A former soldier convicted of one of the worst atrocities in Guatemala's history has received a jail term of more than five millennia.
Prosecutors said Santos Lopez was part of the country's elite special patrol of Kaibiles that had been sent to the farming village of Dos Erres on the border with Mexico on December 6 1982. They were in search of guerrillas who had ambushed a military convoy, leaving 19 dead.
Unable to fund the guerillas or weapons, they raped many of the village's young girls and killed more than 200 people to cover up their crimes.
The atrocities happened at the height of the Cold War proxy conflict that pitted left-wing, mostly Mayan, insurgents against the state, which was backed by the U.S.
The court in Guatemala City heard that the victims were killed with sledgehammers and thrown down a well, the BBC reported.
A three-year-old boy called Óscar, who survived, was abducted by a commander and raised by the soldier's parents. The search for the boy by a prosecutor was the subject of a 2017 documentary called Finding Oscar.
Lopez, 66, was sentenced to 30 years for crimes against humanity and 30 years for each of the 171 people. He also got an additional 30 years in jail linked to the killing of a surviving child.
The sentence for the 66-year-old is solely symbolic, as the maximum jail term in Guatemala is 50 years.
Former Peruvian general Rodolfo Robles told the court that the Kaibiles had acted in a planned and coordinated manner and that none of its 60 members opposed or tried to stop the killings, Sky News reported.
Lopez was deported from the U.S. in 2016 to face the court, which found him responsible for 171 of the killings. A number of other Kaibiles have been convicted, each receiving a sentence of more than 6,000 years
Military dictator Efrain Rios Montt faced genocide charges for his role in the conflict that stretched from 1960 until 1996, during which around 200,000 people were killed and another 45,000 disappeared.
Montt allegedly ordered the murders of 1,771 indigenous Ixil-Maya people. He died in April before he could face justice.
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