Federal Agents Arrest a Former Guatemalan Soldier Charged With Massacring Civilians
Advancing an investigation that has spanned two continents and three decades, U.S. federal agents have arrested a Guatemalan immigrant suspected of involvement in the massacre of about 250 villagers in 1982 during Guatemala’s civil war.
Jose Mardoqueo Ortiz Morales, 54, was arrested at his home in Hyattsville, Maryland, last Friday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said Tuesday. Ortiz is a legal permanent resident of the United States who worked in a mail room at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, authorities said. He faces charges in U.S. immigration court and potential deportation to Guatemala to stand trial for one of the worst massacres in Latin American history, the officials said.
Ortiz becomes the fifth suspect arrested in the United States for the slaughter of men, women and children in the hamlet of Dos Erres in northern Guatemala more than three decades ago. Five veterans of an elite Guatemalan commando force known as the “kaibiles” have been convicted by courts in Guatemala on charges arising from massacre. But six others have eluded capture, some of them aided by Guatemalan security forces whose power has impeded the quest for justice, according to Guatemalan and U.S. investigators.
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In 1982, amid Guatemala’s brutal civil war, 20 army commandos invaded the jungle hamlet of Dos Erres disguised as rebels and killed more than 250 people. It took 30 years for Oscar Alfredo Ramírez Castañeda, one of only a handful of survivors, to learn the truth about the massacre. During the Dos Erres massacre in December of 1982, the commandos stormed the remote jungle hamlet and unleashed a two-day rampage of rape, torture and murder. Witnesses identified Ortiz as one of the soldiers who blindfolded the victims, interrogated them, hit them with a sledgehammer and dumped them into a well in the center of the village, according to Guatemalan and U.S. court documents. Ortiz was a corporal in the 20-man unit of battle-hardened instructors in the commando academy, according to the documents.
Because of privacy laws covering U.S. immigration cases, few details were available about the investigation that led to the capture of Ortiz. He is believed to have come to the United States in the late 1990s after the civil war ended and the investigation of the massacre began in Guatemala, according to U.S. officials.
Ortiz has worked at the university for at least a decade, officials said. He has a brother who lives in Maryland and a wife and child in Guatemala, officials said.
Ortiz avoided detection in 2009 when U.S. federal agents and the war-crimes unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, acting on information released by a Latin American human-rights court, identified other fugitives living in Florida, California and Texas, officials said. Ortiz apparently shielded himself by using the first name Jose in the United States rather than Mardoqueo, the more distinctive first name by which he was known to witnesses who had identified him in the Guatemalan investigation years ago, officials said.
The U.S. investigation of Ortiz began in early 2015 as the result of a lead provided by Guatemalan prosecutors to the U.S. Justice Department, officials said. The Guatemalans indicated for the first time that Ortiz also used the name Jose, causing U.S. officials to check their databases with that new information.
Agents then undertook the lengthy process of identifying the man they believe is the Dos Erres fugitive, investigating and monitoring him, and developing a prosecution strategy, according to officials. Ortiz now faces charges in immigration court for his alleged role in extrajudicial killings in Guatemala, a procedure intended to remove his legal immigrant status and enable his deportation to Guatemala, officials said.
“How do these guys who are known war criminals get papers and legalize themselves?” Greathead said. “And the victims don’t. Thousands of Guatemalan and Salvadoran victims of those conflicts, of serious human-rights crimes in which the United States had a role, have trouble getting legal status. It mandates a reevaluation of our immigration policies.”
