RIVERSIDE, Calif. — A federal jury convicted a former Guatemalan
army lieutenant Tuesday of immigration fraud, finding that he obtained U.S.
citizenship in 2008 by concealing his role in the massacre of 250 men, women
and children during Guatemala’s civil war three decades ago.

Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes,
who for a time had operated three karate schools in Southern California, became
the highest-ranking former soldier convicted on charges related to the
slaughter that wiped out the jungle hamlet of Dos Erres in 1982. Investigations
in the United States and Guatemala have achieved unusual progress in the case,
the only mass killing among hundreds in the 30-year Guatemalan civil war for
which soldiers have been held accountable.

Sosa, 55, will be sentenced Dec. 9. He faces a prison term of at least 10
years, loss of U.S. citizenship and then deportation to Guatemala, where he is
charged with murder. U.S. authorities also have jailed two other former members
of Sosa’s commando squad on immigration charges, while Guatemalan courts have
convicted five Army veterans for the Dos Erres massacre itself.

Seven
suspects, including two commanders, remain at large in a nation where war
criminals are often protected by the security forces and criminal mafias.

Sosa,
a second lieutenant during the war, was the junior officer among four
lieutenants in the 20-man elite unit of commandos known as “Kaibiles.”  Jurors heard grim testimony from two
participants and a survivor during the five-day trial. Sosa played a key role as
a leader of the squad’s “assault team” specialized in interrogations and
hands-on killing, according
to testimony of two former soldiers.

The compactly-built
martial arts expert oversaw the systematic extermination of villagers in the
center of the hamlet, ordering his men to throw victims — including
babies — into a well. Sosa fired his gun and threw a grenade into the
pile of living and dead bodies in the well, according to testimony.

The
spectators in the courtroom for the verdict included a survivor of the
massacre: Oscar RamírezCastañeda,
a 34-year-old restaurant worker and father of four who came from Boston to this
city on the inland edge of Southern California’s urban sprawl.

It was another
remarkable moment in a
unique odyssey. Ramírez was 3 years old in 1982
and has no memory of the massacre. The commandos killed his mother and eight
siblings, but a lieutenant — Oscar Ramírez
Ramos — spared the boy and brought him home to his family. The lieutenant
died months later in an accident; his family raised Oscar as one of their own.

Ramírez immigrated to the United States as a young man and
did not find out his true identity until 2011, when Guatemalan prosecutors
tracked him down. A DNA test proved that Ramírez came
from Dos Erres and reunited
him with his father, who survived because he was in another village on the
day of the military attack. The U.S. government gave Ramírez
political asylum last year.

“Justice is being done for all the victims,” Ramírez
said after the verdict. Although he said he condemns Sosa and the other
commandos for their savagery, he walks an emotional tightrope because he feels
gratitude for being spared. Seeing Sosa a few feet away stirred a mix of
feelings, he said.

“I
felt a little bit of everything,” Ramírez said.
“Bitterness, hate, sympathy, because all of us are human beings.”

Ramírez had been prepared to testify for the prosecution,
but the judge upheld a defense motion excluding him as a witness because he
lacked memory of the events. Nonetheless, his attorney, R. Scott Greathead, said it is likely that Ramírez,
as a victim of the massacre, could testify at Sosa’s sentencing.

Greathead called the verdict “an important validation” of efforts
by human rights advocates and Guatemalan prosecutors who have long pursued
cases against former Kaibiles. “What we have to look for now and press for now
is for investigations and prosecutions of those who were in higher command, who
were responsible for Dos Erres and other massacres,” he said.

Earlier this year, a Guatemalan court found the country’s former
dictator Efraín Ríos Montt guilty of genocide for
masterminding a military campaign that resulted in hundreds of similar mass
killings in rural areas. His conviction was thrown out on procedural grounds,
however, and a retrial is uncertain.

Because
Sosa could not be tried for war crimes in U.S. courts, federal prosecutors
pursued a strategy that has been effective in cases involving human rights
abusers from around the world.

Prosecutors
charged Sosa with unlawful procurement of naturalization and making false statements
on U.S. immigration forms for omitting his membership in the Guatemalan military
and lying when he indicated he had never committed a crime for which he had not
been arrested.

Sosa’s lawyer asserted that his client did not think he committed a
crime because he was an obedient soldier who followed orders. The lawyer also
argued that the questions on the forms were vague.

Sosa’s ability to elude prosecution for
three decades revealed
lapses in both the U.S. and Canadian immigration systems. Three years after
the 1982 massacre, Sosa deserted the Guatemalan army and fled to San Francisco
for reasons that remain murky. He claimed that guerrillas were gunning for him,
but his brother told ProPublica in an interview last year that Sosa also feared
government intelligence agents because of an internecine military feud.

Sosa sought political asylum in the United States in an application that
detailed his combat exploits. When U.S. authorities ruled that he did not have
a well-founded fear of prosecution, Sosa went to Canada and gained political
asylum and citizenship there. That decision showed a startling lack of scrutiny
by Canadian officials, according to U.S. and Canadian human rights experts.

In 1998, Sosa divorced his wife and came to New York, where he married a
U.S. citizen and obtained permanent residency, this time concealing his
military service. During that process and his naturalization 10 years later in
California, U.S. immigration officers failed to notice in his file that his
1985 asylum application had made clear that he was a veteran of the Guatemalan
Army.

Although Sosa was convicted of a relatively minor crime, the role of the
U.S. government in prosecuting the Dos Erres case reinforces the quest for
justice in Guatemala, according to Fredy Peccerelli,
a Guatemalan human rights activist and forensic anthropologist who investigates
the crimes of the civil war. Peccerelli’s lab conducted the DNA tests that
identified Oscar and another survivor as victims of Dos Erres.

“This
strengthens the case in Guatemala because, although it’s for immigration, you
have a U.S. jury that has heard the evidence and ruled that there was a
massacre,” said Peccerelli, who attended the announcement of the verdict along
with Ramírez and Greathead.

“This adds to an
accumulation of evidence in both countries,” Peccerelli said.

The judicial and
media attention in the United States is also important because powerful sectors
in the economic and political elite of Guatemala are resisting efforts to
pursue the atrocities of the past, Peccerelli said.