es withheld information about the body and refused to cooperate with the Presbyterian church and MINUGUA. (Amnesty International, 1996).One year earlier, Pascua Serech was murdered in August 1994. Serech was trying to end the civil patrols by the forced service and to end village youths being forced into the military. He was also trying to end the many human rights violations such as disappearances and extra judicial executions that the military had carried out in the area. Shortly after ordering the detention of those believed responsible for Serech’s death, the judge assigned to investigate the case was shot execution style. The detainees were then released. (Amnesty International, 1996).Bishop Juan Jos Gerardi was the Bishop of Guatemala and Coordinator of the Human Rights Office of the Archbishop of Guatemala. He was head of the public presentation of the Roman Catholic Church’s inter-diocesan Recuperation of the Historical Memory Project (REMHI) of April 1999. This project was designed to generate testimonies of the tens of thousand of extra judicial executions and “disappearances” suffered by civilians, the large majority of whom were indigenous people, during the civil conflict which encompassed Guatemala for over three decades. REMHI found the army responsible for approximately seventy per cent of the violations investigated. Two days after this presentation, unidentified assailants battered Bishop Gerardi to death as he returned home. The army denied any involvement in the murder and the government promised a full investigation. By the end of the year neither the circumstances nor the perpetrators of the killing had been established. Human rights activists believe that the government’s motive behind the killing was to warn individuals looking to identify perpetrators of past abuses. (Amnesty International, 1999).In May of 1999, Public prosecutor Silvia Jrez Romero de Herrera was killed...
