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Monday, April 27, 1998 Published at 20:44 GMT 21:44 UK World: Americas Guatemalan bishop murdered Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera at a press conference a few days before his death
A leading Roman Catholic churchman in Guatemala has been killed in front on his house in the capital, Guatemala City.
Bishop Juan Gerardi,
75, an outspoken human rights activist, is reported to have been beaten to death by unidentified assailants late on Sunday.
Police investigators blanketed the area early Monday searching
for clues to the murder.
Observers said the killing may be in retaliation for a report
Gerardi compiled on human rights abuses and the human cost of
Guatemala's 36-year-long civil war.
The human rights report, released last week by church officials,
said that some 150,000 people in this country of 10 million were killed in the conflict, one of the longest and most brutal in the
Americas.
Some 50,000 more are still missing, according to the report, and
an estimated one million people were displaced by the violence,
either leaving the country or hiding in the countryside.
Also, some 200,000 children were orphaned and 40,000 women were
widowed.
The report, three years in the making and the first of its kind
in Guatemala, was delivered during a mass at the main cathedral to government representatives and members of indigenous groups.
Guetamala is an impoverished, mostly indigenous Central American nation of
10 million people has one of the most abysmal human rights records in the
hemisphere.
Death squads still active
One prominent human rights activist who declined to give his
name said that the murder was "a clear message" that death squads
"continue to operate in the country and do not want the truth to be
known."
In the 1980s Gerardi was bishop of the archdiocese of Quiche, in
northern Guatemala, where some of the worst human rights abuses by
the army took place.
Gerardi made many enemies in military and right-wing circles for
his constant criticism of human rights abuses by authorities.
On Thursday the current Bishop of Quiche, Julio Cabrera, warned
that releasing the human rights report could lead to revenge
killings.
A Vatican
spokesman, Father Pedro Freites,
expressed shock over the murder of the Bishop,
who he described as one of the new martyrs of the Latin American Catholic
Church.
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