BISHOP GERARDI REALLY was contemplating retirement—he occasionally mentioned the possibility, although most people seem to think that he was too energetic and involved in his work, and too important a figure to Archbishop Penados and the Church, to go through with it—the completion of Guatemala: Never Again would have represented a logical and triumphant capstone to more than five decades in the priesthood. The son of Italian immigrant merchants, Gerardi had spent most of his first twenty years as a priest serving poor, mostly Indian, rural parishes until being called to Guatemala City, where he worked for two extremely conservative and politically powerful prelates in succession—Archbishop Mariano Rossell and Cardinal Mario Casariego—and served a stint as Chancellor of the Curia. His appointment as bishop of the northern diocese of Verapaz in 1967 coincided with the years of the Second Vatican Council (1965) and the Latin American Episcopate’s Medellín Conference (1968), seminal gatherings that committed the Church to a greater openness and its clergy, at the latter conference especially, to a worldlier role, responsive to the needs of the poor.
What to some seemed like aspects of a radical new theology—reforming the liturgy to make it more accessible, for example—must have seemed like practical good sense to the young Bishop Gerardi. The Verapaz diocese ranged over rugged cloud-covered mountains, subtropical rain forests, and rich coffee-growing slopes. It had long served the spiritual needs of a small oligarchy made up of the owners of coffee plantations, many of whom were descended from nineteenth-century German immigrants, at the expense of a rural population of mostly Q’eqchi Maya Indians. For centuries, on the rare occasions when Catholic Masses were given in their isolated communities, the Q’eqchi, many of whom didn’t even speak Spanish, heard them in Latin. Bishop Gerardi pioneered the implementation of Mayan-language Masses. He encouraged his priests to learn Q’eqchi and trained and sponsored Q’eqchi-speaking catechists and other lay teachers. “Our Church feels deeply challenged by the reality and situation lived by our indigenous peoples,” Gerardi wrote in 1973. “Effectively we find ourselves faced with a situation of exploitation, marginalization, illiteracy, endemic illnesses, poverty, and even misery; all of which amount to a state of injustice, and reveal a state of sin. This situation, seen by the light of our faith, invites us to return to the nucleus of the Christian message, and to create in ourselves the intimate consciousness of its true meaning and exigencies.”
Reading over some of the pastoral letters and other writings produced by Gerardi in those and later years, I was struck by how he balanced a traditional sense of pastoral mission—seeking and preaching the mystery of salvation in the example of Christ—with a commitment to the poor. “The suffering of Christ in his mystical body is something that should cause us to reflect. That is to say, if the poor are out of our lives, then, maybe, Christ is out of our lives.” The inclusion of that “maybe” was characteristic. Nobody ever described Bishop Gerardi as dogmatic.
In 1980, Gerardi, who had become bishop of the Quiché diocese, in the country’s most populous Indian province, escaped an assassination attempt. He nearly became the second bishop to be murdered in Central America within a year. (During the preceding five centuries only one other bishop, in the seventeenth century, had been slain.) Another outspoken and influential prelate associated with liberation theology, El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero, had recently been assassinated by gunmen linked to El Salvador’s ruling, far-right ARENA party.
Bishop Gerardi in Quiché, circa 1975
Guatemala’s internal war had by then been going on, with various degrees of heated and bloody intensity, for eighteen years. The war was a consequence of a coup engineered by the CIA in 1954 against Jacobo Arbenz, only the second democratically elected president in Guatemala’s history. Arbenz had passed an agrarian reform law to alleviate the inequities of a system that he called, in his inaugural address, “feudal.” Privately owned uncultivated land—far from all of it—was expropriated and redistributed to landless peasants. Some of the land was expropriated from the country’s largest single landowner, the United Fruit Company. The Arbenz government reimbursed United Fruit, though at the deflated prices the company had declared the land to be worth for tax purposes.
United Fruit wielded considerable influence inside the Eisenhower administration through some important personal connections, particularly the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen. As Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer explained in Bitter Fruit, an account of the 1954 coup and its aftermath, John Foster Dulles, the U.S. secretary of state, had negotiated a favorable railroad transportation deal for United Fruit in Guatemala when he was a senior partner in the New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. Allen Dulles, who had also done legal work for United Fruit, was director of the CIA. But the most important motive behind the coup was U.S. government fears of communism. Arbenz had legalized the Party in 1952. (It was quite small, with only a few hundred active members, almost none of whom had much influence.) First the Truman and then the Eisenhower administrations misconstrued the politics behind the Guatemalan government’s actions, refusing to acknowledge that Arbenz was essentially a nationalist, with no proven ties to Moscow. And so, on the heels of a similar operation in Iran, in which Prime Minister Mosaddeq was deposed, the CIA’s first covert regime-change program in Latin America—which included strident allegations about the imminent establishment of a Soviet military beachead—was soon under way. After several months of economic sabotage, psy-ops maneuvers, threatening gestures by the U.S. military, and an actual invasion by a small rebel force armed and trained by the CIA, Arbenz agreed to resign and asked for political asylum in the Mexican embassy. Guatemala was handed over to an extreme right-wing faction of plantation owners and political leaders who founded their own paramilitary death squads, and to the Guatemalan Army, which was backed by the United States. Arbenz’s land-reform policy was reversed and many of its proponents and beneficiaries were murdered. The Guatemalan Army eventually became the most brutal, corrupt, and criminal military institution in the western hemisphere.
Five years after Arbenz was removed as a force in Latin America, the Cuban revolution inspired a new concern about the region. Following an aborted military revolt led by a handful of Arbenz-era officers in 1960, the Eisenhower administration made the fateful decision to beef up the Guatemalan Army’s intelligence units, thus engendering a clandestine apparatus of state terror and crime over which eventually even the United States would lose control. A pair of young soldiers—Lieutenant Yon Sosa and Luis Turcios, both of whom had received elite U.S. military training outside Guatemala—took to the countryside to wage guerrilla war against what they described as “tyranny and humiliation.” The uprising had some early support from the now-outlawed Guatemalan Communist Party, but was quickly put down. Although the cause of armed revolution survived, the number of guerrilla forces in Guatemala in the 1960s never exceeded several hundred; yet a counterinsurgency campaign supported by the United States (it was called “counter-terror”) had killed some 10,000 civilians by the end of the decade. An especially tragic paradox of that time was that while the Alliance for Progress program sponsored by President Kennedy sought ways to identify and support young moderate democratic reformers in Guatemala—even, in the 1960s, bringing them to the United States to study—Guatemalan security forces and death squads, backed by the United States, murdered those same reformers after they returned and began to practice what they had learned. By the 1970s, two-thirds of the people who’d been sent to study in the United States had been killed.
As the possibilities for peaceful change were cut off by violent repression, the ranks of the mostly Marxist guerrillas swelled. Guatemala’s internal war, like the other conflicts soon to follow in Central America (in El Salvador and Nicaragua especially), was usually depicted in the context of rivalry between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, and local causes were downplayed, but in fact it was essentially a war to protect an entrenched elite. By the early 1980s, the Guatemalan Army’s highest-ranking officers had become wealthy. Almost all the death squads operating in Guatemala were linked to the Army, although their activity was regularly blamed on rogue right-wing extremists. Either you supported military dictatorship and the oligarchy or you were regarded as a leftist.
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