave Flux Analysis Show Ocean Heat Changes Are Unrelated To CO2
- +25°C …It’s The Exploding Global Urbanisation, Stupid! Why Heat Waves Are Setting Records
- Heat And Drought In Germany Are Nothing New, Archive Media Show
- Lousy Station Siting: Swirling Controversy Surrorunds Germany’s Latest “New Alltime Record High” Temperature
Aletho News 
Leave a comment