The Art of Political Murder (41 page)

Rubén Chanax, in Mexico City, had told Mario Domingo a much more disturbing story about his G-2 training course. At the end of the intelligence course, he said, as a kind of final exam, the trainees had to commit a murder. Considering that it was a course for the Guatemalan Army's most murderous entity, this was not incredible. Chanax described an incident he said had occurred in May 1992 on the Incienso Bridge, spanning a deep ravine outside Guatemala City, resulting in the double homicide of a young couple selected at random. The weapon was a pistol, he said. “And then,” said Chanax, “we graduated, if you want to put it that way.” Later Mario Domingo found brief newspaper reports from May 10, 1992, of a couple found dead at the bottom of the ravine underneath the Incienso Bridge.

A
FTER THE PUBLICATION
of the book about the case by Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico, in which they said that a thorough search of military records turned up no documentation whatsoever of Rubén Chanax's military service, Rodrigo Salvadó and Arturo Aguilar went to San Cristóbal Totonicapán and found Chanax's grandfather, who gave them photographs of a young Chanax in uniform. ODHA provided those photographs to the press. Jorge García had for months been petitioning the Ministry of Defense for documentary proof of Rubén Chanax's military service. Inquiries for Rubén Chanax Sontay turned up nothing, but now, on the basis of the conversations with Chanax and with his mother, Rosa Sontay, the prosecutor asked for records for Rubén Chanax Gómez. On May 3, 2004, he received a one-page signed and stamped document that read: “After searching the archives, we confirmed that there is only information about a señor Rubén Chanax Gómez, who was on active duty in the Army Corps of Engineers ‘Lieutenant Colonel of Engineers and Engineer Francisco Vela Arrango' from 1 February 1992 to 31 July 1994, when discharged for having completed his required tour of duty.” The document also described his treatment for a chronic sinus condition in 1993. Rafael Guillamón told me later that once, during the first months after the bishop's murder, he'd sat Chanax down in front of some disassembled weapons, including military assault rifles. Chanax had reassembled them with an easy, familiar confidence.

Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico were no longer living in Guatemala, but Rico was quick to respond to the discovery of the new information supporting Chanax's contention that he had Army experience. She published a column in
Prensa Libre
complaining that the photograph of Chanax in uniform, which had also been published in
Prensa Libre
, was hopelessly blurry (although ODHA had given the paper several legible photographs).

Maite Rico also found the idea that Chanax would use his stepmother's maternal surname ridiculous. But there was a
greater problem. The document Jorge Garciá had successfully subpoenaed from the Ministry of Defense, she said, gave Chanax's age when he left the Army as thirty-one: “The problem is that that is Chanax's age now, not his age at the time of his military service. All these absurdities lead one to think that this document was introduced into the Defense information system
after October 31, 2003, the date on which Chanax turned thirty-one. The objective: an attempt to give credibility to his testimony. Who did it? That is what has to be verified…. Rubén Chanax Sontay is a false witness, as we demonstrated in our book,
Who Killed the Bishop?
”

Rubén Chanax Sontay in uniform, circa 1993

That particular column by Maite Rico is a key document, I believe, for understanding the nature and context of the campaign waged against the verdicts in the Gerardi case, and against the witnesses, the prosecutors, and ODHA. Rico's account of the military document she saw is especially provocative. It was
not
, in fact, the same document that the Ministry of Defense gave to Jorge García. That document, Report 2418, contains no mention of Chanax's age. I have seen, and have in my possession, a photocopy of that document. (Chanax's age at any time had never been an issue and, anyway, it made no sense to suggest, as Rico's mystifying document did, that Chanax would have been conscripted at such an advanced age, nearly thirty.) So where did Rico get her document? Who sent it to her and why? I asked Mario Domingo about this and he replied, by e-mail, “That was what made us deduce that the authors of that book must get their information from Military Intelligence.”

S
OME OF THE MOST WORRISOME ISSUES
in Chanax's testimony went back to the very first moments of the crime. Mario Domingo had long been troubled by the question of how El Chino Iván could have immediately returned to the park after retrieving his cigarettes from Don Mike's and not seen the black Jeep Cherokee in which Captain Lima and Sergeant Major Villanueva arrived at the church of San Sebastián. In the first week of March 2003, Arturo Aguilar and Rodrigo Salvadó were sent to Costa Rica to talk to El Chino Iván. All they had to go on was an unspecific address in the outskirts of San José, “near a red bridge.” They walked the streets, knocking on doors; finally Rodrigo and Arturo
called at a door answered by a man who said that El Chino Iván did live there, but that he wasn't in. The house was near a reeking sewage canal. After several more visits and phone calls, it became obvious that El Chino Iván was avoiding them. Several unrelated people seemed to be living at the address, and one finally directed Arturo and Rodrigo to a young woman named Wendy Cascante, who had met El Chino Iván in a computer class soon after he'd arrived in Costa Rica. She had become pregnant with his child, and they had tried living together in her mother's house, but that domestic arrangement hadn't lasted very long. Since leaving her, El Chino Iván came to visit only sporadically, sometimes bringing money for their little daughter's support. Cascante didn't know where he lived now or how he supported himself, but she suspected that he'd returned to a life of street crime. She recalled that El Chino Iván had been especially nervous during the months just after the trial in 2001, repeatedly saying that he was going to be killed. Once she'd answered the telephone and a male voice said, “Tell the Guatemalan that we're going to kill him.”

Arturo and Rodrigo finally found El Chino Iván. They met with him twice, and he told them a new story about what happened after the shirtless man stepped out of the garage at the parish house. Chanax had testified that he'd rung the parish-house doorbell to inform Father Mario that the little garage door—from which the shirtless man had emerged minutes before—had been left open. But El Chino Iván said that
he
, not Chanax, rang the bell that night, and that no one had answered. He said that
he
—not Father Mario, as Chanax claimed—had then closed the little door of the garage.

For the most part, El Chino Iván stuck to his original narrative about the night of Bishop Gerardi's murder, but he now said that he had seen some men gathered in Don Mike's store that night. He didn't know who they were. And he admitted that he'd seen Rubén Chanax speaking with Obdulio Villanueva in the park on
the Sunday morning of the murder. He also said he suspected that Bishop Gerardi hadn't been murdered by “Hugo.” He didn't even believe that Hugo existed. El Chino Iván said that he thought Villanueva and Captain Lima were the murderers, and that they had been helped by Rubén Chanax.

When the Untouchables asked why he'd revealed none of this at the trial, El Chino Iván said that it was because before the trial he'd received a telephone call from Ardón's former assistant, Gustavo Soria (who Rafael Guillamón, MINUGUA's chief investigator, emphatically insisted worked for Military Intelligence). Soria, El Chino Iván said, had wanted him to alter his original story at the trial, and had offered money. El Chino Iván claimed that he'd refused the offer and had instead stuck to the original story. This would explain his fear and the death threat that Wendy Cascante said he'd subsequently received.

In May, Mario Domingo and Jorge García returned for a second time to Mexico to talk to Chanax, who said that somebody from the Guatemalan military had visited him recently and offered him $10,000 if he would return to Guatemala and retract his testimony. “Look, I've already told you plenty,” Chanax said, “and I know you want to implicate me, but I promise you this: I'm never going to prison and nobody is going to kill me on account of this case.” The military visitor had apparently told Chanax that El Chino Iván was living in luxury in Costa Rica and that the Public Ministry was preparing to betray Chanax. Jorge Garciá, upset to learn that Chanax's whereabouts had been discovered, reassured him that none of this was true.

Rubén Chanax clarified one of the puzzling elements in the witnesses' testimony. In their separate statements to the police on the night of the bishop's murder, Chanax and El Chino Iván had contradicted each other about what had happened after the shirtless man had left the park. In Chanax's version, the man had returned, walking down the avenue, buttoning on a white shirt; in El Chino Iván's version, it was a beige shirt and he
walked directly into the park. El Chino Iván even claimed to have sold the stranger cigarettes. In his conversations in Mexico, Rubén Chanax revealed that the shirtless man had never returned at all; he said that both versions were untrue. “I made that part up,” Chanax confessed. “El Chino and I had the mission of confusing the investigation.”

O
NE WAY
of possibly resolving the contradictory accounts about the crucial minutes following Bishop Gerardi's murder was to bring Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván face to face. In November 2003, Mario Domingo, Jorge Garciá—who had recently become the special prosecutor in the case—and two observers from MINUGUA went to Mexico City. They told Chanax to meet them near the Zócalo, the city's enormous central plaza. The lawyers arrived with El Chino Iván, who'd been brought from Costa Rica for the surprise reunion. While El Chino Iván behaved as if he were overjoyed to be reunited with his old friend, Chanax clearly felt betrayed and fell into a sulk.

The lawyers took the witnesses to a hotel suite they had rented nearby. There, El Chino Iván recited his original story. He'd left Don Mike's minutes after Rubén Chanax had. When he reached the park, he'd glimpsed Chanax speaking with the shirtless man in front of the garage door. Realizing that he'd left his cigarettes behind in the store, he'd turned back, retrieved them, and then returned to the park. El Chino Iván said that he was away from the park only two or three minutes. That, he claimed, was when he had his encounter with the shirtless man. (Now, faced with lawyers and UN representatives instead of scruffy young Untouchables, El Chino Iván didn't repeat the suspicion he'd voiced in Costa Rica, that Hugo didn't exist.)

Rubén Chanax said that the shirtless man was barely exiting the park, on the Third Street side, when the black Jeep Cherokee entered the drive on the Second Street side. According to Chanax, it had all happened—the shirtless man exiting the
garage, Lima and Villanueva arriving—within a few minutes. So if El Chino Iván was away only two or three minutes, as he insisted, how could it be that he hadn't seen Captain Lima and Obdulio Villanueva arrive to alter the crime scene? Because, insisted Rubén Chanax, El Chino Iván was away from the park much longer than two or three minutes.

Mario Domingo was convinced that Chanax's version was the true one, or at least the truer one, and he had a private conversation with El Chino Iván in which the
bolito
finally admitted that he might, actually, have been away from the park longer than he originally stated. He said he didn't remember. “Maybe I was away longer,” he stammered. “Maybe ten minutes.” El Chino Iván had probably never seen the shirtless man. His claim that he'd seen the man now known as Hugo may have been premeditated disinformation, or simply a lie.

Rubén Chanax said that the original plan had been for Hugo and El Chino Iván to fake a robbery in the church, but El Chino Iván panicked and ran away. He returned to the garage at the San Sebastián parish house, but only after Captain Lima and Obdulio Villanueva had come and gone. The plan was that he and Chanax would say nothing, but when the police arrived, El Chino Iván told them that Chanax had seen everything, and the police took Chanax away. During those first interrogations, Chanax had revealed little more than his encounter with the shirtless man. Then El Chino Iván, once he was in custody too, had invented his own contradictory version.