OPERATIONAL CHALLENGES: Setting the Basis for Accusation of Bias
With time, the two commissions gained trust from the public and began to receive
overflowing numbers of victims and witnesses to human rights crimes who wanted to tell their
stories. But the process was inevitably missing the essential other side of the conflict’s story: the
perspective of the perpetrators and commanders of these atrocities. Obviously, perpetrators do
not have the same inclination to speak out as do the victims (as long as their personal safety is
not threatened).
140
Moreover, perpetrators in El Salvador and Guatemala had no incentive of
amnesty to bring them to talk, as in the South African commission. As a consequence, the
numbers of perpetrators who gave testimony was extremely low compared to the numbers of
victims who came forward. Of those who did come forward to the CEH, many did not even feel
deep remorse for their acts. 141 Some felt like they had been unjustly dealt with by their superiors
in the security forces. They complained of not having received certain promised rewards. To
them, going forward to the CEH was a way of putting pressure on those individuals. 142
Unfortunately, the military would use this imbalance in testifiers to claim bias in the entire
report.
Similarly, the fact that the CEH did not have a comparable amount of evidence and
information from the earlier pre-1977 period as it had for the later period143 made this a
`discrepancy’ and ‘problematic inconsistency’ that the military later targeted as evidence of bias
in the CEH report. Few people came forward to speak about that earlier period because the
repression had been so successful in defeating organized political and opposition groups that the
few who survived had dispersed and ceased to be politically active.
144
Since the CEH often
gained access to victims through organized political and community groups, little information
came from those who were not involved. Even more important was the fact that during the
62earlier period very few human rights groups existed to document the atrocities. 145 It was the
significantly more developed civil society of the 1980s that was indispensable in monitoring and
documenting valuable information that the commission used to understand the extent of the
crimes and patterns of atrocities conducted throughout the later period.
146
Thus, the CEH had to
compensate for its lack of statistics on the pre-1977 period when it estimated the total death toll
from the conflict. The lack of data from before 1977 explains why the report’s analysis of the
conflict is weighted more towards the latter years. This emphasis is one feature that has allowed
the military to claim that the report was biased and under represented their perspective — the
ideological clash interpretation of the war. However, this imbalance of data sources did not
change the essential story told by the CEH147 — that of economic injustice and racist policy that is
essential to tell in order to address these ills. This is the story that is necessary in order to help
heal the pain perpetuated from the past through the present and, eventually, feel the resolution,
peace, and, eventually, reconciliation with society and the government.
Tags: data sources, government, society