c. 1998 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ A 1996 peace accord ended 36 years of civil war in Guatemala. But the murder Sunday (April 26) of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a leading human rights activist, reminded survivors of a harsh reality: those responsible for torturing and killing tens of thousands during the war have never been punished and can strike again.”The bishop is a martyr to impunity,”said anthropologist Victoria Sanford, a MacArthur Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security.”People who committed gross violations of human rights are still making decisions in the army and government.” The question, she said, “is not who slammed the brick into the bishop’s head, but who gave the order?”
Thousands of Guatemalans mourned at Gerardi’s funeral Wednesday, and Thursday a team of U.S. investigators, including FBI experts, headed for Guatemala to help solve the crime.
The motives for the attack _ repeated blows to the bishop’s head with a concrete block _ remain uncertain as no one hs claimed resposnibility.
But Sanford and numerous human rights officials believe the killing was in retaliation for Gerardi’s release two days earlier of the document, “Never Again in Guatemala.” The 1,400-page report of the Roman Catholic Church’s Historial Memory Recovery Project concludes that the army was responsible for 80 percent of the 150,000 killings during the war, a death toll 50,000 higher than commonly cited.
The report, based on 6,500 interviews, helped mark an end to decades of silence surrounding human rights abuses _ a silence Sanford remembers well.”The first time I went to a village to do interviews in the highlands in 1990, no one would talk,” said Sanford, who is also a consultant to the independent Guatemalan Anthropology Forensic Foundation, which has uncovered evidence of massacres in 37 villages.”They’d witnessed selective assassinations and disappearances. Their villages had been burned. They learned to be silent and not see.”
By the time she returned in 1996, people were tracking her down to tell their stories.”A woman in northern Quiche insisted on coming to my hotel late at night because she wanted to do an interview,” recalled Sanford, who interviewed 350 people in all. “She began to sob, and I told her that she didn’t have to continue. She said, `Please let me go on even if I cry.’
“She had been married when she was 14 and was pregnant at 15 with twins when her husband, a rural teacher, was dragged out of the house by soldiers late one night. She went from military base to military base with a baby on her back and one in her arm and demanded to see the prisoners, but she never found him.
“Later, she took a 12-hour bus trip to my house in Guatemala city,” said Sanford. “For two days I sat and listened while she talked.”
The church’s three-year Historical Memory Recovery Project, which Gerardi directed, took testimony from both victims and perpetrators in an attempt to document violations by both the Army and guerrillas.
“Cathecists who had been involved in literacy and health work went to communities with questionnaires as part of an endeavor for reconciliation,” said Sanford. “It was extremely important because a large number of men were forced to participate in army civil patrols and commit atrocities against their neighbors under army orders, sometimes massacring whole villages. I’ve seen people who committed atrocities come forward and ask their communities for forgiveness.”
In return, people offering testimony were promised preserved memories without retribution in reports like “Never Again.”
But, Sanford said, killing the bishop sends a clear message: “If we can kill the bishop in 1998 with a brick in his home, how safe do you feel in your home?”
Marvyn Perez, a Guatemalan medical doctor who fled his country at age 14 after being tortured, said that indigenous people who gave testimony implicating perpetrators are undoubtedly afraid for their safety, and will be reluctant to talk in the future.
Daniel Rothenberg, who teaches human rights at the University of Chicago, believes, however, that down the road people will testify. “The deep need people have to tell their stories is so powerful that violent intimidation of this type will not silence them in the long run.”
Perez said he and many Guatemalans know people responsible for kidnappings and killings, and he’s most concerned about holding accountable the people who gave the orders. But the military, he said, finds low-ranking scapegoats.
The Guatemalan Archbishop’s Human Rights Office issued a statement on the Gerardi murder warning: “If impunity is allowed to extend to this crime, the cost for Guatemala will be high.”
Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu announced he would form a high-level commission to investigate the crime. And currently, 25 soldiers are on trial for a 1995 massacre at Xaman, the first time members of the army have been tried for a wartime mass murder.
Still, Sanford wants to see human rights groups exert further pressure by bringing cases before international courts. “And a war tribunal should be set up,” she said. “Some people worry this will destabilize the government. But if you don’t try these people they will keep killing.”
DEA END LIEBLICH
