The Art of Political Murder (45 page)

In early 2003, when Gutiérrez was serving as foreign minister in the Portillo government, agreements were signed establishing a special commission under UN auspices to investigate criminal networks in Guatemala—the clandestine “parallel powers” alleged to have their roots in Military Intelligence. It was to be
called the Commission for the Investigation of Illegal Bodies and Clandestine Security Apparatus and was generally referred to as the CICIACS (pronounced see-syaks). It would be another international truth commission, but one legally empowered to investigate and take on the issue of impunity for organized crime linked to the Guatemalan military, police, and government. As foreign minister, Edgar Gutiérrez was deeply involved in the project, and the government was unlikely to have agreed to it without his urging. But the Guatemalan Congress, which was led by General Ríos Montt, rejected CICIACS as a violation of national sovereignty. (It certainly loomed as a violation of the impunity from prosecution of many members of Congress who were complicit in clandestine crime mafias.) President Berger had resurrected the CICIACS initiative but couldn't yet overcome the predictable resistance. Berger was perceived as a weak civilian leader even by Guatemalan standards.

Edgar Gutiérrez and I met for lunch in Mexico City during the Christmas holidays at the end of 2005. He reflected on the Limas' obsession with him. “People like the Limas can conceive of using political power in only two ways,” he said. “For personal enrichment and vengeance against enemies. That's how power has always worked in Guatemala. So when I was at the SAE they looked at me and said, This guy is so clever we can't even see what he's doing. They imagined I was everywhere.” They couldn't comprehend that an individual might have a concept of political power—never mind convictions—different from theirs.

I
FELT AS IF
I
WERE LEARNING
as much about the Gerardi case as I had learned in all the preceding years combined. Sometimes important sources who were indignant about the credibility given to a campaign of propaganda and smears against ODHA and the prosecutors, and who otherwise would not have talked to a journalist, decided to speak. Some of the new information centered on the role of the fearsome Major Francisco Escobar Blas,
who had been implicated in the murder by Aguilar Martínez. Escobar Blas had been one of the prime movers behind the efforts to promote the Valle del Sol scenario—that Ana Lucía and her cohort had murdered the bishop when he discovered they had been trafficking in items stolen from the church.

It turned out that Father Mario, who was known for his comforting bedside manner when visiting ill and elderly parishioners, used to regularly give communion to Major Escobar Blas's ailing grandmother in her home. Leopoldo Zeissig was the first to tell me that, and it was corroborated by Rafael Guillamón. Escobar Blas's mother and grandmother both lived within a few blocks of the church of San Sebastián, and he sometimes lived with one or the other of them. His mother told Rafael Guillamón that on the night Bishop Gerardi was murdered, people from the EMP were phoning the house deep into the early morning hours, looking for her son. Later, when it became impossible to deny that there had been at least two men from the EMP at the San Sebastián parish house and park that night, it was officially claimed that the photographer seen there was Specialist Darío Morales and that the tall thin man in a red baseball cap accompanying him was Major Escobar Blas—who was neither tall nor thin.

Major Escobar Blas had been a legendary figure in the war zones back when he was a pilot with elite airborne counterinsurgency units. A former combat veteran described him as the kind of soldier who liked to strut around with the head of a decapitated guerrilla dangling from each hand. A few months after Bishop Gerardi's murder, he was sent to take an advanced military course in Chile. Escobar Blas told his mother that it was “a presidential order.” The mother told Rafael Guillamón that her son was receiving threatening phone calls before he left for Chile. On the very day he went away, she said, Captain Lima had come looking for him in person, but had just missed him.

Why was Captain Lima looking for, and possibly angry with, Escobar Blas? Maybe because Captain Lima's role in Bishop
Gerardi's murder had been secondary to Major Escobar Blas's, yet it was the captain who was in trouble, the captain who had been recalled from the prestigious UN mission to Cyprus, the captain whose name was in the newspapers. Meanwhile lawyers from the Oficinita were supplying Escobar Blas with an alibi and he was being sent off to Chile.

Major Escobar Blas found out that his mother had been talking to MINUGUA. He phoned her and told her to stop talking
babosadas
, foolishness.

Escobar Blas was summoned back from Chile when the court-ordered evidentiary hearings were held at the church of San Sebastián and witnesses and some suspects were asked to reenact their movements and tell what they had seen on the night of the murder. Escobar Blas was reluctant to return to Guatemala, and a message, of sorts, was conveyed to him. (MINUGUA knew the details of this incident, as did the prosecutors.) His mother came home late one night and saw a young couple embracing in the dark shadows near her front door. They pushed themselves into her house behind her. She was very brutally assaulted. As they left, one of her assailants said, “A message from Valle del Sol.” If his mother couldn't recognize the message behind those words, her son, one of the creators of the Valle del Sol fiction, certainly would.

So Major Escobar Blas flew back to Guatemala and turned up at the San Sebastián church and gave his weird performance at the evidentiary proceeding as the tall, thin soldier in a red baseball cap seen by witnesses. But what was Major Escobar Blas really doing that night? Chepito Morales, a military defense lawyer, once confided, or boasted, to Rafael Guillamón, “We had to put Escobar Blas somewhere that night.” He needed an alibi, and the Oficinita provided one, placing him at the crime scene. It was not illegal, after all, for the EMP to have sent agents to look in on an occurrence within its security perimeter.

“H
OMOSEXUALITY WAS DEFINITELY THE KEY
that opened the San Sebastián parish house to the killers,” Rodrigo Salvadó said to me
one rainy afternoon as we sat in the corridor by ODHA's courtyard going over details in the crime one more time. But how? To understand how the killers got into the parish house, one had to go back perhaps twenty years. Another story, as if long hidden inside one of the smaller boxes in a Chinese box—a box of fear inside a box of prudence inside a box of patient time-biding—had emerged.

In 1984, Military Intelligence had become aware of a house in Zone 4 where homosexual officers and civilians mixed at secret parties. It was known as Club Rosa. Few national armies openly tolerate homosexuality among troops, and it isn't hard to imagine how difficult it must be for a gay officer to accommodate his nature to the Guatemalan Army. The swaggering Colonel Lima, who could be described as a personification of the Army's culture of strident machismo, must not have been pleased to learn that promising young officers and cadets from the Escuela Politécnica were partying, even cross-dressing, at Club Rosa. But how to stop this activity without bringing scandal and embarrassment down on the Army at a time when it was at war and when foreign governments and the international press were keeping such a close eye on the country? This was how: a member of Club Rosa, surnamed Muñoz Martínez, was murdered, and in a particularly gruesome manner. The message was understood. Two young officers deserted and fled the country, reportedly to California, where they still reside, one operating a karate dojo there. The rest were quietly transferred to other commands and units. Some served their time in the military and eventually fell by the wayside. But others, managing to hide or master their vulnerability, marrying, producing children, went on to successful military careers. One or two turned up in the nucleus of President Arzú's EMP. (Two EMP officers mentioned in this chronicle of the Gerardi case are known to have been lovers, and were even discovered in bed together by the wife of one of the men. She then, as one former soldier told me, “shouted it from her rooftop in Colonia Lourdes.”)

Twelve years later the war was over, and in those new times homosexuality was tolerated a little bit more in some sectors of
Guatemalan society, if not actually in the military or among those associated with the conservative wing of the Catholic Church. And a new incarnation, in a sense, of Club Rosa came into being. Closeted homosexuals were meeting in an elegant home in Zone 2, a neighborhood of belle epoque mansions only a few blocks from the home of Major Escobar Blas's mother. When Captain Lima was interviewed by Claudia Méndez, after his arrest, he told her about “a tryst house near the Morazán Park” in Zone 2. “They say Monseñor Hernández used to go there with Father [Mario] Orantes, along with some very wealthy lesbians.” Father Mario's close friend and ordination godmother, Martha Jane Melville Novella, was said to be the owner of the house. At least one other EMP officer, a veteran of the first Club Rosa, occasionally attended the gatherings. Diego Arzú, the son of former president Arzú, was also said to be a member of the group. Diego, who was in his early twenties, had dated a niece of Martha Jane Melville Novella, which was how he was introduced into her aunt's circle.

A leaflet was circulated in Colonia Lourdes, the military officers' residential neighborhood, only days after Bishop Gerardi was killed. It claimed that on the night of the murder Captain Lima had been sent to the San Sebastián parish house to extricate Diego Arzú. In his interview with Claudia Méndez, Captain Lima denied that accusation, but he also introduced into the conversation the allegation—without refuting it—that Diego Arzú belonged to the circle that met in what he referred to as the Zone 2
casa de citas
, which can mean a bordello, or a place of illicit trysts.

“There was definitely something going on between Diego Arzú and Father Mario Orantes,” said Rafael Guillamón. Several of the park vagrants, including Rubén Chanax, had mentioned Diego Arzú's visits to the San Sebastián parish house. And a diplomat, a great admirer of President Arzú, told a former member of ODHA that Diego's “double life” was “a strong rumor among the cabinet and in the corridors of the palace.” But what could the relationship have been between the priest and the aristocratic president's young
son? Father Mario had worldly enthusiasms but also a spiritual side. Perhaps the priest understood the youth's travails and gave him support and counsel. Leopoldo Zeissig said that he believed, but hadn't been able to corroborate, that Bishop Gerardi's murderers had somehow exploited the link between Father Mario and Diego Arzú, especially afterward, during the cover-up.

In a press conference from prison, Captain Lima had revealed that he had in his possession receipts for the delivery order from Pollo Campero to Father Mario on the night of the murder. Father Mario had told prosecutors that he had ordered a meal from Pollo Campero; so why would Lima use the receipts in order to issue, presumably, one of his subliminal warnings? Axel Romero, Bishop Gerardi's nephew, was shown those receipts not long after the murder. The order was for two large
combos
—sixteen pieces of fried chicken and eight orders of fries. Who might have eaten all that fried chicken with Father Mario in the hours before the murder? A lover? More than one of the murderers? Did his guests surprise Father Mario? Or did they arrive at the parish house according to plan?

There are two terms that one repeatedly hears in Guatemala, especially in discussing the blend of paranoia, stealth, ruthlessness, betrayal, corruption, violence, and cunning that characterize the exercise of real and secret power. One term is
machucar la cola
—to snag the tail, step on the tail, grab hold of the tail. (General Espinosa, who collected elephant figurines, especially admired elephants because, among other reasons, they have “a very short tail that nobody can
machucar
.”) Finding ways to
machucar
a rival's, a superior's, a colleague's, or a subordinate's tail is a key to getting ahead, and to survival. The second term is
chantajear
—blackmail. It's what you can do to people when you have them by the tail.

Protecting his son Diego was hardly President Arzú's only problem. The reputation and even legitimacy of his presidency were threatened by the murder of Bishop Gerardi. And there were other things that the president would not wish to see disclosed
or publicly exploited by his rivals. A few of these involved his son Roberto, who had become ensnared, according to Rafael Guillamón, in the goings-on at a disco nightclub owned by EMP officers in Zone 14, where narcotics were trafficked and heavily consumed. Someone who possessed information about all this, and who was himself in a powerful position—a general, for example—would be able to bend a number of people to his will, including the president.

When Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico's book
Who Killed the Bishop?
was kicking up a storm in Guatemala, President Portillo asked his intelligence officers to find out what they could about who had been helping the authors. (Rico had told an admiring Guatemalan television interviewer that during the two years she and her partner spent investigating and writing the book they had lived off their savings.) Portillo was told that President Arzú had helped to fund the journalists' endeavors. The source of that information being Military Intelligence, I repeat it with natural skepticism. But it does seem worth considering in light of the strikingly proprietary manner with which Arzú displayed his enthusiasm for the book, copies of which he handed out in great numbers. Soon after the new U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, James Derham, assumed his post in 2006, he had a private meeting with Arzú, who was then the mayor of Guatemala City. The ambassador was given a copy of
Who Killed the Bishop?