Guatemalan official dies in helicopter crash
Guatemala's interior minister, Vinicio Gomez, died in a helicopter crash on June 27. The aircraft went down in a wooded area in the north, killing all four people on board. The cause of the accident is not known, but the area had been blanketed in fog and heavy rain.
Gunmen kill former govt adviser
Gunmen killed a former top government security adviser in April while driving through Guatemala City, a week after he was fired by President Alvaro Colom amid complaints he had become too powerful. A Venezuelan citizen, Victor Rivera was hired by the government in the 1990s to help authorities confront a wave of kidnappings. Human rights officials allege that police under Rivera's direction were killing suspected gang members, although he denied any wrongdoing.
Five sentenced for Río Negro massacre
After three years of bureaucratic suspension and six months of hearings, five ex-civil patrollers were sentenced to 780 years in prison by the Sentencing Tribunal in the highland county of Salamá on May 28. The massacre of Río Negro women and children is one of 626 documented massacres perpetrated during the bloodiest of Latin America's civil wars, in which 250,000 people were killed or disappeared.
