Guatemala Struggles to Find Peace

• Dysfunctional Justice
• Recovering Historical Memory
• A Chance to Grieve
• Working for Reconciliation
• Confessions and Reparations
• Truth Commission Report

Several factors explain the rise in postwar violence. Many of today's criminals were yesterday's soldiers. When politicians negotiated an end to the conflict, generals who had gotten rich off the war turned their skills to other lucrative rackets, such as drug trafficking, money laundering, and car-theft rings. Many of the poor who fought the war were abandoned. They resorted to what the military had trained them to do. "I am part of the generation born during the conflict," says 34-year old Ronalth Ochaeta, director of the Human Rights Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Guatemala City. "I've grown up in a culture of polarization where reaching consensus is difficult and where distrust dominates human relationships." Distrust, frustration, and other factors have led to an increase in lynchings in the last few years. The United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala reported in March that, during the last nine months of 1998, 47 lynchings took place throughout the country, leaving 37 people dead and an undetermined number injured. In many cases, criminals were captured in the act and citizens who distrusted the justice system took punishment into their own hands. Yet the vigilantes often make mistakes, as when three men stopped to change a flat tire near San Cristobal Ixchiguan on March 17, 1998. A local mob mistook the three for thieves who had held up a beer truck earlier in the day, doused them with gasoline, and burned them to death.

Dysfunctional Justice

Recovering Historical Memory

One of the most remarkable contributions was the Project to Recover Historical Memory, a three-year program sponsored by the Catholic Church in Guatemala. More than 600 lay pastoral workers were trained in scientific interviewing techniques and taught how to use a tape recorder. Then they were sent off to gather testimonies on human-rights violations that took place during the war years.

In April 1998, the Catholic Church released a 1400-page report entitled Guatemala, Never Again! It was based largely on the more than 6500 interviews the lay workers had conducted--almost two-thirds of which were done in one of 15 different Maya languages. The document offered the first detailed analysis of the bloody struggle between leftist guerrillas and a series of US-backed military governments--a struggle that cost as many as 200,000 lives. The church report blamed the military and the government-sponsored paramilitary groups for 85 percent of the violence. It suggested that the government take decisive steps to bring about forgiveness and reconciliation.

Church leaders recognized that their prophetic stance could prove costly. "We want to contribute to the construction of a country that is different. That's why we're recovering the memory of the people," Bishop Juan Gerardi, the project's coordinator declared. "This path has been and continues to be full of risks, but the construction of the Reign of God is a risky task."

Two days later, Gerardi was dead, his head repeatedly smashed with a concrete block. Most Guatemalans believe that the military, upset about Gerardi's report, silenced the 75-year-old bishop as a way to discourage further research into who sponsored the genocide. A year after the killing, the government has yet to launch a serious investigation of Gerardi's assassination. Many believe this murder will remain unsolved like so many other political crimes in the Guatemala's history.

Silencing Gerardi, however, could not stop the truth from emerging. The church had given the voiceless victims a chance to speak. Most of those who offered their testimonies were indigenous women who had watched as their husbands or children were shot in front of them or dragged away, never to be seen again. Their need to tell their stories was so dramatic that, in some parishes, hundreds of widows lined up on the first day for taking testimonies. For many, it was the first time they felt safe talking about what had happened to their loved ones. After decades of terror and silence, it was a giant step toward justice.

Gerardi told me in an interview a few weeks before he was killed that pardoning doesn't mean forgetting. "The person who forgets or who pretends to forget doesn't do away with what happened," he said. "To pardon really means to create new attitudes, to provoke change inside people and between people--not just to palliate the hurt that remains."

Dennis Smith, a Presbyterian Church (USA) mission worker in Guatemala, agrees. "The only power left with the victims is the power of choosing whether or not they can forgive," he says. "And in order to forgive, they've got to be able to put a name and a face on who's responsible in their community."

A Chance to Grieve

The church's assistance with exhumation, identification, and reburial of the dead provides survivors an opportunity to grieve for their loved ones properly, a process not allowed during the war. It also gives them a chance to rebury the family members in a manner consistent with Mayan traditions. The Maya place great importance on communicating with their dead, which they carry out at the gravesite. That's impossible if their loved one was "disappeared." To overcome this problem, the church has worked with communities to create "symbolic graveyards." The community sets aside a site where the dead are named on crosses and where their spirits can be called to commune with loved ones.

Working for Reconciliation

Just as the textile project has helped the survivors of the violence cope financially, Chicoj says that reconsidering their response to the violence has helped them survive emotionally. "For years after their husbands were killed, [the widows] carried around a lot of anger," Chicoj reports. "In those days, they would have killed their husbands' killers if they'd had a chance. Yet as they bore this anger over the years, it began to make them sick. They prayed to God to remove the anger. This has helped them to go on living. But this hasn't happened overnight.We have a long process in front of us of learning to live together in community."

Even though the war is over, the ideological polarization that characterized the conflict still lingers, at times posing a barrier to reconciliation. José Alvarez, a Lutheran pastor in the eastern city of Zacapa, began conducting seminars at the end of the war to help people understand the peace accords and learn how to implement them at a local level. He invited other churches to participate, and eight Pentecostal Christians showed up for the first seminar. Alvarez said one of them complained about the songs he had chosen for the worship service that began the event. "He told me the songs we sang had been written by the guerrillas because they spoke of justice and peace," Alvarez says. "I explained to him that the words came from one of the Psalms."

Valle trains Mayan pastors as "peace promoters" in seminars covering nonviolent conflict resolution, restorative justice, mediation skills, the biblical understanding of shalom, and the participation of the church in the construction of peace. He also helped set up a victim-offender reconciliation program. Guatemala's legal codes support the reduction or elimination of sentences if the offender and victim can arrive at a mutually acceptable understanding.

In indigenous villages, interpersonal reconciliation is at the heart of traditional justice systems. Yet such local autonomy disappeared during the military's control of the countryside. One of the peace accords guarantees a return to the practice of customary law in indigenous communities. This system--in which infractions are judged by the village elders according to ancient guidelines–would be everything that current Guatemalan justice is not: accessible, prompt, inexpensive, and culturally and linguistically sensitive. Indigenous systems of justice, using discussion and demanding consensus, focus on rehabilitation and reparation for damages rather than punishment.

Confessions and Reparations

In a speech last December 29, marking the second anniversary of the war's end, Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzú learned the hard way that forgiveness isn't easy. Speaking before a mostly indigenous crowd in Santa Cruz del Quiché, Arzú asked forgiveness for the government's role in violence against civilians during the war. But Arzú spoke in Spanish without a translator. The message was for external consumption only.

The speech was "a sham," according to indigenous leader Rosario Pu. "The wounds will remain open until the government specifically admits it was the army that [did the killing]," he says. "To talk about forgiveness is easy, but moral and economic reparations are necessary if we are to begin to forget these sad histories."

According to Mennonite theologian Mario Higueros, "pardon is possible only when you know who committed the violence. Only the victim can liberate the offender," he says. "The victims can't begin to liberate themselves from their bitterness until they know who killed their loved ones. That means naming names. It means military leaders confessing their sin. Until that happens, no political speech is going to begin to cure the open wounds of our history."

Truth Commission Report

Text and photographs copyright 1999 by New World Outlook: The Mission Magazine of The United Methodist Church. Used by Permission. Visit New World Outlook Online at http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/.

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