Paul KeenanA cycle of violence continues, writes Paul Keenan
On July 18 violence broke out at Guatemala’s notorious Pavon prison as rival drug gangs engaged in a deadly clash for reasons as yet unknown but predictably nefarious. The outbreak would claim 13 lives, a number of them by horrendous means, before police re-secured the prison many hours later. And though the authorities would not be immediately aware, the riot’s end also marked the closure of one of Guatemala’s darker historical chapters.
Although media attention would at first focus heavily on the bizarre revelation that a well-known Argentine model, Joanna Birriel, was among the dead, this news led quickly to the realisation that the man she had been visiting, Byron Lima Oliva, had also perished.
Recognised as one of two of the prison’s most powerful figures in the criminal pursuits of extortion and drugs running – uninterrupted in the ungovernable confines of Pavon – Oliva was, in a former life, a captain with the country’s armed forces, putting him at the centre of the latter stages of Guatemala’s painful civil conflict which raged from 1960 to 1996.
It was in this role that he was to become linked with the country’s most high-profile murder in the years of extra-judicial killings and forced disappearance.
Military regime
By the time Byron Lima Oliva entered the ranks of the Guatemalan army, following his own father, Colonel Byron Disrael Lima Estrada, into the service, the force was the undisputed arbiter of life and death in the central American nation.
Though well used to military dictatorships from the dawn of the military regime of Carlos Castillo Armas in 1954, by the 1970s varying military leaders were passing the torch of rule among themselves amid a leftist insurgency arising from a desire for land rights and justice for indigenous people and poverty-stricken workers.
By the 1980s, the military was in total command, and protected its place through the most violent means. History records that Guatemala was the first Central American country to utilise the means of forced disappearance by way of dealing with opponents while terrorising the wider population. By the end of the civil conflict, in addition to more than 200,000 dead, up to 50,000 people had been disappeared.
Into this milieu stepped the figure of Catholic Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera. A native of Guatemala City, as Bishop of Verapaz from 1967, Conedera built on his personal interest in the indigenous Mayan community of his region, a community especially hard hit by the military in their struggles for recognition and rights.
Events within Guatemala would not, of course, allow for the bishop’s narrow focus on this one community, and it was in 1980 that Bishop Conedera took a precarious step into wider realities. After an attack on the Spanish embassy left 39 people dead, the bishop spoke out forcefully on the breaches of human rights blighting the country.
The bold move would lead to numerous death threats but an undeterred Conedera continued on his path. In 1988, and now serving as Bishop of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, he was instrumental in the establishment of both the Human Rights Office of the Archbishop of Guatemala (ODHAG) and the Recovery of Historical Memory project (REMHI). Both arose from attempts on all sides at that time to engage in a negotiated peace for Guatemala.
Most significant of the twin initiatives, REMHI involved the marathon task of collating the testimonies of citizens from across the country in relation to the civil conflict and, most important of all, the identities where they could be established of those military personnel directly involved in human rights violations.
Within a decade, the work of REMHI would lead to a mammoth report, Nunca Más (Never Again), a vital tool in laying bare what Guatemala had endured under military rule. The report also offered over 1,000 names with alleged links to killings and disappearances.
Even in the post-conflict environment of 1998, however, such a move could not go unpunished by those unwilling to relinquish the measure of control they still held.
Two days after he presented Nunca Más to the UN-backed Historical Clarification Commission, Bishop Conedera was brutally attacked at his home and beaten to death in an incident the shook even hardened Guatemalans to the core. The bishop’s remains could be identified only by the episcopal ring he wore.
So shocking was the killing that it was to lead to the first conviction in a civilian court in Guatemala for a crime committed by military personnel.
Thus, in April 2001, for his part in the prelate’s killing, Captain Byron Lima Oliva faced a judge to be sentenced to a 30-year prison term alongside his father the colonel and Sergeant José Obdulio Villanueva. An accomplice in the killing, Conedera’s assistant, Fr Mario Orantes, received 20 years.
Though Villanueva would be himself murdered in a prison riot in 2003, both Limas would subsequently have their sentences reduced to 20 years, with Colonel Lima ultimately released for good behaviour in 2012.
Simultaneously insulting to the memory of Bishop Conedera and illustrative of the nation created by the corrupting years of military rule, Byron Lima Oliva was not bound by his prison confines (he apparently came and went at will) from flourishing in the criminal fraternities established by former military personnel – such as the ultra-violent MS-13 drugs gang, founded by a former soldier – and those made up of young Guatemalans made desperate and feral by their impoverished and unequal environment.
One example of the latter is Marvin Montiel Marín, whose journey through life in Guatemala saw him rise through the ranks of the cartels to ultimately receive an 826-year term in Pavon prison in 2008, thereby placing him in the path of Byron Lima Oliva on July 18. It was at his command that the ambush on the former army man was launched.
Sadly, any temptation to whisper of divine justice in this final bloody act is to miss a harsh reality in the tale. It is a tragedy that is Guatemala’s as a whole and arising directly from a desire by men like Captain Lima to silence figures like Bishop Conedera.
Ultimately, it is personified in figures like Marvin Montiel Marín, children of inequity and forced poverty who continue to make Guatemala the deadliest non-war zone on earth.