The Art of Political Murder (24 page)

In early February 1999, Monseñor Hernández resigned as chancellor of the Curia. He said that he was retiring not because of what was being said about the Gerardi case, but simply because “in less than two months I will be sixty-five, and I'm tired.” At the same time, in a move that would have repercussions for the case later, Edgar Gutiérrez resigned from ODHA and REMHI.

D
URING THE SECOND WEEK
of January, the taxi driver had given a deposition to prosecutors. The taxi driver's name was Jorge Diego Méndez Perussina, and he was the nephew of General Roberto Perussina, a former minister of defense. He had quit working and was living at home with his wife and children, receiving support and some protection from ODHA. He was a scruffy, jittery, but affable man with something of the high-strung hilarity, and even the look, of a pudgy Dennis Hopper. He'd been a drug user from the age of twelve.

On the night of Sunday, April 26, 1998, at around ten o'clock, Méndez Perussina had picked up some transvestites who asked to be taken to Ninth Avenue, near the Red Cross headquarters in Zone 1, where there was a seedy gay bar in an alley. Instead of turning down Fifth Street, he mistakenly turned down Third—a fateful error—and when he reached Ninth Avenue his passengers said, “Let us off here,
papito
,” and he did. He turned left onto Ninth, and then left onto Second Street, driving toward the church of San Sebastián.

The block-long stretch of street alongside the park was isolated and dark at that time of night. A good place to pull over and smoke some marijuana, perhaps even laced with something stronger, and that is what Diego Méndez Perussina did. He opened up his glove compartment, prepared his joint, lit it, and inhaled, and when he looked up he noticed a strange scene at the end of the block. A
white Toyota Corolla was parked with its door open, and some men, including a shirtless man, were standing outside it. The shirtless man had a military-style haircut and was about five feet six inches tall. Another man had his hands on the shirtless man's shoulders, as if detaining him in some way. Méndez Perussina thought he saw a mark, perhaps a scar or tattoo, on the shirtless man's arm. Until very recently in Guatemala, four-digit license-plate numbers, especially in certain combinations, had belonged to police or military vehicles. In an almost instinctual act—in case he should ever see the same car again when the urge was on him to get high in his taxi—he memorized the number. He rolled up his window, and suddenly another car, a gold Toyota Corolla, with no license plates, sped past him on Second Street, through the Sixth Avenue intersection, and turned onto Fifth Avenue, left, against the one-way traffic. He thought that the gold Toyota must be part of whatever police operation was going on.

When Diego Méndez Perussina's family discovered what he'd seen and that he was apparently willing to testify about it, he began receiving visits from relatives he hadn't seen in years, including General Perussina and a cousin assigned to a section of the Ministry of Defense formerly known as “Vulture Central.” They suggested that if ODHA released the videotape of the statement he had already given to the Untouchables, he should retract it. When they learned that he had been speaking with MINUGUA too, they said they no longer wanted anything to do with him. The day before he was to give a statement to the special prosecutor, Méndez Perussina was forced into a car by three men who drove him around blindfolded for two hours. When the car stopped so that one of his abductors could place a call from a phone booth, Méndez Perussina managed to fling himself out the door and ran to a nearby hospital. I saw him the next day. He had raw, wet scrapes on his palms and knees.

Méndez Perussina thought that the abduction had probably been more of an attempt to terrify him than an actual thwarted
“disappearance,” and the idea of having to go into exile for his own safety after testifying seemed to dismay him as much as any other of his current prospects. “I don't want to go,” he said to me, his eyes filling with tears. “Why should I have to leave for doing the country a favor?”

T
HERE WERE OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
in the case. Around midnight on December 29, Captain Byron Lima, back from Cyprus for good, had been arrested—after an anonymous telephone call to the police—outside his car on a deserted street for creating a disturbance and carrying a weapon without a license. He was drunk, or perhaps on drugs. He gave false answers about his identity, and he was carrying false identification cards. The policemen who had participated in the arrest told me that he had warned them that they would soon know what it was like to wake up in bed with the barrel of a pistol pressed to their foreheads. They said Lima strode outside the police station, still handcuffed, and announced, “I'm looking for where I'm going to put the bombs when I get out. I'm going to blow all this to shit.” He was released to military authorities within hours of his arrest.

During the first week of January, one member of the Valle del Sol gang had been murdered, and the police announced that they had captured two others. The day before, Fernando and I had gone to a police hospital to interview Elser Omar Aguilar, a twenty-two-year-old former member of the gang who was quietly being lined up to testify about Ana Lucía Escobar's criminal past. She claimed that she didn't know him, but Elser said that he'd been her lover. He said that he'd met her when he was stealing cars with Carlos García Pontaza, who became her lover later. He said that Ana Lucía had paid the rent on the house in Valle del Sol that the gang used for kidnappings, and that he used to give her cocaine, to which she was addicted. He implicated her in a kidnapping gone awry, in which Ana Lucía was supposed to distract a security
guard while the victim was abducted from inside his office, but the kidnappers failed to capture their prey, and another member of Valle del Sol killed the security guard with an M-16 that Elser claimed to have sold to the gang.

Elser Omar Aguilar was awaiting trial for murder, and he had briefly been in the same prison wing as Father Mario. He described the priest rocking out to tapes of Guns 'n' Roses and teasing gay inmates. When Fernando asked if he thought it was possible that Ana Lucía and Carlos García Pontaza could have had something to do with Bishop Gerardi's murder, Elser said he didn't know. “But to give you an example,” he said, “if someone contracts me to murder someone, I'm going to do it the way I like to do it. I'm not going to beat him in the head. Two bullets with an unregistered gun…. But these people like money. If they were paid to do it, they were paid well.” The price for murdering Bishop Gerardi, he guessed, would be at least 200,000 quetzales ($30,000).

About a year after Fernando Penados and I spoke to Elser Omar Aguilar, he was kidnapped from the hospital where we'd visited him. He turned up murdered, stuffed into the trunk of an abandoned automobile.

O
NE AFTERNOON
A
RTURO
A
GUILAR
, the youngest Untouchable, and I paid an uninvited visit to Father Mario and his mother in his room at the Ciudad Vieja hospital, where he was being treated for a pulmonary infection. An armed guard stood in the stairwell outside. Father Mario was wearing a bathrobe and pajamas and had grown a beard. The bathrobe looked as if it hadn't been washed in a while. There was a sodden air of depression, of barely repressed hysteria, in the room. The priest kept his eyes riveted on the floor the whole time we spoke. He gestured angrily when I mentioned Ana Lucía and insisted that he'd never met her until she turned up with Monseñor Hernández at the parish house on the night of the murder.

On Ash Wednesday, February 17—I was back in New York—the new judge assigned to the case, Henry Monroy, provisionally freed Father Mario, saying that he was still subject to investigation. The judge also ruled that the taxi driver's testimony was pertinent. The ODHA lawyers had advised Méndez Perussina to leave the fact that he had pulled into Second Street to smoke pot out of his statement. The day after the judge's ruling, the taxi driver's name appeared in the newspapers for the first time, and his mother received a phone call from her brother, General Perussina, saying that her son was going to be killed and should flee the country immediately. He left a week later, without his wife—with whom his relationship was acrimonious and who refused to accompany him—or any of their children.

Father Mario was convalescing at his parents' house. His mother went to the San Francisco de Asís clinic to pick up Baloo, and a crowd of reporters watched the dog being led to the car, but they were not permitted to witness Baloo's reunion with the priest. The night-shift veterinarian told me over the phone that a more technologically advanced cart that would help Baloo walk was being built in the United States.

F
ERNANDO
P
ENADOS HAD LOST
Ronalth Ochaeta's confidence. He was too secretive. Whenever Ronalth or ODHA's lawyers asked if they could speak to his sources, or even know who they were, Fernando said no. Then Ronalth discovered that Fernando was using ODHA's money to pay off the sources. Rodrigo Salvadó and Arturo Aguilar, the two youngest Untouchables, knew that Fernando had contacts in Military Intelligence, but even they didn't know who these contacts were. Fernando was trying to be a one-man version, it seems, of the sort of criminal investigations team the Church hadn't allowed him to form in the first place. But it could be that Fernando was paying money to someone who was taking advantage of him. And it would turn out later that there were many important leads that he had ignored or overlooked. Rafael Guillamón, the investigator from MINUGUA, told me he had discovered that Fernando had at one point obtained a record of his cell-phone calls. He had apparently been trying to penetrate MINUGUA's investigation of the murder. Guillamón suspected that Fernando trafficked in information with his sources in the EMP and elsewhere, and not always to ODHA's benefit.

Whatever his mistakes, Fernando Penados had made crucial contributions to the Gerardi case and had helped establish ODHA's investigation as a force to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, when
the Untouchables' contract was up, Fernando was told that there was no longer money to pay him. Only Rodrigo Salvadó and Arturo Aguilar were kept on.

I was still in New York.
The New Yorker
published my piece, and I moved on to other things.
ElPeriódico
published an abridged translation. I tried to keep up with the Gerardi case, logging on to the Guatemalan newspapers' Web sites every day. But I knew that the real information wasn't appearing there. Whenever I left Guatemala, the country turned into a ship lost at sea without radio contact. There was no way to keep in touch or to stay informed. People in Guatemala, especially if they were involved in certain kinds of work, always worried that their phones were tapped, that their mail was opened, that their e-mails were intercepted, not entirely without reason. In Guatemala, even late-night drunken e-mailers are discreet.

Major developments in the case, I eventually noticed, were always preceded by an especially frustrating period of silence. I thought I was able to recognize when one of those was occurring, and then I would be anxious for days or weeks. Once or twice a year, at least, I managed to get to Guatemala and would catch up. On one trip I found Fernando Penados flat broke but still trying to investigate the case on his own, borrowing money to pay his sources, and persuading the other former Untouchable, Arturo Rodas, who was now working at Avis Rent-A-Car, to lend him cars so that he could get around the city.

In March, there had been more evidentiary hearings at the San Sebastián parish house. Father Mario was instructed to re-create his movements on the night of the murder. “
Bueno
, Father. Put yourself in your room at ten PM and walk us through what happened from there.” The priest reenacted being awakened in his bed by the light in the corridor, going out to turn it off, heading down the corridor to the garage, and discovering the lifeless body he claimed he did not recognize as Bishop Juan Gerardi's. Then Father Mario began to walk in circles. “In circles and circles,”
Leopoldo Zeissig, then one of Celvin Galindo's assistant prosecutors, recalled later. Finally, the priest put on his eyeglasses. For about twenty minutes, in a nonsensical pantomime, Father Mario attempted to re-create not recognizing the bishop and not knowing what to do. Both of Bishop Gerardi's cars had been parked in the garage, indicating that he was home, whether the priest had heard him arrive or not. Father Mario perambulated all over the parish house, back down the corridor to his room to fetch a flashlight, back to the garage, out the front door to ask the
bolitos
if they had seen anybody, finally to the door of the cook's room. “But he never knocked on Bishop Gerardi's bedroom door,” Leopoldo Zeissig said, “either to check to see if he was home, or to inform his superior that there was a corpse in the garage.” Father Mario never even paused before that door as if to think about whether or not to wake him.

Ana Lucía Escobar also put on a riveting show, leading prosecutors and ODHA's lawyers on a trek through the parish house as she re-created
her
movements on the night of the murder. She said that she was studying to become an actress, and during questioning from the prosecutor Galindo, she provided long vivid accounts of her “mistaken” prior arrests. In response to another question, she replied that at home she referred to Monseñor Hernández as “Dad.”

Darío Morales, the photographer from the EMP seen taking pictures inside the parish house that night, was summoned to the proceedings as well. He repeated the account he had given previously to Otto Ardón, saying that he had received a call from Major Escobar Blas at three o'clock in the morning, ordering Morales to meet him in the park across the street from San Sebastián. Morales denied taking pictures or entering the parish house or the garage. There was more than one lie in Morales's account, though not all the lies were yet evident.