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03-06-2025
GUATEMALA CITY: A top Guatemalan court has sentenced three former paramilitaries to 40 years each in prison after they were found guilty of raping six Indigenous women between 1981 and 1983, one of the bloodiest periods of the Central American nation’s civil war.
The conviction and sentencing on Friday mark another significant step towards attaining justice for the Maya Achi Indigenous women, who were sexually abused by pro-government armed groups, during a period of extreme bloodshed between the military and left-wing rebels that left as many as 200,000 dead or missing.
Former Civil Self-Defence Patrol members Pedro Sanchez, Simeon Enriquez and Felix Tum were found guilty of crimes against humanity for sexually assaulting six members of the Maya Achi group, Judge Maria Eugenia Castellanos said.
“The women recognized the perpetrators, they recognized the places where the events took place. They were victims of crimes against humanity,” she said, praising the women’s bravery in coming to court to testify on repeated occasions.
“They are crimes of solitude that stigmatize the woman. It is not easy to speak of them,” the judge said.
Indigenous lawyer Haydee Valey, who represented the women, said the sentence was “historic” because it finally recognized the struggle of civil war survivors who had demanded justice for decades.
Several Maya Achi women in the courtroom applauded at the end of the trial, where some dressed in traditional attire and others listened to the verdict through an interpreter.
One of the victims, a 62-year-old woman, told media she was “very happy” with the verdict. Pedro Sanchez, one of the three men convicted, told the court before the sentencing, “I am innocent of what they are accusing me of” but Judge Marling Mayela Gonzalez Arrivillaga, another member of the all-women, three-panel court, said there was no doubt about the women’s testimony against the suspects.
The convictions were second in the Maya Achi women’s case against former military personnel and paramilitaries. The first trial, which took place in January 2022, saw five former paramilitaries sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Advocacy group Impunity Watch said the case “highlights how the Guatemalan army used sexual violence as a weapon of war against Indigenous women” during the civil conflict.
In 2016, a Guatemalan court sentenced two former military officers for holding 15 women from the Q’eqchi community, who are also of Maya origin, as sex slaves. Both officers were sentenced to a combined 360 years in prison.
In March last year, Jesus Tecu remembers wrapping his little brother in his arms in an attempt to protect the two-year-old from the horrors unfolding around them.
It was March 13, 1982, and their village of Rio Negro, a Maya Achi community situated along a river in central Guatemala was under attack. Guatemala was in the midst of a grisly civil war, and army and paramilitary forces had been stalking the countryside, razing Indigenous villages to the ground.
Already, Tecu’s parents had been among the dozens of Rio Negro residents slaughtered just one month prior in another village but now soldiers and paramilitary patrolmen were in the town, and 10-year-old Tecu hoped to shield his brother from the killings and rapes they were witnessing.
A patrolman decided to take Tecu to be his household servant, but he did not want to bring home a toddler too. Ignoring Tecu’s desperate pleas, the patrolman grabbed the two-year-old from his arms, smashed him against rocks and threw his body into a ravine. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
