a politically conservative, devout Catholic physician, known for his nonpartisan commitment to public health issues, was forced to take his family into exile in the 1970s. The barefoot doctors he had trained to deliver essential medical treatment, such as dysentery pills, to the rural poor were being murdered by the Army, which also confiscated a small public clinic he’d built with international donations in the Ixil Triangle town of Nebaj, in a rugged corner of northern El Quiché.
ON JANUARY 31, 1980, El Quiché literally flamed up into the world’s consciousness when thirty-seven Mayan peasants occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City to call attention to the violence being inflicted on their communities. Guatemalan security forces stormed the embassy, provoking an inferno that killed all but one of the protesters, as well as embassy staff members and others trapped inside the building. Among the dead was the father of the future Nobel Peace Prize–winner Rigoberta Menchú. That night the sole surviving Indian protester was kidnapped from his hospital bed and killed. His corpse was flung onto the campus of the University of San Carlos, the national public university, before dawn.
The massacre in the Spanish embassy precipitated an international outcry, and Spain broke off diplomatic relations with Guatemala. Not long afterward, a campaign of terror against the Catholic Church that wouldn’t abate for years was launched throughout the misty mountain towns, villages, and hamlets of El Quiché, which was populated mostly by Maya. In the departmental capital, Santa Cruz, the seat of Bishop Gerardi’s diocese, the mutilated corpses of two Church catechists were discovered hanging outside a small radio station. Convents were strafed with machine-gun fire and attacked with grenades. As the fighting against guerrillas intensified in el antiplano, the mountainous central highlands, the Army seized and occupied church buildings, parish houses, and convents, turning them into barracks and interrogation and torture centers. Statues of saints were draped in military camouflage and olive green, as if to remind parishioners to whom they really owed their obedience, at least if it was earthly salvation they sought. The Spanish priest from the village of Chajul, in the Ixil Triangle, was ambushed and murdered. In Joyabaj, Father Faustino Villanueva was assassinated at his desk. Sometimes, after the Army had finally vacated a church parish or convent building, people would leave lighted candles outside for the restless spirits of those who had been murdered inside.
IN THE ONCE BUSTLING town of Nebaj, the Army placed a machine-gun nest in the belfry of the church, overlooking the plaza. A few years later, in 1984, I rode the bus from Guatemala City to Nebaj with my friend Jean-Marie Simon, a photographer and journalist who was also a courageous investigator for human rights organizations such as Americas Watch and Amnesty International. In Nebaj we visited a tiny community of nuns who were still residing in a rustic little convent house in the middle of a complex of colonial-era church buildings that the Army had occupied. A nun placed a small tape recorder on a table and we listened to the faint sobs and screams from torture sessions the nuns had recorded through their adobe walls at night. At the time, the Army and civilians who had been pressed into service in rural militias—called civil patrols—were bringing captured Indian refugees down from the mountains by the truckload and settling them in bleak camps, rows of pine shacks with zinc roofs. The camps were called “model villages” and given Orwellian names such as New Life. We accompanied the nuns to the town market to buy food staples and multicolored plastic plates and cups for the refugees. The nuns selected plates and cups in every color but green—the Army’s color, one explained in a lowered voice. It was a subtle protest, unlikely to be noticed by the refugees or the Army, but who dared risk anything more?
For years, experts on Guatemala’s internal war have argued over how much blame the guerrillas, in particular the faction called the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, or EGP), deserved for the violence. Did they, by moving among the population and promising protection they were unable to provide, make the Army’s actions inevitable? The guerrillas certainly bear some responsibility. But the Guatemalan Army also had its own agenda, one that, in the early 1980s, foreclosed any chance of a peaceful or negotiated settlement to the war. A national-security-state mentality relegated the entire Mayan altiplano into an area in need of the Army’s own extremely thorough brand of transforming authority.
For as long as possible, Bishop Gerardi sought to maintain a prudent distance from both the guerrillas and the Army. But on one occasion, often recounted since his murder, he confronted the commander of the Quiché military zone. The Army, he told the commander, was killing many more people than the guerrillas were. In its zeal, Gerardi warned, the Army was falling into lawlessness and was driving people into the arms of the guerrillas. The commander responded by asking for Bishop Gerardi’s cooperation—meaning that Gerardi should, for example, identify guerrilla collaborators in his parish. He refused, and the Army began to regard him as its enemy. Demetrio Toj, a lay teacher and radio announcer who was abducted by the Army and tortured but somehow managed a spectacular and extremely rare escape, told ODHA that at one point his tormentors had demanded to know “where Gerardi hides the weapons.” Not long after the kidnapping of Toj, Gerardi was warned by villagers in San Antonio Ilotenango that soldiers were preparing an ambush for him. He was guided out of the village by an alternative mountain path at night, under cover of darkness.
Following the escape from death in San Antonio Ilotenango, Bishop Gerardi perhaps lost his nerve. “When you feel death at your door, it paralyzes you,” he once confided to Edgar Gutiérrez. Gerardi decided to close the El Quiché diocese, a decision that would long haunt him. But it was an act of protest as well as fear, perhaps partly intended to draw the attention of Cardinal Casariego, an old-fashioned, conservative prelate who assiduously cultivated his relationships with the wealthy and powerful and who used to bless Army tanks with Holy Water. Cardinal Casariego kept silent about the repression, even about the murders of his own priests. His emphatic anticommunism appears to have made him an uncritical supporter of the Army.
The exit of the clergy from El Quiché only deepened the province’s isolation while doing nothing to impede the slaughter, and Bishop Gerardi and Próspero Penados, who was then bishop of San Marcos, soon traveled to the Vatican, where, in a private meeting, they informed Pope John Paul II about the situation. The pope was moved by what they said and wrote a public letter to the Guatemalan Episcopal Conference strongly condemning the violence against the civilian population and the persecution of the Church: “I share your sorrow,” the pope wrote, “over the tragic accumulation of suffering and death that weighs, and shows no sign of abating, over so many families and your ecclesiastical communities, debilitated not only by the murders of more than just a few catechists, but also of priests, in the darkest circumstances, in vile and premeditated ways. I am particularly saddened by the grave situation in the diocese of El Quiché, where, because of multiple criminal acts and death threats against ecclesiastics, the community remains without religious assistance.”
Cardinal Casariego must have felt that open letter as a stinging rebuke. Guatemala’s conservative rulers and elites were infuriated. Wasn’t Pope John Paul II a symbol of anticommunist resistance all over the world? Why was he siding with the “communists” in El Quiché?
Although Bishop Gerardi asked for a new assignment and permission not to return to Guatemala, the pope ordered him to reopen the El Quiché diocese. Gerardi obeyed, but at the Guatemala City airport he was met by a military contingent that denied him entrance into the country and put him on a plane to El Salvador. Bishop Quezada Toruño, who had gone to the airport with other Church delegates to meet Gerardi’s flight that day, recalled years later—by then he was Cardinal Quezada—that it had been his impression that only their presence had prevented the soldiers from taking Gerardi away and probably killing him.
In El Salvador, as soon as he landed, Gerardi was warned by the country’s centrist Christian Democratic president, Napoleon Duarte, that assassins were waiting for him. Gerardi flew on to Costa Rica, where he endured three years of anguished exile. Three months after the El Quiché diocese was reopened without him, a priest there was murdered. Before the war was over, more priests, nuns, and religious workers would be “martyred” by violence in El Quiché than in any other diocese in the Americas.
