By Paul Jeffrey
Special to the National Catholic Reporter

Guatemala City - The bishop's broken body lay in the front of the Metropolitan Cathedral as a multicolored river of people flowed by, the tears of many falling on his casket. Most of the mourners were indigenous women--K'iche', Mam, Q'eqchi, Kaqchikel--and as they moved silently past the body of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera their brightly embroidered blouses formed a brilliant rainbow of hope for a land so long plagued by torture and killing.
     "He was a shepherd who gave his life for his people," said Juana Ixcoy, a K'iche' woman who travelled ten hours by crowded bus to line up to say goodbye to Gerardi. "He loved us so much he ended up suffering our fate," Ixcoy said.
     Gerardi, the auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of Guatemala, was a church leader who championed the rights of victims, and he ended up a victim himself. Just two days before he was killed he had stood in the front of the same cathedral and prophetically warned that the church's mission was a dangerous undertaking. "We want to contribute to the construction of a country that's different. That's why we are recovering the memory of the people," Gerardi declared on April 24. "This path has been and continues being full of risks, but the construction of the Reign of God is a risky task."
     Gerardi spoke those words when he presented the final report of a church-sponsored three- year "Project to Recover the Historic Memory." Entitled "Guatemala: Never Again," the report blamed the military for the bulk of the violence that reigned here for 36 years until the December 1996 peace accords put an end to war.
     Late the night of April 26, just 55 hours after presenting "Guatemala: Never Again," at least one unidentified assailant surprised Gerardi as he returned home to his quarters in the Church of San Sebastian, located in a gritty neighborhood in downtown Guatemala City. According to investigators, Gerardi was putting his car in the garage when the killer or killers surprised the 75-year old prelate and struck him 14 times in the head with a chunk of cement. At least one assassin was seen leaving the church and fleeing in one of two waiting cars. A witness who saw one of the alleged killers was taken into protective custody by United Nations officials.
     "The bishop uncovered the truth, and they couldn't stand it, just as they couldn't stand it when Jesus spoke the truth," said Rigoberto Pérez, a priest in Santa Cruz del Quiché who coordinated the historic memory project in the diocese of El Quiché. "Because Monseñor Gerardi presented the truth about Guatemala, he is now a victim among the victims he loved so much."
     Pérez told NCR that Gerardi would be welcomed into heaven by the "thousands of martyred catechists and religious who went before him. They are welcoming him now with love, their martyred bishop of Guatemala."
     Gerardi's killing came as a shock to Guatemalans, many of whom believed--or attempted fervently to believe--that such incidents belonged in the past. After all, the war ended 16 months ago and the peace process has been limping slowly forward. Although common crime has grown rampant, political violence has seemed an anachronism. On April 14 the United Nations Human
Rights Commission removed Guatemala from its list of persistent human rights violators.
     Gerardi's killing graphically belied such illusions of peace.
     The big question was who killed him. Before the bishop's bloodied body had been removed from his garage, the rush to judgement began. Government officials lamely suggested it was common delinquency, and warned it would be hard to catch those responsible. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," quipped President Alvaro Arzú. 
      Most believed the killing was politically motivated, however. Gerardi "was assassinated by the death squads that want to finish off the peace process," declared Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú. "This assassination was designed to intimidate all the victims that spoke of their history for the [church] report."
     Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini of San Marcos called Gerardi's killing a "natural consequence of the evangelical attitude he maintained his whole life."
     The country's largest newspaper, Prensa Libre, called the killing "a stab in the back of the peace process."
     Archbishop Prospero Penados del Barrio, who himself received death threats in the wake of the historic memory report, expressed his doubts that police would solve the case. "When a crime is paid for from on high, they never find out anything," he said. Archdiocesan officials demanded that the government clear up the case within 72 hours. A group of church activists stood vigil outside the cathedral, a giant banner counting down the hours remaining for the government to solve the case. The deadline came and went without any arrests.
     Arzú complained of the church's ultimatum but met briefly with the episcopal conference and declared three days of national mourning.
     Several human rights activists and church leaders, accustomed to years of dirty tricks in the administration of justice, warned the government that they wanted the "intellectual authors" of the crime, not just the person or persons who actually killed the bishop.
     On April 28, frustrated police officials announced they were accepting an offer of assistance from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
     At the same time, the police turned down an offer from Guatemala's military to help in the investigation. That's not surprising, given that many here believe the army is somehow behind the assassination. The generals are reportedly unhappy with constitutional reforms mandated by the peace accords, reforms that would limit their role to national defense and install a civilian as defense minister. And perhaps more importantly for this case, some in the military remain unrepentant about their behavior in years past. They simply won't tolerate any suggestion that they erred in what they believed to be a holy war against communist subversion. Church appeals to confession and repentance fall on ears deafened by years of tuning out the screams of torture victims.
     The generals have had problems with Gerardi for some time. While bishop of El Quiché, after dozens of his pastoral agents were assassinated, Gerardi told army officers: "You are assassins, you are enemies of the people. We have to be on the side of the people, therefore we're on the other side from you. As long as you do not change, there can be no agreement between you and us." 
     The generals didn't like such talk, and Gerardi escaped two attempts on his own life before taking the unprecedented step in 1980 of withdrawing almost all pastoral personnel, literally closing the diocese. Gerardi went to the Vatican to brief the pope, who ordered him back to Guatemala. Yet immigration authorities wouldn't let Gerardi enter the country, probably saving him from an ambush the army had prepared just outside the airport. A group of waiting nuns pooled their money and bought Gerardi a one-way ticket to Costa Rica, where he lived in exile until 1984.
     With movement toward democratization in the mid-80s, Gerardi returned home but remained in the capital. He helped mediate budding peace talks. In 1990 he founded the archdiocesan human rights office, a feisty group of church lawyers and investigators that quickly became a thorn in the side of a military trying hard to project a new image. The human rights office provided legal services to the victims of government repression, and solved cases of kidnappings, car theft, and killings that the police seemed clueless about resolving. Military officials were often behind the crimes that the church investigated.
     Although some critics of the church labeled Gerardi a leftist sympathizer, the bishop's social activism wasn't the product of any ideological option. Instead, Gerardi's progressive posture grew out of an openness to the poor who suffered from decades of repression and racism. Gerardi, like Archbishop Oscar Romero in neighboring El Salvador, was first and foremost a pastor, not a politician.
     In 1995, when the country's Catholic bishops created the historic memory project (known by its Spanish acronym REMHI), Gerardi was a natural to coordinate it. Under his supervision, over the next three years pastoral agents recorded more than 6,500 interviews, almost two-thirds of which were in one of 15 Mayan languages. (See NCR, February 13, 1998.)
     It was REMHI's final report that seems to have been Gerardi's last straw. The 1,400-page, four volume document provides the first detailed analysis of the long bloody struggle between leftist guerrillas and a series of U.S.-backed military governments. It documents 14,291 separate acts of violence which produced 55,021 victims. Church leaders pointed out that the report described only part of the violence. Killings, disappearances, torture, rape, threats, and illegal detention are all documented.
     Government soldiers and paramilitary squads were responsible for 85.43 percent of the violence reported in the study. Guerrilla insurgents got blamed for 9.3 percent of the violence, according to the report. Responsibility for the remaining 5.27 percent of the violence could not be determined.
     The report included the description of 422 massacres, 401 of which were committed by the army or paramilitary death squads. The church said guerrilla forces carried out 16 of the massacres. Church investigators couldn't establish responsibility for five of the massacres contained in the report.
     In addition to presenting cold data on who was responsible for what, the final report included selected portions of transcribed interviews. One survivor of a 1983 army massacre in the north of El Quiché is quoted in the report: "What we witnessed was horrible, the bodies were burned, the women stuck through with poles as if they were animals ready to be cooked as roast meat, everyone bent double, the children chopped up in little pieces with machetes."
     In a section of the report entitled "The road to social reconstruction," church leaders made a series of recommendations on how the Guatemalan government could help rebuild this war-torn country. These included indemnification for victims and a school curriculum that honestly describes what happened during the war.
     The report also called for government and guerrilla leaders to admit their responsibility for the violence. It recommended that those responsible for human rights violations be purged from the military and not be allowed to run for public office. It suggested that streets and parks named after military officials be renamed, and statues of generals taken down. The report called for the closing of the Kaibil counterinsurgency school in the Petén jungle, as well as the elimination of the notorious Presidential Guard.
     Such recommendations may seem a bit tame in a democracy. Here in Guatemala, however, they amounted to a serious provocation. Before REMHI could even get all four volumes back from the printer, Gerardi was dead.
      If his killers wanted to discourage an honest look at the past, they may have misjudged how Guatemalans would respond. "Instead of silencing the church, the killing of Monseñor Gerardi will have the opposite effect," Pérez predicted. "It is going to make people even more curious about what was in the REMHI report."
     Gerardi's killing also increases the expectations of the U.N.-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification--the "truth commission"--which will present its findings in three months. The U.N. commission, established by the two sides of the conflict during final peace negotiations, will not be allowed to state publicly who was responsible for what, however.
     Alfredo Balsells, one of three members of the U.N. group, called Gerardi's slaying "an incentive for the work of the commission." Balsells said the truth commission's final report "will be an homage in memory of Monseñor Gerardi."
     Catholic activists here also suggest Gerardi's martyrdom will breathe new life into a church that's still rebuilding from the persecution of recent decades. "The bishop's assassination was a gift of God to the church in Guatemala," said Pérez. "Just as the blood that Jesus shed created a community of faith that was a problem for the Pilates of the world, so will the blood of Monseñor Gerardi bless us and give us strength in our struggle for life." 
     On April 29, during a funeral mass for Gerardi in the Metropolitan Cathedral, the faithful gathered to mourn but also to take strength from each other and their martyred bishop. In the homily, Bishop Gerardo Flores of La Verapaz declared that Gerardi "struggled for an authentic peace, not based on lies but rather founded on justice and truth. That's why he gave his life and that's why they wanted to quiet his voice. But today his voice sounds louder than ever before."
     As shouts of "Justice! Justice!" echoed through the packed cathedral, Flores recalled the title of REMHI's final report, a title that Gerardi had chosen himself. "Someday soon," Flores said, "We hope that this county's people can sing, can cry out wholeheartedly: Guatemala! Guatemala! Never again!"
     Following the mass, Guatemala's bishops and almost 400 priests led a procession that carried Gerardi around the central plaza. They then returned to the cathedral, where the murdered bishop was buried in the crypt below the altar. Thousands of Guatemalans stood weeping, many throwing red carnations onto Gerardi's casket as church leaders carried it past. Many shouted Nunca Mas!--"Never again!"--as the bishops carried their fallen colleague around the plaza. Before they made it back to the cathedral, the sky turned grey and it began to rain for the first time in weeks.