Juan Gerardi

Juan Gerardi was beaten to death in his garage two days after presenting the Catholic Church's report on who had killed whom in the Guatemalan civil war. He was a bishop of the Quiche, the highland diocese that suffered the worst of the army's counterinsurgency in the early 1980s, and he closed it in 1980 after his priests began to be murdered; he was refused re-entry to the country and spent two years in exile. He returned as auxiliary bishop of Guatemala City and founded the archdiocese's human rights office. After the peace accords of 1996 established a truth commission that was forbidden to name individuals, Gerardi ran a parallel church inquiry, the Recovery of Historical Memory project, which collected some six thousand testimonies through parish networks in the languages people actually spoke. Its report, Guatemala: Never Again, attributed about ninety per cent of the roughly two hundred thousand deaths and disappearances to the army and its paramilitaries, and it named units and officers. He presented it in the cathedral on 24 April 1998. On the night of 26 April he was attacked in the garage of the parish house and killed with a concrete slab; the body was so damaged that identification took time. The investigation was obstructed for years, and prosecutors and witnesses fled the country. In 2001 three army officers and a priest were convicted, the first time a Guatemalan military court's protection had been broken in a human rights case, though the chain of command above them was never established. He had also served on the truth commission's church counterpart during the war years and knew the risk precisely. His killing was the first case in Guatemala in which serving officers were convicted in a civilian court. The REMHI report remains the fullest account of the war that exists, and copies of it were distributed to parishes before the presentation specifically so that suppressing it would not be possible.

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