The Art of Political Murder (4 page)

General Ríos Montt had on many occasions openly antagonized and defied Pope John Paul II. For example, Ríos Montt made it a point, on the eve of the pope's first visit to Guatemala, in 1983, to ignore papal pleas for clemency and execute several “subversives” who had been sentenced in special military tribunals that didn't include defense attorneys. In a sorely needed gesture to the Church, General Mejía Victores reluctantly allowed Archbishop Penados to summon his old friend Gerardi back from exile.

ODHA,
WHICH
A
RCHBISHOP
Penados established in 1989, with Bishop Gerardi as its head, was the first grassroots human rights organization in Guatemala capable of operating on a national scale. Many Guatemalans trusted the Church as they did no other institution—although others, of course, despised it. In any case, the Church was the only organization that could overcome the cultural limitations of the United Nations truth commission, which was why Bishop Gerardi conceived the REMHI project. Guatemala's modern Maya speak twenty-three indigenous languages and dialects, and many do not speak Spanish as a second language. Many of the Maya communities were in military zones where a climate of repression still prevailed long after the fighting had stopped. Tens of thousands of Maya who abandoned their homes during the years of terror, fleeing into remote mountains and forests, had for years been living in semi-clandestine communities—“resistance communities”—inside the country and over the border in Mexico, and also in refugee camps. Bishop Gerardi understood that most Maya villagers wouldn't feel secure cooperating with UN investigators, many of whom were foreigners, unless the Catholic Church could first help dispel deeply ingrained inhibitions and fears against speaking out.

The REMHI report—whatever its flaws as strict social science—was by far the most extensive investigation of the war's toll on the civilian population that had ever been attempted.
Guatemala:
Never Again
identified by name a quarter of the war's estimated civilian dead (the 50,000-plus names fill the fourth volume) and documented 410 massacres, which are defined as attempts to destroy and murder entire communities. Most of the massacres occurred between 1981 and 1983, but some took place as late as 1995. There were also over 1,500 violent killings of three or more civilians at one time. The report compiled estimates of the numbers of refugees created by the war, of widows and orphans, of victims of rape and torture, and of the disappeared. It drew on the testimony of victims, survivors, and combatants from both sides of the conflict, as well as on declassified U.S. government documents. The report also included an examination of its own methods of collecting information, reflecting on such challenges and pitfalls as the unreliability of memory and the passage of time. It analyzed the war's historical background, its impact on communities, its strategies and mechanisms. One chapter cast some light on the most feared and mysterious of the state's entities, Military Intelligence, usually referred to as G-2. (The terminology was adopted from the U.S. Army's classification system: G-1, Personnel; G-2, Intelligence; G-3, Logistics; etc.) The report described the structure and functions of its various units, one of which was devoted to sexual spying (gathering information on cheating husbands or employing prostitute-spies to compromise opponents). Where it had the evidence to do so,
Guatemala: Never Again
identified military units responsible for crimes, and in numerous cases named individuals. The report concluded that the Guatemalan Army and associated paramilitary units, such as the rural civil patrols, were responsible for 80 percent of the killings of civilians, and that the guerrillas had committed a little less than 5 percent of those crimes.

The authors of the REMHI report attempted to describe and illustrate the logic behind what they called “the inexplicable.” But numbing numerical estimates, analysis of tactics and causes,
and even journalistic reconstructions of specific massacres could “explain” only so much. Bishop Gerardi, as he'd once told Edgar Gutiérrez, had wanted a report that would “enter readers through their pores” and move them. Thus there were hundreds and hundreds of pages of direct testimony distributed throughout the text:

The señora was pregnant. With a knife they cut open her belly to pull out her little baby boy. And they killed them both. And the muchachitas [little girls] playing in the trees near the house, they cut off their little heads with machetes
. Case 0976, Santa María Tzejá, Quiché, 1980.

They killed them with machetes, they killed them by strangling and with bullets. They picked up the children by their legs and smashed them against a tree, and the tree they smashed the children against, that tree died, because of so many children smashed against that tree so many times, well the tree died
. Case 3336 Río Negro, Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, 1982.

On the 19th of March 1981 the Army came to the village of Chel, and took from the church the 95 people praying there, and they took them down to the river at the edge of the village, and there they massacred them with knives and bullets. The rest of the people were frightened and they fled into the mountains where they were pursued by helicopters. The responsible ones were the Army and the civil patrols
. Case 4761, Chel, Chajul, Quiché.

When I looked, they were calling the people to come together and they were ordering them into a church that is there and I stayed hidden where I was, watching everything that was happening, until I saw that no one was left outside, men, women, old people, children, they put them in the church. When I looked, they were closing the doors and then they poured gasoline around and then they set it on
fire. That's the testimony I've come to give
. Case 977, Santa María Tzejá, Quiché. 1982.

I don't know if it was a captain or a lieutenant who arrived with the soldiers and said, “We're going to finish off this village because this village is with the guerrillas.” By one in the afternoon they'd finished killing everyone and only the women and children were left. And then the lieutenant said, “We better kill the women and children so that no one will be left.”

They killed the women and children with bombs [grenades], because there were so many children; and as they had pretty young women in that town, well then the soldiers separated out those women. They formed into three groups, and got to work killing those poor people, but the soldiers had their way with the young ones, it was the lieutenant who started fucking around with the poor muchachas [young women]. The two-year-olds were all pressed together into a tight ball, and they were set on fire all pressed together, into a ball, all the children were burned
. Case 6070 Petanac, Huehuetenango, 1982.

Josefa [Acabal] was talking with Eulalia [Hernández] when the soldiers came and surrounded the house. They cut up the señoras with knives, they killed them, five people in all. When the corpses were on the ground they started burning the house, they threw the corpses on the fire
. Case 4912, Xix Hamlet, Chajul, Quiché, 1983.

The burning fat runs outside, look, how the fat of the poor women runs. It looks like when it rains and the water runs in the gutters. The fat runs like that, pure water. And what's that? I thought as I went in, and pure fat was coming out of those poor women, pure water comes out
. Case 6070, Petanac, Huehuetenango, 1982.

A reader might emerge from those pages ready to believe the Guatemalan Army guilty of any crime it might ever be accused of. That would later pose a problem for those who had to investigate
and prosecute the case of Bishop Gerardi's murder. They would have to resist drawing prejudicial conclusions emotionally rooted in the savagery of the recent past.

In 1998, when the REMHI report appeared, no Guatemalan military officer had ever been convicted or imprisoned for a crime related to human rights, although a few cases had resulted in convictions against low-level soldiers and members of militias. Some major cases had been stalled in the courts for years, and the amnesty decreed by the peace accords was meant to prevent any more such cases from going forward. But under international law there were conditions in which the amnesty might one day be breached or partially overturned, and
Guatemala: Never Again
, it would later seem obvious, helped to make those conditions seem within reach. Bishop Gerardi had let it be known that evidence collected by REMHI would be made available to people who might later seek justice against either the military or the guerrillas, should circumstances permit.

So the REMHI report introduced unpredictable and unforeseen dynamics into Guatemala's postwar climate. It loudly initiated a public conversation—responsible for 80 percent of the war's crimes!—that the Guatemalan Army and its allies had not expected to have to tolerate, certainly not
within
the country. By anticipating the looming, more authoritative report sponsored by the UN, and by breaking taboos against speaking out and assigning blame, REMHI posed a direct challenge to the amnesty and to the Army's uncontested position at the center of Guatemalan society. There was much at stake in preserving that position. Initially empowered as protectors of the country's oligarchy and of the United States' cold war goals, the Army had became a power unto itself, its officer corps constituting an elite social class that looked after its own interests.

But how could murdering Bishop Gerardi in retaliation for the REMHI report—two days
after
its publication—have served those interests?

S
OON AFTER ARRIVING
at the parish house on that final Sunday evening of his life—after Ronalth Ochaeta dropped him off—Bishop Gerardi, without even changing his clothes, went out again. Father Mario later recounted that when he left his bedroom for the six o'clock Mass, on the short walk down the corridor to the sacristy and the church, he passed the garage and saw that both of the bishop's vehicles—a beige Toyota Corolla and a white VW Golf—were parked there. When he headed back to his room about forty-five minutes later, the VW Golf was gone. But there was nothing unusual about that. As he did every Sunday night, Bishop Gerardi had picked up his sister Carmen at her home—the same house where they'd spent their childhood, in Candelaria, one of the city's oldest and most venerable barrios. The Gerardis had grown up across the street from the home of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, whom they had known as children. There was a statue of Asturias in a traffic island in front of the two houses.

Bishop Gerardi and Carmen went to the home of their nephew Javier, where they watched television and had a simple dinner of
plátanos
, beans, and cheese. Then the bishop drove his sister back to Candelaria, arriving there—as she was able to recall later, because she'd asked him the time—at twenty minutes before ten. They lingered in the car awhile, talking, before saying good-bye.
Carmen watched her brother drive off in the direction of the church of San Sebastián. At that hour, investigators later calculated, with the streets empty of traffic—by day they were usually impossibly jammed—it was a drive that the bishop could have made in five minutes, and probably in no more than eight.

So a few minutes before ten, Bishop Gerardi drove up Second Street and turned left into the driveway that runs between the San Sebastián complex and a tree-filled park. The complex includes, in a row, a Catholic school building, the parish house, the garage, and the church. The park is traversed by a paved walkway leading from Sixth Avenue to the raised plaza in front of the church doors. At night, the park is dark and quiet, and the neighborhood, which bustles by day, because it is so close to the downtown business area and government buildings, is mostly deserted. Shops were shuttered, offices and school buildings were empty, and the heavy wooden doors of faded residences were securely locked. San Sebastián is an old parish, dating nearly to the founding of the city in the late eighteenth century, but the church itself, which is of modest size, with two bell towers, one at each corner, was twice destroyed by earthquakes and twice rebuilt during the past century. A remnant of the colonial era, a statue of the Virgin of Sorrows of Manchén, her chest pierced by numerous swords, her pale polychrome face ethereally sad, lips parted to expel a gentle sigh of pain, stands in a side chapel.

A dead-end side street, Callejón del Manchén, extends two blocks, between Third and Fifth streets, from alongside the church of San Sebastián to the rear of the old National Palace. At the intersections of Callejón del Manchén and Fourth and Fifth streets, guarded security gates protect the presidential residence, which is situated between them. The very wealthy and patrician President Arzú, who is descended from Spanish colonial viceroys and archbishops, was the first Guatemalan president to choose to live in his own home instead of in the presidential residence, which was being used for business and formal ceremonies. Also
inside those gates were the headquarters of the Guatemalan Army's Presidential Guard and the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP), or Presidential Military Staff. In recent decades there was probably no city block in all of Central America more forbidding or generally feared than that one on Callejón del Manchén, where the EMP and its notorious military intelligence unit, formerly known as El Archivo, were situated. The EMP and the Presidential Guard, aside from overseeing the personal security of the president and his family, sheltered, among its approximately 500 members, an elite anti-kidnapping commando unit. During the war years, there were rarely any survivors of the EMP's interrogation and torture sessions. (According to declassified U.S. documents, Guatemalan Military Intelligence—G-2—and the Archivo, though technically separate, worked hand in hand.) Looming on the other side of Fourth Street, just outside the gates and only about 200 feet from the church, is the modern white-concrete and black-glass multistory building of the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis (SAE), a government information-gathering agency that up until 1998, at least, was also integrated into the military's intelligence structure.