NOTE: This is *not* a current events item; NEWSWEEK just loaded its
Bishop Gerardi coverage from 1998 now, but the story is obviously old.

Notable quote: "Where they kill bishops, no one is safe."

===

THE DEATH OF A BISHOP: The Brutal Killing Of A Guatemalan Human-
Rights Leader Deals A Blow To The Country's Fragile Peace.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/92392

By Martha Brant and Brook Larmer | NEWSWEEK

May 11, 1998 Issue

IF GUATEMALAN BISHOP JUAN GERARDI Conedera had any premonition of the
tragedy to come, he showed no signs of it on April 24. The silver-
haired prelate was calm, even buoyant that afternoon as he presented
the culmination of his life's work as a human-rights advocate: a
groundbreaking 1,400-page report on the atrocities committed during
Guatemala's 36-year civil war, which formally ended with a 1996 peace
accord. Gerardi, who witnessed some of the war's worst violence as a
priest in the rural highlands nearly 20 years ago, launched the study
to break ""the slavery of silence'' and to accelerate the nation's
process of healing and reconciliation. Its unblinking conclusion: 90
percent of the 150,000 people killed were unarmed civilians, 75
percent were indigenous Mayans, and 80 percent were killed by the
Guatemalan Army or its allies. ""Knowing the truth hurts,'' said
Gerardi, ""but it is, without a doubt, a healthy and liberating
act.'' The report is named, wishfully, ""Guatemala: Nunca Mas.''
Never Again.

Two days later, however, the past returned with a vengeance--and
Monsignor Gerardi himself was its victim. After a Sunday-night dinner
with family, the 75-year-old bishop arrived around 10 at his
apartment next to the San Sebastian Church in downtown Guatemala
City. He never made it inside. A man lurking in the shadows attacked
him as he got out of his car, bludgeoning him to death with more than
a dozen blows with a concrete block. The brutal murder, coming so
soon after the release of ""Nunca Mas,'' bore the hallmarks of a
political assassination. Gerardi's body was discovered two hours
later by a priest who could identify the bishop only by his gold
prelate ring. Gerardi's cranium was crushed, his face disfigured
beyond recognition. It was as if the murderers were trying to blot
out any memory of the past--or at least to show that it's too early
to say ""never again.''

Gerardi's murder has dealt a blow to Guatemala's fragile peace. For
the past 17 months, the traumatized nation of 11 million has been
struggling to move forward, even as the main perpetrators of past
abuses--the military--still enjoy nearly absolute immunity. There has
been some progress: political violence has declined, and the United
Nations announced last month that it was removing Guatemala from its
black list of ""rights violators.'' But Gerardi said such a move was
dangerously premature, and his own death may have proved him right.
Dozens of priests were killed during the war, but never in 36 years
had anyone touched a Roman Catholic church official of such high
rank. Human-rights activists say it is more disturbing and
potentially destabilizing than the infamous killing of Salvadoran
Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was gunned down while saying mass in San
Salvador in 1980. Why? Romero was killed during a war, whereas
Gerardi was murdered in the midst of a peace process that was
supposed to end such nightmares. ""Where they kill bishops,'' says
Frank LaRue, head of the Center for Human Rights Legal Action in
Guatemala, ""no one is safe.''

The specter of a return to fear and silence loomed over Guatemala
City last week, but it didn't stop people from pouring into the
streets to commemorate the life and death of Bishop Gerardi. On
Tuesday night, tens of thousands of students, workers and peasants
marched silently from the Metropolitan Cathedral, where Gerardi's
body lay in state, to San Sebastian Church, the scene of the murder.
A large black banner above the entrance to his simple parish church
read: IF THEY KILL ME, I WILL BE REVIVED BY MY PEOPLE--MONSIGNOR
ROMERO. Indeed, on Wednesday, a drizzly gray day, the plaza outside
the cathedral was filled with people--women in colorful woven skirts,
men in cowboy hats and embroidered pants--who came to pay their last
respects. Paula Gomez, a woman from the rural village of San Juan,
left her home at 3 a.m. so she could make the funeral. When asked who
could have committed such a crime, she put her fingers to her lips
and pointed to the sky. ""Only God knows,'' she said, and started to
cry.

THE TRAGIC IRONY IS THAT, IN death, Gerardi may have finally made
people take human rights more seriously. ""Nobody can minimize the
problem now,'' wrote commentator Carlos del Valle del Rio in the
Guatemalan newsweekly Cronica last week. ""Nobody can say, as
important Guatemalan political sectors did in the days before his
murder, that Gerardi was only chasing phantoms.'' Now the democratic
government of President Alvaro Arzu is tracking all sorts of leads.
Arzu, who called for three days of mourning (but angered many
Guatemalans when he chose not to attend the funeral), exhorted his
security forces to conduct ""an exhaustive investigation.'' By the
weekend, more than 150 agents were working the case, along with
several agents from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The stakes couldn't be much higher for the Guatemalan
government. ""If the system doesn't function, there is going to be a
problem bigger than war: people are going to take the law into their
own hands,'' says Edgar Gutierrez, who worked on the ""Nunca Mas''
report with Gerardi. Nobody is pinning the blame for the bishop's
murder on the state--a positive change in itself. But many human-
rights activists doubt if Arzu is willing to take on entrenched
sectors in the Army and society that want to bury the past. The
government has already made some strides: it has signed landmark
agreements respecting indigenous rights and identity. It has allowed
several investigations into genocide and other human-rights
violations. And it also has allowed 25 soldiers to be put on trial
for a 1995 massacre of 11 rural peasants in Xaman. But solving
Gerardi's murder poses an even bigger test. ""The government has two
choices,'' says Gutierrez. ""Fight the powerful groups that don't
want peace or do damage control and cover-up.'' Last week the police
arrested ""a principal suspect'' based on the testimony of two
homeless men who were in the park across from Gerardi's church. But
most human-rights activists scoffed at the suspect--a drunk with a
criminal record--as nothing more than a red herring.

Not everybody is happy with the church's self-appointed role as
keeper of the nation's conscience. Back in 1996, the armed forces'
spokesman warned the church about the danger of exposing the ghosts
of the past. ""Be careful about the rancor you create within our
hearts and our souls,'' he said, ""because those who died have
fathers, mothers, sons and wives. This will open an enormous wound.''
The country's economic, political and military elite have always had
problems with the church's progressive sectors, arguing that many
followers of liberation theology sympathized with--and aided--the
leftist guerrillas. Cronica magazine even suggested that the church
might use the ""Nunca Mas'' project ""to wash its hands of its
participation in the war.''

Nobody, however, could call Gerardi a fire-breathing radical. His
friends insist he was neither a Marxist sympathizer nor a follower of
liberation theology. (When a reporter asked him in 1981 if
Guatemala's poverty and repression justified a Marxist revolt, he
responded: ""If the Indians didn't own land under capitalism, they
certainly won't under communism.'') But Gerardi saw enough of
Guatemala's killing fields to become the church's most ardent
defender of human rights. He spent 13 years working in the war-
ravaged northern departments of Verapaz and Quiche, where he saw
whole villages destroyed and thousands of unarmed civilians killed in
the Army's campaign to drain the ""sea'' in which the guerrillas
swam. In 1980, after three local priests were killed and he himself
narrowly escaped an ambush, Gerardi shut down the parish in Quiche
and left the country. When he tried to return a few months later, the
government denied him entry, and he was forced to spend four years in
exile in Costa Rica.

Life in exile only made Gerardi more determined to fight for peace
and justice. When he returned in 1984, church officials gave him a
post in Guatemala City, since it was considered safer than the
countryside. The church as a whole had grown more timid in the face
of military power, but in 1989 Gerardi created the archdiocese's
human-rights office; later, he launched the Recuperation of
Historical Memory project (""Nunca Mas'') and played a behind-the-
scenes role in facilitating peace talks between the government and
the guerrillas. All along, his criticism of the military grew
sharper. In a 1996 press conference presenting his annual human-
rights review, Gerardi accused the Army of engaging in everything
from kidnapping to murder to organized crime--at a time when the
military had hired a Washington, D.C., public-relations firm to brush
up its image. The Army ""has created a parallel system of power which
has brought the justice system to its knees,'' he said. ""In the name
of God, I call for an end to this injustice.''

HOW DID HE INTEND TO ACHIEVE that end? By speaking truth to power.
The three-year ""Nunca Mas'' investigation was designed to reveal the
truth about wartime atrocities. (Gerardi never saw it as an
alternative to the U.N.-sponsored ""truth commission''--which is due
to publicize its findings in July--but rather as an earlier draft to
jump-start the process of healing and reconciliation.) The massive,
four-volume report, which shows the roots of the war in the 1954 CIA-
backed overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo
Arbenz, is based on the testimony of 6,500 people gathered over three
years in 15 different Mayan languages. But after promising to ""name
names,'' unlike the official study, the archdiocese mentions only a
few high-ranking officials; Gerardi did not want to inflame the
situation. Still, the numbers are staggering: besides the 50,000
disappeared and 150,000 killed, the war left 40,000 widows, 200,000
orphans and more than 1 million refugees or displaced people.

The words of the victims give the report its power. By deploying 600
bilingual workers trained in interviewing techniques, ""Nunca Mas''
was able to uncover the truth in a country where silence usually
reigns. ""We had to create a space for catharsis,'' says Gutierrez.
About 8 percent of the testimonies came from people who committed
atrocities, often as part of obligatory service in military-formed
civilian patrols. But most are from the victims. There is the
testimony of a wife who finds her husband with his eyes and tongue
torn out. Or the survivors in one village who talk about returning to
find their children hacked to death and the women tied to poles and
crucified. Or there is case 6070 (almost all are anonymous), in which
government soldiers killed all of the men in one village--and then
decided to build a funeral pyre with the women and children. ""The 2-
year-olds were all piled together,'' recalls one survivor, ""and they
burned them all.''

Despite Gerardi's brutal murder, there is little chance that
Guatemala will return to the dark days of the early 1980s--in part
because of his own example. ""He spoke for those who couldn't,'' said
Debbie Barry de Mora, 33, marching last week in a black sweat
shirt. ""It's scary, but not telling the truth would mean returning
to repression.'' Another marcher, Patricia Fonseca, 38, voiced deep
concerns about crime, impunity and the sheer brutality of Gerardi's
killing. But she also sees a newfound courage being born. ""It's a
different Guatemala,'' she said, gesturing at the crowd around
her. ""People have lost their fear.'' Down the road, a banner read:
NUNCA MAS SILENCIO! (NEVER MORE SILENCE!). It almost seems like an
admonition from Gerardi himself, prodding his country down the road
to redemption.

CENTRAL AMERICA'S KILLING FIELDS

Seen as leftist sympathizers, clergy have been targets of some of the
most brutal acts of violence committed during Central America's civil
wars. A chronicle of bloodshed:

1978-1983: The height of Guatemala's civil war; in '81 the government
launches a scorched-earth campaign, destroying villages and forcing
hundreds of clergy to flee.

March 1980: El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero is assassinated
while saying mass; right-wing death squads with military ties are
suspected.

December 1980: Four American missionaries are kidnapped and killed in
El Salvador by military officers who say they took orders from above.

November 1989: In one of the worst atrocities of El Salvador's civil
war, six Jesuit priests are slain; two Army officers believed to have
been following orders are convicted.