T A B L E++T A L K

Have the Teletubbies invaded your home? Share your feelings on these British imports in the Mothers area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Raging hormones
By Polly Shulman
Honest, respectful books that tell kids what they really want to know about sex
(05/13/98)

Les birds et les bees
By Debra S. Ollivier
When it comes to teaching their toddlers about sex, they really do do things differently in France
(05/12/98)

The single-mom scam
By Douglas Cruickshank
"About a Boy" with a yen for single moms
(05/11/98)

Heedless Love
By Barbara Jones
Why parenting doesn't start at conception
(05/08/98)

Kidnapped
By Peter Kurth
My sister's little girls were stolen 19 years ago by her ex-husband. So why is the media putting her on trial?
(05/07/98)

BROWSE THE SECOND THOUGHTS ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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______Death comes for the bishop

Does the murder of a leading Guatemalan human rights activist no longer qualify as news in the United States?
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BY SALLIE TISDALE | On our first day back in Guatemala after many years, we drove about the city with friends. Guatemala City is a crowded, kaleidoscopic place of dusty shop windows, neon, street vendors, hustlers, hurrying shoppers and a continual stream of blaring traffic. It is familiar and oddly foreign -- taxing and exciting, a city crammed with people on one kind of move or another.

As we drove along one of the main avenues, my 14-year-old daughter pointed at a big, pock-marked ochre building. "Police headquarters," said Maralise. The polka dots, she explained, were bullet holes. Julio was born in Guatemala and was once the country's geographer; Maralise is American. They've been married for a dozen years; they met when Julio was in exile from Guatemala, for fear of his life. She looked straight ahead, through the windshield of their tiny, battered car as we drove past. "That's where some of the torture took place."

We had returned to Guatemala because that is where our daughter and one of our sons was born, Mayan children orphaned by war -- a war that ended only in December 1996, when a long-negotiated peace accord between the left-wing insurgents and the government was signed. For many years, Julio and Maralise had helped to make that happen; now they work to see the 188 "commitments" of the accords come to fruition.

For many days we traveled through the highlands, meeting people, going to markets. We had a wonderful time. After warnings both mild and dire -- warnings about kidnapping, robbery, random crime of all kinds -- we were met with courtesy and kindness everywhere we went. (The only rude people I saw were a few Americans looking to cash in on a good exchange rate.)

Guatemala is an emerging, and re-emerging world. A decade ago we had traveled -- naive about the politics, preoccupied with adoption -- into the strange quiet of terror. The streets in the city and the smaller towns nearby were nearly empty, silent, with few cars. The few Mayans out in public often avoided signs of ethnic identity. Young soldiers -- terribly young, boyish soldiers -- stood on street corners in camouflage, holding submachine guns, watching passersby.

This time we traveled busy roads on full buses, visited crammed markets, saw everywhere Mayans in their traditional dress, openly speaking their own languages. My daughter was able to see not only the town in which she'd been born, but the cultural world in which she belonged by that birth -- a rich, ancient, changing world.

In late April, while we were still in Xela in the western highlands, we saw in the newspaper that Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi was releasing his long-anticipated report about human rights abuses during the war. That war killed my children's birth parents -- by unknown "disappearance," by breakdown and poverty and fear. One man who helped on the project explained to the reporter, "The dead are not gone. Their bones are still there in the fields ... If we don't write this story, if we don't tell this story, our children will grow up not knowing."

Gerardi had been a parish priest, then Bishop of Verapaz, then bishop of the province of Quiche, where many of the worst war crimes were committed, including hundreds of massacres of entire Mayan villages. A number of the priests he supervised were assassinated and he was threatened many times; finally, he closed the diocese. In the early 1980s, Gerardi was blocked from reentering Guatemala after a trip and lived in exile for two years. On his return, he founded the Roman Catholic Archdiocese's human rights office in Guatemala City.

Even before the accords were signed, Gerardi began what he called "The Recovery of the Historic Memory Project." Part of the peace accords is a call for formal historical "clarification" of the war. But that official process will be a slow one, and the accords don't mandate naming names. Gerardi and his staff traveled into the country, finding trusted community members and teaching them to take testimony. The project lasted three years and ended with testimony on many thousands of different atrocities arranged into a 1,000-page report. The final four-volume set was called "Nunca Mas" -- never again.

N E X T+P A G E: Murder at home