Guatemala Report

...Bishop Gerardi was no stranger to violence and repression...

...Recent electoral reforms advocated by Mexico's President Ernesto Zedillo have enabled voters to punish the PRI, his own party, for its history of graft, nepotism, and venality...

...This year voters in fourteen of Mexico's 31 states will elect governors and/or mayors...

...The report indicted the Guatemalan army and its paramilitary spin-offs for 85 percent of those killings...

...Last July, for instance, Zedillo-backed innovations allowed the people rather than the chief executive to decide upon Mexico City's mayor...

...Before Monreal knew what hit him, he had mysteriously lost his bid to a so-called "unity candidate" backed by the influential Borrego...

...Artemio Iglesias Miramontes emerged as the candidate of the PRI's old guard...

...Dedazo (naming of candidates by party bigshots), alquimistas (election fixers), carrusel (multiple voting by one person), mordida (bribe)--these words glisten in the lexicon of this nation's cynical citizens...

...Cardenas is now regarded as a serious threat to defeat the PRI nominee and succeed Zedillo as president in the 2000 election...

...To add insult to injury, current PRI president Mariano Palacios AIcocer implied--with no proof at all--that the popular Monreal had ties to narco-traffickers...

...Although the contest doesn't take place until August 2, recent polls show Monreal as the odds-on favorite...

...Encouraged by the remarkable openness of the 1997 contests, Ricardo Monreal Avila--the PRI's number-two man in the Chamber of Deputies, a former senator, and an attractive progressive with broad intra-party backing--began barnstorming the north-central state of Zacatecas with an eye to capturing the statehouse...

...Stephen Privett, S.J., is provost of Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California...

...Nonetheless, the PRI managed to maintain a 76-52 grip on the stodgy upper house because only one-fourth of the Senate stood for election...

...reform of the army to curtail its political and social influence and to restore civilian control...

...This observer had the sense that people shared the martyred bishop's belief, expressed the previous Friday, that the work of REHMI, the promotion of justice and peace, is "a beautiful service of veneration for the martyrs and a dignifying of the victims of destruction and death...

...It took more than half an hour for the whiterobed clergy to make their way through the crowds into the cathedral, down the aisle past the open casket of Bishop Gerardi, and into the sanctuary...

...The nomadic Somalis have forty-five names for the camel because of the dromedary's crucial role in their lives...

...revamping the judicial system...

...Commonweal II 0 May 22, 1998...

...In addition to its historical findings, the report called for major changes to support the peace process...

...If these findings hold up, the PRD will boast its first state executive...

...and appointment of international observers to monitor the peace process...

...The recommendations included: economic and psychological restitution for victims' families...

...Destruction delivered with impunity from abroad awakened a native capacity for suicidal catharsis and renewal, provided by the ideologues of the Khmer Rouge...

...It will be both ironic and appropriate if this murder produces a thorough and impartial investigation that brings perpetrators and plotters to justice and serves as the first step toward a Guatemala where truth and justice prevail over silence and impunity...

...with a procession of hundreds of concelebrants, including twenty-five bishops representing the Episcopal Conferences of Canada, Mexico, the United States, and the countries of Latin and Central America...

...An assailant struck him on the head with a block of concrete and then dragged the bishop inside the garage where he pulverized his skull beyond recognition...

...George W. Grayson REPORT FROM MEXICO Open primaries for the PRI olitical murders, drug trafficking, police corrupp tion, and the ongoing civil strife in Chiapas continue to dominate the headlines about Mexico in United States newspapers...

...Moreover, last July the PRI lost its hammerlock on the 500member Chamber of Deputies as the PRD, PAN, and minor parties collectively amassed 262 seats...

...This time it was accomplished under the impulsion and with the complicity of the Vietnamese people, whom they have always hated and feared, under the influence of the Chinese, their overpowering neighbor, and under punishment from an American government, which as Bundy makes plain, had among its members absolutely no one who knew anything about Cambodia's society or history--or cared...

...What happened in Cambodia between the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975, and the Vietnamese invasion that stopped the Khmer Rouge terror in December 1978, had happened before...

...c) 1998, Los Angeles Times Syndicate Stephen Privett GUATEMALA REPORT A bishop-martyr is buried housands of Guatemalans watched on Wednesday, April 29, as the casket of Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera was carried through the massive front doors of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Guatemala City...

...Thus, Jestis Manuel P6rez Piton, a savvy PRI strategist with electoral experience in a half-dozen states, suggested a revolutionary nominating mechanism: an open consulta or primary in which all Chihuahuans could participate...

...In the late 1980s he worked to establish the Archdiocesan Office of Human Rights before assuming responsibility for REHMI in 1995...

...The previous Friday in the very cathedral where he is now interred, Bishop Gerardi presented the findings of the Recuperacion de la Memoria Historica (REHMI) project which he directed and coordinated...

...They responded by opting for PRI defector Cuauht6moc C~rdenas (47 percent), nominee of the leftist-nationalist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) over the standard-bearers of the PRI (25 percent) and the center-right National Action Party or PAN (15 percent...

...The most moving and inspiring moment of the two-hour liturgy came at the conclusion of the homily when Bishop Flores in a booming bass voice promised Guatemalans "that the day will soon be here when the people will cry and sing, Guatemala, Guatemala: nunca mas ]never again...

...When he publicly presented the report, Bishop Gerardi said that REHMI was "a painful denunciation that challenges each one of us to commit ourselves to action so that those abominable acts never happen again...

...At the same time, the right-leaning PAN, which already claims six governorships, savors the possibility of obtaining several more...

...From the twelfth century forward-after the immense temple complex of Angkor was built--a series of cataclysmic defensive and civil wars occurred in Cambodia that ended in ruined cities and partition of the country between Thais and Vietnamese...

...All this produced a terrifying synthesis of forces...

...Still, Mexico is also undergoing a slow but real political evolution that promises to bring more democratic and responsive government to a country that has known only one-party rule for nearly seven decades...

...Norodom Sihanouk has himself said that "several times in the past, the Khmer people, who built Angkor, have demonstrated a morbid desire for mutual self-destruction...

...he reasoned...

...The funeral liturgy began promptly at 10 A.M...

...The study took three years and involved 600 investigators who used fifteen Mayan languages to speak with more than 6,500 witnesses...

...It described the deaths of 55,000 Guatemalans, 75 percent of whom were Mayan...

...In 1988 his fellow bishops selected him as one of their representatives on the Committee on National Reconciliation...

...REHMI was a church-sponsored effort to recover the historical memory of the victims of the worst repression during the armed conflict in Guatemala...

...acceptance by the army, the government, and other armed units of full responsibility for the atrocities and human-rights violations they committed...

...resolution of long-standing land ownership inequities...

...The investigation focused on the most egregious assassinations and massacres, which accounted for only a fraction of the total number killed during the conflict...

...The bishop had been murdered at approximately 10 o'clock on Sunday evening as he stepped from his car to open the garage door...

...Faced with Monreal's defection and evident popularity, PRI operatives began having second thoughts about the party's top-down nomination process...

...Fearing defeat, the PRI state leadership agreed, and Iglesias--while privately grumbling about such a process-followed suit lest he admit fear over entering a fair fight...

...Amid this soul-searching came the need to select a PRI nominee in Chihuahua, a huge, PANcontrolled state which shares a border with Texas...

...He declared "that the Commonweal 9 May22,1998 search for truth does not end here...

...It would be foolish to minimize the serious nature of these problems...

...But the hard-living, unsavory Iglesias seemed destined for defeat, particularly if nominated by dedazo...

...Archbishop Prospero Penados del Barrio, who was flanked by the papal nuncio and the president of the Guatemalan Bishops Conference as be began the funeral rites, appeared almost numbed by the brutal murder of his auxiliary bishop...

...Outraged, Monreal bolted the PRI to accept the gubernatorial nomination of the left-nationalist PRD...

...It must return from where it was born and it must support the role of memory as an instrument for social reconstruction...

...If those behind the murder of Bishop Gerardi intended thereby to end "the search for truth" and halt "the social reconstruction" undertaken by the peace process, they are sorely disappointed...

...Similarly, Mexicans have a caravan of words to condemn corrupt practices perfected by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) during its sixty-nine-year reign...

...As bishop of E1 Quiche, he had escaped two assassination attempts before being forced to leave the country in 1980 for exile in Costa Rica...

...His ambition raised the hackles of PRI power broker Genaro Borrego, a former party president and ex-governor of Zacatecas, who now runs Mexico's social security system...

...The responsive applause echoed like thunder off the walls of the cathedral for a full ten minutes...

...In a fiery funeral homily, Bishop Gerardo Flores of Verapaz repeated the Guatemalan Episcopal Conference's assertion that the murder was directly related to the role that Bishop Gerardi played in coordinating the REHMI project, publicizing its findings, and endorsing its recommendations: "for this reason they killed him, crushing his skull and destroying his face...

...He returned four years later as auxiliary bishop and vicar general of Guatemala City...

...What was there to lose...