The Art of Political Murder (30 page)

According to Gómez Limón, prisoners at Antigua could come and go by paying the warden and prison mayor 200 quetzales, as long as the prisoner was present at the morning and evening roll calls. The Sunday morning of April 26, Gómez Limón watched Obdulio Villanueva, shortly after the roll call at five-thirty AM, heading down that passageway, and when he did not come out the other side, Gómez Limón knew that Villanueva had gone out the door into the street. Nevertheless, when Villanueva's family came to visit that same day, Gómez Limón, in his role of
segundo encargado
, dutifully went to look for him in the infirmary, the warden's office, and the guardhouse, but he was nowhere to be found. According to Gómez Limón, Villanueva
was
back in time for the roll call at five-thirty PM in the yard. But then he went out again. That night Villanueva's bed, which was only a few feet from Gómez Limón's, remained empty, though by the next dawn's roll call Villanueva had returned. In the morning, Gómez Limón said, Villanueva was anxious to watch the television news. “Since the television is mine,” Gómez Limón testified, “you have to ask me for the remote, so that I will lend you the
tele
.”

I watched Gómez Limón's testimony on videotape. He spoke in Spanish, but with the cadences, repetitions, and somersaulting clauses of the Mayan languages, and also with the typical
Ahhhh, sí pues
, and other similar rhetorical expressions through which he narrated his own acts of listening or thinking, and denoted his
own reactions and deductions as events unfolded. “
A la gran chucha!
It's time for the news! He was very worried, watching the Channel 7 news,” Gómez Limón recounted to the court. “I went to watch a little. He was sitting in the plastic chair, and he looked the way he looks at you, like he wants to punch you.” The burly, grim-faced, rough-featured Villanueva, hard lines at the side of his mouth, did resemble a thug from central casting. “Then Villanueva explained, ‘That is a priest, and they killed him.'
Ahhhh, sí pues
. And I thought it was my own craziness when I thought, Oh, and it happened when he was out.”

Gómez Limón said that he and the other prisoners knew that Villanueva had worked as the president's bodyguard. The day that Villanueva entered the prison, the authorities had warned that he should be left alone: “‘Don't touch him in any way, because he works for the State.'”

Gómez Limón claimed that he'd never told anybody about what he saw that day, April 26. But a few months later, without warning or explanation, he was transferred to another prison, Pavoncito. Shortly after he arrived there, a prisoner came into his cell block shouting his name. “What's going on? And he's calling my name again,” Gómez Limón recalled. “And I say, ‘That's me,' and he says, ‘Well, they're looking for you.'
Ahhhhh…
. ‘The president is looking for you.'” (The president of the Committee of Order and Discipline, who is elected by other prisoners, is a kind of
capo
who runs the prison rackets—narcotics, alcohol, and so on—usually in coordination with the warden and guards.)

The other prisoner asked Gómez Limón if he'd been an
encargado
at the Antigua prison when Villanueva was there. Gómez Limón answered that he had, and the prisoner said, “Well, that's the situation. What more do you need know? They want to kill you. They're offering 65,000 quetzales for you.”

They found the prison president, who told Gómez Limón he would take care of him, and he assigned two prisoners as guards. Gómez Limón was ordered into the “well,” a dark, solitary cell.
He spoke to a jailhouse lawyer and got in touch with the Public Ministry. Leopoldo Zeissig came to see him at Pavoncito, and Gómez Limón told him his story.

In the courtroom, Gómez Limón, who wore a black ponytail and had broad, expressive Mayan features, sat at a small table facing the judge—from behind he looked like the Incredible Hulk, because of the bulky bulletproof vest he was wearing under his green, imitation-leather jacket—telling his story of how fear and a survivor's wily desperation had brought him to this moment: “I was very worried, because the truth is, Villanueva, they say he's very heavy in his way of doing things. They increased my protection, but in that place where I was, you're always in danger.” He then described some of the threats directed against his family, his children and his brothers—presumably by the Army or supporters of the defendants, though Gómez Limón hadn't yet said so. “And they come and tell my family they're paying 20,000 quetzales so that I won't say anything. Well, this was last week, they come again and they're offering 100,000 quetzales so that I won't say anything, won't open my mouth. Yesterday they came for a third time”—to see his brother, Noé Gómez Limón—“and they want to know, ‘What's your brother going to say?' They've tried many strategies, to stop me from telling the truth.”

The well-tailored
licenciados
of the defense—the far more Indian and mestizo public-sector prosecution lawyers and judges made a striking contrast—questioned Gómez Limón for three hours. The prosecutors betrayed their anxiety by objecting to nearly every question, but Gómez Limón almost always seemed ready to jump right in, signaling, as he looked from Judge Cojulún toward the defense, that he wanted to answer by putting his hand out and turning it palm up with a certain flourish, and then he would hold that posture until the lawyers stopped arguing and the judge finally ordered, “
Contesta.”
Answer.

The defense tried to imply that Gómez Limón's testimony was being given in return for luxuries—a private room in prison,
perhaps, or better food—and that he had been coached in his story. He had expressed himself more than adequately in Spanish, but one stubbornly pursued line of questioning, interrupted by objections and
No contesta
's from the bench, went like this: “Señor Witness, where were you born? What is the Mayan tongue in that place? Do you speak that
lengua
? Do you prefer to speak in Kakchiquel or in Spanish? How do you prefer to testify? In Spanish or Kakchiquel? In which language do you express yourself best when you are with you family?” and on and on. The only point of the questions was to suggest that Gómez Limón was a native Kakchiquel-speaker, and how could a Kakchiquel Indian and criminal have put together such a coherent story on his own?

But it was the cook's lawyer, Ramón González—a small-time defense lawyer and public defender, low-paid, unlike the rest of the defense team—apparently sensing that the witness was wearying from riding the dangerous bull of his own fear and seemingly desperate honesty, and pushing for a courtroom trophy of his own, who accidentally provoked the examination's most memorable revelation.

Defense: “How many times did you talk to Prosecutor Zeissig?”

Gómez Limón: “Twice. People said that Villanueva is
muy matón
, a real killer. ‘Get me the prosecutor!' I told my wife, ‘Call the prosecutor!' Inside, all the time I had to stay inside. They had me worried about poison. They brought me my food. I couldn't even buy a soft drink. They came to see me. Prosecutor Zeissig. A person from MINUGUA. I didn't ask their names. They put me in this place, a safe place, near the guardhouse. How sad, to live like this. People said, ‘Why did you get mixed up in this, if Villanueva is a killer?' If I mention names, more enemies for me!”

Defense: “When did these people come to talk to you?”

Gómez Limón: “I don't know anything. I don't want to involve more people.”

Defense (shouting): “How is it that they came three times, offering money? You took an oath! Give me the names!”

Gómez Limón (in a frantic burst, as if thinking out loud): “What I need is to tell the truth. I'm protected here, and the court will find some way that nothing will happen to me.”

Defense (shouting): “Can you tell me the names of the people who offered the money?”

Prosecutor interjects: “He said he doesn't know.”

Gómez Limón (blurting): “Well, yes, but those people are here, the ones who are offering the money. The first who came was [the jailhouse lawyer] Paco. Then came the lawyer who is right there.” (He indicated a defense lawyer, Roberto Echeverría Vallejo.) “He had come right from the Ministry of Defense, they say. Who did they go to? To my brother who is a prisoner in Escuintla, who told my other brother, who is the one the
licenciado
has now come to, at seven-thirty last night. And my brother came to the place where I was being kept and said, ‘They're offering money so that you won't say anything and all this will end.'”

Captain Lima's lawyer, Roberto Echeverría Vallejo, had just been accused of attempting to buy the witness. (Later, at the end of the trial, when Goméz Limón's brother Noé was called to testify, Echeverría quietly slipped out of the courtroom. Noé Goméz Limón told the story of the lawyer who had come to buy his brother's silence, and he perfectly described the physical characteristics of the bearish, balding, sallow Echeverría.)

The visit to Pavoncito by the observer from MINUGUA whom Gilberto Gómez Limón mentioned was perhaps the reason he was still alive. The prisoner who had first informed him about the price on his head had no such protection when, during a flash prison riot, he was fatally stabbed, the only prisoner to die in that riot. (“What a coincidence,” was Mynor Melgar's dry assessment.)

In Villanueva's defense, his lawyers presented family members, including his wife, who said they had visited him in the Antigua prison on the day his accusers claimed he'd left it. Villanueva's wife was a humble person. She didn't seem like the kind of person who would lie with such an earnest demeanor. The prosecutors
and ODHA's lawyers were worried by that testimony. However, Zeissig reminded them, judges know that if anyone is likely to lie in court, close family members are, no matter how out of character that might seem. Under cross-examination, Villaneuva's wife had been forced into several contradictory statements. For example, first she said that there was no phone in her village, but then she said that she'd been informed of her husband's release from prison by phone.

An important revelation came late in the trial. The prosecutors discovered that Villanueva had been eligible to be paroled from prison on April 24,
two days before
the murder, but had chosen not to take his freedom until April 28. Why would someone elect to stay in prison four days more than he was required to? Unless, of course, prison was an alibi.

R
UBÉN
C
HANAX
S
ONTAY
, the trial's star witness, had been brought back to Guatemala from the as yet undisclosed country of his exile to testify. Chanax's pretrial statements, if allowed to stand unchallenged, were devastating to all of the accused except Margarita López, the cook, and he seemed vulnerable because of the apparent inconsistencies in his stories, and because of the implausibility of some of his assertions.

Chanax had previously testified, in January 2000, that he'd encountered Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva, along with another person he knew only as Quesén, by the park on the Sunday of the murder, at about nine-thirty in the morning. Villanueva warned him to stay away from the park until ten that night, because someone was going to die. He said he felt pity for Chanax and didn't want to have to kill him. Chanax asked who was going to die, but Villanueva wouldn't say.

Why, of all the vagrants who lived in the park, had Villanueva singled out Chanax to warn of a murder that was to occur there that night? The answer Chanax had given during his pretrial testimony was not persuasive: “Later I imagined that it must
be because I'm the only one who doesn't drink; the rest are drunks.”

For his day in court, Chanax, a boyish twenty-seven-year-old with a halting yet determined voice, wore a shirt, a wide tie with a big knot, and a cumbersome bulletproof vest underneath his jacket. He gave his occupation as carpenter and began his testimony with an account of his nearly thirty months of required military service. He'd had nowhere to go after his discharge, and he had eventually found a home in the park in front of the San Sebastián church and self-employment there as a car washer. Earlier, Chanax had testified that he was able to recognize Colonel Lima on the night of the bishop's murder because the colonel had once broken up a fight between him and a group of high school students in the park, and had then introduced himself as the father of Captain Byron Lima, who was in charge of the president's security.

Now, in court, Rubén Chanax introduced a new story. Colonel Lima, he said, had approached him in the park one day and identified himself as a colonel of G-2, Military Intelligence. (Colonel Lima would not have had to cut his ties in retirement.) According to Chanax, the colonel had asked Chanax to work for him. “I want you to be my informant,” the colonel had said, “because of what happens here, being so close to the palace.” Chanax said that he accepted the colonel's offer because he needed the money. He was given a phone number and told to call it every Saturday. Three months later, he was asked to watch Bishop Gerardi. When Chanax phoned to inform, he was simply to say the code words “Operation Bird.”

That testimony provided a new logic for Rubén Chanax's story. (Villanueva had warned him because Villanueva knew of his role as an informer whose job it was to spy on Bishop Gerardi.) Leopoldo Zeissig would tell a Guatemalan reporter weeks after the trial that he hadn't known everything Chanax was going to say in court, though he'd intuited that Chanax might have been an informer
for Military Intelligence, “because only someone who was in on what was going on could have known in such detail about all that happened that night.”

Later, I thought that the defense lawyers must have realized the risk to their clients in summoning Chanax back from exile to testify but had reasoned that the witness would still be inhibited by fear—fear of retaliation, and also of the repercussions of incriminating himself. Maybe that was what those lawyers had taken from a pretrial hearing held before Chanax went into exile, when he and Captain Lima had confronted each other. During that earlier hearing, after several heated exchanges—Captain Lima essentially arguing that Chanax was a liar and fabricator, and Chanax steadfastly holding his ground—an irate Captain Lima had finally warned, “And what will you do if a video turns up that implicates
you
in the crime?” The defense must have believed that Chanax, when called to testify in front of the judges and television cameras, would
never
confess to having had any role in the operation that resulted in the murder of Bishop Gerardi.