Guatemala City—Since his brutal murder in April 1998, Guatemalan authorities have insisted that Bishop Juan José Gerardi had been the victim of a common crime or a crime of passion. But in a report made known last week, Acisclo Valladares, a former attorney general of Guatemala who was commissioned by the Guatemalan Catholic Church to examine the government inquiry into the Bishop’s murder, concluded that he was most probably murdered by persons linked to the military and that the priest arrested for his murder has been wrongly accused.
Bishop Gerardi was bludgeoned to death at his home two days after he had presided over the presentation of the Church’s report into the atrocities carried out during more than three decades of Guatemala’s civil conflict. Based on a three-year study of over 55,000 reported human rights violations, the Church’s Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) project concluded that some 79% of abuses had been carried out by the security forces. Bishop Gerardi had been a moving force behind the project.
Authorities announced in July that Bishop Gerardi’s murder was an “inside job” carried out by other residents of the Bishop’s home. They subsequently arrested Father Mario Orantes, a priest living on the premises, a house-keeper, and Father Orantes’ dog, suggesting alternately that the killing had been a crime of passion or that the dog had attacked and killed Gerardi. An initial autopsy reportedly found that the Bishop had died of dog bites, but when his remains were exhumed for re-examination by two independent foreign forensic pathologists, they found otherwise. Father Orantes, however, remains in custody.
The government promised a full inquiry into Gerardi’s murder, but investigator Valladares has concluded, as have other Guatemalan human rights groups, that the official investigation of the killing has been gravely flawed. He pointed out that the authorities have failed to initiate inquiries into what he considers the most logical explanation: that military or former military personnel were involved in the Bishop’s murder in order to prevent the identification and prosecution of those responsible for abuses perpetrated during Guatemala’s dirty war.
In a related case, three former members of the Civilian Self-Defense Patrols (PACs) were sentenced to death in November for their participation two 1982 massacres in the villages of Rio Negro and Agua Fría. This marks the first time in the history of Guatemala that a court of justice has brought a guilty verdict against persons responsible for mass killings. The PACs, groups established by the military during the long civil war, recruited peasant civilians to help control the guerrillas.
The court found three indigenous peasants, Carlos Chen, Pedro González Gómez and Fermín Lajuj Xil, responsible for the deaths of more than 270 men, women and children in these communities of the northern departments of Baja Verapaz and Quiché. The court based its verdict on eyewitness accounts of survivors who identified the three men as participants in these massacres. Witnesses recounted the brutal details of the acts carried out by the PAC members, including the hanging of women and the beating of children against rocks and trees.
But the intellectual authors of these crimes, including high-ranking military officials, remain unpunished. According to Walter Valencia of the Human Rights Legal Action Center (CALDH), the case will remain open in order to bring the masterminds behind both massacres to justice. The 36-year conflict left 145,000 people dead and 40,000 disappeared.
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