Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service. First hand accounts

from the people who were there. I'm Mike Lanshin. Today we're going back to 1998 and the

killing of Guatemala's leading human rights campaigner Bishop Juan Gerardi. He was

bludgeoned to death just days after presenting a damning report into army abuses committed

during the country's 36-year civil war. I've been speaking to someone who knew the Bishop

well. It's April 1998 and inside the Cabinet's Cathedral of Guatemala City, mourners are filing

past the open coffin of Bishop Juan Gerardi. Suited politicians and diplomats line up alongside

religious leaders and indigenous Mayans in their brightly coloured traditional robes. Just a few

days earlier, many of these same people had crowded into the cathedral to hear Bishop Gerardi

present the conclusions of a major church investigation into wartime abuses.

The tall grey-haired Bishop told his audience that day that the truth about what had gone on in

the past had to be known and recognised so that it would not be repeated. Ronald Ochaeta worked

alongside Bishop Gerardi as head of the church's human rights office. He looked so satisfied. He

told us we have done something historic for the country and for the church. It's been very hard,

but we did it. It was a momentous achievement. The four volume report entitled Guatemala

Nunca Mass or Guatemala never again had been three years in the making. It concluded that the vast

majority of the estimated 50,000 civilians who died during the conflict had been killed by the army

and its paramilitary forces. It was an unprecedented indictment of the powerful military. Bishop Gerardi

was killed just two days after its publication. The 75-year-old Bishop had long been a thorn in

the army's side. In the 1970s at the start of the Civil War, his diocese in the northern province

of Qiché was the scene of violent confrontations between soldiers and left-wing rebels. His indigenous

Mayan parishioners were often accused of siding with the insurgents. Many were tortured and killed by

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