President Trump's directive for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to prioritize the capture of “bad hombres” for deportation led in October to the Silver Lake section of Providence, where ICE apprehended an accused war criminal after decades of freedom in the United States.

Their target was 67-year-old Juan Alecio Samayoa Cabrera, a former paramilitary civil commander from Guatemala.

Commander Samayoa was a well known sombrero-wearing, gun-toting, machete-wielding ladino who commanded 500 paramilitary civilians whose main objective was to get information on guerrillas and pass it along to the national army, no matter the cost. And the cost eventually rose to thousands of lives of innocent men, women and children of Mayan Indian descent, by means of brutal torture, slaughter and rape.

Samayoa's associate in the paramilitary civil patrol, Candido Noriega, was sentenced to more than 200 years in the late 1990s for his participation in the massacres, but Samayoa eluded authorities by illegally entering the United States.

Here in the Providence area and New Bedford, we have an estimated 6,000 Mayan refugees from the Quiche region of Guatemala who have been awaiting justice, and until now justice has been an imaginary word to them.

No Mayan believes Commander Samayoa is worthy of bail. The Gospel of Matthew states, "You shall not murder, and anyone who murders shall face judgment." Commander Juan Samayoa is about to face that judgment.

Gordon Duke

Johnston

The writer is a board member and former director of Organization Maya K'iche USA Inc. in New Bedford.