The Art of Political Murder (2 page)

On Friday, April 24,
Guatemala: Never Again
was formally presented in the cathedral. The cavernous house of worship—an austerely sturdy, earthquake-scarred, 150-year-old neoclassical edifice—was packed with diplomats, politicians, members of nongovernmental organizations, former guerrillas, journalists, human rights activists, and others. The only body not represented that it would seem should have been was the government of the president of Guatemala, Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen.

Television screens were installed in the two aisles off the nave of the cathedral so that the people sitting and standing there could watch the ceremony at the altar. Despite the gravity of the
report, the mood was quietly jubilant. To many it seemed as if Guatemala really was on the verge of a new era. Only twelve days earlier President Arzú had announced on national television that the country had been removed from the UN Human Rights Commission's list of the world's worst human rights violators, a status it had held for nineteen years and which had led to UN sanctions, intrusive observer missions, and periodic suspensions by the U.S. Congress of military aid (although covert and other forms of military assistance, through the CIA and surrogate nations such as Taiwan and Israel—which, for example, built the Guatemalan Army an ammunitions factory—had continued).

Along with the peace accords, the end of Guatemala's position as a pariah state cleared the way for renewed foreign aid and assistance. And now the Church, through REMHI, was initiating a truthful accounting of the past—an accounting that, Bishop Gerardi had stressed on many occasions, was crucial for repairing the country's shredded social fabric and for ensuring that human rights abuses would no longer be protected by an official culture of silence and lies or by a legal system that effectively gave certain institutions and sectors of society carte blanche to commit crimes.

In the cathedral that evening, bishops from every diocese that had been involved in REMHI were assembled at the altar. (Only one of twelve dioceses had declined to participate.) A Lutheran pastor was also invited to speak. “When we began this task, we were interested in learning, in order to share, the truth,” Bishop Gerardi said in his speech, “to reconstruct the history of suffering and death, discover the motives, understand the how and why. Portray the human drama, share the pain, the anguish of thousands of dead, disappeared, and tortured…. The REMHI project has been a door thrown open so that people can breathe and speak in liberty, and for the creation of communities of hope. Peace is possible, a peace that arises from the truth for each and every one of us.”

After the ceremony, there was a reception in the Archbishop's Palace. The crowd, including some 600 of the people who had worked on REMHI in the field, pressed into one of the old colonial-style patios for a traditional repast of tamales and coffee, and to congratulate Bishop Gerardi. Edgar Gutiérrez soon noticed that Gerardi had withdrawn to the end of a corridor alongside the patio and was standing in the shadow of one of the arches, silently observing the crowd. Gutiérrez approached and asked if he felt overwhelmed by so many people. The bishop answered, somewhat vaguely, “It's turned out to be a wonderful night. Hopefully it won't rain.” Then he asked, “And you, Edgar, have you made arrangements to leave the country with your family, to go study somewhere until the waters here calm down?”

“They're not calm, Monseñor?” asked Gutiérrez.

“Well, they'll be much more agitated when they finish reading REMHI.”

“So then I still have time, Monseñor,” said Gutiérrez, with a touch of bravado.

During the final weeks and days of his life, Gerardi had several times warned his young associates to take precautions. He had urged Ronalth Ochaeta to explore the possibility of a scholarship to study at a European university, or to look for a job with an international organization. But Gerardi seemed much less concerned about his own safety. Guatemala, after all, remained a fervently Catholic country, despite a surge in conversions to evangelical Protestantism, particularly during the last decades of the war. Gerardi may have assumed, as everyone else around him apparently did, that his status as a highly visible eminence in the Catholic Church protected him.

S
UNDAY
, A
PRIL
26,
THE LAST DAY
of Bishop Gerardi's life, began normally enough. Margarita López, for more than twenty years the cook and housekeeper at the parish house, served him morning coffee—strong, the way he liked it—in his room. Bishop
Gerardi slept in a simple wood-frame bed. A crucifix hung on the wall above it, and his dentures were in a glass of water on a night-stand. The room was sparely furnished, with bookshelves, a desk, a stereo, and a television set in the corner. Bishop Gerardi donned his robes, pulled on his heavy bishop's ring, and gave the seven AM Mass. Afterward he was visited by his nephew Javier and Javier's children. The assistant priest, Father Mario, later recalled how absorbed the bishop was while watching the children play Nintendo in his room. Father Mario, who was then thirty-four and had shared the parish duties for eight years, was among the first to notice how unusually Bishop Gerardi was dressed that day, in blue jeans and a red-checked shirt instead of his black suit and collar.

At about eleven that morning, Ronalth Ochaeta came to the church of San Sebastián to pick Gerardi up and take him to El Encinal, a wooded hillside residential community overlooking Guatemala City, where Dr. Julio Penados, the archbishop's brother, was giving the celebration for REMHI. They first drove to Ochaeta's house to collect Ochaeta's wife and children—the bishop's “grandchildren,” as he liked to say. Ochaeta, a small, stocky man with a cherubic mestizo face, had been working at ODHA for nearly ten years, and Gerardi, it was often remarked, had come to regard him as a kind of son. On the way to the party, Gerardi excitedly recounted impressions of the events of Friday night, and said, “Now I can retire in peace.” He played with Ochaeta's children, giving them pieces of chocolate as a prize if they could reproduce the funny faces he made.

The guests at that final Sunday afternoon celebration were mostly colleagues from ODHA and family members. Many recalled later that “Monse”—short for Monseñor—was in an ebullient mood, and they commented on the unaccustomed informality of his clothes. He wore a beige jacket over his jeans. Monse looked, a woman guest told him, as if he'd suddenly shed ten years. There was festive banter, drinks, and, later, bowls of stewed garbanzos
and beef. The sky was a brilliant placid blue, the air fresh and fragrant with the smell of pine and eucalyptus trees.

Naturally, when people who were there recount what they remember about that afternoon, they emphasize details that in hindsight seem charged with premonition. And so they recall that at one point Bishop Gerardi said to Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez, “You two shouldn't go around together so much. They'll say you're
huecos
”—Guatemalan slang for homosexuals. When the laughter subsided, he insisted he was serious. “Remember, now is when the smear campaigns begin,” he warned.

They recall that the main subject of conversation, of course, was the REMHI report. “Now we know what happened, but we don't know who gave the orders,” Bishop Gerardi remarked at one point. “I think we need to begin another little project,” a new report on “the intellectual authors” of the war's atrocities. He let those words sink in, then cackled mischievously. And Gutiérrez responded, “Ay, Monseñor, if we do that they'll kill us for sure.”

And they recall that Edgar Gutiérrez's small son fell from a swing made from a rubber tire suspended by a rope from a tree and cut his lip open badly and that the other children were shouting, “There's blood! There's blood!” and that it was after that, around four-thirty, that the party slowly began to break up. Gutiérrez's mother-in-law, who was visiting from Mexico, was so perturbed by Bishop Gerardi's warnings that she decided that afternoon to take her three grandchildren back with her to Mexico City.

Ronalth Ochaeta, with his wife and two children in the car, drove Bishop Gerardi back to his home at the church of San Sebastián, in a still mostly residential neighborhood in Zone 1. (Guatemala City is demarcated into numbered zones, most encompassing several neighborhoods—
colonias
or
barrios
—which often have names of their own.) San Sebastián was only a few blocks north of the central plaza fronting the cathedral and the recently renamed Palace of Culture—formerly the National Palace,
the seat of so many dictatorships. Between San Sebastián and the palace was the presidential residence. They reached the church sometime between five-thirty and five-forty-five. “Don't you have Mass?” Ochaeta asked. The bishop said that Father Mario was giving the six o'clock Mass. They spoke a bit about a trip Gerardi was to take to a conference in Mexico on Wednesday, and Ochaeta assured him that everything was arranged. Bishop Gerardi got out of the car, turned to wave good-bye, and went inside the parish house.

I
F
B
ISHOP
G
ERARDI REALLY
was contemplating retirement—he occasionally mentioned the possibility, although most people seem to think that he was too energetic and involved in his work, and too important a figure to Archbishop Penados and the Church, to go through with it—the completion of
Guatemala: Never Again
would have represented a logical and triumphant capstone to more than five decades in the priesthood. The son of Italian immigrant merchants, Gerardi had spent most of his first twenty years as a priest serving poor, mostly Indian, rural parishes until being called to Guatemala City, where he worked for two extremely conservative and politically powerful prelates in succession—Archbishop Mariano Rossell and Cardinal Mario Casariego—and served a stint as Chancellor of the Curia. His appointment as bishop of the northern diocese of Verapaz in 1967 coincided with the years of the Second Vatican Council (1965) and the Latin American Episcopate's Medellín Conference (1968), seminal gatherings that committed the Church to a greater openness and its clergy, at the latter conference especially, to a worldlier role, responsive to the needs of the poor.

What to some seemed like aspects of a radical new theology—reforming the liturgy to make it more accessible, for example—must have seemed like practical good sense to the young Bishop Gerardi. The Verapaz diocese ranged over rugged cloud-covered mountains, subtropical rain forests, and rich coffee-growing
slopes. It had long served the spiritual needs of a small oligarchy made up of the owners of coffee plantations, many of whom were descended from nineteenth-century German immigrants, at the expense of a rural population of mostly Q'eqchi Maya Indians. For centuries, on the rare occasions when Catholic Masses were given in their isolated communities, the Q'eqchi, many of whom didn't even speak Spanish, heard them in Latin. Bishop Gerardi pioneered the implementation of Mayan-language Masses. He encouraged his priests to learn Q'eqchi and trained and sponsored Q'eqchi-speaking catechists and other lay teachers. “Our Church feels deeply challenged by the reality and situation lived by our indigenous peoples,” Gerardi wrote in 1973. “Effectively we find ourselves faced with a situation of exploitation, marginalization, illiteracy, endemic illnesses, poverty, and even misery; all of which amount to a state of injustice, and reveal a state of sin. This situation, seen by the light of our faith, invites us to return to the nucleus of the Christian message, and to create in ourselves the intimate consciousness of its true meaning and exigencies.”

Reading over some of the pastoral letters and other writings produced by Gerardi in those and later years, I was struck by how he balanced a traditional sense of pastoral mission—seeking and preaching the mystery of salvation in the example of Christ—with a commitment to the poor. “The suffering of Christ in his mystical body is something that should cause us to reflect. That is to say, if the poor are out of our lives, then, maybe, Christ is out of our lives.” The inclusion of that “maybe” was characteristic. Nobody ever described Bishop Gerardi as dogmatic.

In 1980, Gerardi, who had become bishop of the Quiché diocese, in the country's most populous Indian province, escaped an assassination attempt. He nearly became the second bishop to be murdered in Central America within a year. (During the preceding five centuries only one other bishop, in the seventeenth century, had been slain.) Another outspoken and influential prelate associated with liberation theology, El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero, had recently been assassinated by gunmen linked to El Salvador's ruling, far-right ARENA party.

Bishop Gerardi in Quiché, circa 1975

Guatemala's internal war had by then been going on, with various degrees of heated and bloody intensity, for eighteen years. The war was a consequence of a coup engineered by the CIA in 1954 against Jacobo Arbenz, only the second democratically elected president in Guatemala's history. Arbenz had passed an agrarian reform law to alleviate the inequities of a system that he called, in his inaugural address, “feudal.” Privately owned uncultivated land—far from all of it—was expropriated and redistributed to landless peasants. Some of the land was expropriated from the country's largest single landowner, the United Fruit Company. The Arbenz government reimbursed United Fruit, though at the deflated prices the company had declared the land to be worth for tax purposes.