The Art of Political Murder (28 page)

Usually, a judge sends arrest orders directly to the police, but Zeissig asked if he could deliver them. He wanted to add pressure to the situation. The new chief of police, however, made it clear that he was extremely reluctant to arrest the military men. Zeissig returned to Gonzáles Rodas and asked him to speak directly to President Portillo.

“I can't do that,” the attorney general answered. “Go back to the police. You'll see, they'll do it.”

“You know how things are in Guatemala,” Zeissig responded. He argued that if they didn't move quickly, the men might easily be tipped off and given time to escape.

The attorney general finally agreed to speak to President Portillo the next day, during their weekly Thursday meeting. Edgar Gutiérrez, now a member of Portillo's government, told me what happened. “The chief of police went to the president's office,” he said, “and the president called me. When I arrived, he showed us the arrest orders. The president, with the order in his hand, said, ‘Look, if you use conventional methods to capture these people, they're going to get away. Choose the most trustworthy people you have, don't use telephones or radios, and order a surprise operation to capture them.'”

It would be President Portillo's most direct intervention in the Gerardi case.

At four o'clock that afternoon, Zeissig received a call on his cell phone from his wife: the news had broken on television that a police operation was under way in Colonia Lourdes. Captain Lima was arrested at home. His father, Colonel Lima Estrada, was apprehended at a house in another part of the city.

The operation to capture Obdulio Villanueva at his small rural farmhouse lasted from five to ten in the morning on January 22, during which time the suspect engaged the police and soldiers who came to arrest him in a gun battle that lasted two hours. Father Mario, who was still in Houston, Texas, returned to Guatemala to turn himself in weeks later, while court orders were being prepared for his extradition.

In the ensuing weeks, Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva's lawyers presented proof that their client had been freed from prison, having served his sentence, two days
after
the murder of Bishop Gerardi. But prosecutors found some of his old cellmates who explained that Villanueva had frequently received visits from military officers, and that he was sometimes allowed to sleep outside the prison, in hotels in Antigua—the beautiful old town is a major tourism destination, with majestic ruins of churches and convents from a colonial-era earthquake. Unfortunately, none of the prisoners was willing to say this on the record. Finally, there
being no evidence against him other than Rubén Chanax's testimony, the judge ordered Obdulio Villanueva freed.

Mario Domingo and Nery Rodenas had by then sheepishly confessed to Leopoldo Zeissig that the earlier witness from the EMP, the presidential waiter Aguilar Martínez, had also implicated Obdulio Villanueva in the crime, but that ODHA's lawyers had asked him to withhold that information from his deposition, because it seemed incredible. Zeissig was furious. Even if they'd instructed Aguilar Martínez not to mention Villanueva, ODHA
still
should have informed him. Then he and his assistants could have quietly begun investigating months before anyone else learned that Villanueva was a suspect. Chanax's testimony and the subsequent arrest orders, Zeissig presumed, had given Villanueva's protectors enough time to cover their man's tracks and ensure the silence of other prisoners.

But there was one small breakthrough. Zeissig managed to establish that Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva had remained on active duty, drawing a salary as a member of the EMP, while he was in prison.

T
HE
L
IMAS
'
DEFENSE TEAM
was led by Julio Cintrón Gálvez, an elderly lawyer with a long record of courtroom successes on behalf of military clients. Like many extremely conservative Guatemalans, Cintrón regarded human rights cases against the military as a leftist stealth tactic for continuing the country's internal war by nonmilitary means. “This is an ideological struggle of the communists against the anticommunists,” he said. His younger colleague, Roberto Echeverría Vallejo, had been a member of the three-judge tribunal that had presided over the trial of Obdulio Villanueva for murdering the milkman. The judges had so reduced the homicide charges against Villanueva that he'd ended up spending less than a year in prison. Among other lawyers and courthouse reporters, Cintrón was regarded as a master of the
kind of legal ploys that had long characterized the practice of criminal law in Guatemala, and Echeverría Vallejo was an adept young protégé.

At a pretrial hearing in March the two defense lawyers, along with Father Mario's defense lawyer, José Toledo, arrived with what Zeissig referred to, metaphorically, as
un gallo tapado
, a hidden rooster. Unveiled, the rooster crowed. Echeverría stunned ODHA's lawyers by presenting Judge Flor de María García Villatoro with a document signed by Archbishop Próspero Penados withdrawing the Catholic Church's backing of ODHA as its legal representative, and thus as a co-plaintiff with the prosecution. It looked as if ODHA was about to be removed from the case. While Judge García Villatoro went over the papers, Echeverría watched the crestfallen Nery Rodenas and Mario Domingo with a satisfied smirk. Cintrón launched into a taunting tribute to the glorious Guatemalan Army, which had defeated the guerrillas, only now to defeat their enemies again—the now “extinct ODHA,” he said—in the courtroom.

“
Puta muchá
, just like that, you're
gone
,” one of the prosecution lawyers cracked sardonically, and there was sympathetic laughter.

Leopoldo Zeissig asked to see the document signed by the archbishop, and he immediately noticed some interesting details. It was a Wednesday, but the document had been signed on Sunday, then notarized that same day. Zeissig pointed out to Judge García Villatoro that lawyers in a case involving the interests of the state couldn't be removed from a legal process, such as the current hearing, without prior notice. Since ODHA's lawyers were already in attendance, they couldn't be removed now.

Zeissig had won ODHA some time. But the lawyers had no explanation for Archbishop Penados's betrayal. Nery Rodenas, tears in his eyes, declared himself ready to resign. During the lunchtime recess, he and Mario Domingo hurried over to see the
archbishop. It turned out that he didn't even know what he'd signed. The previous Sunday, Father Mario's mother had gone to visit the archbishop in the company of the three defense lawyers, along with Monseñor Hernández. Since the death of Bishop Gerardi, Archbishop Penados had been in failing health and broken in spirit, probably clinically depressed. Monseñor Hernández explained to him that the document they wanted him to sign committed the Church to desisting from accusing Father Mario of involvement in the murder of Bishop Gerardi. There was no need for him to read the document, Monseñor Hernández said. The archbishop could trust him. And so the archbishop had signed.

The ODHA lawyers went to Bishop Ríos Montt, who issued a new mandate naming ODHA as the Church's legal representative in the Gerardi case, and on April 10, nearly two years after Bishop Gerardi's murder, Judge Flor de María García Villatoro ordered the rearrest of the former EMP specialist Obdulio Villanueva. On May 18, she ruled that the case against the two Limas and Villanueva should proceed to trial. And she immediately became the target of death threats.

R
ONALTH
O
CHAETA
was still living in Costa Rica when Villanueva was arrested. He read about the arrest in a newspaper than he left spread open on the kitchen table, and his youngest son idly picked it up. The little boy was thunderstruck. The photograph in the newspaper was of one of the thugs who had broken into their house, he excitedly told his father, one of the men who had trained a gun on him and the maid as they sat roped together on the couch.

WITNESSES

I would have wished to live and die free, that is to say, subject to law in such a way that neither I nor anyone else could shake off the honorable yoke.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “A Discourse on Inequality”

N
O MILITARY OFFICER HAD
ever been convicted of a human rights crime in Guatemala. Nor had any military man ever been charged with participating in a politically motivated crime of state such as extrajudicial execution, the crime for which the two Limas and Sergeant Major Villanueva were to be tried. Father Mario was accused of homicide and Margarita López of having withheld evidence. The trial, which was to be heard by a three-judge tribunal, was delayed for over a year while the defense filed various legal motions. It got under way in March 2001, and I went down to Guatemala a few weeks later.

Mynor Melgar was the lead lawyer representing ODHA, which, as co-plaintiff on behalf of the Church, was permitted to assist the special prosecutor in the case against the military men—although not in the cases against Father Mario or the parish-house cook. “So far, in the context of what you can hope to accomplish in a Guatemalan courtroom, I think we're doing well,” Melgar said to me when I arrived. “The crime laboratories here don't have many resources,” he explained, “and there's little capacity for doing good forensics. Usually, the only real evidence you take to trial is the testimony of witnesses. And people can buy witnesses, intimidate them, they can kill them. That makes trying cases in Guatemala very complicated.” Most of the important witnesses in the Gerardi case had made written statements and then fled the country.

Mynor Melgar had left the country too, along with his wife and children. In 1999, he spent nine months in Berkelely, California, studying at the University of California's Institute of Latin American Studies and giving volunteer legal advice to Guatemalan immigrants in the Bay Area. But Melgar, unlike most of the other exiles, had returned. “How nice that you've come back just to die,” an anonymous voice said in one of the first of many threatening telephone calls he received. A few months later, in December 2000, a man held a pistol to Melgar's head while he knelt in the bathroom of his own home, in the presence of his wife and two uncomprehending little sons. The intruder said that he wasn't going to pull the trigger. He had been told just to issue a warning.

Melgar's soft-spoken, cheerfully bantering manner hid a basically reserved nature and a composed and incisive intelligence. When he was intensely engaged, his face settled into an expectant, slightly bemused expression and his eyes held an avid glow. Melgar grew up in El Gallito, Guatemala City's most notorious barrio, where cocaine and crack are sold openly in the dirt streets and where chop shops for stolen cars are dug like caves into the walls of ravines, their entrances covered by day with tin sheeting and brush. In accordance with the sometimes straight moral logic of those living crooked lives—a theme that would figure in the testimony of some key witnesses in the trial—Melgar was something of a folk hero in El Gallito. Not many people from there went to college, and given Melgar's roots and litigation skills, he could easily have become a wealthy narco defense lawyer or even a member of the Oficinita. Instead, he won national and international renown by taking on the Guatemalan Army in case after case. He was the special prosecutor in the Myrna Mack murder case, which resulted in the conviction of the EMP operative who stabbed her to death. He'd won another conviction for murder against Ricardo Ortega, a notorious carjacker who was protected by military officers. And he was the prosecutor in the (stalled)
case against military personnel who ordered and carried out the massacre of 350 civilians in the community of Dos Erres in 1982.

It had not been easy to find judges to hear the Gerardi case. Two of the three judges originally selected had fought successfully for permission to resign, essentially out of fear, although they were obligated to provide other reasons. Judge Carlos Chin's last-minute resignation (he claimed a conflict of interest: his son had studied at the Colegio San José de los Infantes when Sergio Orantes was rector) at the beginning of February had caused a postponement of the trial's scheduled opening. One of the Limas' defense lawyers, Roberto Echeverría Vallejo, filed a motion for a mistrial because Judge Chin had already been ruling on evidence and witnesses. The defense lawyers seemed desperate to delay the trial as much as possible, and ODHA's lawyers suspected that they knew why. Archbishop Penados had announced his resignation several months earlier. The defense lawyers were playing for more time because they thought that the Vatican was going to name a conservative as the new archbishop, someone who would remove ODHA from the case and perhaps even close it down.

The three judges finally selected to hear the case were young, in their early to mid-thirties. On the night before the day set for opening arguments, Wednesday, March 21, as Judge Yassmín Barrios was preparing dinner—she had just removed the steamed corn-husk wrappings from the corn meal
chuchitos
she was about to serve to her bodyguards—two grenades exploded in her backyard, shattering windows and destroying a water tank. A month earlier, Captain Lima's defense lawyers had attempted to have Judge Barrios recused from the trial. What made the grenade attack seem especially sinister was that to reach the backyard of the modest home where Yassmín Barrios lived with her mother, in a dense middle-class subdivision, the perpetrator had to have traversed two adjoining properties with walled-in backyards, implying, perhaps, aerial surveillance in planning the attack, and the possible collaboration of neighbors.

Judge Barrios had an air of nervous fragility. Leopoldo Zeissig, the special prosecutor, was among many who didn't believe she would show up in court for the opening of the trial the next day. He expected to learn that she'd been escorted by MINUGUA to the airport for her trip into exile. That would mean yet another postponement of the trial, and weeks or even months of legal fighting over seating another judge. But the U.S. embassy's human rights officer came to Barrios's home the night of the explosion, and the next morning the U.S. ambassador, Prudence Bushnell, and several other foreign diplomats visited the judge in her office. The show of support sent a strong message to the Guatemalan government and military, and it buoyed Judge Barrios. Her resolve was strengthened by her own sense of the historical importance of the case. When she arrived at the courthouse later in the morning, she told Zeissig, “We're going to endure everything, whatever it takes.”