Jorge Sosa, aka Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes

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Vetting Year
Time from U.S. Entry to Discovery
11 years*
National Security Crime Type
Human Rights violations-related
Nationality of Perpetrator
Guatemalan
Immigration Status Type
Lawful Permanent Residence; Naturalized Citizenship
Agency Responsible for Failure
USCIS for Naturalized Citizenship
Opportunities Missed
1
Nation(s) Vetting Occurred
U.S.
Arresting Agency
Canadian RCMP
ICE-HSI
Criminal Charges
Citizenship application fraud, false statements
Case Outcome
Convicted 10/2014
Case Summary

Guatemalan citizen and military officer Jorge Sosa Orantes eventually became notorious for commanding and personally participating in the 1982 massacre by his commando unit of Dos Erros villagers during his nation’s long civil war.

But SosaOrantes escaped justice for many more years than necessary due to U.S. vetting failures that granted him lawful permanent residence in 1998 and, perhaps worse, eluding ostensibly much-improved, post-9/11 security vetting processes in 2008 to obtain U.S. citizenship, court records and public information show.

Sosa Orantes had his government commando unit surround the village on a mission to arrest guerilla fighters who had earlier ambushed a military convoy, killed soldiers, and seized weapons. He and his soldiers murdered the men, then systematically raped the women and children, then smashed their skulls with sledgehammers and threw 162 of them into the town well, more than 40 percent of them children. Sosa Orantes at one point personally ordered that an infant be thrown into the village well and then dropped a hand grenade down it and fired a gun into the screaming survivors.

This war criminal’s evasion of justice outside of Guatemala began as that nation’s civil war was ending, in about 1985. Sosa Orantes deserted the military, flew to San Francisco, and applied for asylum, claiming he had fought on the other side as a guerilla and was himself persecuted by the Guatemala military, according to media reports. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denied his asylum application for unknown reasons. But no matter. Canada granted him asylum instead and then, in 1998, he married a U.S. citizen. Through the marriage, USCIS granted him a lawful permanent residence green card that year. He moved to Riverside County, Calif., and quietly worked incognito as a karate instructor.

Years into supposed post-9/11 improvements in security vetting, in 2008 he applied for U.S. citizenship – and was approved in 2009. The USCIS citizenship vetting process did not uncover the slaughter, despite the fact that Guatemalan authorities had issued arrest warrants for Sosa Orantes and 16 of his former soldiers.

In 2009, a demand by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to prosecute the perpetrators of the Dos Erros massacre sparked a U.S. investigation that resulted in a 2010 indictment in absentia on immigration fraud charges (the U.S. had no jurisdiction over original crimes in Guatemala). Upon hearing that U.S. authorities were investigating him and had searched his home in 2010, Sosa Orantes fled to Mexico and then to Canada, court records show.

The following year, Canadian authorities arrested him in Alberta, and in 2012 extradited him to the United States to face the 2010 immigration fraud indictment. A jury convicted him at trial. A federal judge sentenced Sosa Orantes to 120 months for each of the two counts.