The Art of Political Murder (27 page)

Celvin Galindo, several family members, and others in the prosecutors' office were receiving telephone threats, and soon the acts of intimidation worsened. Men stalked Galindo's children outside their school. Arlene Cifuentes had mentioned to Ronalth Ochaeta that targeting children was a signature element of the Limas's modus operandi. Nery Rodenas's children would also be trailed from school by thugs.

On October 6, Galindo and his wife and children suddenly went into exile. Only days earlier he'd announced that he was on the verge of indicting military men in the Gerardi case, but the FBI hadn't provided the supporting evidence he'd been hoping for. There were whispers that Galindo had abandoned the case precipitately—that his life wasn't really in danger, that such threats were a routine part of the job. Most parents, however,
once they believe their children are in peril, wouldn't hesitate a second about what to do.

A declassified diplomatic cable of the U.S. embassy from the time says that “Galindo's tenure saw the investigation steadily build momentum as he focused increasingly on the mounting circumstantial evidence implicating the Presidential Military Staff [EMP] and its officers…. Early on October 7, HROFF [the embassy's human rights officer] met with Galindo's deputy, Anibál Sánchez, who confirmed that both he and Galindo believe the case is very close to being solved, but that they are prevented from exploring certain leads by lack of support from González Rodas [the attorney general] and the Public Ministry. As if Galindo's resignation were not bad enough, Sánchez informed HROFF that the central offices of the Public Ministry had just ordered the Gerardi prosecutors' security detail to abandon their posts.”

The next day, the U.S. embassy publicly expressed its concern for the safety of Judge Flor de María García Villatoro.

A
FEW DAYS EARLIER
, on September 29, more than a year after being taken into custody by the Public Ministry, Father Mario's dog, Baloo, died. Soon afterward, the priest departed for Houston, Texas. Later in October, thirty-four-year-old Leopoldo Zeissig, the former assistant prosecutor under Galindo, took over as special prosecutor of the Gerardi case.

A
LFONSO
P
ORTILLO WAS ELECTED
president in December 1999. Portillo was a controversial populist from the FRG Party—a party whose most popular and powerful figure was none other than the former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, who was constitutionally barred from running for president himself because of his past as a military dictator who had siezed power in a coup. President Portillo promised that he would resign if within three months his government couldn't solve the Gerardi case. The president-elect named Edgar Gutiérrez, the former executive director of REMHI,
to be the new head of the Section of Strategic Analysis, the SAE. Gutiérrez vowed to convert the SAE from a branch of Military Intelligence to a wholly civilian information-gathering and analysis agency at the service of the civilian government. That would make it the first Military Intelligence section to be demilitarized, as mandated by the Peace Accords. Gutiérrez took several present and past members of ODHA with him to the SAE, including Fernando Penados.

There was widespread expectation that the EMP would soon be disbanded, but this hopeful idea would be of short duration. President Portillo, his own considerable personal shortcomings aside, would turn out to be no less beholden to the military establishment and other entrenched murky powers than any of his predecessors. The real strongman of the FRG was General Ríos Montt, who was duly elected president of the Guatemalan legislature.

Ronalth Ochaeta soon joined his old colleague Edgar Gutiérrez in Portillo's government as the ambassador to the Organization of American States in Washington. On visits to Guatemala around that time, I was present at long, noisy, excited, argumentative drinking sessions during which the propriety of accepting posts in Portillo's government was discussed. I definitely agreed with those who said it was impossible for people with a past in human rights to join any government in which General Ríos Montt had such a commanding role. But Edgar Gutiérrez and others argued that Ríos Montt wouldn't be around for long: that, after the UN truth commission's genocide ruling, the several legal proceedings being filed, in Spain and Guatemala, against him and other former Guatemalan military dictators would soon discredit him and drive him from power, and they hoped into prison. They predicted an inside battle between dinosaurs and progressives for control of Portillo's government. It was an unprecedented opportunity to learn the inner workings of power, they said, to move from the periphery to the center of political life.

Fernando Penados had no faith in Portillo whatsoever but, he told me, out of admiration for Edgar Gutiérrez and what he was trying to accomplish, he'd decided to follow Gutiérrez to the SAE. Others, like Mario Domingo and Nery Rodenas, were having none of it from the start. To them the whole idea of collaborating with a government in which General Ríos Montt had any role whatsoever stank of cynical compromise and worse. But even they sensed that an opportune and decisive moment to push for results in the Gerardi case had arrived; that for the time being, at least during these first months of Portillo's government, the investigation into the involvement of elements of President Arzú's EMP, a case so quietly, secretively, and painstakingly developed over the past two years, could finally be pushed forward.

A
LTHOUGH RELATIONS WERE CORDIAL
between ODHA and the new special prosecutor, Leopoldo Zeissig, and his team, it could hardly have been called a collaboration at first. ODHA had trusted Celvin Galindo, and had felt betrayed when he fled, accepting a grant to study in Germany. (On a brief trip to Germany later that year Nery Rodenas found Galindo depressed, living with his family squeezed into a drab little apartment in a bleak German city, where his child's bicycle had just been stolen from the courtyard.) They initially underestimated the chubby, prematurely silver-haired, goateed, quietly earnest, at times introverted Zeissig. The prosecution team had been moved from the far-flung office in Mixco to one at the edge of the old downtown, in Zone 2, a walled-in house with a yard that was already partly occupied by a Public Ministry organized crime unit. On previous visits there, Mario Domingo had been puzzled to see Rubén Chanax Sontay, the indigent from the San Sebastián park who was now a protected witness, washing cars in the parking lot. “He wanted work,” Domingo was told by one of Zeissig's assistants when he asked about it, “and so we gave him some work.”

More than two years later, in the summer of 2002, when he was no longer in Guatemala, Leopoldo Zeissig would tell me the story of Rubén Chanax Sontay's emergence as a key witness.

Two weeks after Zeissig had taken over as special prosecutor of the Gerardi case, he was told that the National Police no longer wanted the responsibility of caring for Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván. Two big-bellied assistant prosecutors—Anibál Sánchez and Mario Castañeda—went to visit the men in their rooms in the Hotel Arlington, a sleazy place downtown. The assistant prosecutors found Chanax and El Chino Iván desperate from boredom and uncertainty about the future. It was then that Chanax said that he wanted something to do, that he wanted to work.

Throughout their confinement Chanax and El Chino Iván had stuck to their respective original stories, in those aspects where the stories coincided but also where they differed. But Chanax's quiet, aloof, yet watchful demeanor left the prosecutors with the nagging impression that there was something he wanted to say. When Zeissig decided to give Chanax work washing cars, he told his assistants: “That son of a whore knows more.” They needed to cultivate a relationship with him. They would play good cop, bad cop, Zeissig decided, with himself cast as the bad cop. Anibál Sánchez began taking Chanax to the movies, the former vagrant's great passion. Chanax always arrived at Zeissig's headquarters accompanied by two police guards. But while he was washing cars in the lot, sometimes the police would go off for lunch or leave for other reasons. While the police were away, and later, when Chanax had finished with his chores, the prosecutors would let him come inside to watch cartoons and movies on television.

“He was introverted and timid at first,” Zeissig said. “But you could see that he was intelligent. He noticed what people wore. He'd say, ‘You've been wearing that tie for a week.'”

One day Chanax said to Anibál Sánchez, “Father Mario knew.” But that was all he said.

Special Prosecutor Leopoldo Zeissig

Zeissig called Chanax into his office and accused him roughly of knowing more than he'd told so far. That routine continued for several days. But Chanax remained stubbornly silent.

Then, one afternoon in late November, Chanax responded, “If I tell you what I know, they'll kill us both.”

Zeissig waited for Chanax to explain what he meant, but he wouldn't say anything more that day.

“This
cabroncito
has screwed us now,” Zeissig told his staff. He suspended their Christmas vacations so as not to interrupt the daily routine with Chanax.

One afternoon, Zeissig sat down with Chanax and showed him grisly crime-scene photographs taken inside the parish-house garage. “Look at Monseñor,” Zeissig told him. “He defended a just cause. If you want to have a good conscience, or if you have something to say, then we'll defend you.”

After a long while, Chanax broke the silence: “He wasn't the way he is in the photos.”

La gran puta
, here it comes, thought Zeissig. And he waited.

“What happened,” Chanax finally said, “is that they moved him.”

“Who moved him?” asked Zeissig. “Did the firemen move him?”

“Not the firemen.”

“Who?”

“They'll kill me if I tell.”

“Who will kill you?”

“You know who,” said the former park vagrant. And then he fell silent again.

“You have to let witnesses go at their own speed,” Zeissig told me. “We all choose our moments.”

O
N
J
ANUARY
17, 2000, a journalist named Pedro Pop published a brief story in
Prensa Libre
about Chanax and El Chino Iván. Pop wrote that they had been living in police custody at the Hotel
Arlington, and that he had spoken to them. In the article, El Chino Iván complained bitterly about the prison-like conditions they were living under and asked to be taken out of the country. He said that he and Chanax feared for their lives. “But without a doubt, of the two indigents Chanax is the one who is most worried about his situation,” the reporter wrote, “because he has received threats from people who've said: ‘If you keep squealing, you're going to die.'”

The story was a scoop, though it wasn't all news to ODHA. The Arlington Hotel rented rooms cheaply to lovers by the hour, and once, when one of the young men from ODHA had slipped away there with his fiancée in search of that privacy so precious to young people still living at home with their parents, he had spotted Chanax, and police guards, in the lobby. But if it was true that Chanax had been threatened for “squealing,” to whom was he squealing, and about what?

ODHA's lawyers were taken by surprise when they received a communication summoning them to the special prosecutor's office at four in the afternoon on the very day the article appeared, to hear the official pretrial deposition of the protected witness Rubén Chanax Sontay. Suspecting a trick of some kind, they filed a motion to block the hearing, at least until they could learn more about what to expect. But Judge Flor de María García Villatoro declared their motion out of place.

The untimely appearance of the article in
Prensa Libre
—especially its revelation that Chanax was talking—had forced Zeissig to bring Chanax before the judge well before he wanted to. Chanax and El Chino Iván had told the reporter much more than they should have. Only frantic last-second telephone calls from Zeissig had persuaded him to refrain from printing more.

Chanax testified for seven hours that day, until nearly midnight. When he was finished, Judge García Villatoro asked Zeissig when he wanted to issue the arrest orders, and Zeissig asked the judge for a little more time. There was much to prepare. Arrangements had
to be made for Chanax to go into exile. (He remained in the country until April.)

ODHA's lawyers left the Public Ministry office that night knowing that what they'd just heard was “momentous.” As Mario Domingo later put it, they were feeling so excited but also frightened by what lay ahead that “we were carrying our balls in our hands.”

O
N
J
ANUARY
19, arrest orders, to be executed the next day, were issued against Colonel Lima Estrada; Captain Lima Oliva; Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva, who was no longer in prison; and Father Mario. All of them had been implicated by Chanax's testimony. Another arrest order was issued for the parish-house cook, Margarita López. Leopoldo Zeissig's superior, the attorney general, Adolfo Gonzáles Rodas, a holdover from the previous government—the same man who had backed the dog-bite scenario—wanted to charge the military men with murder, but Zeissig held out for what he considered the more accurate, if slightly lesser, charge: participation in an extrajudicial execution, a premeditated crime of state. Gonzáles Rodas insisted that Father Mario be charged with homicide, and Zeissig relented, thinking that he would be able to modify the charges later.