![]() ![]() We leave the office and find a table at a cafe a few blocks away, right across the street from the former presidential palace. “One of my co-workers came in and said the police were beginning to move,” she says, nonplussed. Walther was at her desk when the fighting broke out. Police surged into the crowd swinging batons. The vendors resisted, and soon a large crowd was shouting and throwing paving stones and chunks of concrete. Just yesterday there was full-blown riot just outside on the square, after a platoon of police officers moved in force to clear out dozens of illegal street vendors, some of whom were notorious for harassing young women and selling drugs. ![]() “There’s a different protest every day,” she says.Īnd sometimes a bit more. She laughs when I tell her about the demonstrators with their Che banner. I’m buzzed in and meet Walther in the light-filled inner courtyard. Gerardi’s killers were finally brought to justice after a three-year investigation rife with political interference, bribery, judicial corruption, death threats and violence. The murder was retaliation by high-ranking military officers for the bishop’s publication two days earlier of a 1,400 page report documenting the systematic torture and murder of as many as 200,000 civilians by a succession of right-wing dictatorships. In 1998, the founder of the office, Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, was beaten to death in the garage of the parish house about three blocks away. There’s no sign, just a pair of heavy wooden doors, an intercom and a video camera. I’m dropped at the curbside of the human rights office, known as ODHAG (pronounced “oh-dog”) for its name in Spanish, the Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala. Ten blocks from the cathedral my cab is detoured by a workers’ protest, where red-shirted demonstrators hoist a banner emblazoned with the familiar beret-wearing image of Che Guevara. Here, too, are signs of unrest: graffiti shouting “Viva Chavez” or “Justicicia por Genocidio,” and walls plastered with faded, photocopied pictures of the “disappeared” - men and women abducted and killed during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, officially ended by the signing of the 1996 peace accords. Armed guards stand outside most businesses, mixing with the multitudes of police and assault-weapon toting soldiers on the streets to give the whole town the feel of a low-grade military occupation.Īs the cab enters the old city, the broad avenues narrow into tight two-lane streets lined with colonial-era buildings in varying states of disrepair. But there’s an unfamiliar touch: By the door of each restaurant loiters a black-uniformed private guard, his face a sullen or bored mask, his hands cradling a pump-action shotgun. At a bus stop I spot an ad for an upcoming concert by the Jonas Brothers, the American teen pop idols.įamiliar fast-food restaurants abound: McDonald’s, Subway, Burger King. Gaudy billboards and advertisements are omnipresent, promising the good life, touting refrigerators and smart phones, soft drinks and new cars. The air outside the car window is a polluted beige, and the city pulses with frenetic commercial energy. It’s a chance to absorb the city one more time, which is not an appealing sight. It might be 25 minutes by car to the cathedral from my hotel when the roads are clear, but from the get-go my taxi hits a snarl of late morning traffic and it’s a steady crawl all the way. We are set to meet at the human rights office in the complex of the Metropolitan Cathedral, an imposing neoclassical structure of stone that looms over the Plaza de la Constitution in Guatemala City’s historic center. Her contemporaries are mostly climbing the corporate ladder, buying condos and starter homes, leading conventional lives. Not exactly the typical gig for a recent law school grad. It’s a low-paid, gritty endeavor made all the more dicey by the grind of living in one of the world’s most crime-ridden cities. On my trip I’ve seen up-close the decrepit and dangerous mental institution they are trying to reform and have witnessed the misery of the patients there. Walther and I are the same age, 33, and I’ve been in town for a few weeks learning about the work she and other rights workers are doing on behalf of the mentally ill and disabled in this choked metropolis. It’s my last day in Guatemala City, and I’m running late for a final meeting with Anna Walther ’08M.A., a staff attorney in the human rights office of the Archbishopric of Guatemala. ![]()
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