Juan Gerardi

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Juan José Gerardi Conedera (born December 27, 1922 in Guatemala (City) ; † April 26, 1998 ibid) was a Guatemalan Roman Catholic bishop who campaigned in his country to come to terms with the crimes committed during the civil war and by members of the Guatemalan armed forces was murdered.

Life

Career

Juan Gerardi, whose ancestors came from Italy, attended the seminary in his hometown of Guatemala. With the help of a scholarship he was able to study theology in New Orleans in the United States . He was ordained a priest on December 21, 1946 and then worked as a pastor in various rural parishes in Guatemala such as Mataquescuintla , San Pedro Sacatepéquez and Palencia , but also in the capital.

Act as a bishop

He was appointed Bishop of Verapaz on May 9, 1967, and took office on August 11 of the same year. He was heavily involved in pastoral work in the communities of the indigenous population ( pastoral indígena ). During the 1970s, at the time of the Guatemalan civil war , he campaigned for the official recognition of the indigenous languages ​​in Guatemala and was able to obtain approval for two radio stations broadcasting in Mayan languages . In 1974 he was appointed Bishop of Santa Cruz del Quiché , but continued to be Apostolic Administrator of the Diocese of Verapaz.

In his dioceses he campaigned for the implementation of the resolutions of the Second Vatican Council and the 2nd General Assembly of the Bishops' Conferences of Latin America and the Caribbean ( CELAM ) of 1968 in Medellín . As was the case before his appointment as bishop, he was frequently involved in human rights issues and became a leading actor in exposing human rights violations in his country .

Between 1980 and 1983, conflicts between the army and various guerrilla groups in El Quiché led to increasing escalation of violence. Hundreds of Catholic catechists as well as the chiefs of the Christian communities, mostly from the Maya people , were murdered. Gerardi repeatedly appealed to military commanders to stop excesses and ill-treatment and to discipline their soldiers.

In 1980 Gerardi chaired the Guatemalan Episcopal Conference . He openly addressed the events of January 31, 1980, when 39 people lost their lives in a fire in the Spanish embassy. The arsonists were often suspected in government circles. In the same year he took part in a Synod of Bishops taking place in the Vatican . Upon completion, he was illegally denied re-entry to his home country. He first traveled to neighboring El Salvador , where he was not granted asylum rights. Until the fall of the Guatemalan military ruler Fernando Romeo Lucas García in 1982, he finally stayed in Costa Rica and Mexico . After two years of exile, he decided to give up the office of Bishop of Santa Cruz del Quiché and did not return to his diocese.

On August 28, 1984 he was appointed auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Guatemala and titular bishop of Guardialfiera by Pope John Paul II .

National Reconciliation Commission

In 1988 the Bishops' Conference sent Gerardi and Rodolfo Quezada Toruño to the National Reconciliation Commission. This was followed by the establishment of a human rights office of the archdiocese ( Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado , ODHA), which supports victims of human rights violations to this day. In this context, a project to “regain historical memory” ( Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica , REMHI) was launched, which was supposed to enable the events of the civil war to be dealt with. Gerardi led the work of this commission as director for four years.

On April 24, 1998 the project presented the results of its work and presented the report Guatemala: Nunca más (“Never again”). This report records the testimony of thousands of witnesses and victims of the repression and acts of violence during the civil war; most of the crimes in it are attributed to the army and government officials.

The historical reappraisal that Gerardi and his colleagues in the REMHI Commission had started with, formed the basis for the subsequent work of the United Nations- funded Historical Clarification Commission (CEH), which started its work as part of the peace process that began in 1996 recorded.

The fact that the Church's Remembrance Commission held the Guatemalan armed forces responsible for the majority of the dead during the civil war was personally resented by representatives of the military and the state organs and private interest groups closely associated with it. The one-sidedness that REMHI was accused of by the state was attributed to the influence of its supposedly “communist” political attitude. The Truth Commission, which was set up under the control of the UN, came to very similar results in its work.

assassination

Two days after the REMHI report was presented, Bishop Gerardi was killed on April 26, 1998 in the garage of his house in Guatemala City. The killers used a concrete slab to crush his head with. Due to the injuries he was so disfigured that his face could no longer be recognized and the body could only be identified by means of the bishop's ring.

According to Giancarlo Collet, the bishop's death can be explained as a direct result of his commitment “as an advocate for the rights of the poor”.

On June 8, 2001, three army officers - Colonel Byron Disrael Lima Estrada , Captain Byron Lima Oliva (father and son) and José Obdulio Villanueva  - were each sentenced to 30-year prison terms. Colonel Lima Estrada was trained by American army and intelligence officers in the so-called School of the Americas . The priest Mario Orantes was sentenced by the court as an accomplice to a 20-year prison term. The trial set a precedent insofar as it was the first time military personnel were tried by a regular criminal court. They appealed, and in March 2005 the Court of Appeal reduced the sentence for Lima father and son to 20 years. Orantes' sentence remained unchanged. Villanueva was murdered in prison prior to the appeal sentence. The Constitutional Court of Guatemala upheld the reduction in sentences in April 2007. In July 2016, Lima Oliva was also murdered in prison.

Although the authors Maite Rico and Bertrand De La Grange in their book ¿Quién mató al Obispo? (“Who Murdered the Bishop?”) Have claimed that the trial was driven more by political motives than the aim of discovering the truth about the bishop's murder, the court stuck to its position that the whole truth was determined Investigation of the entire chain of command has been necessary.

Awards

literature

swell

Individual evidence

  1. REMHI summary of the report of the interdiocesan project: Recovery of Historical Memory ( Memento of November 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), chiapas.indymedia.org, accessed March 31, 2014 ( German ; Spanish ).
  2. REMHI: Recovery of the Historic Memory ( Memento from May 16, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) at the Foundation for Human Rights in Guatemala on fhrg.org, accessed November 20, 2008 (English).
  3. ^ Francisco Goldman: The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? Review of Peter Stanford's book, in: The Independent , March 16, 2008, accessed November 20, 2008.
  4. George Monbiot: “Backyard terrorism”. Guardian, accessed December 15, 2011 .
  5. ^ Death of a bishop in: FAZ of June 27, 2011, page 30.

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