Impunity & The Murder of Monsignor Gerardi
The brutal murder of Guate-
malan Bishop Monsignor
Juan Gerardi Conedera on
April 26 was intended to send a
message. Those who have brutal-
ized 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.
Monsignor Gerardi was assassi-
nated 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 recon-
struct Guatemala’s dark and brutal
past. The Church has been a fre-
quent target of army violence-20
priests and thousands of catechists
were killed during the 36-year civil
war. But this is the first time a
bishop has been killed-and
Guatemala is supposedly at peace.
The news of the murder had
immediate repercussions, reviving
the intense fear that Guatemalans
know all too well. The self-censor-
ship that dominated so much of
Guatemalan public life, which had
eased since the signing of the Peace
Accords in 1996, immediately
resurfaced. As the Guatemala City
daily Prensa Libre noted, “Mon-
signor Gerardi’s murder shows that
in just fractions of a second, the
progress made over the past few
years can go up in smoke.”
Monsignor Gerardi, an ardent
champion of indigenous and human
rights, was long a thorn in the side of
the Guatemalan military. In the late
1970s, he was named bishop of
Quich6, one of the areas most devas-
tated by the army’s scorched-earth
campaigns. Monsignor Gerardi sur-
vived an assassination attempt in
1980, and the army’s relentless per-
secution of the Church prompted
him to close the diocese two years
later. He was briefly forced into
exile, and upon his return became a
crucial actor in the country’s long
and arduous peace process. He was
also the main impetus behind the
REMHI project.
The REMHI project is an
unprecedented grassroots
effort to document the atroci-
ties committed during the war. Be-
ginning 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
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 report
recounts 37,000 acts of violence
against 55,000 victims-75% of
whom were Mayan.
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. The
project’s challenge lay in its meth-
odology. The promoters-500 of
whom were Mayan-traveled the
Guatemalan countryside collecting
testimonies in the native languages
of the victims. 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 perpetra-
tors with the hopes of building a
more just society. In this respect,
REMHI was a radical project, remi-
niscent of the literacy campaigns and
Christian base communities of the
past. Those projects, in which
Gerardi was involved, were also bru-
tally repressed. For Guatemalans, his
murder has made it painfully clear
that even in the 1990s, similar pro-
jects will not be tolerated.
In a very real sense, Monsignor
Gerardi’s death is the fruit of the
impunity that has long reigned in
Guatemala. For the underlying mes-
sage of impunity is clear, both for
the victims and the perpetrators: If
there is no punishment, then there
was, in effect, no crime. 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 date-
nor are they likely to occur under
present conditions. The Peace
Accords establish no mechanism
for bringing to justice the perpetra-
tors of human rights crimes. The
Truth Commission established by
the Accords is toothless-it cannot
name names, and its findings cannot
be used in judicial proceedings. And
while the National Reconciliation
Law was not a blanket amnesty-
individuals must apply for amnesty
on a case-by-case basis-the possi-
bility of convicting perpetrators of
crimes that are not covered by the
amnesty law (genocide, disappear-
ances and torture) in the Guate-
malan judicial system is minuscule.
What better way to ensure impunity
than to give the power to convict
those guilty of such crimes to an
ineffective and corrupt institution?
The murder of Monsignor Ger-
ardi marks a watershed for Guate-
mala. 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. If there is a white-
wash-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.
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