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 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 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 ARCHBISHOP 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 semiclandestine 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