RELIGION BULLETIN-GUATEMALA: Bishop’s Murder Deals Peace Process Hard Blow

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Celina Zubieta

GUATEMALA CITY, May 3 1998 (IPS) - The murder of Roman Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi dealt a harsh blow to the peace process and consolidation of democracy in Guatemala, and harked back to past bloodied by political crimes and human rights violations.

Gerardi, axiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, was killed last Sunday, two days after presenting the report “Guatemala: Never Again”, a Catholic Church investigation of the human rights violations committed during this Central American country’s 36-year armed conflict.

The murder, which shook the country and international public opinion, was described by human rights groups as a politically- motivated crime. But the government has preferred to remain mum “until all the evidence is in.”

Edgar Gutierrez, the head of the Recovery of Historic Memory project which gave rise to the Church’s report, and indigenous leader and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Rigoberta Menchu directly accused the Guatemalan army.

“Guatemala: Never Again” blames the army for 80 percent of the massacres and other human rights abuses committed during the 36 years of conflict, which a peace accord ended in 1996. The guerrillas were accused of nine percent of the violations. Those responsible for the remaining 11 percent were not identified.

“We want to contribute to building a different country, and for that reason we are recuperating the people’s memory,” the 75- year-old bishop said at the release of the report. “This route has been and remains full of risks, but the construction of the Kingdom of God is plagued by risks and only those who have the strength to face them are its builders.”

Two days later, Gerardi received 14 blows from a heavy object, which smashed his skull and face, as he returned to his parish residence.

Human rights leaders called the incident the first direct attack on the peace process confirmed by the December 1996 signing of a peace accord by the government and the former guerrilla Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG).

Local lawyer and human rights activist Karen Fischer told IPS that the murder of one of the main protagonists of Guatemala’s peace process had thrown the country back into dark times. “We cannot obtain a response from the justice system, nor are we allowed to find out the truth about the past. It is terrible,” she said.

“The blow dealt by the murderers has shaken the foundations of peace, and if Guatemalans are intimidated and do not manage to get over the blow, as has already been seen in public expressions by people who express defeatism with respect to the future,” the country will be in serious trouble, commented politician and journalist Oscar Marroquin. “This murder could mean the complete loss in the near future of the cofidence generated by the peace process,” he added.

Gerardi was killed just a few days after the international community decided that the conservative government of Alvaro Arzu was in control of the situation and able to protect human rights.

Government and URNG envoys convinced the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva that peace had been consolidated in Guatemala, which was thus left free of international oversight mechanisms. But the government’s top human rights official, Julio Arango, said Gerardi’s assassination demonstrated that “the structures of impunity remain intact and continue to function under the direct or indirect protection of the state intelligence services.”

While strides have been taken towards dismantling Guatemala’s military intelligence structures, “this incident confirms that at the heart of them are important people who use them to defend the few but powerful spaces they have left,” Arango maintained.

The murder has awakened fears of “a selective elimination of leaders of sectors and groups currently linked to the progress of the peace accords,” he said. “The monster (clandestine security apparatuses) is not dead, it was only dozing, and it has just given a sign of that by mortally clawing Monsignor Gerardi.”

The murder has graphically demonstrated that the peace process has not yet begun, because it was “only the result of arrangements between two military factions, the armed forces and the guerrillas,” said Douglas Gonzalez, the brother of the late president of the constitutional court Epaminondas Gonzalez, whose murder has not yet been resolved.

Gonzalez called on human rights, political and other groups to join together and demand that the Arzu administration guarantee “respect for the constitutional right to life.”

Analysts and rights leaders say the murder’s effects on the peace processs are “unpredictable.” The recovery of confidence in the peace process depends “on the speed and clarity with which the government carries out the investigation, and on the punishment of the planners and perpetrators” of the crime, said Fischer.

In her view, it is also indispensable for people and institutions not to be intimidated by the murderers, and to continue to fight steadfastly for full respect for human rights and to find out the truth.