Guatemalans have long been known for their reserve and secretiveness, even gloominess. “Men remoter than mountains” was how Wallace Stevens put it in a poem, “alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.” Two separate, gravely ceremonious, phantasmagoria-prone cultures, Spanish Catholic and Mayan pagan, shaped the country’s national character, along with centuries of cruelty and isolation. (At the height of the Spanish empire, ships rarely called at Guatemala’s coasts, for the land offered little in the way of spoils, especially compared with the gold and silver available in Mexico and South America.) In 1885, a Nicaraguan political exile and writer, Enrique Guzmán, described the country as a vicious, corrupt police state, filled with so many government informers that “even the drunks are discreet”—an observation that has never ceased to be quoted because it has never, from one ruler or government to the next, stopped seeming true.
Bishop Gerardi was a big man, and still robust, though he was seventy-five years old. He was over six feet tall and weighed about 235 pounds. He had a broad chest and back; a prominent, ruddy nose; and thick, curly gray hair. After the murder, his friends recalled not only his sense of humor and affection for alcohol but also his voracious reading, his down-to-earth intelligence, and a nearly clairvoyant understanding of Guatemala’s notoriously tangled, corrupt, and lethal politics, which made him by far the most trusted adviser on such matters to his superior, Archbishop Próspero Penados del Barrio, a less worldly figure. Soon after Penados was named archbishop, in 1983, he had recalled Gerardi from political exile in Costa Rica. As the founding director of the Guatemalan Archdiocese’s Office of Human Rights (Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala), which was usually referred to by its acronym, ODHA—pronounced OH-dah—Gerardi became one of the Catholic Church’s most important and visible spokesmen and leaders.
The gathering in the garden on that last afternoon of Bishop Gerardi’s life was a celebration of the completion of Guatemala: Never Again, a four-volume, 1,400-page report on an unprecedented investigation into the “disappearances,” massacres, murders, torture, and systematic violence that had been inflicted on the population of Guatemala since the beginning of the 1960s, decades during which right-wing military dictators and then military-dominated civilian governments waged war against leftist guerrilla groups. An estimated 200,000 civilians were killed during the war, which formally ended in December 1996 with the signing of a peace agreement monitored by the United Nations. The Guatemalan Army had easily won the war on the battlefield, but making peace with the guerrillas had become a political and economic necessity. Still, the Army was able to dictate many of the terms of the agreement and engineered for itself and for the acquiescent guerrilla organizations a sweeping amnesty from prosecution for war-related crimes. This “piñata of self-forgiveness” was an ominous beginning for an era supposedly based on such democratic values as the rule of law and access to justice, as well as demilitarization.
The peace agreement endorsed a truth commission sponsored by the UN—the Historical Clarification Commission—which was intended to establish the history of the crimes of the previous years. But many human rights activists, including Bishop Gerardi, who had participated in the peace negotiations, doubted that the UN commission would be able to provide a thorough accounting of events. The commission was not permitted to identify human rights violators by name or assign responsibility for killings. Testimony given to the commission could not be used for future prosecutions. As a counterweight, under Gerardi’s guidance, ODHA had initiated a parallel and supportive investigation, the Recovery of Historical Memory Project (Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica), known as REMHI (REM-hee), which in April 1998 produced Guatemala: Never Again. Bishop Gerardi wrote an introduction to the report.
On Wednesday, April 22, Bishop Gerardi, along with Ronalth Ochaeta, a thirty-three-year-old lawyer who was the executive director of ODHA, and Edgar Gutiérrez, the thirty-six-year-old coordinator of REMHI, held a press conference to brief reporters on the general content of Guatemala: Never Again. When a reporter asked if they were taking extra security precautions, Gerardi ceded the microphone to Gutiérrez, and turned to whisper in Ochaeta’s ear, “Qué vaina,” which is not exactly translatable, but in this context meant something like, “Damn.” Shortly after the murder, Ochaeta saw a newspaper photograph that captured the instant after that whispered exclamation. The bishop had just settled back in his chair, a look of grim preoccupation on his face.
The next evening, Thursday, April 23, Bishop Gerardi and his associates invited journalists and influential personages to a dinner in the Archbishop’s Palace in the sprawling Metropolitan Cathedral complex, near the church of San Sebastián. That night, copies of the first two volumes of Guatemala: Never Again—“The Impact of the Violence” and “The Mechanisms of Horror”—were handed out. While the guests dined, Bishop Gerardi explained REMHI’s methodology, and afterward he took questions. Over a two-year period, he said, some 800 people had undergone intensive training for interviewing and collecting testimony for the investigation. Operating from thirteen regional centers, the “reconciliation facilitators” had spanned out across the country. Guatemala’s population is at least 60 percent Mayan Indian, and the Maya, the rural peasantry especially, had borne the brunt of the war’s carnage. Well over half of the interviews for Guatemala: Never Again had been conducted in fifteen Mayan languages and the rest in Spanish.
On Friday, April 24, Guatemala: Never Again was formally presented in the cathedral. The cavernous house of worship—an austerely sturdy, earthquake-scarred, 150-year-old neoclassical edifice —was packed with diplomats, politicians, members of nongovernmental organizations, former guerrillas, journalists, human rights activists, and others. The only body not represented that it would seem should have been was the government of the president of Guatemala, Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen.
Television screens were installed in the two aisles off the nave of the cathedral so that the people sitting and standing there could watch the ceremony at the altar. Despite the gravity of the report, the mood was quietly jubilant. To many it seemed as if Guatemala really was on the verge of a new era. Only twelve days earlier President Arzú had announced on national television that the country had been removed from the UN Human Rights Commission’s list of the world’s worst human rights violators, a status it had held for nineteen years and which had led to UN sanctions, intrusive observer missions, and periodic suspensions by the U.S. Congress of military aid (although covert and other forms of military assistance, through the CIA and surrogate nations such as Taiwan and Israel—which, for example, built the Guatemalan Army an ammunitions factory—had continued).
Along with the peace accords, the end of Guatemala’s position as a pariah state cleared the way for renewed foreign aid and assistance. And now the Church, through REMHI, was initiating a truthful accounting of the past—an accounting that, Bishop Gerardi had stressed on many occasions, was crucial for repairing the country’s shredded social fabric and for ensuring that human rights abuses would no longer be protected by an official culture of silence and lies or by a legal system that effectively gave certain institutions and sectors of society carte blanche to commit crimes.
In the cathedral that evening, bishops from every diocese that had been involved in REMHI were assembled at the altar. (Only one of twelve dioceses had declined to participate.) A Lutheran pastor was also invited to speak. “When we began this task, we were interested in learning, in order to share, the truth,” Bishop Gerardi said in his speech, “to reconstruct the history of suffering and death, discover the motives, understand the how and why. Portray the human drama, share the pain, the anguish of thousands of dead, disappeared, and tortured…. The REMHI project has been a door thrown open so that people can breathe and speak in liberty, and for the creation of communities of hope. Peace is possible, a peace that arises from the truth for each and every one of us.”
After the ceremony, there was a reception in the Archbishop’s Palace. The crowd, including some 600 of the people who had worked on REMHI in the field, pressed into