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Writing Guatemala's genocide: truth and reconciliation commission reports and Christianity

The truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) now produces an established genre of human rights literature: the TRC report (Hayner, 1994). Functioning as machines of documentation, these commissions collect, analyze, edit, and publish extraordinary amounts of data that form seemingly comprehensive histories of human rights abuses. This essay examines how truth and reconciliation commissions, in particular, write histories of genocide. Given the similarities that exist between anthropological research and TRC methods, exciting approaches could draw on how anthropology itself “yields systems from chaos” (Taussig, 1987, p xiv) through objectivity (Rosaldo, 1989), science (ScheperHughes, 1986), generalizations (Abu Lughod, 1991), interview-based research (Dwyer, 1982), notions of truth (Tyler, 1986), and colonial relationships (Asad, 1973). This exploratory essay, however, takes a road less traveled, by examining how Christian concepts, rhetoric, and images give shape to representations of genocide within TRC reports, including those that are ostensibly secular as well as explicitly faith-based. This investigation grows out of a close textual analysis of two TRC reports. Both address Guatemala’s civil war (ca. 1960–1996), a genocidal conflict that placed the country’s indigenous population between a militarized government and counterinsurgent guerilla forces for over 35 years (Stoll, 1993). At the height of the conflict (ca. 1978–1982), an estimated seventy thousand indigenous people were killed, forty thousand were disappeared, and over one million were displaced out of the country’s total population of eight million (Nelson, 1999, p 9). The first report, entitled Guatemala, Never Again (REMHI, 1998), is the end product of the Roman Catholic Church’s Recovery of the Historical Memory Project. The title of the second report is A Memory of Silence (CEH, 1999) and is the culmination of the United Nations’ Historical Clarification Commission. Journal of Genocide Research (2005), 7(3), September, 331–349