GUATEMALA CITY AP Human rights activists applauded the death sentences handed down to a Guatemalan civil patrol that carried out a 1982 massacre but said Tuesday that the military commanders who they said oversaw it must be punished as well. A court in the central province of Baja Verapaz on Monday sentenced to death three former members of an army-trained civilian patrol for their role in the massacre of 130 civilians on March 13 1982 in what has come to be known as the Massacre of Rio Negro. Their convictions were the first for crimes committed in Guatemala's 36-year civil war which ended in 1996. ``The investigation must remain open so that the masterminds of the massacre including high-ranking military officers can be brought to justice'' said Walter Valencia of the Human Rights Legal Action Center. The men were convicted based on testimony from the survivors many of whom had campaigned for years to bring the killers to justice. The Rio Negro massacre was part of Guatemala's so-called scorched earth campaign to root out civilian support for the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity supporters. Hundreds of Maya Indian villages were razed during the early 1980s. An estimated 150000 people died in Guatemala's civil war and thousands more were tortured or kidnapped. A report released earlier this year by a Roman Catholic Church human rights office blamed the army for nearly 80 percent of the killings. Herlindo Hichos a member of the Missing Persons' Relatives Association said legal proceedings ``must be brought against those who ordered these criminal acts.'' Judge Otto Mayan Morales who handed the sentences said authorities were searching for another nine patrol members who participated in the massacre. But he said no soldiers were with the patrol during the massacre. The sentences in the city of Salama 25 miles 40 kilometers north of Guatemala City came as another war-crimes case against soldiers reopened after a seven-month delay because the public prosecutor received death threats and resigned. The trial of 27 Guatemalan soldiers accused in the 1995 Xaman massacre reopened Nov. 25 with a new prosecutor Alejandro Nunez Pivarel. Nunez said he would call 25 witnesses including survivors of the attack in the village of Xaman. Eleven people among them an 8-year-old boy died when a military patrol opened fire on resettled refugees; 27 others were wounded. The Xaman trial is the first in Guatemala to take members of the armed forces to court for any of the 424 massacres attributed to them during the civil war. APW19981201.1038.txt.body.html APW19981201.0802.txt.body.html