On October 7, a Guatemalan court sentenced Carlos Chen,...

On October 7, a Guatemalan court sentenced Carlos Chen, Pedro Gonzalez and Fermin Lajuj, 3 former right-wing paramilitaries, to death for the killing of 2 women in the Rio Negro village massacre, some 40 miles north of the capital, in which 70 women and 107 children were tortured and killed on March 13, 1982. The court said it could not be proved that the men had killed the rest of the villagers in Rio Negro. The men were also acquitted of the killing of 92 people, including 35 children, on September 14, 1982, in the nearby village of Agua Fria. The 3 men had been sentenced to death by a Guatemalan court in 1998 for their roles in the two massacres, but an appellate court annulled the trial in February 1999 on a technicality. "We are satisfied with the verdict but we don't support the death penalty,' said Paul Seils, legal director for Legal Action in Human Rights (CALDH), a rights activist group that advised victims in the case. The men were members of the military-controlled Civilian Self-Defense Patrols (PAC), created by the military in the 1980s as counterinsurgency units formed by peasants who were forcefully recruited to patrol and combat rebels in rural Guatemala, where guerrilla support was wider. According to human rights groups, the PACs had over one million members including some as young as 15 in its heyday. The PACs were officially disbanded in 1987 under the civilian government of Vinicio Cerezo.