The Guatemalan Prosecutor’s Office requested a prison sentence of 2,860 years this Thursday for a general for the extermination of Indigenous people during the civil war (1960-1996), marking a second genocide trial following the conviction of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt in 2013.
As the conclusion phase of the trial began, which opened on April 5, prosecutor Mercedes Morales asked the court to sentence retired General Benedicto Lucas García to 30 years in prison for genocide. She also requested 30 years for crimes against humanity and 2,800 years for the forced disappearance of 70 people. Despite the requested sentences, Guatemalan law stipulates that a person can only serve a maximum of 50 years in prison.
“It is established that the accused intended to destroy the Maya Ixil ethnic group, whom [the Armed Forces] considered an internal enemy” during the war, said the prosecutor about the former Chief of the Army General Staff. The 92-year-old military officer is being tried for his role in the massacres of more than 1,200 Indigenous people accused of supporting guerrillas between 1978 and 1982, during the presidency of his brother, Romeo Lucas García, who passed away in Venezuela in 2006.
During the seven-month trial, military documents, forensic reports, and testimonies from survivors, among other evidence, were presented. The court is expected to deliver its sentence next week. The prosecutor added that there was “cruelty” in the military operations against the victims, including “children, elderly people, and pregnant women.” “After executing them, or in some cases while they were still alive, they were burned,” she stated.
Lucas attends the hearings via videoconference from a military hospital in the capital and was seen wearing a cap bearing the surname of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday. He is currently serving a 58-year prison sentence imposed in 2018 for the forced disappearance of a young man and the rape and torture of the man’s sister, whose family was labeled “subversive” in 1981.
On Tuesday, Lucas and seven other military officers were granted a reprieve by an appeals court, which suspended the trial in another case following the discovery of more than 500 skeletons. In 2013, a court sentenced Ríos Montt to 80 years in prison for the genocide of Ixil Indigenous people during his de facto regime between 1982 and 1983, but the sentence was annulled by the constitutional court, and the military leader died in 2018 at the age of 91.
The civil war left around 200,000 people dead or missing, according to a UN-backed commission, with most of the victims killed by the military, who accused Indigenous people of collaborating with the guerrillas.
