By Paul Jeffrey
Special to the National Catholic Reporter

Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala - Guillermo Meza patiently asks Manuela Toj questions about her husband Anastasio. Did he use his right hand or left hand when he picked up a machete? Did he ever break any bones? Did he walk with a limp? Did he sit straight in a chair? Which teeth did he still have? How was Anastasio dressed the day he died?
     Using an interpreter since he doesn't speak Toj's Maya K'iche', Meza then leads the indigenous woman through the events of that day in April 1982 when soldiers arrived in her village of Tabil, an hour north of Santa Cruz del Quiché. Toj describes how the soldiers had a list and came looking for her husband, a Catholic catechist. They shot him and her 19-year old son Juan in a nearby field where they were hoeing knee-high corn. Anastasio and Juan were just two of the 17 people assassinated in Tabil that day. 
     Meza, a forensic anthropologist with Guatemala's Catholic Church, soon has several pages on his clipboard full of data, and he sets off to find the next widow on his list. Toj wanders from her house down through the cornfield to where several of Meza's colleagues are digging up bones. She joins the group of indigenous women clustered at the edge of the pit, looking on as their community's past is exhumed.
     A group of three skeletons slowly emerges from the dirt as the diggers carefully brush away the soil a bit at a time. At the end of the day, there's a quiet discussion in the bottom of the pit between Meza and several widows. Judging by the scraps of rotted clothing and the size of the skeletons, they make a tentative decision that two of the skeletons are of Toj's husband and son. 
     The day ends as it began, with a religious ceremony. Villagers kneel in the bottom of the pit around the skeletons, now covered with flower petals and burning candles. Augustin Laynez, a Maya priest, intones prayers while a young woman swings a rusting tin can, sending off clouds of incense. Toj begins to weep, and Rigoberto Pérez, a Catholic priest from nearby Santa Cruz, places his arm around her shoulders. When Laynez finishes the ceremony, Pérez leads the group in reciting Catholic prayers. He asks Toj to pray, and she prays in K'iche', the only language she understands. Pérez then stands up and bids the group to go in peace.

Unlearning "bad habits"
     It's been more than a year since the government and guerrillas signed a piece of paper that said the war was over in Guatemala, yet in countless villages throughout the war-scarred highlands people have yet to put the violence behind them. After 36 years of civil war, it will take a while.
     The peace accords did achieve some results fairly quickly. Almost 3,000 guerrilla combatants were demobilized last year, yet some 500 still linger in "temporary" refuges with no job nor land awaiting them. The army cut 15,000 soldiers from its ranks in 1997, yet increased crime provided President Alvaro Arzú with a pretext for increasing the military budget and reopening some rural military bases closed just a few months ago. The military's budget for 1998 is up 10 percent over last year, despite a requirement in the peace accords that it be reduced by one-third, as a percentage of GDP, by the year 2000.
     "If we continue to give the army more arms to combat the problem of common crime, and as long as we allow the army to recuperate their power, we won't be able to overcome the past," says Edgar Gutiérrez, director of the Catholic Church's Interdiocesan Project to Recover the Historic Memory (REMHI).
     The new civilian police force created by the accords has begun work, yet human rights activists worry that too many former soldiers and police are simply being recycled into the new force. According to Oscar Recinos, president of Neighborhood Watchers, an anti-crime group, "The Police Academy is like a tortilla factory without quality control" designed to produce 20,000 new agents by 2000. "In three months of training they can't teach honesty nor take away the bad habits from anyone," Recinos warns. 
     Those "bad habits" evidently die hard. Three weeks after Toj's husband and son were dug up in Tabil, four unidentified killers arrived in the village and pumped three rounds into Laynez, the Maya priest. Laynez had argued in the village for the exhumation, and he had also had some disagreements over property boundaries with some powerful landowners in the area. For whatever reason it was carried out, his killing belies any illusion that the peace accords have brought peace. 
     Despite such violence, political killings last year were down from previous years. Yet the German law professor directing the country's United Nations-coordinated truth commission complained in January that Arzú and the military weren't cooperating in figuring out what happened during the war's most brutal years. "An army that doesn't want to talk about its past is cause for fear," declared Christian Tomuschat, president of the Historical Clarification Commission (CEH), complaining on January 5 that the government had refused to turn over documents requested by the CEH.
     Tomuschat's commission didn't get much information from the U.S. government either, despite earlier promises from the Clinton administration that it would cooperate. The CEH's final report, due out in the middle of the year, will be crippled both by the weakness of the commission's mandate--it is not allowed to "individualize responsibility"--and by the fact that the main sponsors of decades of terror have kept their archives unavailable.

Putting a face on those responsible
     After the CEH was defined during peace negotiations in 1994, many church activists and popular leaders began to worry that the official truth commission simply wouldn't have the teeth to do the job they believe is necessary in revealing responsibility for the massacres, torture, and disappearances that came to characterize the war. The country's Catholic bishops believed that a more rigorous look at the past was necessary as a base for reconciliation, and in 1995 created REMHI, what many saw as a sort of alternative truth commission. With funding from European governments and church agencies, REMHI selected some 800 church activists as "reconciliation animators," basing their selection on the trust the individuals could invoke in their communities. Many of those chosen were themselves survivors of the violence. They were trained in scientific interviewing techniques and how to use a tape recorder, then sent off to gather testimonies about three decades of terror.
     In several communities, REMHI was able to build on what the church had already done in collecting testimonies about martyrs. Catechists and religious were often targets of government-sponsored repression, so there was no shortage of testimonies to document. In Cotzal, for example, church leaders had begun celebrating the "feast of the martyrs" in 1992, when they had placed 550 crosses on one wall of the church sanctuary, each bearing the name of someone from the community who'd been assassinated or disappeared. During the visit of Pope John Paul II to Guatemala in 1996, church leaders presented the pontiff with carefully-documented testimonies regarding the political assassination of 77 Catholic leaders.
     REMHI was clearly a pastoral response to the need of the people to talk about what had happened, including the perpetrators. The parish priest in Cotzal, Federico Wübbolt, recalls how one man "told me he had killed 70 people. He claimed it was hard the first time, but got easier after that. He said he'd killed babies, children. He told me with a lot of frankness that neither with liquor, nor alcohol, nor with women could he forget what had happened."
     Most of those who offered their testimonies, however, were victims of the violence, many indigenous women who had watched their husbands or children shot in front of them or taken away, never to be seen again. Their need to tell their stories was so dramatic that in some parishes hundreds of widows lined up on the first day for taking testimonies. Church workers had to assign appointments over the following weeks. For many of those who came to present their testimonies it was the first time they felt safe talking about what had happened to their loved ones.
     The project provoked criticism. According to Marco Antonio Rodríguez, president of the Evangelical Alliance, "REMHI is a bad idea. There needs to be a genuine pardon, and that means forgetting. But they want to write it down and remember it instead of forgetting."
     Juan Gerardi, the auxiliary bishop of Guatemala City who oversees REMHI's work, argues that pardoning "doesn't mean to forget. The person who forgets or who pretends to forget doesn't do away with what happened. You can't get rid of it. To pardon really means to create new attitudes, to provoke change inside people and between people, not just to palliate the violence and the hurt that remains."
     According to Dennis Smith, a Presbyterian Church (USA) mission worker in Guatemala, "The only power that has been left with the violated is the power of choosing whether or not they can forgive. And in order to forgive, they've got to be able to put a name and a face on who's responsible in their community."

The sins of all
     Yet putting a face on those responsible was just what military and guerrilla leaders had tried to avoid when they agreed to a weak official truth commission. Not surprisingly, many of those who supervised the war's fighting discouraged the public from presenting their testimony to REMHI investigators. In Chimaltenango, military officials called together residents in several villages and warned them that talking about the past would only increase the risk that the violence would return. Gutiérrez says local REMHI interviewers argued publicly with the military officials, but to no avail. When church leaders protested to the military high command in the capital, the generals denied it had happened. "Yet we had trained our interviewers well in how to use their tape recorders," says Gutiérrez, "so we turned recordings of some of these talks over to the military officials as proof that we weren't inventing anything." The harassment in Chimaltenango ceased.
     The guerrillas often encouraged "passive resistance," Gutiérrez says. "They told their people not to come talk to us. In one area, their instructions were to go and tell everything bad about the army. Don't go into the details about what's really happened. Talk about the massacres, talk about the early 1980s. And don't say anything more. But one way or another, we learned of their sins as well, the sins of all."
     REMHI collected--and tape recorded--more than 6,000 detailed testimonies, 70 percent of which were in 17 Mayan languages. Each interview includes the description, on average, of five assassinations. That makes for a rough total of 30,000 killings described in REMHI's voluminous archives. Included are the narrative descriptions of more than 600 massacres. Yet the project didn't "use the same definition as international law, where the killing of three or more people constitutes a massacre," says Gutiérrez. "We looked for instances where the clear intention was to annihilate an entire community or family. If we had used the international norm of three or more, we'd be talking about many more massacres."
     These results were gathered in a sophisticated computerized data base and in the middle of last year made available to a team of analysts from church and academic backgrounds who began drafting REMHI's final report. At the same time, REMHI granted investigators from the CEH access to some records in an effort to help the official commission--which after many delays was finally inaugurated on July 31--get a head start on its daunting task. Tomuschat praises REMHI's work as "a starting point" for the official commission.
     Following a review late last year by several bishops, REMHI's final report was being readied for the printer in January. When released in April, the report will provide not just a numerical accounting of what happened, but will focus on about 60 "emblematic cases," particular acts of violence that represent the larger picture of what happened during the war. The report includes more than 700 pages of analysis, examining the roots of the conflict and how the violence affected different social sectors. Unlike the official truth commission report, REMHI's report will indicate who was responsible for what.
     The REMHI report also promises to take a look at the role the church itself played in the violence, including the charge often made by the army that pastoral workers supported the guerrillas in several parts of the country. Gutiérrez says the report wouldn't be fair if it didn't also take a critical look at the church's behavior.
     And it will ask if the war was worth it. Julio Cabrera, the bishop of El Quiché, suggests the report would acknowledge that there were "serious and reasonable motivations for people to rise up in arms. There were completely honest people who--having exhausted other resources, including elections--looked to the revolutionary struggle as the only manner to change the unjust state in which we lived." Yet Cabrera insists that "this searched for solution didn't achieve its objective, neither here nor in other parts . . .and, after so many dead, history will pronounce a severe judgement: violence failed as a political strategy to change society. But the causes that originated the conflict remained pending."

"Dignifying the dead"
     As REMHI completed the gathering of testimonies and the work of analyzing the data, the project began a new stage of working with communities affected by the violence in an effort to reconstruct the social fabric of the communities. REMHI formed its own team of forensic pathologists, the third such group in the country, and began carrying out exhumations of mass graves in rural villages.
     The dig in Tabil was the team's second exhumation. The day after Manuela Toj and her neighbors prayed around the skeletons, the team finished removing the bones and clothing fragments. They were placed in cardboard boxes and stored in Pérez's church sanctuary in Santa Cruz. Once all 17 remains had been removed, the boxes were transported to the team's lab in the capital. As team members sorted through the puzzle of bones, Meza's detailed interviews with survivors came in handy. Memories of missing teeth or broken limbs and the color of faded clothing scraps all proved useful in identifying which bones belonged to whom. In the case of Tabil, the team identified all 17 sets of remains before returning them to Tabil, where they were given proper burial. With her husband reburied, and with the church helping her obtain documents, such as a death certificate, that could never be acquired during the war, Manuela Toj could begin to get on with her life in a country at peace.
     The exhumation, identification, and reburial of the dead provides survivors an opportunity to properly grieve for their loved ones, a process not allowed during the war, as well as a chance to rebury them in a manner consistent with Mayan cosmovision. Such "dignifying of the dead" contributes to emotional, psychological, and spiritual healing. When the body is dug up with respect and reburied with proper religious ritual and symbolism, important emotional processes can be acted out, even if traditional rituals have to be adapted. For example, the Mayan tradition of gathering at the bedside of a gravely ill person in order to ask for forgiveness can be adapted to these circumstances.
     Mayas place great importance on communicating with their dead, which they carry out at the gravesite. That's impossible if their loved one was "disappeared." To overcome this problem, REMHI's staff has worked with communities to create "symbolic graveyards," a special site set aside by the community where the dead are named on crosses and their spirits convoked to the place. Afterward, community members can go there to celebrate the Day of the Dead or when they need counsel from their dead.
     Most of the bodies being dug up today are those of people killed by government troops or paramilitary forces. Yet the team's third dig set a new precedent. During three weeks of digging in August and September in Chacalté, a small village in the north of El Quiché, the team uncovered the remains of at least 75 people, almost all women and children. They were victims of a June 1982 massacre carried out by the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), one of the four guerrilla groups that waged war against the Guatemalan government.
     In over five years of exhumations in Guatemala, it was the first time the victims of a guerrilla massacre had been unearthed, and it caused quite a controversy. EGP leaders denied the massacre, claiming the civilians had been killed in a crossfire between the guerrillas and the army. Yet the bones told a different tale. The common refrain on the forensic examination sheets filed away in the team's lab in Guatemala City belied such rewriting of history. Golpes contundentes en craneo y tórax--"blunt blows to head and chest". Meza and his colleagues interviewed survivors who said the EGP guerrillas came in the night and killed most of the victims without firing a shot.
     "It's still a taboo to claim that the guerrillas did something like this," says Ronalth Ochaeta, director of the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala. "Certainly we can't make a quantitative comparison with the army, because there's no comparison. The army did much more. But it's true that the guerrillas committed similar barbarities as the army. Someone has to say that. The communities are demanding that we say that."
     Of the more than 75 sets of remains from Chacalté--the exact total isn't known since some miscellaneous body parts were uncovered that didn't match--Meza's team identified only 17.  All were returned to the village and buried in a mass grave on November 2.
     According to the forensic team's Federico Reyes, who came to REMHI after helping found the country's first forensic anthropology team in 1992, the gravediggers will remain busy at least into the year 2000. "There's plenty of work for us to do, we have more requests from communities than we can handle," he says.

Unique contribution to reconciliation
     REMHI's exhumations are but one part of a comprehensive pastoral program. After the final peace accords were signed, REMHI began training hundreds of pastoral agents in mental health skills so that they could accompany the survivors in the difficult moments of recovering and reburying their dead, as well as grapple with the everyday tensions of building reconciliation at the village level. In indigenous areas, this training focuses on utilizing Maya cosmovision and practices as tools for reestablishing family and communal relationships. The training also includes the nonviolent resolution of conflicts. As REMHI is phased out, staff members are opening diocesan "Offices of Peace and Reconciliation" that will coordinate this work.
     These offices will also provide legal services to the victims. The counterinsurgency program left a snarl of bureaucratic problems for survivors. Widows often can't remarry until their former husband is declared officially dead, almost an impossible task if there's no cadaver. Nor can they inherit land. Children have problems with their last names. So the church is helping with this, training local paralegal workers and working with the courts to speed up the process. Rather than paying a private attorney the equivalent of $400 to have someone declared dead, villagers can avail themselves of local church activists, trained by REMHI, who help them do it at no cost. Moreover, in 1997 church activists helped draft a law--approved by the Guatemalan Congress in October--that makes it easier for families to have "disappeared" relatives declared dead.
     Some in the military have worried that REMHI would encourage survivors to legally accuse those responsible for the for the death of their loved ones. Yet Gutiérrez says that while church legal workers are willing to help if someone wants to prosecute, they urge serious reflection before beginning a legal process. Given the corrupt nature of Guatemala's legal system and the atmosphere of impunity that still prevails after the end of the war, Gutiérrez warns that "it's a real battle, for which we have to prepare ourselves. That first of all means recovering our dignity, being sure of what we want. If we're not ready inside ourselves and inside our community, then we'll easily get discouraged, frustrated, and we'll end up worse than before."
     REMHI's final report is going to include a section detailing suggestions for government compensation to the victims. While some of this will involve indemnification, Gutiérrez says it will also suggest "measures to insure that the past doesn't repeat itself." Among other things, according to Gutiérrez, this will involve "talking about the paramilitary and clandestine security forces, investigating the intelligence apparatus of the military, and redefining its mission." Gutiérrez, smiling, predicts this will be "an interesting discussion," in which military officials "will say that if they were in the same circumstances, they would do the same thing again. That's where the agenda will have to include a discussion of our concept of security. What kind of state do we have that in order to survive has to kill its own citizens?"
     Few Guatemalans are willing to speak of genuine reconciliation so early in the post-war period. Most believe that repairing the wounds of war will take many years, even generations. It will no doubt be a long and arduous task. Yet by insisting that the past be known before the future can be defined, the REMHI project makes a unique contribution to building peace and reconciliation. It is providing both a reference point for national discussions about political responsibility as well as a local structure for forging new relationships based on honestly confronting the interpersonal violence imposed by the war. REMHI takes seriously the obstacles to peace, and insists that they be confronted and overcome rather than ignored for the sake of an easy but troubled peace.