The Art of Political Murder (35 page)

F
OR THE MOST PART
, the officers from the EMP remained consistent in the basic elements of their version of the events of the night of the murder. But low-ranking soldiers provided some surprises. For instance, the EMP specialist Estrada Pérez said that he'd seen Captain Lima inside the EMP grounds, in civilian clothes, between ten and eleven that night, which was when Aguilar Martínez said that he'd seen Lima arrive, dressed casually.

A witness for the prosecution, a prisoner named Hugo Izquierdo Banini, testified that he had shared a cell with Captain Lima for forty-five days in the Centro Preventivo in May and June of the previous year. He said that Captain Lima had confided to him that President Arzú, through an intermediary, had stayed in touch with him over the telephone and provided money for his needs. Colonel Pozuelos and Major Escobar Blas, according to Izquierdo Banini, had intervened to make sure that the captain received special treatment in prison.

Carlos Barrientos, the prisoner who had turned Captain Lima's agenda book and other documents over to the Public Ministry after their fistfight in the Centro Preventivo, also testified. Mario Domingo told me that Barrientos was a former agent with G-2, Military Intelligence, who, in a romantic conflict over a woman,
had murdered a policeman. He'd fought with Lima for control of their sector of the prison.

“I'm under death threats,” Barrientos told the court, “but I'm here to tell Captain Lima that I'm not afraid of him. I'm telling him that to his face.” Barrientos was blunt about his motives: he had stolen the agenda and other papers and handed them over to the Public Ministry because he wanted to “fuck over Lima.” After he'd managed to get Lima expelled from the sector of the prison in dispute, a grenade was tossed into the house of his wife and children.

The Limas continued to maintain that the Valle del Sol gang had murdered Bishop Gerardi. When Ana Lucía Escobar was called to testify about what she'd observed at the crime scene that night in April, Captain Lima made a show of being scared out of his wits by the witness, turning to the judges to complain that she was looking at him threateningly. Ana Lucía responded with an embarrassed giggle.

A
T THE BEGINNING
of the trial it had been widely thought that Father Mario was the key to solving the Gerardi case. Though his behavior remained one of the case's mysteries, it now seemed strangely superfluous. The priest made a sorrowful spectacle in his pajamas and bathrobe, with his great soft slab of a face and his tittering asides to his lawyer. Marta Nájera de Orantes, his mother, was always looking on, sitting in the front row of the spectators' gallery with his nurse. As soon as there was a recess, they would get up and go to him. It occurred to me that the priest might have secrets that he would rather take with him to prison for decades than confess in front of his mother.

Father Mario hadn't needed the wheelchair before his legal troubles began, and during the trial he was occasionally photographed nimbly hopping into and out of it when he was not in the courtroom. Aside from Rubén Chanax's testimony, there was no single piece of conclusively damaging evidence against the
priest—there were just lots and lots of little things that added up to an impression of dismaying, baffling guilt. The cook at the parish house, Margarita López, had, in the immediate aftermath of the crime, told Juana Sanabria that when Father Mario came to her door to wake her the night of the murder, he was freshly bathed and dressed. She had said the same thing to another woman. It was partly because she repressed the story later that Margarita López had been arrested for withholding evidence.

Juana Sanabria testified about her frantic and repeated calls to Bishop Gerardi's telephone in the hours after the murder, calls Father Mario claimed that he hadn't heard, though the bishop's room was next to his own. She said that she had phoned three different numbers in the parish house. The sacristan, Antonio Izaguirre, told the court that the telephones could be heard ringing throughout the house, and that at night it was Father Mario's responsibility to answer them.

E
DGAR
G
UTIÉRREZ
, REMHI's former director, spoke to the court about the Guatemalan Army's intelligence structures, and their stake, as he perceived it, in the murder of Bishop Gerardi. Gutiérrez was now the head of the only intelligence-gathering agency manned by civilians. He recounted how, weeks after the bishop's murder, President Arzú's High Commission had refused to look into the participation of the Limas in the crime despite several leads pointing to their possible involvement, or to investigate any of the president's security personnel or the so-called Cofradía, the brotherhood of active and former intelligence officers. During the war, Gutiérrez said, “military and paramilitary structures became accustomed to working with total impunity. Then their acts were based on their security functions. When the guerrillas were no longer a threat, those structures went on operating in the same way, but not with any political objectives anymore, now they were devoted to delinquency…. Their crime practices grew over the years. And the civilian governments weren't
capable of dismantling them. Because this impunity protects them, it intimidates and prevents anyone from denouncing them.”

A spokesman for MINUGUA, Terry Delrue, pointed out that crimes like the murder of Bishop Gerardi, if they were not punished, encouraged the growth of organized crime. Guatemalans in the military had gotten rich through criminal activities such as narcotics trafficking, kidnapping, automobile theft, dealing in contraband, extortion, and so on. Bishop Gerardi had been murdered because he threatened the military's hold on the state's overdeveloped intelligence apparatus, its hold on real power—the so-called parallel power that is the clandestine underbelly of official power—and on their criminal rackets, which depended on their being able to commit crimes with impunity.

Bishop Ríos Montt also explicitly connected the state's murky parallel powers to Bishop Gerardi's murder: “The fact that the authorities had these elements of the Army working in the EMP and refused to investigate them shows that they're incapable of confronting problems like the one occupying us now. I've always said that as long as this power behind the throne exists, Guatemala will not be free, nor will it have justice or peace. Here, presidents come, and presidents go. Just when we thought we'd recovered an environment that made it possible to live in peace, they answered: Here, take your dead man, who tried to discover the truth.”

I was back in Guatemala for the closing arguments in the case. The prosecution went first. Leopoldo Zeissig reviewed the evidence the prosecution had presented, point by point, but bogged down and couldn't finish within his allotted time. Mynor Melgar, however, closed powerfully. Bishop Gerardi's murder, the prosecution lawyers argued, had been an elaborate, methodically planned extrajudicial execution carried out by a still unknown number of Guatemalan intelligence operatives and specialists, a politically motivated crime of state, sprung into motion like clockwork on the morning of Sunday, April 26, with, among other elements, Specialist Villanueva leaving the Antigua prison, and Captain Byron
Lima flying in from Miami after an overseas presidential security mission.

The prosecution asked that criminal investigations be initiated against, among others, several high-ranking EMP officers: majors Villagrán and Escobar Blas, and the head of the EMP, Colonel Rudy Pozuelos. The prosecutors also asked for the charges against the priest to be downgraded from homicide to participation in an extrajudicial execution. ODHA had resisted enormous pressure from within the Church to drop the charges against Father Mario, or at least to avoid attacking him in the closing arguments. Mynor Melgar insisted that OHDA owed loyalty above all to the law and to the legal case it was participating in, including the evidence against the priest. But ODHA did ask that the charges against the housekeeper be dropped.

In his closing statement, Mynor Melgar, marking the rhythm of his words with a pencil drummed up and down, promised that ODHA would not falter in seeking justice for Bishop Gerardi's murder, no matter how high up subsequent investigations might lead. He even asked for an investigation of former President Álvaro Arzú, who had sent his brother as an emissary to Bishop Ríos Montt, offering to free Father Mario in exchange for the Church's promise to stop accusing the military. Melgar outlined a case for the defendants' complicity based on their “dominion” over the crime: foreknowledge of the crime, and even relatively secondary operational involvement, gave them the option of preventing and denouncing it, thus implicating them as accomplices. Melgar spoke of Bishop Gerardi's decades of struggle for justice and on behalf of Guatemala's poor, which had long ago earned him the enmity of the Army, culminating in the REMHI project.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, during the defense's closing arguments, José Toledo, Father Mario's dandyish young lawyer—to the amusement of the prosecution, Toledo had dyed his hair a reddish hue and was wearing it in a tiny ponytail—struck a reprehensible
note, shouting across the room at ODHA's lawyers that the Church had benefited from the bishop's death by selling copies of the REMHI report and sweatshirts with his picture on them. “Who had the motive to kill him?” Toledo railed. The defense lawyers repeatedly shouted, “Chanax lied!” and accused Rubén Chanax of being the murderer, in league with organized crime (Valle del Sol, etc.). They repeated their argument that Chanax, by having admitted spying on Bishop Gerardi, had admitted a role in the crime, and so should be arrested. But, they said, Rubén Chanax's testimony was also a fabrication, prepared by the Public Ministry, and legal proceedings should be lodged against the special prosecutor for knowingly using false witnesses. Irvíng Aguilar compared the prosecution's tactics to Joseph Goebbels's strategy of repeating a lie until it became the truth.

Whenever the defense lawyers said something especially outrageous, nuns sitting in a row in the courtroom were unable to contain themselves, gasping in horror, and whispering in chorus, “Shameless!” “
Qué bárbaro!
” “How could he say such a thing?”

The august, silver-haired Julio Cintrón, with his deep velvet voice and ice-blue stare, made a seething and grandiloquent closing argument. His point was that you couldn't convict someone of being an accomplice in an extrajudicial crime if you didn't know who had committed the crime. Who, after all, was this “Hugo” mentioned by Rubén Chanax and Jorge Aguilar Martínez and presumably spotted by the taxi driver?

During a recess, while I stood in front of the spectator section, near the cordoned-off area where the trial was conducted, I heard a stream of expletives spoken in a deep voice behind me:
hueco
, faggot, and so on. I looked back and saw Captain Lima turning away from me, and I asked, heatedly, if he'd been speaking to me. He fixed me with a cold glare that quickly became contemptuous and said, with forceful but measured diction—as if I'd insulted him but he was determined to display his lofty superiority—that he had nothing to say to a person such as me, and he walked
away. A young woman sitting in the front row, horrified, said that I had indeed been the target of his invective, and the women sitting alongside her nodded. They looked at me with frightened expressions. I thought, with a sinking feeling, Oh, no, what have I done now? After lunch, Leopoldo Zeissig told me that Lima's defense lawyers had tried to have me expelled from the courtroom for provoking their client. (I assume that it was my closeness to ODHA and my piece in
The New Yorker
, which had been excerpted in
elPeriódico
, that drew Lima's scorn.)

No matter how inept its arguments might seem, the defense was cheered on by the many right-wing zealots who came to the trial to show their support. One of them was an elderly but sprightly woman—her surname was something like Von Lutten—who, as far as I could tell, never missed a session. She wore her unruly gray hair loose around her shoulders and dressed flamboyantly, like a mad old hippie, in a purple or pink blouse and tights pulled over twig-thin legs. The ODHA lawyers nicknamed her the Pink Panther. In decades past she'd published a newspaper column that people who remembered it described as either extremely right-wing or fascist. She thought the defense lawyers were wonderfully clever. Whenever they unleashed a zinger, she turned her painted face toward the prosecution table and, with a sneering grin, laughed like a Mexican death skull.

The side of the courtroom where presumably leftist supporters of the prosecution sat was called Woodstock by Guatemalan reporters. It was filled with human rights activists, “solidarity” types in sandals, progressive nuns in secular dress, and Franciscan friars in austere brown smocks. Were they as frightening to others as the Pink Panther was to me? Did their passivity hide another kind of violence? Did they (we?) truly want justice or simply another kind of vindication, a symbolic revenge for decades of rampant, unpunished murder?