Brothers on Two Paths Have Two Visions for Guatemala

Cloistered with his closest advisors in a hillside home above this crowded capital, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, former president and future congressman of Guatemala, plots his return to power.

He interrupts the marathon sessions only to attend campaign rallies, observing from behind tinted lenses with the practiced stance of an officer reviewing troops as his party’s presidential candidate shouts to their supporters. The candidate, Alfonso Portillo, is favored to win today’s election.

In the noisy, congested valley below the general’s strategy sessions, Bishop Mario Rios Montt celebrates Mass each morning and tries to comfort the beleaguered congregation of the downtown San Sebastian Church. In less than two years, the parish has suffered the brutal murder of the bishop’s predecessor, human rights activist Juan Jose Gerardi, followed by the arrest of a parish priest for the killing, his release and recent exile.

The bishop, once an anonymous church administrator, has taken on Gerardi’s work with a commitment that approaches fervor, disseminating a report that details military involvement in human rights atrocities during a 35-year civil war that ended in 1996. The abuses reached their peak during the general’s presidency. The report is widely believed to be behind Gerardi’s bludgeoning death in April 1998.

The general and the bishop, the brothers Rios Montt, are two of the most public figures in Guatemala today, leaders in the two institutions that have dominated this Central American country of 12 million since colonial times.

The bishop’s closest associates call him a soldier of the church. The general’s collaborators say he is a man of God. Although no one interviewed had ever seen them together or could even say whether the brothers attend family gatherings at the same time, all insisted that they get along well.

Both dismiss any relevance between their relationship and their work, any explanation other than coincidence for how two brothers from rural Huehuetenango province rose to such prominence.

Army, Church Find Relations Strained

Yet their story is the story of the army and the Roman Catholic Church--and thus of Guatemala. It explains how those two towering institutions have evolved over the last half-century, often confronting each other with differing visions for this country but still managing to present at least a facade of cordiality.

Now, with the church’s insistence on a full investigation of suspected military abuses, from highlands massacres to Gerardi’s murder, that centuries-old relationship appears to be nearing its nadir. And the Rios Montt brothers appear poised for a public confrontation.

“To have one son in the church and one in the army was a survival strategy for colonial . . . families, but this is still true in the Guatemala of today,” said historian Oscar Guillermo Pelaez. “The case of the Rios Montts is exceptional because of the levels that the two have reached in hierarchy, one in the army and the other in the Catholic Church, but it is nevertheless indicative.”

With graying hair combed back from a receding hairline and a rounded figure beneath his robes, the bishop at age 67 appears to be a jovial parish priest as he celebrates Mass and speaks briefly with parishioners afterward. All that betrays his busy schedule is his quick step.

“Without the pastoral work, you just become a paper pusher,” he said later during an interview in his ample but austere office at the cathedral here, a few paces from stone posts carved this year with the names of 17,000 civilian war victims. And while he’ll patiently answer questions, there is one subject that he will not discuss.

“I do not talk about my family,” he said during a previous telephone conversation. “I am a bishop of the church. My last name and where I am from do not matter.”

Of his childhood as one of 11 brothers and sisters growing up in Chiantla, a small village in a province known for both its poverty and its rich Indian heritage, he had a single comment: “Since we did not have land or a business, we had to get an education. I had barely finished grade school when I left for the seminary.”

Teenager Makes a Lasting Impression

The future general, three years older, left home a little before. Their father sold a house in the town to pay the boy’s passage to this capital city, where he hoped to enter the military academy. He failed the eye test.

He stayed and was here Oct. 20, 1944, for the revolution that ended 73 years of dictatorship. Chosen to guard the national palace, the teenager showed a demeanor that impressed a revolt leader.

That colonel helped Rios Montt get into the academy, launching his military career in a way that for the next 38 years would identify him with the army’s most progressive elements.

The October Revolution was the beginning of a decade of democracy and an attempt at profound social and economic reform, which the conservative Catholic Church opposed. The reforms ended with a CIA-backed coup in 1954 that the church supported.

Disheartened leftist officers formed a guerrilla movement in 1960, leaving the army in the hands of right-wing leaders and resulting in Guatemala’s long civil war. “What had been a revolutionary army became a counterinsurgency army,” said Pelaez, the historian.

Rios Montt stayed in the army, whose leadership joined the church in opposing substantial reform.

The church expanded rapidly, from 114 priests in 1945, the year the future bishop entered the seminary, to 346 when he was ordained 14 years later. By that time, most clerics in Guatemala were foreign missionaries sent by the Vatican to fortify the church against a perceived communist threat. Instead they brought new ideas to the local church.

Those included concepts from the Second Vatican Council convened in 1962, the roots of progressive principles that Bishop Rios Montt now talks about in explaining the church’s role in protecting human rights.

“The church is not for angels; it is for people,” he said. “There are those who would prefer that we do our work only inside the church. . . . But if no one else will do the work, then we must do it.”

But nearly two decades passed from the Second Vatican Council until the Guatemalan church took up the cause of human rights.

In the meantime, the army was becoming increasingly repressive. By then a general and director of the military academy that once rejected him, Efrain Rios Montt opposed the dictatorship of Carlos Arana Osorio and ran for president in 1974 against his handpicked candidate, who won amid accusations of fraud.

Rios Montt was forced into de facto exile as military attache in Madrid in 1974, after Cardinal Mario Casariego, the highest-ranking prelate in the country and a staunch anti-communist with close ties to the army, refused to help him. The same year, Rios Montt’s brother became a bishop.

When the general returned to Guatemala in 1977, a friend invited him to attend meetings of the California-based evangelical Church of the Word, an increasingly popular rival to the Catholic Church in a land that is now about one-third Protestant.

“He liked the practical way of incorporating religion into daily life,” said Francisco Bianchi, a church member who became one of the general’s closest advisors. The general converted.

Meanwhile, a group of young army officers were becoming discontented with the conduct of the civil war and the government. “There was a huge division between the high command and the people in the field,” said Mauricio Lopez Bonilla, then a second lieutenant. “The high command was anti-communist, but those of us out in the field could see that people were right to take up arms.”

The young officers staged a coup in 1982 and offered the presidency to the general. Lopez Bonilla remembers him as “the most skeptical person and the most difficult to persuade. . . . He would get this gleam in his eye, as if to say, ‘You’re going to tell me?’ ”

Despite his progressive reputation, the general developed a “rifles and beans” strategy that he was convinced would win the war. Soldiers killed or drove from their homes any civilians who could provide the guerrillas food, shelter or even a population to blend into. The government, meanwhile, offered an alternative: amnesty, model communities to replace villages the army had burned and civil patrols--which eventually numbered 1 million men--to protect the new towns.

In the cities, forced disappearances and death squad killings stopped. But in the countryside, the army undertook a scorched-earth policy that Rios Montt called his “scorched-communist” approach.

“Rios Montt was in no way the same man we knew in the electoral campaign of 1974,” said Victor Montejo, a teacher in rural Huehuetenango. “Here, in communities where he had once offered water, electricity, roads and schools, all he sent were soldiers, rabid dogs that destroyed entire communities.”

Report Detailed Massacre’s Scope

In 1982 alone, according to human rights reports, 18,167 people, many of them civilians, either were killed or disappeared and are assumed dead, nearly half the documented death toll of the civil war.

The magnitude of the massacres was not known at the time, partly because of censorship. The first thorough accounting was not presented until April 1998, when the Archbishop’s Office on Human Rights unveiled the report, titled “Never Again,” based on three years of interviews with war victims.

Significantly, when the general was in office, Cardinal Casariego made few public objections to the military policy. But as a church administrator, Bishop Rios Montt was silent at this time.

The cardinal and the general “were personal friends,” said Lopez Bonilla, who oversaw government relations with the church in this predominantly Catholic nation.

Still, religious conflicts were brewing. While the general had named an advisory group of army officers, the real power was held by the evangelical civilians Rios Montt brought with him from his church board, including Bianchi.

The inner circle began the day with a 7 a.m. prayer and seldom went home until 12 hours later. On Sundays, the president would deliver televised sermons. “It was a sterile effort at moralizing,” said Lopez Bonilla. “All he did was spoil our entire 1/8agenda 3/8 by scolding everyone.”

Sixteen months after the 1982 coup, the military high command removed Rios Montt from power. He remained in the military, still popular with younger officers but without an assignment, and he stayed involved in politics.

As he had a decade before, Casariego refused to support him. Lopez Bonilla said the bishop never intervened for his brother with the Catholic hierarchy.

In 1983, the same year Rios Montt was removed, Casariego died, leaving the church to a new generation of leaders, formed in the countryside and willing to speak out against abuses. Two years later the army, under increasing pressure to step aside, agreed to relinquish power to a civilian government.

The legacy of that period has left the church and the army--and the Rios Montt brothers--on opposite sides of the issue gripping Guatemala today: Is it time to finally tell the truth about the war?

Bishop Rios Montt says Gerardi was killed for telling the truth, beaten to death in the garage of the San Sebastian parish house two days after “Never Again” was published. Church officials and a source close to the investigation have said the evidence links the army to his murder.

The general, who refuses most interviews except with sympathetic U.S. television evangelists, has not commented publicly on the death of Gerardi.

Past Didn’t Prepare Him for Activist Role

Mourners were surprised when the archbishop named as Gerardi’s replacement Rios Montt, who had spent the previous decade as the Bishops’ Conference treasurer and before that as a priest in Esquintla and Santa Rosa, provinces nearly untouched by violence. “Msgr. Rios Montt is an administrator,” said Edgar Gutierrez, a human rights activist who once worked with him.

“I was not trained for this,” Rios Montt confessed to human rights workers recently. “The archbishop said, ‘Do you want to help me?’ and I said, ‘Of course. I don’t know how, but here I am.’ ”

Since then, the church’s accountant has become its lion for justice. He has called for restricting the size and influence of the armed forces and government intelligence agencies. “During more than 40 years of violence, the armed forces have invaded every strata of society,” the bishop said in a television interview.

“The history of Guatemala is a history of injustice and impunity,” he said. “The people who talk--the president, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the ministers--are not the ones who have the real power. The real power is behind the throne, at the highest levels of politics, business and the military.”

That is why Guatemalans believe that the general is on his way back to power, despite a constitutional amendment that forbids him from being president because he participated in a coup. His Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG), a populist party that has not taken a clear position on investigating war crimes, won a plurality in Congress during elections last month and 47% of the votes for president--more than any other party but not enough to avoid today’s runoff. Portillo, the FRG presidential candidate, faces the ruling National Advancement Party’s Oscar Berger in the election.

Rios Montt won a congressional seat in November’s balloting and is likely to become the chamber’s next president.

“He is the party,” said Pelaez. “He is the strongman.”

The general no longer preaches, even during church services. However, he did call a meeting of the FRG congressional delegation to warn them not to keep mistresses or hire pretty secretaries who might lead them into temptation.

“He believes in sticking to his principles, no matter who is involved,” said Carlos Velasquez, the general’s neighbor.

The general’s closest political allies are his wife, Tere, and his daughter, Zury, both members of Congress.

Whereas the general rarely talks with the media, the bishop accepts them as an ally in the church’s struggle to reveal the secrets of the war and Gerardi’s murder.

“Some people just want to forget things. But first, it can’t be done; and even if it could, that would not let us learn from experience,” he said. “We need to heal the wounds correctly in order to have a different destiny.”

But any move forward depends in part on the incoming government--one the bishop’s brother may well dominate. The church will continue to insist on justice, he said.

Solving Gerardi’s murder “would be the first sign that the government wants to do things well,” he said. But he is not hopeful that the change in administration will bring a change in attitude.

“I hope it will,” he said, “but I do not know whether it will be better or worse.”