The Art of Political Murder (11 page)

The ODHA office was in a Spanish colonial building nearly two centuries old in the Metropolitan Cathedral complex, two blocks from the headquarters of the Presidential Guard and four blocks from the church of San Sebastián. Its massive double wooden doors—they looked more like the gates to a medieval castle—opened onto a courtyard paved with rough gray stones where vehicles were parked. Visitors buzzed an intercom in the blackened stone frame of the entrance and, once admitted through a small door set in one of the larger ones, stepped into a vestibule where a receptionist sat behind bulletproof glass. An open corridor with a red-tiled roof ran around an interior courtyard, with offices, workrooms, and storage areas opening onto it.

On my first visits to ODHA I met with Ronalth Ochaeta, who was friendly enough and reasonably forthcoming, but careful. He phrased his answers to my questions as if he expected to see them
printed in a newspaper the next day. He did, however, let me hang around a bit, and one day he introduced me to Fernando Penados, who was in charge of the murder investigation and was obviously the key person for me to talk to. But Fernando came off as intimidating and hermetic, and he rebuffed my first attempts to interview him. I got around that with the help of Cecilia Olmos, who fed me morsels of information from MINUGUA that I could drop. This went on for a while, until Fernando finally, he told me later, said to some of his colleagues, “How has that
pisado
—asshole—found out so much?” Which led to what would become many, many conversations.

Ronalth Ochaeta (front right), carrying the coffin of Bishop Gerardi

Fernando Penados's tough-guy air seemed at odds with his upbringing as a possible prince of the Church, although it was leavened by a good-natured charm. There was also, I eventually realized, an impressionable side to Fernando—a touch of immaturity and romantic or overheated imagination—but he was
hardly a naïf. He told me that during the discussions between ODHA and the Church about forming an independent team to investigate the bishop's murder, he had proposed two options. “One, we can form a team that will be able to conduct a real criminal investigation,” he had said. “People with incredible experience in investigating cases, but who, because of their past, have their vulnerable points. If we pay them well, these people will find the person who came out of the garage without a shirt. Or, two, we can form an ODHA type of team, with clean, trustworthy people. People who don't have experience in criminal investigations.” The Church authorities, said Fernando, “in the very logical and wise explanations that they gave me,” decided, of course, that they couldn't pay the sort of people he was talking about. “They said, ‘We'll have an ODHA-type team just to document the case.'”

ODHA supported many groups—REMHI, people working on legal and educational projects and on mental health programs for victims of the war's violence, exhumation teams—and the legal office under which Fernando's investigators worked had the smallest budget of any of them. His team, which had only four members, was called, half jokingly, Los Intocables, the Untouchables, which accurately evoked their youthful spirit of adventure while poking some ironic fun at their ambitions. Two of the Untouchables, Arturo Aguilar and Arturo Rodas, were physically large young men. Aguilar was a law student at Rafael Landívar University, a Jesuit school. He was only twenty and still lived at home with his parents, but he'd been doing volunteer work at ODHA since his adolescence. During a year as a high school exchange student in Madison, Wisconsin, he'd joined the football team, where he played center. Arturo Rodas was a childhood friend of Fernando's who was working as the manager of a gas plant in Quezaltenango when Fernando contacted him. His nickname, inspired by his girth and pharaonic features, was El Califa. He was conservative in appearance, while the other Arturo, “El Gordo” Aguilar, was a devotee
of indie rock and the writings of Charles Bukowski and wore an earring, close-cropped hair, and baggy grunge attire. They made a comical sight sitting side by side in the front seat of OHDA's old Suzuki Samurai mini-jeep, like a pair of Babar the Elephant detectives.

The Untouchables' fourth member, Rodrigo Salvadó, was a tall, thin twenty-two-year-old anthropology student who had been working with REMHI's exhumation team one day when Fernando was leaving the ODHA courtyard in a jeep, on his way to the morgue, and realized he didn't have any cigarettes. He would need to smoke at the morgue, because of the stench, and when he spotted Rodrigo smoking in the courtyard, he leaned out the window and asked if he wanted to join his team, and if so to get in the car. Rodrigo was handsome, with a long black ponytail, and the others had nicknamed him El Shakira, after the famous Colombian singer who was at the time raven-haired. The son of academic
parents with leftist affiliations in the 1970s and 1980s, Rodrigo had lived on the run with his mother when he was a boy, continually changing houses in the political underground and in exile over the border in Chiapas and Mexico City before returning to Guatemala. Many of his parents' relatives and friends were killed or had “disappeared.” Rodrigo was a remarkably unflappable and easygoing young man with a quiet, quick wit.

The ODHA lawyer Mario Domingo, with two Untouchables, Rodrigo Salvadó and Arturo Aguilar

Fernando had in the beginning perceived the mission of the Untouchables as collecting information that could be used to assess the claims of the prosecutors and the police, who had shown themselves to be more than reluctant to seriously investigate or follow up any lead that might implicate the Army, or to advance the scenario that Bishop Gerardi's murder had a political motive. But before long Fernando, along with ODHA's legal team, realized that instead of playing a merely defensive role, they might be able to make a case against the true killers. A lot of information flowed through ODHA. People who had something to say about the Gerardi case, whether their motives were sincere or mendacious, their information helpful, mistaken, or designed to mislead, seemed to contact the Church before contacting anyone else.

Investigating Bishop Gerardi's murder quickly became an obsession and a way of life for the Untouchables, but one that merged with their usual lives—essentially those of young, unmarried, middle-class men who were far from puritanical or pious. After work nearly every day they would gather in a bar or nightspot, huddled together at a table over beers, eternally talking, it seemed, about the case, while, on occasion, young women made caustic comments over their shoulders before moving off in search of more attentive companions. “You go to bed thinking about this case,” Fernando once told me. “And at night you dream about it. And when you wake up in the morning, you're still thinking about it.”

T
HE TRAIL OF EVIDENCE
that ODHA's investigators and lawyers would follow began on April 28, the day before Bishop Gerardi's
funeral, as a crowd of 20,000 people marched through the streets of Guatelmala City in protest against the murder. That afternoon, Mynor Melgar, who had recently joined ODHA as coordinator of its legal team, replacing the less experienced Nery Rodenas, after having served in the Public Ministry for most of the 1990s, was summoned to the office of the chancellor of the Curia. Melgar, a dark-skinned, broad-shouldered man with black hair combed straight back, large languid eyes, and a mustache, had a quiet, confident, seen-it-all affability. Though still in his early thirties, he was renowned as a prosecutor of human rights cases. He had been the special prosecutor in the Myrna Mack murder case, winning an unprecedented thirty-year conviction against Noél Beteta, the EMP operative who had stabbed the young anthropologist to death. In another unprecedented case, he'd won a murder conviction against Ricardo Ortega, a violent young carjacker protected by military officers who ran a car-theft ring.

Waiting in the chancellor's office that day was the parish priest from the church of El Carmelo, in a working-class barrio in Zone 7. His name was Gabriel Quiróz, and he was obviously frightened and distressed. Father Quiróz told Melgar that as he was dressing to assist in the funeral ceremonies at the cathedral that morning, a man had come to see him. The man, who seemed nervous, said that he was a taxi driver and that on April 26 he'd been working the night shift. Sometime after ten—he wasn't sure of the exact time—he'd driven past the church of San Sebastián and had seen a white Toyota Corolla parked nearby. Several men were gathered around the Toyota, including a man who was naked from the waist up. The Toyota's license-plate number had four digits—the kind of number, the taxi driver knew, that was usually assigned to police cars or other official vehicles. The taxi driver thought a bust of some kind was going on, but the next day, when the murder of Bishop Gerardi was all over the news, he realized that he must have seen the shirtless man whom witnesses had described to the police. He had come to Father Quiróz because he didn't know what to do.

Father Quiróz didn't know the taxi driver's name, nor did he recall ever having seen the man before. Maybe the taxi driver hadn't given his name, or the priest, startled and himself frightened by the visit, hadn't registered it. The taxi driver was light-skinned, with a mustache, a bit overweight, said the priest, and he apologized, because that was all he could remember. But he had the slip of paper on which the taxi driver had written the number of the license plate, and he handed it to Melgar, who unfolded it and read the hurried scrawl: P-3201. The priest told Mynor Melgar that when he walked the taxi driver to the door, he saw a white taxi waiting outside, with at least one other man inside it.

Melgar passed the piece of paper to Ronalth Ochaeta, who gave the number to the interior minister the next day, asking that it be checked out.

“Why does a person passing in a taxi memorize a license-plate number?” Fernando Penados asked, rhetorically, one day in early September, after I'd been in Guatemala for two weeks. “First, the hour. And second, because this person is no tame dove. The taxi driver notices these things because he has his past.” Fernando said that the taxi driver told the priest that he had once been arrested on a drug charge. Someone with that kind of experience tends to notice the same things that a good policeman does. If that sort of person sees a group of men and another man wearing no shirt standing by a car—indeed, the kind of car undercover policemen frequently use—on a dark street late at night, that person will memorize a license-plate number.

Four months after first learning of license-plate number P-3201, ODHA was still hunting for the taxi driver, hoping that he was not already dead. The taxi driver was the mystery witness Andy Kaufman's friend had mentioned.

O
TTO
A
RDÓN
was appointed special prosecutor in the case. ODHA was granted co-plaintiff status, as legal representatives of Bishop Gerardi's family and the Church. Thus ODHA was, theoretically,
a partner of the prosecution. But what ODHA soon discovered about Ardón's past did not inspire confidence. Until recently he had been a lawyer for the Guatemalan Air Force, and he was related to military officers. In 1996, when he was on a team prosecuting soldiers accused of massacring over 300 civilians, he was removed from the case after relatives of the victims complained that he blatantly favored the defense. (Mynor Melgar had eventually taken over as prosecutor of that case.) Indeed, many people began to suspect that Bishop Gerardi's murder had occurred on the date it did because those who planned the crime knew that the investigation would fall to Ardón. He had only two assistant prosecutors working under him on the Gerardi case, including Gustavo Soria. By contrast, a case involving corruption and contraband rackets had twenty investigators assigned to it.

Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván, the two indigents who were taken into custody the night of the murder, had given conflicting descriptions of the shirtless man, which resulted in quite different composite sketches of the “suspect.” Nevertheless, the sketches had been widely published in the Guatemalan press as the face of Bishop Gerardi's murderer. Chanax's and El Chino Iván's perusal of mug shots led to the arrest, three days after the murder, of Carlos Vielman, a young, alcoholic, sometime indigent. At the police lineup in which Vielman was presented to the witnesses, hidden in a row of other young men, Chanax said that the man without a shirt was not among them, but El Chino Iván positively identified Vielman as the man he had sold cigarettes to that night. Vielman was much shorter than the man both witnesses had earlier described, and he had tousled curly hair. One side of his face was grotesquely swollen from a dental infection. He seemed nearly retarded and had been imprisoned in the past, most recently for public drunkenness, though for only about five days. He had been released from jail less than a week earlier, and had celebrated by embarking on a drinking binge that lasted up to the moment of his arrest.