54 year old ex-Guatemalan soldier, Pimentel Rios has been sentenced to 6,060 years behind bars for his role in the in the massacre of 200 people in Dos Erres village at the peak of the country’s brutal civil wars in 1982.  He was an instructor at a Guatemalan training school for the kaibiles. This is by far one of the longest life sentences in justice history.

Pimentel Rios was all the while living as a fugative in America, California and working in a factory when he got arrested and later extradited to Guatemala to face justice.  He is said to have clobbered 200 people to death in a single day with  hammers and all sorts of murder weapons. They blamed the villagers for some missing weapons that got stolen before going on a killing rampage when they could not recover the weapons. Women and young girls were gang raped before being thrown down a well. Even children were killed by these Guatemalan kaibiles.

The long sentence was inevitable for this murderous commander because for each of the Dos Erres villager killed, he paid the price of 30 years in jail and another 30 years for crimes against humanity.The Guatemala’s civil war which started way back in the 1960s raged on until 1996 and more than 200,000 lives were lost at the end of it all.

We hope this long jail sentence will appease the relatives of those who perished. and give the solace even if belatedly.