David Stoll's review of Julie Lopez' Bishop Gerardi: Death in God's Neighborhood

David Stoll has a recent book review of Julie Lopez' Bishop Gerardi: Death in God's Neighborhood. He favorably compares her investigation with those of the not so favorable Francisco Goldman and the pretty favorable Maite Rico and Bertrand de la Grange.

In Guatemala, the nagging question of ‘Who killed the bishop’ has become a mirror—or perhaps a political Rorschach test—for how one defines the challenge of law and order. Frank Goldman looks in the mirror and sees the “art of political murder.” In that case, Msgr. Gerardi was the victim of a superbly efficient army killing machine—and in that case Guatemala has not changed much from the darkest days of the 1980s.

For Maite Rico and Bertrand de la Grange, the mirror shows that Gerardi succumbed to a particular army faction’s skill in exploiting the private lives of Catholic clerics. This faction then fooled the human rights movement into withdrawing its support from a relatively responsible administration, one that was more or less committed to the peace accords, and implicitly giving its support to an administration that wrecked the peace accords.

For Julie López, finally, the assassination of Msgr. Gerardi is an x-ray into the bottomless intrigue of Guatemalan political life. But not an x-ray that tells us who killed him. Or why.

Not surprisingly, it is López who lives in Guatemala.

I was fascinated by Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? and still have a hard time no thinking that it was members of the Guatemalan military who orchestrated the Bishop's murder in order to punish him for the Catholic Church's human rights report and to prevent investigations from going any further.

Like many events in Guatemala, however, the true story of what happened that night in April 1998 remains murky. The evidence that the father-son Lima tandem carried out the murder is not as compelling as the evidence that they were implicated in the cover-up. We might never know what happened or why.

You can read Julie's description of her book here in this post from August 2013.