Guatemala City
6,060-year sentence: A former member of an elite Guatemalan military force extradited from the U.S. last year was sentenced to 6,060 years in prison for a 1982 massacre during Guatemala’s civil war. Pedro Pimentel Rios, 54, was a member of a unit that stormed the village of Dos Erres and killed 201 people. Soldiers bludgeoned children and infants in the head with sledgehammers, raped women and girls, and left no one alive. At the time, the Guatemalan army was backed by the U.S., and after the massacre Pimentel became an instructor at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Panama. Pimentel later settled in California and worked at a sweater factory until he was arrested and deported.
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Buenos Aires
Abortion legal after rape: The Supreme Court in Argentina has ruled that women who have an abortion after being raped will no longer be prosecuted. The court this week confirmed a lower court’s decision to allow a 15-year-old, who had been repeatedly raped by her stepfather for years, to terminate her pregnancy. Argentine law had previously been unclear on the point. The law read that abortion was legal only “if the pregnancy stems from a rape or an attack on the modesty of a woman of feeble mind.” Some judges interpreted it to mean that abortion was legal only for mentally handicapped women who had been raped. An estimated half a million women have illegal abortions in Argentina each year.