ICE Just Arrested a Legal Immigrant Wanted For Mass Infanticide, Rape

Brittany M. Hughes | January 9, 2017
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(Footage shows the 1982 massacre in Las Dos Erres, Guatemala)

A former Guatemalan soldier responsible for the violent massacre of more than 200 men, women and children in the ‘80s was arrested last week by U.S. Immigration and Customs officials after being admitted into the United States and having lived here indefinitely as a legal permanent resident.

Jose Mardoqueo Ortiz Morales, 54, was picked up by officials out of Baltimore’s Homeland Security Investigations office last week after it turned out he’d previously served as a member of the Kaibiles, a Guatemalan army special forces unit linked to gruesome war crimes and other “crimes against humanity,” ICE stated.

ICE officials reported Ortiz Morales was one of about 60 Kaibiles soldiers who in 1982 massacred between 200 and 300 people in the village of Las Dos Erres, including 113 children under the age of 14, according to the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission. The soldiers initially went into the village looking for some rifles that had gone missing during a raid on their convoy. When they didn’t find the weapons they were looking for, they proceeded to slaughter all of the innocent villagers.

“According to witnesses and documents filed in U.S. courts, over the course of two days the Kaibiles massacred men, women and children, raped many women and girls, and forced pregnant women to miscarry before killing them,” officials stated. “Many of the bodies were thrown into the village’s well and others were left in a nearby wooded area. The settlement was then razed to the ground.”

The GHRC described how soldiers threw live infants down the village well and killed the smaller children by bashing their heads against walls and trees or beating them to death with hammers. Adults were either shot, strangled or beaten to death, and unborn children were cut out of their still-living mothers. 

ICE noted that more than a decade after the atrocity, an Argentine forensic team dug up the village’s well and found 162 skeletons, “including many belonging to young children.”


(Bodies dumped during the 1982 Dos Erres massacre, including that of many small children, were exhumed twelve years later by a forensic team.)

Despite the fact that Ortiz Morales is wanted in connection with murder, rape, torture and infanticide in Guatemala, an ICE spokesperson refused to tell MRCTV how long he had been living in the United States prior to his arrest or when he first gained his legal permanent residency, citing “privacy restrictions.”

Ortiz Morales is the fifth Kaibil to be shipped back to Guatemala after enjoying many peaceful years in the United States. Pedro Pimentel Rios, 54, was deported back to Guatemala in 2011 after being linked to the massacre. Another Kaibil, Santos Lopez Alonzo was arrested in 2010 in Houston and charged with reentry after deportation.

Two other Kaibiles, Gilberto Jordan and Jorge Vincio Sosa Orantes, lived here legally and even eventually became naturalized U.S. citizens before being linked to the crimes. Both have since been charged with naturalization fraud for failing to disclose their prior military and criminal history beforehand.

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