The Art of Political Murder (29 page)

An investigator from MINUGUA told me it was likely that the grenades had been tossed into Judge Barrios's yard by her own security detail, which was headed by a police officer named Ronald Manfredo Ruano. Most of the men in the security detail were former soldiers from the EMP. (A year later, Officer Ruano would be arrested for the extrajudicial execution of two young men he and a partner had taken into custody. Their bodies were found with their hands tied behind their backs, a bullet in each head.)

The opening of the trial was nearly postponed again when the accused military men refused to come out of their cell blocks in the Centro Preventivo, on the outskirts of the city, alleging a plot to assassinate them by sniper fire on the long drive to the Torre de Tribunales, in the neo-Mayan complex of government buildings and plazas at the edge of the old city center. “If that happened to her,” said Captain Byron Lima, referring to the grenade attack on Judge Barrios, “imagine what could happen to us.” But finally, an hour and a half late, the men were led into the courtroom at the
Guatemalan Supreme Court. Captain Lima was wearing a Kaibil T-shirt. Some reporters noticed that there were tears in his eyes.

Judge Flor de María García Villatoro, who had issued the arrest orders and had juristiction over the pretrial investigation, was receiving round-the-clock protection from MINUGUA. Earlier that year Amnesty International had sent letters to President Arzú and the attorney general asking that special protection be provided to Nery Rodenas, who had succeeded Ronalth Ochaeta as executive director of ODHA, but no such protection was offered. The death threats to ODHA accelerated as the proceedings went on. In one day alone, Rodrigo Salvadó reported twenty calls to his home from a man who said that a group was on its way to kill Rodrigo at midnight. Three of the four most important witnesses in the case were in exile as the trial got under way: Diego Méndez Perussina, the taxi driver who saw the shirtless man standing by a parked car and wrote down the license-plate number that was traced to the military; Jorge Aguilar Martínez, the EMP waiter who had implicated Captain Lima and Sergeant Major Villanueva; and Rubén Chanax Sontay. The fourth key witness, a thief who had been in the Antigua prison with Obdulio Villanueva, was still incarcerated.

Oscar Chex, the former G-2 Military Intelligence agent who had listened in on Bishop Gerardi's telephone calls, was in exile, as were Juana Sanabria, the administrator of the church of San Sebastián and the bishop's closest personal friend, and even Father Quiróz, the priest whom the taxi driver had first gone to see. El Chino Iván Aguilar, the
bolito
who had lived with Rubén Chanax in the Hotel Arlington before Chanax made his final statement to the prosecutors, was in another Central American country. A number of people who might have been able to corroborate aspects of the testimony of others or even provide new information of their own had been murdered or had died, including, by then, many of the
bolitos
who used to sleep outside the San Sebastián parish house and garage. Their deaths, perhaps, were mostly attributable to the hardships of
life on the streets, but some of the
bolitos
were also rumored to have “disappeared” or been murdered.

No one had endured a steadier volume of threats than the people who worked in the special prosecutor's office. Funeral music would play into their phones. This was a familiar trick. Leopoldo Zeissig once tried to dial his wife at home and an unknown woman's voice came on, speaking to him like a concerned close friend, advising him to resign from the case. All the telephones in the prosecutors' office would start ringing at once, a bombardment of simultaneous calls. Then all the cell phones would start ringing. It was like something out of a Japanese horror movie. Zeissig's wife was a young attorney, and they had a one-year-old child. How could anyone ever grow accustomed to receiving anonymous calls saying, “Your husband hasn't come home yet? Well, he's not coming home.”

One day a green ambulance parked outside the special prosecutor's office. It had a four-digit license plate. For several days in succession, the ambulance arrived punctually; sometimes a Jeep Cherokee was parked behind it. Finally Zeissig and some members of his security staff drove a car with tinted windows alongside the ambulance and videotaped it. A few days later Zeissig received a call from someone who said, “Don't be angry. I'm just doing my job. Those people who were watching you? They know everything. We know where your wife works. We know where your parents live. We know where her parents live. We saw that you were filming us, so we left. We're going to do other things now that you won't notice.”

Two policemen were stationed in front of Zeissig's house at night—policemen were also stationed outside the homes of the assistant prosecutors—but intruders managed to climb up onto the roof overlooking the patio. Zeissig then sealed off his patio from the rest of the house. By the time the trial began, Zeissig was under twenty-four-hour protection, traveling everywhere in a caravan of three cars escorted by pickups carrying armed police commandos.

At the Centro Preventivo, Captain Byron Lima had had a scuffle with another prisoner, Carlos Barrientos, who was angry over the special privileges Lima and his codefendants were receiving. In the course of the fight, Barrientos somehow made off with Lima's personal agenda notebook, which he turned over to the prosecutors. The noteook contained telephone numbers, records of the visits Lima received, and an accounting of the prison businesses Lima was running. There was even a draft of a letter to a lover, the unmarried mother of their child, in which he complained of the high cost of having to pay off witnesses. The notebook also contained hand-drawn maps and diagrams of the layout of Leopoldo Zeissig's home—drawings indicating possible ways to get into the house and into the bedrooms—as well as the telephone numbers and addresses of his assistant prosecutors.

T
HE TRIAL WAS HELD
in an auditorium-like courtroom with rows of steeply banked seats and walls of polished marble and inlaid tropical woods. (The Supreme Court ordinarily used this courtroom, but it was made available for the Gerardi trial because so many spectators and members of the press were expected.) The three judges—two women, Yassmín Barrios and Amada Gúzman de Zuñiga, and a man, Eduardo Cojulún, who was the presiding judge—sat on a raised dais, behind piles of legal volumes and documents, in the middle of a long table lined with more than a dozen empty chairs. Below, perpendicular to the judges' table, the prosecution team—Leopoldo Zeissig and his assistant prosecutors, and the ODHA lawyers, Mynor Melgar, Nery Rodenas, and Mario Domingo—sat at a table facing the defense lawyers. Behind the defense lawyers' table was a row of chairs where the two Limas and Sergeant Major Villanueva usually sat. Margarita López always sat at the defense table next to her lawyer, as did, at the far end, alongside his lawyer, Father Mario, in a wheelchair, dressed, for most of the trial, in his bathrobe and pajamas. The priest was being kept in custody at a private hospital. (On the first day of the
trial he arrived with an oxygen tank and a mask, although it soon became apparent that he was unfamiliar with the way they worked, and he didn't bring them again.)

Except when all three judges leaned close together in intense discussion, the two female judges sat silently while Eduardo Cojulún briskly and elegantly ran the proceedings. Judge Barrios, who had a soft, round face, full lips, and black curly hair, spent most of the trial wearing the expression of a sorrowful Madonna in an old Italian painting, her eyes cast upward at the cloudlike whitewash of the wide, arching ceiling. Judge Gúzman de Zuñiga was so resolute in her seemingly stricken lack of expression that ODHA's lawyers nicknamed her “Santo del Pueblo,” after the rustically carved, blankly staring wooden saints of village folk Catholicism.

“I thought the defense would be stronger,” said Nery Rodenas of the early proceedings. “I thought it would offer stronger proofs, even if they were false ones.” But not many others shared the ODHA lawyers' confidence. Early in the trial the courthouse had been filled with spectators every day, but by the ninth week the crowds had waned, and it had become almost fashionable in Guatemala, especially among those who weren't actually attending the trial, to remark with a knowing air that the case wasn't going well. An influential young columnist from
Prensa Libre
told me, “For all the effort
los muchachos
have put into it”—she meant the boys from ODHA—“it's leaving many doubts.” But she hadn't been attending the trial either, so how did she know? Foreign press attendance had dropped off to almost nil except for a few wire services and two European journalists—a Frenchman who had for a while been a press spokesperson for MINUGUA and had previously reported for
Le Monde
, and a Spanish woman who reported for
El País
. They liked to remind Guatemalan reporters that Dr. Reverte Coma, the discoverer of the dog-bite marks in the bishop's skull, was an eminent and respected figure.

Most people one spoke to in Guatemala, whatever they thought of the trial, seriously doubted that the judges would vote
to convict. They thought that the judges would be bought or simply wouldn't dare convict, for so it had always been in the past. But those who were attending the trial regularly were hearing things that had never been spoken out loud in Guatemala before. They were receiving an unprecedented tour through some of the inner workings of the covert intelligence units that had sown so much terror in their country.

Over the trial's forty-six sessions, 115 witnesses and experts would testify. It wasn't easy for anyone, certainly not a foreign reporter occasionally dropping in, to follow such a complex and largely circumstantial case. The pretrial depositions of the witnesses who were now in exile were droningly read into the court record. All you had to do was step out of the courtroom for a cup of coffee, or doze off in your seat, or let your attention stray, and you could easily miss, say, the EMP waiter Aguilar Martínez's entire testimony, the first eyewitness account that directly implicated Captain Byron Lima Oliva and the EMP in the crime.

Captain Byron Lima Oliva

O
NE OF THE KEY WITNESSES
who did testify at the trial was called by the defense. He was Gilberto Gómez Limón, who in the spring of 1998 was in the prison in Antigua—a drive of half an hour or so from Guatemala City—with Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva. In pretrial testimony, Gómez Limón had claimed that Villanueva had been outside the prison on the day of the murder.

“The defense had to try to discredit the pretrial depositions,” Mynor Melgar explained. “They thought that Gómez Limón was ignorant, that he'd be easy to destroy. We were afraid they
would
destroy him—or buy him, or intimidate him. The witnesses who come here feel frightened for their own safety. What guarantee is there that a witness, once he's on the stand, is going to tell the truth? And we were thinking, if they destroy Gómez Limón, or if they destroy Rubén Chanax, they destroy our case.” The defense lawyers seemed to believe that in Gómez Limón they had found the prosecution's softest target.

In April 1998, when Bishop Gerardi was murdered, Sergeant Major Villanueva was in the first year of the five-year sentence (later much reduced) he had received for slaying the milkman Sas Rompich. Gómez Limón was serving time for robbery. He and Villanueva were in the same cell block. By looking over a wall in that cell block, prisoners could see down into a passageway that led to the infirmary, the guardhouse, and the prison director's office. But a part of the passageway was blocked from view by a short section of wall in front of a door to the street. If someone walking down the passageway went behind that wall and did not emerge on the other side, it could mean only that the person had gone out the door into the street.

Gómez Limón was the
segundo encargado
, the number two prisoner in charge of the maintenance of the cell block, and his duties included collecting seventy-five quetzales, about ten dollars, from each new prisoner who wanted to be excused from cleaning
chores. The money was used (he would testify) to buy mops and cleaning materials. Gómez Limón was the kind of inmate who liked to keep a little domestic order, cooking simple meals for himself with a certain zest that attracted Villanueva's attention. Gómez Limón said that he greatly resented it, that he did not think it was “correct,” when Villanueva tried to bully him into cooking for him. Gómez Limón was a bit of a busybody too, the sort of person who would always hoist himself up to see who was going down the passageway with the section of wall hiding the door to the street.