The Art of Political Murder (52 page)

The illegal activities of the EMP anti-kidnapping commando unit were described in MINUGUA's seventh annual report (1997) and in
Inforpress Centroamericana
, October 10, 1997. Since 1972,
Inforpress Centroamericana
has published a weekly information bulletin, with an English-language counterpart,
Central American Report
. Both are available at
www.inforpressca.com
.

Narco trafficking: In 2003, when the United States revoked the visas of a group of powerful generals and others reputedly linked to narco trafficking and crime mafias, Fernando Linares Beltrana was included in the group. The visa of General Francisco Ortega Menaldo, who was a former head of the EMP and the Guatemalan military officer most frequently linked to narcotics trafficking, was also revoked. Linares Beltrana was General Ortega Menaldo's defense attorney. The official reason given
for revoking his visa was that he was “a known helper, assistant, or conspirator with others in the illicit trafficking of controlled substances or chemicals.”

See Washington Office on Latin America, Special Report, “Guatemala Decertified,” April 2003; see also
elPeriódico
, March 1, 2003.

Following the assassination in 1994 of Chief Justice Epamonidas González, who—using evidence provided by the DEA—had ruled to extradite a Guatemalan lieutenant colonel to the United States for narcotics trafficking, the Constitutional Court reversed the extradition order. Since then no Guatemalan court has extradited any military man to the United States on drug charges. See “Bush's Brush with Latin American Drug Lords,” Frank Smyth,
The Nation
, March 9, 2007.

Envio
, April 2002, a publication of the University of Central America, Nicaragua, contains an account of Arzú's incendiary speech calling human rights activists “traitors to the fatherland.”

Dr. José Manuel Reverte Coma: Invited to El Salvador in 1993 by the right-wing president Alfredo Cristiani, Reverte Coma contradicted the findings of a UN anthropological team investigating the massacre of civilians at El Mozote. He was removed from the team at the request of the head of the Salvadoran Truth Commission, former Colombian president Belisario Betancourt. See
Prensa Libre
, September 24–25, 1998; and
Proceso
827, University of Central America in El Salvador, October 21, 1998.

A memorable account of the Holy Week murders of the GAM leaders and the death and torture of Rosario Godoy de Cuevas and her relatives, by a writer who experienced those episodes firsthand, is provided by Jean-Marie Simon in
Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny
.

Luis Mendizábal: An article in the Salvadoran newspaper
La Prensa Gráfica
, on August 29, 2004, described Luis Mendizábal as a Guatemalan liaison to El Salvador's ARENA party and to the ARENA leaders accused of running death squads and of the assassination of Archbishop Romero. From a series, published in ten
installments, on ARENA's leader Roberto D'Aubuisson. In
elPeriódico
, July 4, 2000, Mendizábal was described as one of the founders of the Oficinita and as a security adviser to President Arzú.

For Judge Henry Monroy's flight into exile, see, among other sources, the U.S. State Department Country Report on Human Rights in Guatemala, 1999.

Regarding the position of the “populist” Alfonso Portillo within the FRG Party: In an interview with the reporter Claudia Méndez of
elPeriódico
in 2005, General Ríos Montt recalled that FRG hard-liners had wanted to replace Portillo with the vice president. “They came to me and proposed elevating Paco Reyes to president and naming someone else vice president,” Ríos Montt said. “Get rid of Portillo, and put in Paco. The plan was to switch the chairs: ‘We have to get rid of him,' they told me.”

I have quoted from several declassified communications of the U.S. embassy and the State Department from 1998 to 1999. They show that embassy officials, diplomats, and foreign-service officers went from supporting the Guatemalan government and believing the military's denials about its role in Bishop Gerardi's murder to fully sharing MINUGUA's assessment that the government was covering up a political crime. See the cable from the U.S. embassy entitled “MINUGUA Puts Government to Test on Gerardi Murder Investigation,” Guatemala 001279, April 1999.

III The Trial

Various human rights groups documented the threats received by investigators, judges, prosecutors, and members of ODHA who were involved in the Gerardi case. For example, the U.S. Department of State Country Report of 2001 on human rights in Guatemala reported, “On June 14, and again on September 18, a military helicopter circled over the house of Judge Yassmín Barrios at a very low altitude. The police detail guarding the house reported that the helicopter did not belong to the Interior
Ministry, which oversees the police, but to the military.” The report also confirmed other threats against her. By the end of 2001 in Guatemala, the U.S. Country Report also noted, “80 cases of threats to justice workers had been reported, approximately half of which were associated with the Gerardi trial.”

Threats against Rodrigo Salvadó and Mario Domingo were reported in Amnesty International's
Submission to Param Cumaraswamy Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers
, May 2001. Param Cumaraswamy, in his report on Guatemala to the UN Human Rights Commission, April 2000, expressed particular concern about two problems in Guatemala: the pervasive practice of impunity for those who violate human rights and the frequent threats against judges and prosecutors involved in such cases. Human Rights Watch, Lawyers Rights Watch Canada, and other groups also reported in detail on threats against prosecutors and judges.

Future trials: The judges in the trial of the Limas, Sergeant Major Villanueva, Father Mario, and Margarita López did not close the case with their verdict. They called for further investigation into the material authorship of the crime; investigation of the role of the EMP chain of command; and investigation of those who obstructed justice, including seven military officers, two civilians, and four prison officials. They named Rudy Pozuelos, Andrés Villagrán Alfaro, Francisco Escobar Blas, Darío Morales Garcia, Julio Meléndez Crispín, Edgar Carrillo Grajeda, Carlos Rene Alvarado, Erick Urízar, Luis Alberto Lima Oliva (Colonel Lima's youngest son), Hugo Nájera Ruiz, Santos Hernández Perez, Erick Medrano Garcia, and Misael Chinchilla Monzon.

IV The Third Stage

Maite Rico and Bertrand de la Grange published their article on the Gerardi case in
Letras Libres
, August 2001. Their book
¿Quién mató al obispo? Autopsia de un crimen politico
was published in 2003 by Random House, Mexico. Rico and de la Grange
dedicated only one passage in the book to the special prosecutor Leopoldo Zeissig. In that passage, which is representative of their journalistic method, they described Zeissig as having received a telephone call, during which a “cloying melody” played, that he considered part of a pattern of threats. “Investigators never succeeded in determining the source of that supposed threat,” they write, dismissively. It seems most improbable that there would have been an investigation into just one telephone call in which “cloying” music played. There has never been a serious investigation into any of the countless telephone threats, or the telephone espionage, against Guatemalans. That Guatemalan military intelligence units employ telephones in such a manner is not in doubt. The U.S. State Department Country Report for 2002 expressed concern about the EMP's telephone espionage without mentioning any investigation against such acts.

Rico and de la Grange quote a rival prosecutor's opinion of Zeissig: “‘Aside from being stupid, he was paranoid,' commented Berta Julia Morales, in charge of bank robberies and a friend of lapidary phrases. ‘He's only a man because the midwife said so.'” The authors do not mention that Berta Julia Morales is the prosecutor who prematurely classified as a suicide the probable murder of Carlos García Pontaza, the leader of the Valle del Sol gang who refused to implicate his ex-girlfriend, Ana Lucía Escobar, in the crime. Her conclusions were strongly disputed by MINUGUA and the Public Ministry. The U.S. State Department's Country Report of 2001 on human rights in Guatemala criticized Berta Julia Morales's performance in another politically charged case of multiple murders, that of Francisco Aguilar Alonzom and his wife: “The prosecutors assigned to the case, including Berta Julia Morales, failed to develop plausible motives for the murders despite evidence of a pattern of killings conducted by a sophisticated and well-coordinated organization.”

As to whether or not someone contributed financially to Maite Rico's and Bertrand de la Grange's three-year investigtion, there is
some confusion. During an interview with Dionisio Gutiérrez on the television show
Libre Encuentro
on April 25, 2004, Rico said “We financed the book ourselves. Specifically, from our savings and … royalties from our book on Marcos.” Three years later, in a letter to
elPeriódico
published on June 20, 2007, in response to an erroneous account that this book claims that President Arzú paid them (a claim that was made by Military Intelligence during the Portillo administration), Rico said, “Arzú did not pay us. We were paid, and very well, by our publishers.”

Escobar Blas: Allegations of Major Escobar Blas's role in the kidnapping and murder of Beverly Sandoval Richardson emerged during the trial, in the summer of 2000, of Gustavo Carranza, who was accused of the crime and was sentenced to death for it. Carranza said that the real kidnappers had been killed by the intellectual leaders of the crime, Major Escobar Blas and two other EMP officers. He said that Escobar Blas, a former air force pilot, had disposed of the slain kidnappers by dropping them from a small plane into the crater of the Pacaya volcano.

The Limas in prison: The Public Ministry and the homicide division of the Criminal Investigations Section of the National Police produced a substantial file on the fatal riot at the Centro Preventivo. File number 20030212 describes the Limas' retail businesses in prison.

Chanax's military experience: When I visited him in Europe, Rafael Guillamón took out a notebook with notes of his interview of 1998 with Doña Rosa Sontay, Chanax's mother. She had told Guillamón that when she went to the Jalapa base to claim her payment as the closest relative of a soldier, she'd discovered that her son was using the name Chanax Gómez.

For independent corroboration of the Inter-American Court's description of a “third stage” in crimes of state, including manipulation of the legal process and defamation campaigns: A United Nations report of December 2002 by the special representative of the secretary-general, on the situation in Guatemala,
stated: “95 percent of the alleged violations against human rights defenders are death threats and acts of intimidation, such as following vehicles, surveillance in front of the victims' homes and offices, anonymous and malicious telephone calls, searching offices and homes, wiretapping and theft of computer files. Defamation campaigns were also reported.” The U.S. State Department's Country Report of 2001 on Guatemala observed: “There were also credible allegations of parallel investigations by Military Intelligence—in the Bishop Gerardi and Ordonez Porta murder cases—that interfered with the justice system's efforts to investigate and prosecute those responsible.”

For General Otto Pérez Molina's alleged murder of Efraín Bámaca, see
New York Times
, March 24, 1996, “Guatemalans Covered Up Killing of an American, U.S. Aides Say,” by Tim Wiener. The article discusses the deaths of Michael DeVine in 1990 and of Bámaca after his capture by the Guatemalan Army in 1992. General Pérez Molina was also linked by human rights organizations to another notorious murder, the 1994 assassination of Judge Edgar Romero Elías. For that and more on Pérez Molina, see Washington Office on Latin America,
Hidden Powers in Post-Conflict Guatemala
, December 2003. The ODHA lawyer Mario Domingo was among those who heard Rubén Chanax claim that Pérez Molina was in Don Mike's store the night of the murder. Domingo thought that Chanax could be mistaken, but Rafael Guillamón of MINUGUA, who had much more contact with Chanax than Domingo did, felt that Chanax was telling the truth.

Where was Jorge Aguilar Martínez on the night of the murder? The attorney who notarized the document that Osmel Olivares Alay showed Mario Domingo was the military defense and Oficinita lawyer José “Chepito” Morales. Olivares Alay, at the request of Colonel Pozuelos, signed the document, which attested that Aguilar Martínez was on janitorial duty with him in the National Palace between eight PM and one AM. But in reality, Aguilar Martínez, sweaty and somewhat agitated, turned up there
at one AM. Where was he during the previous crucial hours? Was he where he originally claimed, in the Services Office near the Guard Command, or did he have some other, more direct, role in the crime? After the EMP closed, ODHA and Jorge García spoke with another EMP specialist, Benjamín Alvarenga, who was in the Services Office that night. Alvarenga gave nearly the same account as Aguilar Martínez. He identified Captain Lima, Obdulio Villanueva, and Specialist Galeano among the men he saw arrive after the murder. Mario Domingo now believes that Aguilar Martínez was directly involved in the operation, probably in a security role. The defense lawyers didn't summon him to testify at the trial because they feared what his testimony would reveal.

President Oscar Berger: Berger was regarded as a weak and ineffective president. A nationwide opinion poll on his presidency in January 2006 recorded an 80 percent disapproval rating.

“Club Rosa”: According to an anonymous source, a former member of G-2 Military Intelligence, officers and cadets from the prestigious Escuela Politécnica were linked to the first Club Rosa.