Bishop Gerardi and the Report He Presented

Guatemala's internal armed conflict ran for thirty six years and fell hardest on Maya communities in the highlands, where entire villages were destroyed. When it ended, the Catholic archdiocese of Guatemala City ran its own inquiry, the Recovery of Historical Memory project, sending trained interviewers from the parishes to take testimony in the communities and in the languages people actually spoke. Some six thousand statements were collected.

On 24 April 1998 the auxiliary bishop Juan Gerardi presented the four volume result in the cathedral, under the title Guatemala: Never Again. It documented tens of thousands of deaths and attributed the great majority of them to the army and its auxiliaries. Two days later he was beaten to death with a concrete block in the garage of his parish house.

The investigation was obstructed for years, and prosecutors and witnesses left the country. In 2001 a court convicted three army officers and a priest of involvement, in the first Guatemalan trial in which military officers were tried in a civilian court for a political killing; the case went through appeals and retrials afterwards. A United Nations backed truth commission reporting in 1999 reached conclusions close to the archdiocese's, and found that acts of genocide had been committed against Maya groups. The killing of a bishop for publishing them is one of the defining episodes in the modern history of the Latin American church.