Fourteen years ago today, a report titled Guatemala: Nunca más was released, carrying statements from thousands of witnesses and victims of the country’s 36-year internal armed conflict. The report pointed a finger at the Guatemalan government and military, attributing the majority of deaths and human rights violations to them.
Thirteen years and 363 days ago, the man who led the research – Guatemalan Bishop Juan José Gerardi – was beaten to death in his garage in Guatemala City.
Nunca más
The Nunca más – meaning “never again” – report was a work with the Interdiocesan Project Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI). The goal was to gather testimony and other documentation, reporting on widespread massacres in the highlands of Guatemala, and to investigate the perpetrators of those crimes. The report also pointed out that nine out of ten victims was an unarmed civilian.
One of the project’s former directors and Guatemalan politician Edgar Gutiérrez wrote about the project for the World Association for Christian Communication. He said “reconciliation animators” gathered thousands of testimonies from all around the country, “covering huge distances, freely giving their time and effort, dealing with terrible stories, some times putting up with indifference, others putting up with incomprehension and both open and veiled threats.”
He also noted that people often preferred to forget the past rather than bring it up.
“The people, in effect, were ill, they cried, they suffered,” he wrote. “The initial aim of REMHI, led by our inspiring pastoral director, Bishop Juan Gerardi, then responsible for the Human Rights Office of the Archbishopric of Guatemala, was to get on with the work of the [Commission for Historical Clarification], taking into account limitations of time and difficulty of access to communities, especially indigenous ones, still dominated by fear.”
A BBC report published the day after Gerardi’s murder quotes a prominent human rights activist, who declined to give their name. The activist said that the murder was “a clear message” that death squads continued “to operate in the country and do not want the truth to be known.”
UN-Sponsored Truth Commission
The framework for Gerardi’s report was instrumental in the creation of the UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification, which was conducted between 1997 and 1999.
The commission found that more than 200,000 people were killed between 1960 and 1996, and an additional 45,000 were disappeared. The commission found that in the four most violent regions “agents of the state committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people.”
The UN-sponsored commission reported that between 1978 and 1983, the Guatemalan military conducted a “scorched earth” campaign against expanding guerrilla groups. The commission notes that guerrilla integration with Mayan communities was based on racial prejudices and “intentionally exaggerated” by the government.
“The massacres, scorched earth operations, forced disappearances and executions of Mayan authorities, leaders and spiritual guides, were not only an attempt to destroy the social base of the guerrillas, but above all, to destroy the cultural values that ensured cohesion and collective action in Mayan communities,” it states.
The Recent Charges
Over the past few years, there have been several former military officers tried and convicted for their roles in the massacres.
On 12th March, Pedro Pimentel Ríos was the fifth person sentenced to 6,060 years in prison for his role in the Dos Erres massacre, where more than 200 people were tortured and killed. Carlos Antonio Carias López, Reyes Collin Guali, Daniel Martínez Méndez and Manuel Pop Sun were sentenced to the same in August 2011.
On 21st March, former civil patrollers Eusebio Grace, Julián and Mario Acoj and Santos Rosales as well as former military commissioner Lucas Tecú were found guilty for their roles in the Plan de Sánchez massacre, and each was sentenced to 7,710 years in prison. At least 256 indigenous people died in the massacre, which took place on 18th July, 1982.
“Slowly but surely, justice is beginning to prevail for these horrendous crimes that have hung over Guatemalan society for three decades,” said Sebastian Elgueta, Central America researcher at Amnesty International, soon after the verdict.
In January, former president José Efraín Ríos Montt was placed under house arrest, awaiting trial for charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The retired general was de facto ruler of Guatemala between 1982 and 1983, during the height of violence in the country. Half of all the documented human rights violations during Guatemala’s internal armed conflict took place in those years.
That said, exhumations are still in progress in certain regions, like the one taking place at a former military outpost near Cobán.
Also, according to the Guatemalan newspaper La Prensa Libre, about 14 people are still wanted for crimes related to the Dos Erres massacre. Countless others are wanted on other violent crimes related to the internal armed conflict, as well.
Lauren Carasik – clinical professor of law and director of the International Human Rights Clinic and the Legal Services Clinic at Western New England University School of Law – wrote an opinion piece for Al-Jazeera in January.
She said there is evidence demonstrating that current Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina was a military commander in the Ixil Triangle during the period in which the UN found that the army had committed genocide, and 70-90 per cent of the villages in that region were razed.
“Instead of signalling his intention to reconcile with the past, Perez Molina denies that genocide occurred and conveniently ignores the UN Truth Commission’s finding that 93% of the war crimes were committed by the army – and only four per cent were attributable to the insurgents,” she wrote.
And in the 2007 book The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? author Francisco Goldman suggests that Pérez Molina could have been the mastermind of Gerardi’s murder – an accusation denied by the president.
