The Art of Political Murder (20 page)

The dog-bite theory would seem to have been demolished, but at a jammed press conference held at the end of the second and final day of the exhumation, Dr. Reverte Coma embraced Otto Ardón and gushed, “What a look of triumph you have! You can see it!”

Reverte Coma's performance at the press conference constituted, for me, one of the most bizarre episodes in the case. In a Castillian accent ringing with aristocratic Hidalgo haughtiness, he referred to the American experts as “very barbaric” and defended his hypothesis: “That is a dog bite here or in Peking!” He held out one hand and slapped it with the crooked fingers of the other to illustrate how a dog can bite with just its top teeth. “It's their word against mine,” he said, defiantly crossing his arms over his chest, raising his chin, and sitting back in his chair. Then he got up to act out the crime. First he was Father Mario, saying
“Fass”
to the dog; next he was Baloo, pouncing; then he was a cowering Bishop Gerardi, covering his head with his arms to ward off the dog; then he was Father Mario again, stomping on the bishop's face with his shoe. “The individual or individuals who kicked the bishop in the face hated him profoundly,” Reverte Coma announced. “They've wanted to give this the appearance of a political crime. Lie! This is a domestic crime and that is extremely clear!”

A few days later, there was a story in a Guatemalan newspaper about how Reverte Coma had been expelled from the exhumation of the El Mozote massacre site for impeding the investigation with ludicrous interpretations. All those very small skeletons were not massacred children, he had suggested, but adolescent guerrillas—young recruits from a race of small, malnourished men—killed in battle. Belisario Betancourt, the former president of Colombia, who had presided over the UN investigation of El Mozote, happened to pass through Guatemala on unrelated business a few
days later and confirmed the story. Reverte Coma was the author of some thirty books, among them
From Macumba to Voodoo, The Curse of the Pharaohs
, and
Medical Anthropology and Don Quixote
. There was nothing in itself revealing, of course, in Reverte Coma's being a Don Quixote enthusiast. But his behavior—honor-obsessed, egotistical, cruel, seemingly deluded, and perhaps a touch mad—did make him seem like a character sprung from the darkest side of the Spanish fantastic imagination, from Cervantes to Goya.

“Maybe Baloo was a ghost dog,” Jack Palladino cracked, “or else he was wearing sneakers.” The crime scene video of the parish-house garage taken the night of the murder showed a bloody footprint, he observed, but no paw prints.

The American and Guatemalan experts who examined Baloo concluded that he was “extremely tame” and even “meek.” Norman Sperber wrote that in all the prior dog-bite cases he'd been called on to investigate, “the dog was sedated in order to accomplish the necessary examinations and impressions. The dog ‘Baloo' is the only case in which an examination was accomplished without the need for sedation … due to the unusual docile and non-combative nature of the dog.” I watched a video of Baloo limping about at the evidentiary proceedings in the patio of the San Francisco de Asís clinic. The overall impression was of a decrepit, ailing, completely dispirited old dog.

Yet this was the same thick-necked dog that had growled at me, the
perro bravo
. Could even the dog be dissembling? Bishop Gerardi's sister, Carmen, who had lived for a time at the parish house while recovering from an illness, told me that Baloo was indeed bad-tempered and that whenever Father Mario was about to walk him, he would shout a warning, and everybody would dash into his or her room and close the door while the snarling dog plowed past—everyone except Bishop Gerardi, that is, because Baloo loved him, loved to sleep at his feet while Monseñor worked at his desk or read.

I
N THE COURTYARD
on the morning of the exhumation, an elderly social worker from the Guatemalan Church had reminded me of the many exhumations that were taking place at massacre sites all over the country. “Even in death, Bishop Gerardi is a good pastor,” he said, “sharing the fate of his people, submitting to the mortification of allowing his bones to be exhumed in the cause of justice.” This had seemed more appropriate to the solemnity of the occasion than other remarks I'd heard that had strained for eloquence. But if Guatemala teaches you anything, it is never to poeticize or idealize reality. The prosecution, and its allies in the press, especially the newspaper
Siglo Veintiuno
, whose board of directors was made up of a small clique of the country's wealthiest and most conservative families, tenaciously clung to Dr. Reverte Coma's theories, which they claimed had been vindicated. “Charlatans, those gringos are
charrrrr-
latans!” the little lawyer Mario Menchú shouted when I visited him in his office, where, on the floor by his desk, he kept a plaster copy of the jagged triangular chunk of pavement that his client, the hapless
bolito
Carlos Vielman, had once been accused of wielding.

Judge Figueroa decided that neither side had proved its case. How was he supposed to know who was right? Father Mario remained in prison, and Baloo went on living at the San Francisco de Asís clinic. The judge had ninety days from the date of Father Mario's arrest in July to decide whether to charge the priest with murder and send the case to trial. The exhumation and dismemberment of the bishop's cadaver seemed to have resolved nothing.

During the following weeks, the press continued to report on Baloo's confinement. When the dog's health took a turn for the worse, it was reported that veterinarians thought it best that Baloo be put down. But the decision belonged to Father Mario, and he insisted on sparing the dog he affectionately referred to as
mi gordito
, “my little fatty.” A cart with wheels and a leather
harness was built to help Baloo get around on his withered hindquarters.

When the rumors of homosexuality and a crime of passion in the San Sebastián parish house had first appeared in June, an unprecedented “black snowfall” of ashes had blown over Guatemala City from the simmering Pacaya volcano, burying the town under an inches-deep blanket of soft, sooty powder that required a titanic cleanup effort. On the day after the exhumation, the phenomenon repeated itself. Though the ashes fell more lightly this time, looking like desiccated insect wings slowly drifting down from the sky, they were sufficient to close the airport. Helen Mack was going to drive Jack Palladino to El Salvador so that he could catch a flight from there, but before they set out we had lunch. Helen Mack was usually self-effacing and, in the Guatemalan manner, quaintly formal, though when discussing her foes and their provocations she often unleashed astonishing torrents of profanities, as she did at lunch that day.

A few days earlier, a small plane registered in Colombia had crash-landed in flames on an airstrip on the Mack family's sugar farm on the south coast, and the story, with incriminating insinuations, was trumpeted on the front page of
Siglo Veintiuno
. No cocaine was found, but that could have been because the fire had consumed it, or the police had made off with it. Like a practiced animal tamer, Helen Mack had moved quickly to defuse the situation: she contacted the U.S. embassy, with its busy DEA operation, so that officials could authoritatively clear the Mack family of any suspicion of having narco airstrips on their farm. Ronalth Ochaeta's wife, Sonia, had recently sold her car through a used-automobile dealer, and right after it was sold, packages of cocaine were supposedly found in the car's trunk. This, too, was broadcast in the press with suggestions that the Ochaetas were cocaine dealers and had carelessly left some of their product behind in the car before selling it. Later, Ronalth would endure something similar when ludicrously inflated assessments of the worth of a country
house he was building would be used to suggest that he had embezzled funds from ODHA. However false the charges, the damage to public reputations was real and, for Ronalth and his family and others, became a part of the fabric of daily life.

Guatemalans were skeptical about anyone who claimed to—or even seemed to—act from selfless or altruistic motives, certain as they were that such people must be, at best, cynical opportunists. After all, one civilian president after another had turned out to be outrageously corrupt or cowed by the Army and its clandestine crime mafias. The police were so widely regarded to be criminal, cowardly, and inept that across the country mobs were taking the law into their own hands, lynching suspected thieves and delinquents. An especially perverse expression of cynicism was that many Guatemalans preferred to believe the best of those widely regarded elsewhere as monsters. Thus the former dictator General Ríos Montt, who was perceived by most foreigners as genocidal, was one of the most popular and supposedly “populist” democratic politicians in Guatemala, a symbol of “law and order.” On the other hand, when my mother visited some of her now elderly school friends in Guatemala, they assured her that Bishop Gerardi had been the
jefe
of all the homosexuals and
maras—
criminal street gangs. They were old women and widows, pious, relatively affluent matrons, gathering over coffee and cake for a sentimental reunion. Where did they get such notions?

“Small countries have big politics,” Joseph Brodsky wrote. Some small countries have even bigger intelligence services. Intelligence services, of course, don't just gather information; they also, when it serves their or their government's ends, spread disinformation. Cocaine-stuffed planes, drugs secreted in the trunk of a young wife's car, tapped telephones and threatening calls and opened mail, complicit journalists and judges, ubiquitous informers and infiltrators—the Army had many chess pieces to play with, and a very large board.

At lunch, while specks of volcanic ash floated down around us, Helen Mack spoke about Freemasons. It was like a conversation Guatemalans might have had a century before, in the era of General Justo Rufino Barrios's anticlerical Liberal revolution. In that sense, Bishop Gerardi's murder seemed like Guatemala's last great nineteenth-century crime. It was redolent of Masonic and Jesuit intrigue, and it had propelled the country's two most influential institutions—the Army and the Church—into their bitterest confrontation since the 1870s, when General Barrios, “the Reformer,” expelled Jesuits from the country; turned nuns out of their cloisters; converted churches and convents into prisons, post offices, a Masonic temple, a customs warehouse for liquor and tobacco; and invited Protestants from Europe and North America to Guatemala as part of a program for racial improvement and modernization. General Barrios's government seized traditional Maya lands and gave them to immigrants and Liberal Party cronies to convert into coffee plantations, the basis of an economy whose trappings exist to this day. He was the tyrant whom the Nicaraguan exile Enrique Guzmán said had made even the drunks in Guatemala discreet, and who in many ways shaped the society that Guatemalans still reside in. Barrios despised the aristocratic Conservative elite his revolution had driven from power, but those
cachurecos
were too wealthy and entrenched to simply be done away with. So he founded the Escuela Politécnica military academy as the breeding and training ground for a new ruling caste of men cut from the same rough cloth as himself, and the Escuela Politécnica has been at the heart of Guatemalan society ever since, turning out a steady flow of ambitious young military officers to dominate the country.

In certain respects, Guatemala skipped the twentieth century. When I began to see how a society that had taken shape in the nineteenth century was beginning to disintegrate and change into something else—not necessarily less dangerous, though that was what the fight was about—on the cusp of the twenty-first, I also
understood how the Guatemalan Army and priests like the Orantes brothers and their associates were, paradoxically, linked, not as co-planners of a murder—though they might yet be proved to have been that too—but through a common stake in the preservation of a culture under assault by forces much broader and greater than, but definitely including, those represented by Bishop Gerardi and REMHI. They were the defenders of a willfully walled-off culture rooted in local ideas about privilege, status, and the militarism and anti-Indian policies of the nineteenth century, which had easily metamorphosed into the cold war militarism and massacres of the twentieth. But as General Pinochet's arrest in London in the autumn of 1998 for human rights violations in Chile, an arrest ordered by a judge in Spain, would show—along with so many other changes in the world—it was getting harder to keep the walls up around small countries.

At lunch that day, Helen Mack listed Masons who were in positions to eventually have an impact on the Gerardi case: five Supreme Court justices, the head of the police, an array of generals and colonels, even the attorney general. “And that's why human rights cases don't get anywhere in Guatemala,” Helen Mack said flatly, though of course that wasn't the only reason.