Taking Note
JMB
Impunity & The Murder of Monsignor Gerardi The brutal murder of Guatemalan Bishop Monsignor Juan Gerardi Conedera on April 26 was intended to send a message. Those who have brutalized the...
...The REMHI project was a direct affront to the wardens of impunity, and it was surely this threat that led to Monsignor Gerardi's death...
...If there is a whitewash-if Gerardi is portrayed as a victim of "common crime," as President Arzti has suggested, or the "lone assassin" theory prevails and the intellectual authors are not apprehended-then the reign of impunity will have triumphed...
...Monsignor Gerardi was assassinated outside his home just 48 hours after he led the public presentation of the final report of the Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI)-an historic effort led by the Catholic Church to help reconstruct Guatemala's dark and brutal past...
...The project's challenge lay in its methodology...
...The case must be fully and thoroughly investigated, and the perpetrators and the intellectual authors must be apprehended and brought to justice for the country to move forward...
...He was also the main impetus behind the REMHI project...
...Those projects, in which Gerardi was involved, were also brutally repressed...
...The Peace Accords establish no mechanism for bringing to justice the perpetrators of human rights crimes...
...For Guatemalans, his murder has made it painfully clear that even in the 1990s, similar projects will not be tolerated...
...The murder of Monsignor Gerardi marks a watershed for Guatemala...
...The Church has been a frequent target of army violence-20 priests and thousands of catechists were killed during the 36-year civil war...
...In the late 1970s, he was named bishop of Quich6, one of the areas most devastated by the army's scorched-earth campaigns...
...The Truth Commission established by the Accords is toothless-it cannot name names, and its findings cannot be used in judicial proceedings...
...The news of the murder had immediate repercussions, reviving the intense fear that Guatemalans know all too well...
...In a very real sense, Monsignor Gerardi's death is the fruit of the impunity that has long reigned in Guatemala...
...The testimonies, along with an extensive analysis of the mechanisms of terror used by the Guatemalan state, were published in the 1,500-page report which Gerardi presented at the Metropolitan Cathedral...
...The promoters-500 of whom were Mayan-traveled the Guatemalan countryside collecting testimonies in the native languages of the victims...
...Beginning in 1995, the organizers trained 600 promoters to gather the testimonies of the survivors of the war, the victims' relatives, and even the perpetrators of violence...
...The report recounts 37,000 acts of violence against 55,000 victims-75% of whom were Mayan...
...The REMHI project is an unprecedented grassroots effort to document the atrocities committed during the war...
...While some hold out hope that there may be convictions in some of the most heinous cases of human rights crimes in Guatemala, no significant convictions have occurred to datenor are they likely to occur under present conditions...
...For the underlying message of impunity is clear, both for the victims and the perpetrators: If there is no punishment, then there was, in effect, no crime...
...By doing so, REMHI opened small political spaces at the local level in which those most affected by the violence could speak its name and challenge its perpetrators with the hopes of building a more just society...
...Those who have brutalized the country for decades and have never had to answer for their crimes have made it clear that they will not tolerate any attempts to challenge the impunity that reigns in Guatemala...
...He was briefly forced into exile, and upon his return became a crucial actor in the country's long and arduous peace process...
...As the Guatemala City daily Prensa Libre noted, "Monsignor Gerardi's murder shows that in just fractions of a second, the progress made over the past few years can go up in smoke...
...What better way to ensure impunity than to give the power to convict those guilty of such crimes to an ineffective and corrupt institution...
...Monsignor Gerardi, an ardent champion of indigenous and human rights, was long a thorn in the side of the Guatemalan military...
...The self-censorship that dominated so much of Guatemalan public life, which had eased since the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, immediately resurfaced...
...In this respect, REMHI was a radical project, reminiscent of the literacy campaigns and Christian base communities of the past...
...But this is the first time a bishop has been killed-and Guatemala is supposedly at peace...
...Monsignor Gerardi survived an assassination attempt in 1980, and the army's relentless persecution of the Church prompted him to close the diocese two years later...
...And while the National Reconciliation Law was not a blanket amnestyindividuals must apply for amnesty on a case-by-case basis-the possibility of convicting perpetrators of crimes that are not covered by the amnesty law (genocide, disappearances and torture) in the Guatemalan judicial system is minuscule...
Vol. 31 • May 1998 • No. 6
