The Art of Political Murder (34 page)

Why, asked Claudia Méndez, hadn't Major Francisco Escobar Blas also been arrested and sent to trial?

“Because they wrapped the cord around the littlest ones. Everything has a hierarchy.”

“Do you think the truth of the crime will ever be known?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“The investigators aren't interested. They're frightened or too inept to go forward and capture higher-ups.”

“But who wouldn't reveal everything they know in order to defend themselves?”

“But then who is going to defend me?”

C
LAUDIA
M
ÉNDEZ
'
S INTERVIEW
with Captain Lima's father, the sixty-year-old Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, was published in
elPeriódico
on May 13, 2001. Colonel Lima Estrada explained that he was on trial because his enemies “wanted to win in the political sphere the military war they lost.” He said that they were seeking vengeance. “I'm just the point of the spear. Once they've created a judicial precedent, then they're going to go after the others.”

“You've been described as the brains of the operation,” Méndez said. “The charges say that—”

“No!” interrupted the colonel. “The brains are the señores Edgar Gutiérrez and Ronalth Ochaeta, who, along with Army officers, involved me in this.” He was referring to a “new wave” of military officers, some from the provincial capital of Cobán, former ODHA executive director Ochaeta's hometown. “A new wave, constitutionalist, obedient to civilian rule, respectful of human rights, this wave of
patojos
, boys, now colonels, joining up with the little group of legalists from ODHA—they implicated me in this problem.”

“Who are you referring to?” Méndez persisted.

“You want me to name names? The names are those in the
apócrifo
.” (This was the anonymous document, purporting to be an internal intelligence report, that had been faxed to reporters and human rights organizations in August 1998, and had named the Limas, along with the officers from Cobán.)

“Is there anything in life that you are afraid of?”

“Yes: that the guerrillas could execute me, apply their revolutionary justice.”

“I don't understand.”

The colonel exploded angrily. “You don't understand because you are just a little girl. You are a
niña
. You are not up to the level of my brain. Write this down: I don't answer a lot of your questions because you are not of my brain level, you haven't lived….
Listen to me:
I'll get out of the Gerardi case. I'll get out of Gerardi. And then what will it cost to do
rrrrrrrrrrrr
.” (The colonel gestured with his hands as if they were a pair of pistols.)

The colonel reminded Méndez that, in his view, the Church, or at any rate some of its members, had been allied with the guerrillas in the war.

“And Gerardi?”

“He had his line.”

“And what was that?”

“Ask the priests who've been coming to the trial. They'll tell you: liberation theology.”

Colonel Lima Estrada had used his interview with Claudia Méndez to put his theory about the crime into play. Everything about the Gerardi case—perhaps even the murder itself—was a continuation of the war by other means. The war wasn't over.

But at the time of the interview, Colonel Lima was facing a less theoretical problem. He didn't have a credible alibi for his whereabouts for that Sunday night, April 26, 1998. His belated efforts to provide one at the trial had only worsened the difficulty. In his first pretrial declarations the colonel had insisted that he'd spent
Sunday night at home with his family. But his wife didn't make an appearance at the trial to corroborate this. His youngest son, a teenager, gave it his best try but was ineffective. He said he'd gone into his bedroom to do homework that night and had fallen asleep. He had no way of knowing who came and went at the house during the crucial hours. So a new witness suddenly appeared at the trial—an old friend and neighbor, Colonel Edgar Carillo Grajeda, who told the court that on that Sunday night, from the hours of eight to eleven, he was sitting on beer crates in Colonel Lima's garage conversing. And what, Special Prosecutor Zeissig asked during a typically patient cross-examination, had he and Colonel Lima been talking about? About the glory days of the war, of course, Carillo Grajeda replied, swelling with proud emotion, when he'd fought under Colonel Lima in the Gumarkaj counterinsurgency battalion. “There was one beautiful day,” he recalled, “when we had the cadavers of thirteen guerrillas laid out at our feet, all wearing a disgusting olive green, with red wounds…. There is no greater or more beautiful glory for a soldier than to see his enemy lying dead at his feet.”

Colonel Lima Estrada did not testify in the trial and so did not face cross-examination by the prosecutors. Thus he did not have to answer before the judges the obvious question that Claudia Méndez put to him in their interview: Why had he never before, in any of his pretrial declarations, mentioned sitting on beer crates in his garage conversing with his friend from eight to eleven on the night of the murder?

Colonel Lima Estrada replied that the judge monitoring the statements had not let him express himself. “She never let me talk…. No one handles his interrogation as he ought to. I have only one witness:
him
, and that's enough. And me and my own word are enough! … Nobody had better try to corner me, because if I don't want to tell it, then I don't tell it. My word is the truth.
Period
!”

B
UT IF, AT APPROXIMATELY TEN O
'
CLOCK
on the night of the murder, Colonel Lima, in the company of two other men, stopped into Don Mike's little store, around the corner from the church of San Sebastián, and ordered some beers, in order to monitor the crime, how would they have done that? According to the prosecution, all that the colonel had to do was leave the shop, cross to the opposite sidewalk, stand on the corner, and look into the park. Maybe he'd had a radio through which he could send messages or even directions—to say, for example, that the shirtless man had come out through the garage and that everything was proceeding “
sin dieciocho
.” Or he might say that now was the moment for the driver of the second Toyota—the one that raced past the taxi driver—to pick up an operative who had fled through a rear exit of the church.

The defense argued that it was impossible to see the parish house from the street corner in front of Don Mike's shop, and an evidentiary procedure was conducted one morning in the last weeks of the trial regarding this issue. Lawyers, judges, police guards, and the press filled the street in front of the shop. It was a fast, tense operation. Zeissig, who'd refused to don a bulletproof vest, was clearly a little frightened; his eyes were wide as he strode rapidly down the street from the shop to the opposite corner. His bodyguards, pressed around him, kept their hands on their pistols underneath their jackets and nervously scanned the rooftops.

I stood on the corner next to Irvíng Aguilar, Obdulio Villanueva's lawyer. He was short and rotund, with a protruding belly, a fat, flushed face, and thick gray hair. From where I stood I could clearly see the parish-house garage through the park and the trees.

“You can't see anything!” the defense attorney yelped in triumph.

“I can see it perfectly,” I said. It was absurd that I wanted to argue with him.

“No, no, no!” he shouted. “From here you can't see anything!”

T
HE GESTURE THAT
Colonel Lima Estrada had made during his interview with Claudia Méndez, pointing with his hands as if they were pistols, came up during the trial. During an afternoon hearing Mario Domingo complained that the colonel was making threatening gestures at him.

“I haven't done anything,” the colonel responded, “and there are video cameras that record everything.” Throughout the trial, he told the judges in a tone of offended dignity, his behavior had been “composed and respectful.”

It didn't appear that any of the courtroom video cameras had been trained on the colonel at that moment. But later a reporter, looking over the video footage he'd taken that day, found that his camera had indeed recorded the incident, along with the date and time (April 17, 12:40:25 PM), and he gave a copy of the image to ODHA. Colonel Lima, like a B-movie thug, is miming cocked pistols with his hands, staring across the room.

Major Escobar Blas, the EMP's chief of Protection Services, testified that he had spent all of Sunday, April 26, 1998, from nine in the morning until six that night, at a country club with family members. (That, of course, contradicted Captain Lima's pretrial testimony that Major Escobar had turned up at the famous police roadblock in the middle of the afternoon.) At about three in the morning, he testified, in the first hours of Monday, April 27, he'd received a phone call from Major Villagrán—though in his pretrial statement, he'd said that the call was from Colonel Pozuelos, the head of the EMP. Major Escobar Blas now said that he phoned Pozuelos, who ordered him to go to San Sebastián to check on whatever had happened there. The major, who lived near the church, said that he arranged to meet the photographer Darío Morales by the park at three-forty AM—although several people in San Sebastián that night, including Helen Mack and Nery Rodenas, had seen Morales taking photographs with a flash as early as one-thirty. Major Escobar Blas said that Darío Morales had walked ahead of him, toward the parish house, while he remained behind, talking to firemen. These firemen, said Major Escobar Blas, told him that the person who'd been killed inside the parish-house garage was Bishop Juan Gerardi.

Aside from the glaringly evident fact that the burly, medium-height Major Escobar Blas bore no resemblance to the tall, thin man in a baseball cap whom witnesses saw with Darío Morales that night, there were other problems with the major's testimony. The firemen who'd been called to the parish house by Father Mario at around one in the morning had already returned to their station at the hour Major Escobar Blas claimed to have spoken to them. The firemen wouldn't return until nearly dawn, when summoned back in order to deliver Bishop Gerardi's body to the morgue. So Major Escobar Blas couldn't have spoken to them if he arrived when he said he did.

His testimony was riddled with lies. And under cross-examination the major's arrogant martial façade began to crumble.

“Was it the usual procedure for you, Chief of Protection Services, to go personally to verify an emergency at three in the morning?”

“
Emmmm …
No, it's not usual.”

He began to stumble and hesitate over his answers, and Captain Lima, apparently trying to buy the major some time, rose to his feet and addressed Judge Cojulún. Lima announced that there were two unknown and suspicious people sitting in the courtroom and asked the judge to make them identify themselves. The men turned out to be two ordinary office workers who'd wandered over during their lunch break to catch a bit of the historic trial. Terrified, they gathered up their things and fled.