The Art of Political Murder Read Online Free

Quiché, which was populated mostly by Maya. In the departmental capital, Santa Cruz, the seat of Bishop Gerardi’s diocese, the mutilated corpses of two Church catechists were discovered hanging outside a small radio station. Convents were strafed with machine-gunfire and attacked with grenades. As the fighting against guerrillas intensified in
el antiplano
, the mountainous central highlands, the Army seized and occupied church buildings, parish houses, and convents, turning them into barracks and interrogation and torture centers. Statues of saints were draped in military camouflage and olive green, as if to remind parishioners to whom they really owed their obedience, at least if it was earthly salvation they sought. The Spanish priest from the village of Chajul, in the Ixil Triangle, was ambushed and murdered. In Joyabaj, Father Faustino Villanueva was assassinated at his desk. Sometimes, after the Army had finally vacated a church parish or convent building, people would leave lighted candles outside for the restless spirits of those who had been murdered inside.
    I N THE ONCE BUSTLING town of Nebaj, the Army placed a machine-gun nest in the belfry of the church, overlooking the plaza. A few years later, in 1984, I rode the bus from Guatemala City to Nebaj with my friend Jean-Marie Simon, a photographer and journalist who was also a courageous investigator for human rights organizations such as Americas Watch and Amnesty International. In Nebaj we visited a tiny community of nuns who were still residing in a rustic little convent house in the middle of a complex of colonial-era church buildings that the Army had occupied. A nun placed a small tape recorder on a table and we listened to the faint sobs and screams from torture sessions the nuns had recorded through their adobe walls at night. At the time, the Army and civilians who had been pressed into service in rural militias—called civil patrols—were bringing captured Indian refugees down from the mountains by the truckload and settling them in bleak camps, rows of pine shacks with zinc roofs. The camps were called “model villages” and given Orwellian names such as New Life. We accompanied the nuns to the town market to buy food staples and multicolored plastic plates and cups for the refugees. The nuns selected plates and cups in everycolor but green—the Army’s color, one explained in a lowered voice. It was a subtle protest, unlikely to be noticed by the refugees or the Army, but who dared risk anything more?
    For years, experts on Guatemala’s internal war have argued over how much blame the guerrillas, in particular the faction called the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, or EGP), deserved for the violence. Did they, by moving among the population and promising protection they were unable to provide, make the Army’s actions inevitable? The guerrillas certainly bear some responsibility. But the Guatemalan Army also had its own agenda, one that, in the early 1980s, foreclosed any chance of a peaceful or negotiated settlement to the war. A national-security-state mentality relegated the entire Mayan
altiplano
into an area in need of the Army’s own extremely thorough brand of transforming authority.
    For as long as possible, Bishop Gerardi sought to maintain a prudent distance from both the guerrillas and the Army. But on one occasion, often recounted since his murder, he confronted the commander of the Quiché military zone. The Army, he told the commander, was killing many more people than the guerrillas were. In its zeal, Gerardi warned, the Army was falling into lawlessness and was driving people into the arms of the guerrillas. The commander responded by asking for Bishop Gerardi’s cooperation—meaning that Gerardi should, for example, identify guerrilla collaborators in his parish. He refused, and the Army began to regard him as its enemy. Demetrio Toj, a lay teacher and