Writing Guatemala’s genocide: truth and reconciliation commission reports and Christianity

Source: (2005) Journal of Genocide Research, 7(3)

This investigation grows out of a close textual analysis of two TRC reports. Both address Guatemala’s civil war (ca. 1960–1996), a genocidal conflict that placed the country’s indigenous population between a militarized government and counterinsurgent guerilla forces for over 35 years (Stoll, 1993). At the height of the conflict (ca. 1978–1982), an estimated seventy thousand indigenous people were killed, forty thousand were disappeared, and over one million were
displaced out of the country’s total population of eight million (Nelson, 1999, p 9). The first report, entitled Guatemala, Never Again (REMHI, 1998), is the end product of the Roman Catholic Church’s Recovery of the Historical Memory Project. The title of the second report is A Memory of Silence (CEH, 1999) and is the culmination of the United Nations’ Historical Clarification Commission. (Excerpt)