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_WORLD WATCH______________________________
________________Guatemala_______________
Wild start to murder trial
Slain bishop had been warned
The home of a Guatemalan judge was attacked with a bomb on March 21, on the eve of a trial for five people accused of murdering a bishop in 1998.
Judge Yasmin Barrios said attackers threw two grenades into her home as she ate dinner with her mother and sister. No one was hurt, but the home was seriously damaged. Barrios, one of three judges hearing the case, had previously been threatened at least twice since she was assigned to the case of the murder of Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi Conedera.
Bishop Gerardi was bludgeoned to death at his home on April 26, 1998, two days after releasing a report that blamed most of the 200,000 deaths in Guatemala’s 36-year civil war on the army and its paramilitary supporters. Five other prosecutors and judges have recused themselves from the three-year-long investigation after receiving anonymous threats.
Four men and a woman have been charged in the crime, including the bishop’s housekeeper, a priest who lived with him, and three military officers.
The three soldiers asked Bishop Mario Rios Mont to hear their confessions on the day before the trial was to begin. “By performing this blessed sacrament, we can open our hearts and souls to him,” said the suspects, in a letter mailed to the bishop’s office; they also proclaimed their innocence of the murder charges. “I’m not the judge in the case,” Bishop Rios Mont told a radio station after receiving the letter. “I don’t know why they’re asking me.”
The trial was unexpectedly delayed when one defendant failed to show up for the opening session, and another caused a ruckus in the courtroom. Presiding Judge Eduardo Cojulum postponed the long-awaited trial for one day after sending a doctor to examine retired Col. Disrael Lima, a defendant who did not appear in court, reportedly because of heart problems. Capt. Byron Lima, another defendant and Disrael’s son, yelled out in court: “Wake up soldiers, we have a common enemy.” The younger Lima has contended that soldiers cannot receive a fair trial in a civilian court.
When the trial finally began, prosecutors made the claim that Col. Lima, a former military intelligence chief, had ordered the killing because he was afraid Bishop Gerardi would testify against him in the future. And a key witness reported that the bishop had been warned that the Guatemalan army wanted him dead.
Edgar Gutierrez, a former human-rights leader who now works for the Guatemalan military, said Bishop Gerardi had been warned by a military official from El Salvador that the Guatemalan army had marked him for death. Gutierrez informed the court that Bishop Gerardi had received the Salvadoran official’s warning while he was waiting for a flight back to Guatemala from Vatican City in 1980. “In the El Salvador airport, one of the members of the military junta that was in charge said to Gerardi that he shouldn’t return to Guatemala because the army would kill him,” Gutierrez said. At the time Bishop Gerardi was serving in the Mayan state of Quiche—the same area where Disrael Lima commanded a military base.