Fugitive in Guatemalan Slaying Is Captured
An ex-member of the Guatemalan army’s presidential guard wanted in the slaying of a social scientist who studied victims of military violence was arrested in Long Beach, immigration officials said this week.
Noel de Jesus Beteta, 26, was arrested Friday and turned over to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, said John Brechtel, an assistant INS Los Angeles district director. Deportation proceedings were pending, he said.
Beteta is wanted in the 1990 murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack Chang in Guatemala City. Her death provoked an international outcry. The case was one of six human rights cases cited by Congress last July when it drafted a bill that links economic aid for Guatemala to respect for human rights.
Beteta entered the country illegally in 1990 and worked at a Long Beach boat rental business, Brechtel said. Human rights organizations say that Mack was killed because of her research on people in the Guatemalan highlands who were displaced by military violence and decades of civil war.
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