Juan José Gerardi Conedera

Msgr. Juan José Gerardi Conedera (27 December 1922 – 26 April 1998) was a Guatemalan Roman Catholic bishop and human rights defender.

Early life

Gerardi Conedera, of Italian ancestry, was born in Guatemala City. He studied at the city's seminary and won a scholarship to study theology in New Orleans, United States. On 21 December 1946 he was ordained a priest and served in several rural areas of Guatemala such as Mataquescuintla, San Pedro Sacatepéquez and Palencia, as well as in the capital.

Bishop

On 9 May 1967, he was elected Bishop of Verapaz, assuming office the following 11 August. In the position he emphasised pastoral work among indigenous communities.In the 1970s, amidst the country's on-going Civil War, he was a strong proponent of official recognition for Guatemala's indigenous languages and was instrumental in securing authorisation for two radio stations to broadcase in Mayan languages. In 1974, he was appointed Bishop of Quiché, but continued working as an Apostolic Administrator in Verapaz.

Between 1980 and 1983 El Quiché saw increased levels of violence in the conflict between the Army and various rebel guerrilla factions. Hundreds of Roman Catholic catechists and heads of Christian communities, most of whom were of Maya origin, were murdered. Gerardi repeatedly asked the military authorities to control their actions.

In 1980, while serving as president of the Guatemalan Conference of Bishops, he spoke out openly about the 31 January 1980 Spanish embassy fire in which 39 people lost their lives and in which government instigation was widely suspected. That same year he was called to the Vatican to attend a synod. Upon returning to Guatemala he was denied entry to the country. He travelled to neighbouring El Salvador, which refused to grant him right of asylum, and he settled temporarily in Costa Rica where he remained until military president Romeo Lucas García was overthrown in 1982.

On 28 August 1984 he was appointed auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Guatemala.

National Reconciliation Commission

In 1988 the Conference of Bishops assigned Gerardi and Rodolfo Quezada Toruño to serve on the National Reconciliation Commission. This later led to creation of the Office of Human Rights of the Archbishopric ("Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado", ODHA), which to date provides assistance for the victims of human rights violation. In that context work began on the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) project. On 24 April 1998, REMHI presented the results of its work in the report "". This report carried statements from thousands of witnesses and victims of repression during the Civil War and placed the blame for the vast majority of the violations on the government and the army.

The task of historical recovery that Gerardi and his team pursued was fundamental in the subsequent work of the UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission (CEH), set up within the framework of the 1996 peace process.

Although the REMHI has been strongly criticized as being biased by Msgr. Gerardi's socialist political ideologies because the REMHI seems to blame the National Army for most deaths during the Guatemalan civil war, the U.N. Truth Comission Report comes to very similar conclusions.

Assassination

Two days after the publication of REMHI's report, on 26 April 1998, Bishop Gerardi was bludgeoned to death in the garage of his home in Guatemala City. [citation|title=Review of "The Art of Political Murder: Who killed Bishop Gerardi?", by Francisco Goldman|last=Stanford |first=Peter | date=March 16, 2008|newspaper=The Independent | url= http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-art-of-political-murder-who-killed-bishop-gerardi-by-francisco-goldman-795533.html |accessdate=2008-04-10] His assailants used a concrete slab, disfiguring him to the extent that his face was unrecognisable and identification of the corpse was made by means of his episcopal ring.

On 8 June 2001 three army officers – Col. Byron Disrael Lima Estrada and Capt. Byron Lima Oliva (father and son), and José Obdulio Villanueva – were convicted of his murder and sentenced to 30-year prison terms; a priest, Mario Orantes, whom the court had identified as an accomplice, was sentenced to 20 years. The case was precedent-setting in that it was the first time that members of the military had faced trial before civilian courts. The defendants appealed, and in March 2005 an appeals court lowered the Limas' sentences to 20 years; Orantes' sentence was left unchanged, and Villanueva had been killed in prison before the appeal verdict was reached. These revised prison terms were upheld by the Constitutional Court in April 2007.

Although some books, like Maite Rico and Bertrand De La Grange's "¿Quién mató al Obispo?" ("Who Killed the Bishop?"), have implied that the trial was more about political ideology than about discovering the truth about the bishop's assassination, the court in fact stated that it was necessary to continue the investigation up the chain of command in order to get at the full truth.

Notes

References

*citation|chapter=Monseñor Juan José Gerardi Conedera, 1922-1998: Mártir de la Paz|url= http://www.iglesiacatolica.org.gt/mgerardi.htm |language=Spanish |accessdate=2008-04-10 | title= Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala.
*citation|url=http://www.caritaspanama.org/martires_gerardi.php | chapter=Monseñor Juan José Gerardi, 26 de Abril de 1998, Guatemala | title=Cáritas Panamá | accessdate=2008-04-10.
*citation|date=April 7, 1998 | url=http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR34/015/1998/en/dom-AMR340151998en.html |chapter= Public Statement: Guatemala: Murder of Auxiliary Archbishop Juan Gerardi | title=Amnesty International| accessdate=2008-04-10.
*citation| url=http://www.nisgua.org/search/index.asp?search=gerardi&go.x=0&go.y=0 |chapter=Geradi case documents | title=Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA).
*citation| url=http://leahy.senate.gov/press/199804/980428.html |chapter=The Murder of Bishop Juan José Gerardi | first=Patrick |last=Leahy | author-link=Patrick Leahy| date=April 28, 1998 |title=Vermont's U.S. Senator, Patrick Leahy| accessdate=2008-04-10.
* [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB25/index.htm Colonel Byron Disrael Lima Estrada: Alleged Mastermind behind the Murder of Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi] Declassified Records from the U.S. Department of Defense
*citation|url=http://www.fhrg.org/remhi/|chapter=REMHI: Recovery of the Historic Memory| title=Foundation for Human Rights in Guatemala | accessdate=2008-04-10.

ee also

*Guatemalan Civil War

Further reading

*citation | first=Francisco | last = Goldman | title=The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? | publisher=Grove Press |place=New York | year=2007| isbn=9780802118288.