LOS ANGELES, July 13 (UPI) -- A California man has been deported to his native Guatemala to face charges involving a massacre that took place nearly 30 years ago, U.S. officials said.
Pedro Pimentel Rios is accused of being a member of an elite military unit that carried out the killings of dozens of men, women and children during Guatemala's civil war, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.
U.S. immigration officials said an immigration judge ordered Pimentel Rios, 54, to be deported in May.
The Santa Ana maintenance worker arrived in Guatemala Tuesday afternoon on a federal immigration flight.
He faces charges of being among 20 members of an elite army unit known as the Kaibiles that killed at least 160 residents, including 70 children, in the village of Dos Erres in December 1982.
The massacre was largely ignored until the mid-1990s when governmental and non-governmental agencies began looking into the killings, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said.
A list of several individuals charged in the massacre was released in 2008.
At that time, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials began looking through their records to see whether any of those charged had immigrated to the United States.
Their investigation turned up Pimentel Rios.
