Such questions influenced the creation of the Reconstruction of Historical Memory

Project in Guatemala (REMHI), set up in March, 1995, during the final stages of the
Guatemalan civil war as part of the process of social reconstruction. REMHIsought to
find a way to promote the health of the war's victims without medicalising their suffering
or labeling them as "sick". The project's ultimate aim was to allow the victims
themselves to describe the impact of the violence suffered by the civilians over 36 years
of civil war.
By 1998, REMHI had collected 5180 testimonies from victims or witnesses of human
rights violations, including massacre, torture, assassination, rape, or forced
displacement to the mountains.[1] Although 15 years or more had passed since these
events, many survivors spoke for the first time of their suffering. The testimonies were
recorded by 600 trained interviewers from the witnesses' own communities. A team of
mental-health professionals provided long-term social and psychological support.
The design of the REMHI questionnaire and coding of responses was difficult from the
start. The use of such legally based categories as "torture" and "summary execution" do
not express the horror of the Guatemalan experience. How can one classify a public
ceremony, perpetrated by the army, in which all local citizens were forced to take turns
striking a victim's head with a stick until they died?[2] We assessed several tape-
recorded testimonies to create our own categories for analysis. We excluded clinical
diagnoses such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder and focused instead on
self-reported feelings, symptoms, and family or social difficulties. Our questions ranged
from: What happened? When and where? Why? Who did it? What effects did this event
have? How did the witness respond? What can be done to prevent such events in the
future?

We focused on how the victims coped with providing testimonies. Since clinical and
epidemiological investigations tend to pathologise human experiences, REMHI's design
was guided by the belief that effective health programmes for survivors must try to
reinforce the individuals own efforts at self-help.[3]
Conventional human rights analytic categories were also rendered difficult by local
cultural norms. In Guatemala, the expression of anger was limited by fear of reprisals
within the community. Mayan customs mean that witnesses did not identify physical and
psychological suffering as separate, but spoke simply of "falling ill" as a consequence of
the violence. An important issue that emerged was the distress expressed by the
relatives of people who had disappeared, because they were not able to grieve properly
or discover the fate of their relatives. In Mayan culture, the dead are made present daily
in the community by means of rites and ceremonies, practices that were suppressed
during the war. Victims' testimonies, however, revealed many clandestine cemeteries and
mobilised the families of the dead to press for exhumations and proper burials.
On April 26, 1998, 3 days after the publication of the REMHI report, REMHI's Coordinator,
Monsignor Juan Gerardi, was assassinated in Guatemala City. His assassination
reinforced the conviction that human rights investigations must be tied practically to the
process of reconstruction. The victims' recovery of the right to express their horror, and
the linkage of testimony-taking with psychological support and the collective
reconstruction of memory are essential to social reconstruction after war.[4] REMHI gave
victims the impetus to use their own resources to confront violence, and showed the
value of this approach for other health projects.