The assassination of Bishop Juan Gerardi is a wake-up call to Washington and to the United Nations Mission to Guatemala (MINUGUA), which has been dismissing the ongoing killings in Guatemala as "common crimes." On the contrary, they are the legacy of crimes against humanity for which the Guatemalan military and its allies have yet to be called to account. PNS editor Andrew Reding directs the North America Project of the World Policy Institute.

The brutal murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi is a sign of something very wrong in Guatemala. A year and a half after the signing of a peace accord between the government and guerrillas, Central America's most populous country remains one of the most violent places in the hemisphere, on a par with civil-war torn Colombia. Worse yet, the causes of criminality are being covered over by a conspiracy of silence. No one dares say the obvious: that what is passing for common crime is in fact the legacy of genocide.

The days before his death, Bishop Juan Gerardi indirectly blew the cover off the conspiracy. In a ceremony in the Guatemala City Cathedral, he released a 1400-page report prepared by the Archbishop's Human Rights Office, which he headed. Entitled "Guatemala: Never Again," it documents the most staggering instance of genocide in the western hemisphere in the twentieth century. Some 200,000 Guatemalans, most of them indigenous Mayans, were slaughtered. At least 80 percent were killed by the army and its allies. Paramilitary death squads eliminated an entire generation of political and grassroots leaders. The army itself wiped out hundreds of rural villages, massacring the inhabitants.

This was an American Rwanda, motivated not just by Cold War anti-communism, but by ethnic hatred. Though Guatemala has a majority Maya population, it is governed by a small but privileged white elite that fears the implications of democracy. Those fears have made Guatemala's generals more ruthless and murderous than any of their Latin American counterparts. And the fact that the vast majority of victims were Mayan has made it even more difficult to bring an end to impunity.

To keep insurgencies at bay in the 1970s and 1980s, the army organized a vast terror network of spies, death squads, and civil patrols, that, at its peak, encompassed well over half a million men in a country of just over 10 million inhabitants. Though the network has since been demobilized, former members are continuing to exercise the skills they were taught, including kidnapping, torture, and murder for personal gain and to prevent the justice system from prosecuting them for past and present crimes.

Instilled by an ideology that dehumanized those who differed from the norms espoused by the military and by "decent" society, remnants of these forces have recently turned to other forms of social cleansing. Homeless children, despised by the population because of their reliance on petty theft and prostitution, are prime targets. So are homosexual men. In this atmosphere of ethnic and social hatred, the very concept of human rights is subversive.

As Guatemala's most prominent human rights advocate, Bishop Juan Gerardi has long been a nemesis to the army and its right-wing allies. After he denounced massacres in the northern department of Quiche in the late 1970s, the army killed three of his priests. Gerardi fled to the Vatican. When he returned, the government detained him at the airport and forced him into exile in Costa Rica. Following the election of a civilian president, he returned to Guatemala City.

Yet with the release of "Never Again," Bishop Gerardi crossed the line once more. An intruder beat the 75-year-old prelate so savagely that he could only be recognized by his Episcopal ring. Using the psychology of the death squads, the assassin left a graphic warning that truth has deadly consequences in a country where mass murderers continue to kill with impunity.

This assassination is a wake-up call to Washington and to the United Nations Mission to Guatemala (MINUGUA), which have been dismissing the ongoing killings as common crimes. On the contrary, they are the legacy of crimes against humanity. Until the Guatemalan military and its allies are called to account for that legacy, it will continue to sow violence and undermine democracy.