Guatemala report: a bishop-martyr is buried.

Thousands of Guatemalans watched on Wednesday, April 29, as the casket of Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera was carried through the massive front doors of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Guatemala City. The bishop had been murdered at approximately 10 o'clock on Sunday evening as he stepped from his car to open the garage door. An assailant struck him on the head with a block of concrete and then dragged the bishop inside the garage where he pulverized his skull beyond recognition.

The funeral liturgy began promptly at 10 A.M. with a procession of hundreds of concelebrants, including twenty-five bishops representing the Episcopal Conferences of Canada, Mexico, the United States, and the countries of Latin and Central America. It took more than half an hour for the white-robed clergy to make their way through the crowds into the cathedral, down the aisle past the open casket of Bishop Gerardi, and into the sanctuary. Archbishop Prospero Penados del Barrio, who was flanked by the papal nuncio and the president of the Guatemalan Bishops Conference as be began the funeral rites, appeared almost numbed by the brutal murder of his auxiliary bishop.

The previous Friday in the very cathedral where he is now interred, Bishop Gerardi presented the findings of the Recuperacion de la Memoria Historica (REHMI) project which he directed and coordinated.

REHMI was a church-sponsored effort to recover the historical memory of the victims of the worst repression during the armed conflict in Guatemala. The investigation focused on the most egregious assassinations and massacres, which accounted for only a fraction of the total number killed during the conflict. The study took three years and involved 600 investigators who used fifteen Mayan languages to speak with more than 6,500 witnesses. It described the deaths of 55,000 Guatemalans, 75 percent of whom were Mayan. The report indicted the Guatemalan army and its paramilitary spin-offs for 85 percent of those killings.

In addition to its historical findings, the report called for major changes to support the peace process. The recommendations included: economic and psychological restitution for victims' families; acceptance by the army, the government, and other armed units of full responsibility for the atrocities and human-rights violations they committed; revamping the judicial system; reform of the army to curtail its political and social influence and to restore civilian control; resolution of long-standing land ownership inequities; and appointment of international observers to monitor the peace process.

Bishop Gerardi was no stranger to violence and repression. As bishop of El Quiche, he had escaped two assassination attempts before being forced to leave the country in 1980 for exile in Costa Rica. He returned four years later as auxiliary bishop and vicar general of Guatemala City. In 1988 his fellow bishops selected him as one of their representatives on the Committee on National Reconciliation. In the late 1980s he worked to establish the Archdiocesan Office of Human Rights before assuming responsibility for REHMI in 1995.

When he publicly presented the report, Bishop Gerardi said that REHMI was "a painful denunciation that challenges each one of us to commit ourselves to action so that those abominable acts never happen again." He declared "that the search for truth does not end here. It must return from where it was born and it must support the role of memory as an instrument for social reconstruction...." If those behind the murder of Bishop Gerardi intended thereby to end "the search for truth" and halt "the social reconstruction" undertaken by the peace process, they are sorely disappointed. In a fiery funeral homily, Bishop Gerardo Flores of Verapaz repeated the Guatemalan Episcopal Conference's assertion that the murder was directly related to the role that Bishop Gerardi played in coordinating the REHMI project, publicizing its findings, and endorsing its recommendations: "for this reason they killed him, crushing his skull and destroying his face." It will be both ironic and appropriate if this murder produces a thorough and impartial investigation that brings perpetrators and plotters to justice and serves as the first step toward a Guatemala where truth and justice prevail over silence and impunity.

The most moving and inspiring moment of the two-hour liturgy came at the conclusion of the homily when Bishop Flores in a booming bass voice promised Guatemalans "that the day will soon be here when the people will cry and sing, Guatemala, Guatemala: nunca mas [never again]." The responsive applause echoed like thunder off the walls of the cathedral for a full ten minutes. This observer had the sense that people shared the martyred bishop's belief, expressed the previous Friday, that the work of REHMI, the promotion of justice and peace, is "a beautiful service of veneration for the martyrs and a dignifying of the victims of destruction and death."

Stephen Privett, S.J., is provost of Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California.