The Art of Political Murder (5 page)

So the church of San Sebastián is located in an interesting neighborhood, inside an Army security perimeter. The park itself, it would turn out later, when investigators and journalists subjected it to anthropological scrutiny, was its own complex and busy little world of sometimes clashing subcultures. Local office workers came to the park for lunch or snacks purchased from the food stands lining the sidewalks, or to sit on a park bench for a contemplative shoeshine. Young lovers snuggled on the shaded benches along the paved paths in the afternoons. During the day,
lavacarros
, car washers, plied their trade alongside the park, filling their plastic buckets with water from the fountain. Some of the car washers were alcoholic indigents, but most were not, and almost all belonged to a union that collected small dues at an office downtown where classes were offered on such subjects as how to negotiate prices with customers.

But the park was also a place where tribes of teenagers and small gangs of delinquents staked out and sometimes fought over territory—tough high school kids, heavy-metal
rockeros
, petty thieves,
pushiteros
who sold drugs, and even a gang of druggy alleged satanists who always wore black and who sometimes burst into the church to interrupt Masses, shouting obscenities. Young athletes came to play basketball and
fútbol
in the little basketball court near the Chapel of the Eternal Father, on the Third Street side of the church. Later Father Mario would tell police investigators that the smell of marijuana often pervaded the parish house because of the youths smoking outside, in front of the parish house door, and that sometimes they smoked crack. It was naturally assumed, given the character of the neighborhood, and its nearness to the seat of government and military security and intelligence installations, that some of the park's denizens, the vendors, shoe-shine men, car washers, and petty criminals, must be
orejas
—ears, informers.

On any given night, as many as fourteen homeless men and a woman or two would take shelter in the covered walkway alongside the parish house garage, or on the plaza in front the church entrance, which was commonly referred to as the “atrium.” They slept in beds made from old cardboard and tattered blankets that they folded and stored by day between the beams of the concrete overhang or in other nooks of the church property. Like Guatemala's narco traffickers, gang members, and sports heroes—or like the Turks in
Don Quixote de la Mancha
, “who have the custom of naming themselves according to the flaws or virtues that each possesses”—the indigents had nicknames: Carne Asada (Grilled Meat), Chalupa (Lollipop), El Gallo (Rooster), El Monstruo (Monster), El Árabe, El Canche (Blondie), Ronco (Hoarse One), El Loquito (Little Crazy Man), more than one El Chino (Chinaman), and so on. That was how they were known among themselves and to the police, though most others referred to them, and to such indigents generally,
as
pordioseros
, after the beggars' cry “For the sake of God,” and as
bolitos
, little drunks. “My
bolitos
,” Bishop Gerardi used to say, and they in turn called him
jefe
. (“Another of my
bolitos
died last night,” a neighbor recalled the bishop lamenting on the sidewalk one morning.) The indigents were also called
charamileros
, from the name for pharmaceutical alcohol mixed with water that most of them drank, a concoction also known as a
quimicazo
, which sped them toward oblivion and death. Pure alcohol mixed with dirty water from the basin of the park's fountain was claimed by some to be a particularly potent
quimicazo
.

That Sunday evening, two of the park's indigents—Rubén Chanax Sontay, better known as El Colocho (Curly), and El Chino Iván Aguilar—were in Don Mike's, a small liquor-and-grocery store around the corner from the church. Unlike the owners of other, similar
tiendas
in the neighborhood, Don Mike didn't conduct his business through lowered gates after dark. Customers could gather there, small as the store was, lean against the counter sipping beer or soft drinks, and watch the small portable television set that was mounted in a corner.

Rubén Chanax would later tell police investigators that he was originally from the
altiplano
town of Santa Cruz, Totonicapán, and that he'd been living in the park for about four years, since shortly after his discharge from the Army. He was a doe-eyed, Mayan-featured youth of twenty-four, small but muscular, with wavy-bristly black hair rather than the curls suggested by his nickname, and a quiet, self-contained manner. Alone among the indigents who slept in front of the church, he didn't drink alcohol or take drugs. He said that when he first arrived at the park, four years earlier, he was a drinker, but that under Bishop Gerardi's influence he'd stopped. (A somewhat dubious claim, I think, but who knows?) He earned his living as one of the park's
lavacarros
, though because he wasn't in the union, the other car washers wouldn't allow him to fill his plastic buckets at the park's
fountain. Bishop Gerardi, who does seem to have taken some interest in him—buying him new sponges and cloths, for instance—used to let him come into the Chapel of the Eternal Father to fill his buckets from the tap in its little garden.

El Chino Iván, taller, skinny, lighter-skinned, and a far more truculent character than Rubén Chanax, was a petty thief, a
cristalero
—one of those who smash automobile windows to steal radios and such. He drank and used drugs, including crack and pills known as
piedras
, stones. He'd turned up in the park a year before the murder, after his parents expelled him from their home, and ever since he had been coming and going, disappearing for weeks, then returning. He had been sleeping in the park for the past month.

Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván had spent part of that Sunday in their own idle ways, the former going to see a movie in the afternoon and wandering the city, the latter mostly hanging out at a downtown video-game parlor called Indianapolis. At about seven o'clock that night Rubén Chanax came into Don Mike's—the little shop's real name was Arrobeteria San Sebastián—where he found El Chino Iván watching a Chuck Norris movie on TV. The Chuck Norris movie was to be followed, on Channel 3, by the adventure thriller
Congo
.

Rubén Chanax bought a prepackaged cup of dehydrated ramen noodles and took it back into the park, where, in front of the church, he built a small fire and boiled water in a tin can to make the soup. After his supper, he hurried back to Don Mike's to watch
Congo
. Chanax was a passionate moviegoer, a denizen of the cheap downtown movie theater complexes. Later he would explain that because he'd already seen
Congo
several times and knew how it turned out, he'd left the store before the movie ended, crossed the street, and headed into the darkened park to sleep. He recalled that the clock in Don Mike's said it was a little before ten. The station manager at Channel 3 later confirmed that
Congo
had ended at five minutes after ten.

Near the park entrance Rubén Chanax saw a couple sitting on a bench in the shadows. He ascended the park's slight incline through the darkness, toward the parish house garage. The soft lights outside the garage were on. The church sacristan, when he went home at night, would leave the lights on for Bishop Gerardi if he was out, and Gerardi would turn them off when he returned. Next to the garage doors, on the side closest to the church, there was a grated window. Rubén Chanax climbed onto its ledge and reached up into the beams, where his blanket and the cardboard he slept on were stored. In the more exposed church “atrium” several of the indigents were already asleep, laid out in a row like rag-covered bundles, bodies close together for warmth.

Chanax liked to sleep in a corner in front of the garage, sheltered by the concrete overhang. Lately he'd been sharing that space with El Chino Iván. But sleeping there meant having to get up whenever a vehicle, always Bishop Gerardi's Toyota or VW Golf—Father Mario didn't drive—came into or out of the garage. The garage door was made of hinged, black-painted steel panels that were pulled open and closed laterally, accordion-like, along a rail at the top. The garage door could be opened only from the inside, and there was a smaller door in one of the panels that Bishop Gerardi, when he was the driver, would first have to unlock and enter through. Leaving his car idling in the driveway, he'd step in through the small door, haul the cumbersome and noisy garage door open, get back into the car, and drive it inside. Apparently, he always opened and closed the garage door himself. He never accepted help.

As Rubén Chanax laid out his bedding, he said later, the small metal door to the garage suddenly scraped open. Illuminated by the lights inside the garage, a man in his twenties stood framed in the doorway. Chanax described the man as dark-skinned, of medium height and build, and strikingly muscular. He had large eyes, strong features, a light beard, and a mustache. But the most striking thing about him was that he was naked from the waist
up. Guatemala City is a mountain-plateau city, and the nights can be chilly. People don't go around shirtless, as they might in the hot lowlands and on the coasts.

Chanax asked the half-naked man if a car was about to come out. The man answered, “
Simón, ese
”—a somewhat gangsterish phrase meaning, “Yeah, man.” At that moment, a police patrol car drove up Second Street, and the shirtless man stepped back into the little doorway, pulling it partly shut, and stood frozen, watching through the trees and darkness as the patrol car turned left onto Sixth Avenue and continued past the park and the church. Then the shirtless man stepped out again and ran to Second Street, where he veered right, toward Seventh Avenue. He wore jeans, Chanax would tell the police investigators later that night, and black boots with yellow soles, probably Caterpillar brand boots. About five minutes after the shirtless man left, Chanax saw him return, walking up Second Street, but now he was buttoning on a long-sleeved shirt; he turned onto Sixth Avenue. Chanax said the shirt was white.

El Chino Iván later said that he left Don Mike's about five minutes after Rubén Chanax, when
Congo
was over. He was already inside the park when he realized that he'd left his cigarettes behind in the little shop. El Chino Iván said that before turning back to retrieve them, he saw Chanax speaking, in front of the garage, to a man who was naked from the waist up.

Moments later, in front of the church, another of the indigents, Marco Tulio, shared a plastic bag of food with El Chino Iván. Rubén Chanax said that he joined them there. At about eleven o'clock every night, representatives from Eventos Católicos, a charity organization that delivered simple meals to the homeless around the city, stopped at San Sebastián. But much earlier that Sunday night, investigators would learn later from the indigents, a stranger had turned up at the park bearing a special offering: Kraft cheese sandwiches and three uncapped liter bottles of beer—“not the normal thing,” according to El Chino Iván.
Some of the
bolitos
would claim later that the beer and food must have been spiked with a soporific, because they quickly became drowsy and fell into a heavy sleep. This was why, they said, they hadn't heard or seen anything unusual that happened in and around the garage. They couldn't even remember Bishop Gerardi returning in his white VW Golf.

El Chino Iván, who had not grown accustomed to lying on the hard pavement, exposed to the elements, was usually a restless sleeper, but that night, he said, soon after partaking of the purportedly drugged leftovers from Marco Tulio's plastic bag, he fell into a deep sleep that was undisturbed until six in the morning, when police and investigators from the prosecutors' office roused him. That was when El Chino Iván would describe his own encounter with the no-longer-shirtless man. After he'd gone back to Don Mike's for his forgotten cigarettes—he said that Don Mike handed them to him through the now lowered gates—and was headed back into the park, he came on the same half-naked man he had spotted talking to Rubén Chanax minutes before, except now the stranger was wearing a shirt that El Chino Iván described as light beige with light brown checks. According to El Chino Iván, the stranger said, “
Compadre
, sell me a cigarette.” El Chino Iván handed him two cigarettes, and the stranger gave him a onequetzal bill, worth about fifteen cents (El Chino Iván later turned the bill over to the police), and said, “
Buena onda, gracias
”—roughly, “Cool, dude, thanks.” Then he left again, this time heading out of the park and down Sixth Avenue, in the direction of the presidential residence.

The question of whether it was really only a few minutes, or quite a bit longer, between the moment when El Chino Iván turned back for his cigarettes and the time when he returned to the park, would come to obsess ODHA's investigating attorney, Mario Domingo. It was one of many nagging, seemingly small mysteries related to the crime, and one that Mario Domingo
would not solve, at least to his own satisfaction, for another five years.

Rubén Chanax said that he hadn't partaken of the allegedly spiked food and drink. He and El Chino Iván lay down to sleep in their usual space in front of the garage, and when the man from Eventos Católicos arrived that night, before eleven, to bring the indigents their meals, he rose to receive his, quickly devoured it, and went back to sleep. The man from Eventos Católicos said later that the only unusual thing he noticed that night, apart from how soundly the
bolitos
were sleeping, was that the light inside the garage was on.

Don Mike, whose real name is Miguel Angel Hércules Garcia, and who was thought by park locals to be an informer, had little to say about the events of the night of the murder. He would claim, in his first statements, that he had closed his shop before nine-thirty, and that El Monstruo Jorge and Pablo el Loquito had been inside earlier, watching the movie. He claimed not to know anyone who went by Rubén Chanax's nickname, El Colocho, but he said it was possible that, if he saw such a person, he would recognize him. Later Don Mike would refuse to say very much more to investigators and certainly not to journalists. Whenever any of the latter came to his shop to talk, he would withdraw into the back room.