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Many Roles, One Goal

‘To pardon doesn’t mean to forget ... to pardon really means to create new attitudes, to provoke change inside people and between people, not just to palliate the violence and the hurt that remains.’ (Juan Gerardi, Auxiliary Bishop, Guatemala City)

As of early 1999, a tenuous peace has taken hold in Guatemala and an imperfect but functioning democracy is in place. Five years ago, this could only be a dream. How this Latin American country escaped from decades of war and terror is a long and complicated story. But it could not have happened without the brave involvement of people of faith - at many different levels, and in many different ways.

It can be said that the seeds of the war in Guatemala were planted centuries ago with the arrival of the Spanish. But its direct origins are in 1954, when a liberal democracy, headed by President Jacobo Arbenz, was overthrown in a military coup. Arbenz and his predecessor, Juan José Arévalo, had instituted reforms intended to extend power to the majority of poor Guatemalans.

The elite were almost exclusively ‘ladinos’ of Spanish origin, while over half the population was made up of indigenous people, many of whom did not speak Spanish and had little or no education. Till the late 1990s, two percent of the population controlled two-thirds of all arable land. Arbenz’s proposals had included land reform.

With the coup, the reforms came to an end. Authoritarian military rule was installed and most forms of public dissent severely curtailed. This sparked another coup attempt, an unsuccessful one in the fall of 1960. After their failure, some coup leaders escaped to the east of the country and launched an insurgency. This ground on through the sixties and seventies. In the 1980s, government counterinsurgency efforts were intensified. Terror techniques were employed against both guerrillas and the civilian population. At least 440 villages were destroyed, one million Guatemalans fled their homes, and more than 100,000 people were killed or disappeared.

‘Much peasant support for the guerrillas,’ writes Paul Jeffrey*, a United Methodist Minister and frequent writer on Central American affairs, ‘came from Catholics who found in armed struggle the only way to express the social concern they had received from the church.’

Throughout the long years of civil war, while some elements of the church establishment were satisfied with maintenance of the status quo, others campaigned for human rights and economic justice. Church workers helped the rural poor set up local co-operatives and other community organisations and began to identify and be identified with the insurgency. Along with leaders of these community organisations, they became frequent targets of the military.

Praying for peace in Guatemala. Photo Paul Jeffrey

Catholic priests and church workers frequently offered ‘cover’ to peasants and indigenous people when they took action in pursuit of justice. They supported peasants contesting illegal land seizures, farmworkers campaigning for fair pay and benefits, and refugees returning to their homes from Mexico and internal exile. Even more explicit were the actions of such faith-based groups as Witness for Peace, which placed delegations of foreigners in remote locations hoping their presence would shield local residents, including returned refugees, from violence perpetrated by the military.

And, from the 1960s, writes Jeffrey, even when overt political activity was discouraged by the Vatican, Catholic bishops issued ‘a series of pastoral letters and statements that progressively dealt more analytically with the root causes of the armed conflict.’ In 1976, after a devastating earthquake, the Guatemalan Episcopal Conference (the council of bishops, the CEG) issued a letter stating that reconstruction should move beyond physical reconstruction to the restructuring of society to address social injustice.

In the 1980s, the CEG grew progressively bolder. ‘Para construir la paz’ (‘In order to construct peace’), issued in 1984, described a vision of true democracy. In 1988, there was ‘El clamor por la tierra’ (‘The clamor for land’).

‘The clamor for land,’ the bishops stated, ‘is without doubt the strongest, most dramatic and desperate cry heard in Guatemala.’

In 1986, the military leadership turned control of the government over to an elected civilian president, Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo. This presented the first opportunity to bring about a negotiated end to the violence. The ‘Contadora Group’, consisting of Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela, issued a call for the establishment of a National Reconciliation Commission (CNR). This would include one representative each from the government, the political parties, and the Catholic bishops conference, along with one prominent citizen.

With the appointment of Rodolfo Quezada Toruño, the Catholic bishop of Zacapa, to represent the bishops, the Catholic church assumed a leading role in promoting dialogue and nurturing an environment conducive to peace and reconciliation. Meetings took place between members of the government, the military, and the unified forces of the guerrillas known as the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG).

But little real progress was evident.

Then Rev. Paul Wee got involved. A Lutheran pastor from the United States, Wee had been working in Guatemala since 1981 and had been deeply affected by the horrors endured by the indigenous Mayan peasants. In 1986, he began to pursue a dialogue with people on both sides of the conflict. By 1990, he had got leaders of the Guatemalan military and the URNG to attend private talks in Oslo, Norway. At the end, the parties signed the ‘Oslo Accords’, which stated that peace would be the product of a participatory and stable democracy.

The ice had been broken. The CNR began to act as an intermediary at meetings between the URNG and important sectors of Guatemalan society. These meetings gave the URNG a platform to advance its agenda away from the battlefield. In addition, they presented other groups not directly involved in the armed conflict with the opportunity to state their own goals and their own ideas about how peace could be achieved.

In 1991, the government, the military and the URNG agreed on an agenda for continuing negotiations which included the themes of democratisation, human rights, socio-economic issues, and agrarian issues. By 1993, they both accepted the principle that ‘military interests should give way to the creation of a political environment in which social conflicts could be resolved.’ They also recognised ‘the importance of supporting national reconciliation through the broad participation of society in the peace process.’

International church groups -the Lutheran World Federation, the National Council of Christ Churches USA, the World Council of Churches, and the Latin American Council of Churches- stepped up their work in Guatemala. They brought the military, the URNG, the government, and powerful Guatemalan business interests together for a series of talks. This led to a ‘Framework Agreement’ in early 1994 which laid the ground rules for ongoing negotiations and the establishment of the ‘Civil Society Assembly’ (ASC). Headed by Bishop Quezada, this was a forum for less official discussions on issues related to the conflict.

In early 1996, efforts to reach a final agreement were intensified. Finally, on December 29, 1996, four guerrilla leaders and four government officials signed a peace treaty in Guatemala’s National Palace before over 1,200 invited witnesses including representatives from the religious communities.

Meanwhile the Catholic bishops had not stopped issuing pastoral letters urging that true peace had to be based on social justice. In 1995, ‘Urge la veradera paz!’ (‘True peace is urgent!’), had detailed the social, political, and economic causes of the war, proposed a framework for peace, and described the path to ‘true reconciliation.’

‘It’s undeniable,’ asserted the bishops, ‘that one of the fundamental causes of the more than 34 years of armed conflict has been the unjust and inhuman marginalisation in which the majority of Guatemalans, especially the indigenous and peasants, is submerged.’

This letter laid out a vision of reconciliation deeply rooted in Christian thought, where reconciliation begins with ‘the recognition of blame and the interior disposition both for the one who has offended to ask forgiveness, as well as for the person who has been offended to pardon.’ A 1997 letter stated, ‘Peace is constructed on justice,’ and added, ‘peace will be impossible if we try to cover with a veil of lies the painful economic reality of our people, the anguish accumulated in the heart of so many victims of the genocidal brutality and the accelerating impoverishment provoked by the war.’

With the formidable task of reconstruction and reconciliation in the post-war period, the role of religious people has shifted. Much of the work has been directed at creating an accurate record of what really occurred during the years of war. Two important players have been the Conference of Religious Guatemala (Confregua), which has provided legal assistance to victims of oppression, and the Office of Human Rights of the Archdiocese of Guatemala (Odhag), which has worked to document past abuses and to be a watchdog monitoring continuing abuses. Both of these efforts are consistent with statements issued by the bishops declaring that true reconciliation will only occur when the truth is known, the oppressors accept responsibility for their abuses, and the victims extend forgiveness to their oppressors.

But the most important initiative of the churches in the post-war period has been the Inter-diocesan Project to Recover the Historic Memory (REMHI). This carried out an exhaustive effort to record the testimonies of all citizens who suffered from violence perpetrated by any party during the entire period of conflict.

While there was some opposition to this process by those who said that ‘genuine pardon means forgetting,’ Juan Gerardi, the auxiliary bishop of Guatemala City insisted that ‘to pardon doesn’t mean to forget ... to pardon really means to create new attitudes, to provoke change inside people and between people, not just to palliate the violence and the hurt that remains.’

In order to carry out the REMHI project, hundreds of church workers were trained in interviewing techniques, provided with tape recorders, and sent out throughout the country to interview citizens in their own languages. In quite a few cases, those responsible for violence, many of whom had suffered emotionally because of what they had done, repented their crimes. For many people, the REMHI interviews provided a first opportunity to talk about what had happened to their loved ones with any sense of security.

REMHI carried out a total of 6,000 interviews by mid-1997. The testimony it collected provided information on approximately 30,000 killings, including testimony on more than 600 massacres. This information was entered into a computerised database for analysis. The final report was called, Guatemala: Never Again!.

An optimistic title. The report was released on April 24, 1998. Two days later, its instigator, Bishop Juan Gerardi, was brutally murdered. Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, had said to the REMHI coordinators:

‘Memory is bound by fear and it’s very difficult to break the ligatures of fear. Some have suggested the mistaken idea that to remember is dangerous, because by remembering, history will repeat itself as a nightmare. Yet experience suggests that what happens is exactly the reverse. It is amnesia that makes history repeat itself, repeat itself as a nightmare. A good memory permits us to learn from the past, because the only reason to recover the past is so that it serve to transform our present life ... Amnesia implies impunity and impunity encourages crime, both in personal and communal terms.’

* See Jeffrey, Paul, Recovering Memory: Guatemalan Churches and the Challenge of Peacemaking, (Life and Peace Institute: Uppsala, 1998). Much of the information presented here is based this extensive report.

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