COOPERATION FROM CIVIL SOCIETY
TC staff and commissioners interviewed employees of NGOs, church leaders, media
representatives, and community leaders. 126 The TC collected 2,000 testimonies relating to 7,000
victims in its own truth-finding work, while secondary sources provided information on 20,000
more victims from the conflict years. Despite having courageously assisted the population
during the years of the conflict, the level of involvement of local Salvadoran human rights
organizations in the post-conflict period and the quality of their help to supplement the work of
the TC was disappointing.
127
As truth commissioner Beurgenthal explained,
The gradual perversion of governmental authority by the military, with the
willing or unwitting collaboration of civilian authorities, and the military’s total
immunity for its acts, however criminal, was the cancer that invaded the fabric
57of Salvadoran civil society and eroded its ability to protect itself against this evil
disease. 128
International NGOs that had monitored and prepared human rights reports on general patterns or
specific cases did provide helpful information to orient, at least, the outsider commission to the
real situation inside the country (even though they could not be included in the report).
In contrast to Salvadoran civil society’s very limited level of cooperation and participation in
the UN truth commission’s work, Guatemalan civil society was constantly involved.
Guatemalan NGOs and community organizations maintained active communication with the
CEH, giving the commission feedback, connecting the CEH to communities with whom they
already had long-term relationships, helping with technical and logistical assistance, and
supplementing the CEH work with their own records and case investigations. Much of the
CEH’s success is owed to the contacts and dedicated work of civil society, emerging in the
1980s and taking on an active role in Guatemalan public life through the 1990s and today.
The CEH was fortunate to have outside assistance and support from three particularly notable
civil society sources. They provided the CEH with invaluable information that jump-started their
own process and which the CEH could include in its report. Teams of forensic anthropologists
in Guatemala, including the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team (now Foundation:
E/FAFG) which had been working since 1991, provided methodical, scientific evidence
regarding the nature of deaths and massacres that they had collected from exhumations of mass
graves that disproved military denials of responsibility. 129 They have continued their work and
as of March 2004, have exhumed 335 clandestine graves with a total of 1,600 individual cases. 13°
They have continued to exhume despite death threats over the years because they believe in their
responsibility to help uncover the truth of violence, case by case, and preserve and record
58evidence for future justice in the courts. The resolution that the exhumations bring to the
families as they recover their loved ones is a sense of restorative justice.
A second source of information came from a coalition of human rights groups who worked
with the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) — the group that trained
the EAFG — to construct a database of violations that held record of some 37,000 killings by the
time the CEH began work. 131 The AAAS provided the CEH with technical assistance and help
in the post-publication dissemination of its report as well. It maintains the principal website for
the CEH report, offering online access to versions of the report in English and Spanish.
Additionally, they sell a complete volume set in Spanish on CD-ROM at a modest price.
The Archdiocese of Guatemala provided a third outside source of rich information for the
CEH. 132 At the time of the 1994 peace agreement to create the CEH, the Archdiocese of
Guatemala concerned about various limiting aspects of the CEH’s mandate, began the Recovery
of Historical Memory Project (RecuperaciOn de la Memoria Hist&lea, REMHI). 133 It was
essentially an unofficial truth commission. In this way, REMHI was not restricted to an
unrealistically short investigation period, was not prohibited from naming names of perpetrators
in its final report, and could afford to take the time to reach more extensively and deeply into
certain rural villages of Guatemala, with whom the CEH never had contact. Pooling all of these
databases plus the information that CEH was able to collect over its year-long investigation
period was what made it possible for the CEH to make a scientific estimation of the number of
people killed in Guatemalan conflict: 200,000. 134 The REMHI project and report was directly
responsible for helping ensure that the CEH’s explanation and characterization of the truth of
Guatemala’s civil conflict was comprehensive and powerful. Implicit is its responsibility to
59achieve eventually some level of reconciliation as a long-term consequence of both truth
commission reports