The Art of Political Murder Read Online Free Page B

counterinsurgency campaign in the highlands. There were hundreds of massacres. Over 600 villages and hamlets were burned to the ground, an estimated 70,000 people were killed, and perhaps as many as 1 million refugees fled into the mountains and over the borders. For Gerardi, those were years of helpless depression and guilt at being so far from the fray. They were also years, some people have said, of solitary heavy drinking. But Ríos Montt was overthrown in 1983 by General Óscar Mejía Víctores, and when Cardinal Casariego died later that year the pope named Próspero Penados del Barrio the new archbishop of Guatemala. Penados was a unifying figure for a badly divided Church. He discarded his predecessor’s limousine and chauffeur for a Toyota, which he drove himself.

    General Ríos Montt had on many occasions openly antagonized and defied Pope John Paul II. For example, Ríos Montt made it a point, on the eve of the pope’s first visit to Guatemala, in 1983, to ignore papal pleas for clemency and execute several “subversives” who had been sentenced in special military tribunals that didn’t include defense attorneys. In a sorely needed gesture to the Church, General Mejía Victores reluctantly allowed Archbishop Penados to summon his old friend Gerardi back from exile.
    ODHA, WHICH A RCHBISHOP Penados established in 1989, with Bishop Gerardi as its head, was the first grassroots human rights organization in Guatemala capable of operating on a national scale. Many Guatemalans trusted the Church as they did no other institution—although others, of course, despised it. In any case, the Church was the only organization that could overcome the cultural limitations of the United Nations truth commission, which was why Bishop Gerardi conceived the REMHI project. Guatemala’s modern Maya speak twenty-three indigenous languages and dialects, and many do not speak Spanish as a second language. Many of the Maya communities were in military zones where a climate of repression still prevailed long after the fighting had stopped. Tens of thousands of Maya who abandoned their homes during the years of terror, fleeing into remote mountains and forests, had for years been living in semi-clandestine communities—“resistance communities”—inside the country and over the border in Mexico, and also in refugee camps. Bishop Gerardi understood that most Maya villagers wouldn’t feel secure cooperating with UN investigators, many of whom were foreigners, unless the Catholic Church could first help dispel deeply ingrained inhibitions and fears against speaking out.
    The REMHI report—whatever its flaws as strict social science—was by far the most extensive investigation of the war’s toll on the civilian population that had ever been attempted.
Guatemala:
Never Again
identified by name a quarter of the war’s estimated civilian dead (the 50,000-plus names fill the fourth volume) and documented 410 massacres, which are defined as attempts to destroy and murder entire communities. Most of the massacres occurred between 1981 and 1983, but some took place as late as 1995. There were also over 1,500 violent killings of three or more civilians at one time. The report compiled estimates of the numbers of refugees created by the war, of widows and orphans, of victims of rape and torture, and of the disappeared. It drew on the testimony of victims, survivors, and combatants from both sides of the conflict, as well as on declassified U.S. government documents. The report also included an examination of its own methods of collecting information, reflecting on such challenges and pitfalls as the unreliability of memory and the passage of time. It analyzed the war’s historical background, its impact on communities, its strategies and mechanisms. One chapter cast some light on the most feared and mysterious of the state’s entities, Military Intelligence, usually