Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

Seeking accountability for crimes of the past was its own high-wire act. The terms of the peace accords did not explicitly address the question of justice or recompense, but two major research projects had begun as part of the broader, postwar reconciliation. One was an international body created by the United Nations called the Commission for Historical Clarification. A staff of three hundred people spent two years conducting thousands of closed-door interviews, reviewing government documents, and reconstructing information on the atrocities of the war years. The commission would go on to publish a twelve-volume account that supplied some of the most definitive facts of the conflict: 200,000 civilians had been killed; there were 669 massacres; 83 percent of the victims were Maya; 93 percent of the crimes committed during the war years involved members of the military. For Helen Mack and others, however, the effort was tarnished by one principal shortcoming. The UN commission could not name individual people or military units or assign blame for any of the documented murders. None of the testimony could be used for future prosecutions in court. A