LITMIR.BIZ

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1,500 violent killings of three or more civilians at one time. The report compiled estimates of the numbers of refugees created by the war, of widows and orphans, of victims of rape and torture, and of the disappeared. It drew on the testimony of victims, survivors, and combatants from both sides of the conflict, as well as on declassified U.S. government documents. The report also included an examination of its own methods of collecting information, reflecting on such challenges and pitfalls as the unreliability of memory and the passage of time. It analyzed the war’s historical background, its impact on communities, its strategies and mechanisms. One chapter cast some light on the most feared and mysterious of the state’s entities, Military Intelligence, usually referred to as G-2. (The terminology was adopted from the U.S. Army’s classification system: G-1, Personnel; G-2, Intelligence; G-3, Logistics; etc.) The report described the structure and functions of its various units, one of which was devoted to sexual spying (gathering information on cheating husbands or employing prostitute-spies to compromise opponents). Where it had the evidence to do so, Guatemala: Never Again identified military units responsible for crimes, and in numerous cases named individuals. The report concluded that the Guatemalan Army and associated paramilitary units, such as the rural civil patrols, were responsible for 80 percent of the killings of civilians, and that the guerrillas had committed a little less than 5 percent of those crimes.

      The authors of the REMHI report attempted to describe and illustrate the logic behind what they called “the inexplicable.” But numbing numerical estimates, analysis of tactics and causes, and even journalistic reconstructions of specific massacres could “explain” only so much. Bishop Gerardi, as he’d once told Edgar Gutiérrez, had wanted a report that would “enter readers through their pores” and move them. Thus there were hundreds and hundreds of pages of direct testimony distributed throughout the text:

      The señora was pregnant. With a knife they cut open her belly to pull out her little baby boy. And they killed them both. And the muchachitas [little girls] playing in the trees near the house, they cut off their little heads with machetes. Case 0976, Santa María Tzejá, Quiché, 1980.

      They killed them with machetes, they killed them by strangling and with bullets. They picked up the children by their legs and smashed them against a tree, and the tree they smashed the children against, that tree died, because of so many children smashed against that tree so many times, well the tree died. Case 3336 Río Negro, Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, 1982.

      On the 19th of March 1981 the Army came to the village of Chel, and took from the church the 95 people praying there, and they took them down to the river at the edge of the village, and there they massacred them with knives and bullets. The rest of the people were frightened and they fled into the mountains where they were pursued by helicopters. The responsible ones were the Army and the civil patrols. Case 4761, Chel, Chajul, Quiché.

      When I looked, they were calling the people to come together and they were ordering them into a church that is there and I stayed hidden where I was, watching everything that was happening, until I saw that no one was left outside, men, women, old people, children, they put them in the church. When I looked, they were closing the doors and then they poured gasoline around and then they set it on fire. That’s the testimony I’ve come to give. Case 977, Santa María Tzejá, Quiché. 1982.

       I don’t know if it was a captain or a lieutenant who arrived with the soldiers and said, “We’re going to finish off this village because this village is with the guerrillas.” By one in the afternoon they’d finished killing everyone and only the women and children were left. And then the lieutenant said, “We better kill the women and children so that no one will be left.”

      They killed the women and children with bombs [grenades], because there were so many children; and as they had pretty young women in that town, well then the soldiers separated out those women. They formed into three groups, and got to work killing those poor people, but the soldiers had their way with the young ones, it was the lieutenant who started fucking around with the poor muchachas [young women]. The two-year-olds were all pressed together into a tight ball, and they were set on fire all pressed together, into a ball, all the children were burned. Case 6070 Petanac, Huehuetenango, 1982.

      Josefa [Acabal] was talking with Eulalia [Hernández] when the soldiers came and surrounded the house. They cut up the señoras with knives, they killed them, five people in all. When the corpses were on the ground they started burning the house, they threw the corpses on the fire. Case 4912, Xix Hamlet, Chajul, Quiché, 1983.

      The burning fat runs outside, look, how the fat of the poor women runs. It looks like when it rains and the water runs in the gutters. The fat runs like that, pure water. And what’s that? I thought as I went in, and pure fat was coming out of those poor women, pure water comes out. Case 6070, Petanac, Huehuetenango, 1982.

      A reader might emerge from those pages ready to believe the Guatemalan Army guilty of any crime it might ever be accused of. That would later pose a problem for those who had to investigate and prosecute the case of Bishop Gerardi’s murder. They would have to resist drawing prejudicial conclusions emotionally rooted in the savagery of the recent past.

      In 1998, when the REMHI report appeared, no Guatemalan military officer had ever been convicted or imprisoned for a crime related to human rights, although a few cases had resulted in convictions against low-level soldiers and members of militias. Some major cases had been stalled in the courts for years, and the amnesty decreed by the peace accords was meant to prevent any more such cases from going forward. But under international law there were conditions in which the amnesty might one day be breached or partially overturned, and Guatemala: Never Again, it would later seem obvious, helped to make those conditions seem within reach. Bishop Gerardi had let it be known that evidence collected by REMHI would be made available to people who might later seek justice against either the military or the guerrillas, should circumstances permit.

      So the REMHI report introduced unpredictable and unforeseen dynamics into Guatemala’s postwar climate. It loudly initiated a public conversation—responsible for 80 percent of the war’s crimes!—that the Guatemalan Army and its allies had not expected to have to tolerate, certainly not within the country. By anticipating the looming, more authoritative report sponsored by the UN, and by breaking taboos against speaking out and assigning blame, REMHI posed a direct challenge to the amnesty and to the Army’s uncontested position at the center of Guatemalan society. There was much at stake in preserving that position. Initially empowered as protectors of the country’s oligarchy and of the United States’ cold war goals, the Army had became a power unto itself, its officer corps constituting an elite social class that looked after its own interests.

      But how could murdering Bishop Gerardi in retaliation for the REMHI report—two days after its publication—have served those interests?

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      SOON AFTER ARRIVING at the parish house on that final Sunday evening of his life—after Ronalth Ochaeta dropped him off—Bishop Gerardi, without even changing his clothes, went out again. Father Mario later recounted that when he left his bedroom for the six o’clock Mass, on the short walk down the corridor to the sacristy and the church, he passed the garage and saw that both of the bishop’s vehicles—a beige Toyota Corolla and a white VW Golf—were parked there. When he headed back to his room about forty-five minutes later, the VW Golf was gone. But there was nothing unusual about that. As he did every Sunday night, Bishop Gerardi had picked up his sister Carmen at her home—the same house where they’d spent their childhood, in Candelaria, one of the city’s oldest and most venerable barrios. The Gerardis had grown up across the street from the home of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, whom they had known as children. There was a statue of Asturias in a traffic island in front of the two houses.

      Bishop Gerardi and Carmen went to the home of their nephew Javier, where they watched television and had a simple dinner of plátanos, beans, and cheese. Then the bishop drove his sister back to Candelaria, arriving there—as she was able to recall later, because she’d asked him the time—at twenty minutes before ten. They lingered in the car awhile, talking, before saying good-bye. Carmen watched her brother drive off

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