EDITORIAL Gerardis death brings moment of
clarity
There are moments, too often involving death, that bring a
stunning clarity to complex circumstances.
So it is with Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, the latest in a long
procession of Guatemalans who have lost their lives in the struggle for basic
human rights.
In the civil realm, the clarity cuts through all the international
intrigue and U.S. State Department double-talk to the heart of the matter. The
United States played a distressingly major role during three and a half decades
as one of the powerful interests that imposed a violent, crushing repression on
Guatemalans, particularly the indigenous Mayan population.
Motivated by both a fear of communist expansion during the
1950s-1970s and by unqualified support and protection of U.S. business
interests there, the United States became deeply involved in Guatemalas
internal affairs, propping up a string of violent dictators.
In the religious arena, Gerardis death highlights the
irrelevance and smallness of the kinds of theological and ecclesial obsessions
that seem to preoccupy so many in authority in Rome and elsewhere. What debate
can possibly follow from an example so genuinely imitative of Christs
sacrificial love that one of his flock could exclaim, He loved us so
much, he ended up suffering our fate (NCR, May 8).
The tragedy, of course, is that so many moments of clarity in
Guatemalas history have gone by without notice. It was all those missed
moments -- the collective groaning of a tortured population seeking justice --
that had moved Gerardi to organize the Historic Memory Project that
painstakingly detailed, in a 1,400-page, four-volume report, the horrors of
Guatemalas 35-year civil war (NCR, Feb. 13).
In a recent editorial calling for Guatemala to show that things
have changed by finding and prosecuting Gerardis killers, The New York
Times lamented the thousands of political murders that took place out
of the worlds spotlight.
Who knows if that bit of self-indictment was intentional. The
slaughter in Guatemala, however, did occur largely out of the spotlight, and
the U.S. press in all of its manifestations shares the blame. The mainstream
media in the United States has not done well in telling the tales of slaughter
and genocide in this hemisphere. Its lack of attention to the work of
Gerardis project until his death is but the latest example. Too often in
the past the reporting sounded like dispatches from inside the State
Department.
If Gerardi is not to end up another silent victim, then the moment
of clarity brought about by his death must lead to change. Guatemala, its
politics and its judicial system, must change if the peace process is to have
any meaning and if the country is ever to approach reconciliation after its
long nightmare.
The United States could certainly be a powerful agent of change,
not only for Guatemala but for the way we operate at large in this hemisphere.
The U.S. government -- the CIA and the State Department, particularly --
undoubtedly possesses data that could shed a telling light on the circumstances
in Guatemala during the past 35 years.
Much of the earliest U.S. involvement in the mid-1950s, when the
CIA overthrew a legitimately elected government, has been documented by
journalists through the Freedom of Information Act. So much more lies hidden,
and the Clinton administration could help both the United States and Guatemala
to step closer to reconciliation and justice by declassifying the documents
that will help tell the full story.
This would ensure that Bishop Gerardis death will not be in
vain.
National Catholic Reporter, May 22,
1998
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