The Art of Political Murder Read Online Free Page A

radio announcer who was abducted by the Army and tortured but somehow managed a spectacular and extremely rare escape, told ODHA that at one point his tormentors had demanded to know “where Gerardi hides the weapons.” Not long after the kidnapping of Toj, Gerardi was warned by villagers in San Antonio Ilotenango that soldiers were preparing an ambush for him. He was guided out of the village by an alternative mountain path at night, under cover of darkness.

    Following the escape from death in San Antonio Ilotenango, Bishop Gerardi perhaps lost his nerve. “When you feel death at your door, it paralyzes you,” he once confided to Edgar Gutiérrez. Gerardi decided to close the El Quiché diocese, a decision that would long haunt him. But it was an act of protest as well as fear, perhaps partly intended to draw the attention of Cardinal Casariego, an old-fashioned, conservative prelate who assiduously cultivated his relationships with the wealthy and powerful and who used to bless Army tanks with Holy Water. Cardinal Casariego kept silent about the repression, even about the murders of his own priests. His emphatic anticommunism appears to have made him an uncritical supporter of the Army.
    The exit of the clergy from El Quiché only deepened the province’s isolation while doing nothing to impede the slaughter, and Bishop Gerardi and Próspero Penados, who was then bishop of San Marcos, soon traveled to the Vatican, where, in a private meeting, they informed Pope John Paul II about the situation. The pope was moved by what they said and wrote a public letter to the Guatemalan Episcopal Conference strongly condemning the violence against the civilian population and the persecution of the Church: “I share your sorrow,” the pope wrote, “over the tragic accumulation of suffering and death that weighs, and shows no sign of abating, over so many families and your ecclesiastical communities, debilitated not only by the murders of more than just a few catechists, but also of priests, in the darkest circumstances, in vile and premeditated ways. I am particularly saddened by the grave situation in the diocese of El Quiché, where, because of multiple criminal acts and death threats against ecclesiastics, the community remains without religious assistance.”
    Cardinal Casariego must have felt that open letter as a stinging rebuke. Guatemala’s conservative rulers and elites were infuriated. Wasn’t Pope John Paul II a symbol of anticommunist resistance all over the world? Why was he siding with the “communists” in El Quiché?

    Although Bishop Gerardi asked for a new assignment and permission not to return to Guatemala, the pope ordered him to reopen the El Quiché diocese. Gerardi obeyed, but at the Guatemala City airport he was met by a military contingent that denied him entrance into the country and put him on a plane to El Salvador. Bishop Quezada Toruño, who had gone to the airport with other Church delegates to meet Gerardi’s flight that day, recalled years later—by then he was Cardinal Quezada—that it had been his impression that only their presence had prevented the soldiers from taking Gerardi away and probably killing him.
    In El Salvador, as soon as he landed, Gerardi was warned by the country’s centrist Christian Democratic president, Napoleon Duarte, that assassins were waiting for him. Gerardi flew on to Costa Rica, where he endured three years of anguished exile. Three months after the El Quiché diocese was reopened without him, a priest there was murdered. Before the war was over, more priests, nuns, and religious workers would be “martyred” by violence in El Quiché than in any other diocese in the Americas.
    In 1982, a military coup ousted General Lucas García as president of Guatemala and replaced him with General Efraín Ríos Montt, an evangelical Protestant who launched an infamous scorched-earth