The Art of Political Murder (31 page)

In the courtroom, Rubén Chanax continued with his account. After Villanueva and Quesén, whom another car washer had once introduced to him as a member of the EMP, gave their warning that morning, Chanax had wandered off and enjoyed an ordinary Sunday: a matinee at a downtown cineplex, an afternoon nap under some trees on a hill in Zone 3. A little after nine o'clock that night, he and El Chino Iván were in Don Mike's little neighborhood store, watching the movie
Congo
on television. It was then that Colonel Lima Estrada came in with at least two men Chanax said he didn't recognize. They were welcomed by Don Mike: “Here come my favorite clients.” The men huddled at the counter, drinking beer and talking. A little before ten, Chanax started back to the park. When he saw how quiet and tranquil everything seemed, he decided that what Villanueva had told him wasn't true, or hadn't been carried out. He began to prepare his
bedding. Then the man without a shirt appeared in the small door in the garage.

“He used to walk across the park,” Chanax testified, “and I'd washed his car once, and he'd told me he worked for the EMP.” Chanax said that this man was called Hugo. After a desultory exchange, the man without a shirt ran off, leaving the small door open. Minutes later, said Chanax, a black Jeep Cherokee arrived on the scene, and two men got out through its rear door—Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva, carrying a small video camera, and Captain Byron Lima. According to Chanax, Captain Lima said, “‘
Vos
,
vos serote
, you little shit, come help us'—like that, but with stronger words, I can't say them here.” Judge Cojulún said, “No,
hombre
, go ahead.” And Chanax said, “He says,
‘Vos
, son of a big whore, come and help us,' and he grabs my arm, and pushes me inside. They gave me a pair of gloves, the kind doctors use.” There was a body lying facedown on the floor in a pool of blood, though Chanax said that he didn't realize it was Bishop Gerardi until they turned the body over.

In his previous statement, Chanax had said that at this point he was terrified and had run off. But now he admitted that he'd stayed. Villanueva filmed the crime scene, set the camera down on the parked car, and helped drag the body several feet farther in. While the men from the EMP arranged the bishop's body—legs crossed just so, hands crossed under the chin—Chanax, as he'd been told to, scattered some newspapers around in the blood, to create an impression of disorder caused by a violent struggle. Villanueva set the large chunk of concrete in the pool of blood.

Captain Lima told Chanax, “If you talk, you'll end up just the same as this one.” He took the gloves back from Chanax, put them into a little bag, and then, with Villanueva, climbed back into the Jeep Cherokee and drove away. The small garage door had been left open. Chanax said that he went to the main door of the parish house and rang the bell several times, but no one answered, until suddenly Father Mario appeared in the small door,
wearing a long black leather coat. Chanax said, “Father, they left the door open,” and before he could say anything else the priest said,
“Gracias
, Colocho,” and kicked the door shut.

Claiming that he didn't know what else to do, Chanax lay down to sleep. If he truly was a Military Intelligence informer, he would have known he had less to fear there, if he did as he'd been told, than by doing or saying anything else, anywhere else. At midnight Father Mario, now dressed in a bathrobe, came out again, and addressed the row of
bolitos:
“Did you see who came in, who came out?” went the now familiar refrain, and Chanax said that he'd answered, “The only one was the
muchacho
who came out a while ago.” The priest went back inside. Moments later, Monseñor Hernández's red car drove up. Soon Father Mario came out again and dramatically announced that Bishop Gerardi had been murdered. He pulled Chanax aside and said, “Tell them [the police] what you know, everything except that I came to the door.”

Chanax finished his testimony by saying, “If I've hidden some things, it's because I didn't feel 100 percent
seguro
”—he was using the word in the sense of secure, or safe—“just as I don't now, really, but I think I'm all right, this being a courtroom.”

What the defense cast as inconsistencies, and thus lies, in Chanax's declarations, the prosecution defended as augmentation. The central progression of events stayed the same; bit by bit, he filled in the picture a little more, until he finally felt
seguro
enough to complete it. During four hours of questions, the defense repeatedly pounded at Chanax's claim to have felt fear, “panic.” During his first statement to the police, the defense argued, he had shown no fear. Why was he talking about fear now?

Defense: “Señor Witness. Why didn't you tell the police what you'd seen?”

Chanax: “I believed they'd kill me if I did.”

Defense: “But you just said you were an informer. But you didn't inform. Who were you afraid of?”

Chanax: “Of all the G-2 that's around that park.”

Defense: “Why, Señor Witness?”

Chanax: “They follow through on their threats.”

Defense: “And now you feel more
seguro
.” The lawyer wanted to exploit Chanax's use of the word
seguro
, as if the witness were referring not to his sense of safety but to the clarity of his recollection, to being
sure
.

Chanax: “Almost
seguro
.”

Defense: “Almost
seguro
! Are you aware your declaration could cost the accused their lives? … Do you realize that when you say you went into the garage, you implicate yourself in extrajudicial execution?”

Another line of questioning, by Echeverría Vallejo, implied a material motive to lie: “When you slept by the garage, where did you put your head down?”

Chanax: “On my pillow.”

Defense (mockingly): “And where did you get the shoes you're wearing now?” (Objection sustained.) “And what do you work at now?”

Chanax: “I work as a carpenter. And I dressed then the way I dress now, though not with a jacket. Are you asking was I filthy and begging? I wasn't. I bought my own clothes, sometimes new, sometimes secondhand.”

The prosecution's cross-examination was mercifully brief.

Mynor Melgar: “When you say
seguro
, what do you mean by
seguro
?”

(Defense objects, claiming witness has already answered that.)

Chanax: “That I'm out of here—out of Guatemala.”

“C
HANAX
'
S TESTIMONY WAS CONTROVERSIAL
,” Leopoldo Zeissig said to me as the trial was drawing to a close. “The defense questioned his credibility. They said he was drugged, coached, bought. It's the defense's job to try to destroy him. And it's up to the judges to decide if they did. The defense interrogated him for four hours. If someone's going to lie, it usually shows up fairly quickly. He told what he knew, and he never lost his composure or contradicted himself.” Zeissig said that the prosecutors had always suspected that Chanax probably knew far more than he'd told. The Public Ministry could not offer a witness the same sort of protections or deals that such a witness might receive in a federal case in the United States (as when a lower-ranking mafioso testifies against his bosses).

The defense was unrelenting in its efforts to propagate the idea that the entire case depended on Rubén Chanax alone, and that he'd lied. “
Chanax miente!
” Chanax lies! (The defense lawyers had shouted it so often, with such theatrical indignation, that it became a drinking toast for ODHA. Lift your beer and cheerfully bellow: “
Chanax miente!
”) The defense's strategy was not only to play through the media to the public, to plant the idea that “the case is leaving many doubts,” but also to leave “handles” in the trial record that a sympathetic judge might want to grab on to if the case was appealed. (“The witness himself admitted he wasn't
seguro
!”)

But it wasn't true that the prosecution's case depended on Chanax. There was another witness whose testimony was also crucial—Jorge Aguilar Martínez, the waiter from the EMP. His pretrial declaration, made in the summer of 1999, was read into the record by a court secretary. He was now in exile, in a foreign political asylum program.

ODHA found Jorge Aguilar Martínez because Rodrigo Salvadó and Arturo Aguilar, the two remaining Untouchables, kept looking through old tips and leads that Fernando Penados, for one reason or another, had never pursued. They found an anonymous hand-printed letter from someone who wrote, essentially, that he or she knew someone who knew someone in the EMP who knew something about the Bishop Gerardi case, giving some details. Four months later ODHA had received another letter, unsigned, though it was believed that the author was same person who had written the first one. But this time the letter had been delivered in an envelope that bore the logo of a labor union, and the person who'd delivered the letter had left his name—Luis Flores. (I have changed his name.) The name seemed familiar to Mario Domingo, who before coming to ODHA had worked as a labor lawyer. Rodrigo and Arturo made repeated visits to the union office, but Luis Flores was never in. What followed was like the patient work of ants.

Rodrigo and Arturo finally found Flores, who confessed that he got the letter from his sister, “Doña Lupita,” who ran a “people's pharmacy” that dispensed medicine free or at reduced prices in a poor neighborhood. Doña Lupita didn't want to talk to them, nor did the woman who had given the letter to Doña Lupita. But the Untouchables were persuasive, and after six weeks of cajoling they drove out to the pharmacy one afternoon and met a curly-haried woman with a round face and small, frightened eyes who said that she was the wife of a member of the EMP who had been on duty the night of Bishop Gerardi's murder. “I don't want my husband to know I'm here,” she said. “This is
very delicate.” She said that her husband had written the letters because his conscience was troubled over the crime, but she couldn't tell them anything more. The Untouchables pressed their case. “Take your time deciding,” Arturo remembered saying, “but we're very interested in what your husband can tell us. They killed a bishop. Our country can't go on this way.”

As they drove back into the city, Rodrigo and Arturo savored a thrilling sense of expectation. For the first time, they had a chance to talk to someone who was inside the EMP on the night of the murder.

There were many more frustrating weeks of canceled meetings, meetings that went nowhere, and others that seemed to bring them tantalizingly close to the source of the information—the husband from the EMP. But by then Doña Lupita's husband had forbidden her to host any more meetings with ODHA in their home. Mario Domingo came with them to a meeting in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel—the Untouchables had chosen it because they thought they were unlikely to be recognized there, among the foreign tourists and business travelers. He told the wife of the man from the EMP that if her husband really had information on the crime, he and his family would have to leave the country for their safety. This might be traumatic, but it could also provide an opportunity for a better life, especially for their children. The wife began to weep. She was frightened and confused. She said she didn't know what she was doing there, that she shouldn't have come. The attention she was attracting made the Untouchables cringe. “But I don't want to leave the country!” she wailed.

After the meeting at the Marriott, the wife seemed to have decided to break off communications. The Untouchables waited nervously but patiently. Finally, a call came. There was another meeting in the lobby of another hotel, where they were given a letter sent by the husband. He was President Álvaro Arzú's personal waiter, he said. Sometimes he also had janitorial duty or was sent to work in a little office near an EMP entrance. He'd
been on duty in that office the night that Bishop Gerardi was murdered. He named five people from the EMP who he said were responsible for the crime: Major Escobar Blas, Captain Lima, a man named Galeano, the EMP commander Rudy Pozuelos, and Obdulio Villanueva. He also named Howard Yang, the head of the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis, not because he'd seen Yang that night but because nothing happened in the EMP without Yang knowing about it. And he wrote that on the day before the murder President Arzú had been visibly nervous and drinking more than usual.