Bishop Gerardi was a priest in the Quiche region during the army's notorious counterinsurgency campaign of the early 1980s. Given the direct repression against nuns and priests and their catequistas, the Church was forced to evacuate their religious leaders for a number of years. Bishop Gerardi was one of many forced to flee into exile for some time.

When Gerardi returned, he eventually took charge of the Archbishop's Human Rights Office, and carried out a long-term and dangerous study of the atrocities which occurred during the thirty five year civil war. In April 1998, a full year and a half after the signing of the final Peace Accords, he issued his findings and conclusions. These were very similar to the findings recently released by the United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission, or Commission for Historical Clarification. (See below). Gerardi's report, called the REMHI report, found the Guatemalan army and related forces to be responsible for the vast majority of the human rights crimes.

Bishop Gerardi issued his report on Friday, April 24, 1998. He was dead within forty eight hours. On the evening of Sunday April 26, he returned home after a quiet dinner with family and friends. He was bludgeoned to death in the garage. According to forensic reports, his face and skull bore some 17 fractures and injuries, apparently inflicted with a heavy cement block. Later evidence suggested that a metal object such as a crowbar was also used by a seond assailant. The killing was highly professional for its combination of extreme brutality, careful planning, and tidily removed evidence.

Witnesses and investigative findings indicated that a car parked outside during the critical time period had a license plate registered with the military. A telephone call was placed from the living room to a phone booth in front of a military installation, and the phone booth was quickly torn out of the sidewalk and vanished. Two military men were filming at the crime scene when police and family and friends arrived. No one had called them, and when asked for identification, they fled the building. Later, a secret source known to the Church leaders and highly trusted by them, revealed that a father-son team in the military were responsible for the crime. The father was the former head of the Guatemalan army's intelligence division. The son had left Guatemala just after the murder.

Despite this voluminous evidence, no military official was questioned. Instead, the church was surrounded by nearly one hundred heavily armed police, and Father Orantes--Gerardi's long time housemate--was arrested and thrown in jail. He remained there for nearly one year despite failing health and a complete lack of reasonable evidence against him. His aged dog, an eleven year old German Shepherd named Baloo, was impounded.

The authorities claimed the arrest was made because a second look at the autopsy photos revealed a mark resembling a dog bite. The observation was made by a forensic doctor in Spain who had never seen the body. Also blood had been tracked into the house. It was therefore "concluded" that Father Orantes had hidden out in the garage, lying in wait. When Bishop Gerardi returned, Orantes ordered his "vicious" attack dog to leap up on Gerardi and knock him down. In a fit of blind passion, Father Orantes then bludgeoned him to death. A homosexual triangle was heavily hinted at.

After the arrest of Father Orantes, the following matters have been established:

1. There was indeed blood tracked into the house. A film of the crime scene shows that it was never even taped off, and that numerous friends and family members had tracked back and forth from the blood covered garage into the house to pray, talk, and weep together.

2. The crime scene showed no dog paw prints anywhere, despite the carnage.

3. Baloo was quite aged and had a deteriorating spinal condition, making it difficult for him to walk, let alone jump. A film shows him dragging his hind legs. Despite the numerous strangers dragging him around, he neither barks nor growls. He appears extremely meek.

4. A second autopsy was performed, and a mold was made of the dog's mouth. The forensic examination showed there was no dog bite at all, and certainly not one that matched Baloo's mouth. By way of example, the small punctures in question show only one arc, not two. A dog cannot bite with one jaw alone. Similarly, for the middle teeth to have punctured the skin at all, the much longer canine teeth would have to penetrate the skull bone beneath the thin skin of the temple. The bone showed not a scratch.

5. The Spanish forensic doctor turns out to be not a forensic pathologist but a forensic anthropologist, and thus not qualified to judge flesh injuries. Bizzarely, he continued to insist not only that a dog bite existed, but that it showed a crime of passion. He also tried to steal a small bone from Gerardi's body during the second autopsy, apparently seeking a "souvenir." An investigation of his background shows that he also tried to insist that the children's bodies found at El Mozote in El Salvador were the remains of malnourished teenagers who were shot in combat.

Many months later, an ailing Father Orantes was finally released from prison. As Church officials pressed for questioning of the army leaders, the army responded by hinting that relatives of the Church leaders should be arrested. It was claimed that these relatives were part of a gang, and that Gerardi had discovered them and that he was murdered to prevent his reporting them.

After the United Nations issued its remarkable Truth Commission report in February 1999, international pressures grew to carry out a bona fide investigation of the murder. As a result, the courts brought in several military leaders for quiet questioning. The judge came under so many death threats that he was quickly forced to resign. The new judge indefinitely suspended all further questioning.

NOTE: Not long after the murder of Bishop Gerardi, a Mayan political candidate received a written death threat from the Jaguar Avenger death squad. In the note, the Jaguar authors threatened to kill him like they had killed Gerardi and others. The note was widely publicized and protested in human rights circles and never denied by the Jaguars, who were issuing more and more threats. The "Jaguar Avengers" is but another name used by an inernal military intelligence death squad more commonly known as the "Comando", which is responsible for locating and liquidating not only "subversives" but the popular human rights and civic groups as well. A number of the members of this death squad are School of the Americas graduates and the leaders visited several times a week with "Uncle Sam" in a high rise building in Guatemala City just down the street from the United States Embassy.