The Art of Political Murder (7 page)

Investigating human rights cases for ODHA was probably the best education in criminal investigation that could be had in Guatemala. By the time he was twenty-three, Fernando Penados had been involved in some of the country's most notorious and murkiest crimes, including the murder, in 1990, of the young anthropologist Myrna Mack Chang, who was stabbed twenty-seven times on a downtown street in a political execution faked to resemble a crime of passion or drug-frenzied robbery. Mack was murdered primarily because her research on the war's impact on highland Maya communities, especially internal refugees such as those living in the resistance communities hidden deep in the mountains, had brought her to the Army's attention. (The Army denied the existence of the resistance communities.) The extraordinary investigation and unprecedented court fights that followed, driven by the relentless perseverance of Myrna's sister Helen Mack, had resulted in the arrest, trial—after twelve judges resigned from the case because of death threats—and conviction, in 1993, of the “stabber,” Noél Beteta, an Army sergeant and operative in the EMP's covert intelligence unit, the Archivo.

The Myrna Mack case was at that time the last known instance in which a Guatemalan police homicide detective had dared to investigate evidence pointing to the Army's participation in a political murder. The detective, José Mérida Escobar, was a young officer known for his firm character and exceptional tenacity. José Mérida had selected another young police detective, Julio Pérez Ixcajop, to be his assistant, and they soon received warnings from a policeman who knew that Noél Beteta was the killer and that he was from the EMP's Archivo. The policeman told them to be careful, “because there are some things that should be investigated, and others not.” When José Mérida persisted, he began receiving
threats. He was demoted and then arrested on false charges of dereliction of duty. At his departmental hearing, he revealed that he'd discovered evidence of the Archivo's involvement in Myrna Mack's murder. A few weeks later, in October 1990, José Mérida was assassinated in a park across the street from the National Police headquarters. He took four bullets in the face. A platoon of armed police standing nearby looked on. “They left him to die like a wounded animal,” another former criminal investigations police officer would testify before the International Court of Human Rights, in San José, Costa Rica, years later.

The National Police was no place to learn how to be a homicide detective. Fernando Penados took courses in various aspects of criminology sponsored by the FBI and by the French and Spanish governments, and then, in 1996, when he was twenty-six, he left ODHA to take a job as subdirector of investigations in the Public Ministry—more or less the Guatemalan equivalent of the U.S. Department of Justice—a job from which he soon resigned, because, as he put it, “there were too many criminals working there.” At the time of Bishop Gerardi's murder, he was teaching at the National Police Academy, as well as studying business administration at Rafael Landívar University.

That Sunday night—or Monday morning, by then—after Penados picked Ronalth Ochaeta up at his home (he said he found Ochaeta in a nearly catatonic state), he drove the less than four miles to the church of San Sebastián in about four minutes. They rode in silence, although finally Penados asked, “What do you think?” and traded a few observations, such as that the church was only a block from the headquarters of the EMP. But it seemed impossible that the Army would dare to murder the bishop. Fernando Penados was on the verge of weeping, and Ochaeta said, “Now isn't the time.” He said that they had to stay calm, that they would need all their wits.

It was about one-twenty-five when they reached the church. The police and firemen (the latter have the job of collecting dead
bodies in Guatemala, and function as ambulance drivers too) had arrived and were inside the garage. There was more than one Japanese compact parked among the cars in the drive. The door of the parish house was answered by Ana Lucía Escobar, a pretty young woman known as La China. Ana Lucía was a member of the household of Monseñor Efraín Hernández, the chancellor of the Curia, and she was destined for a lasting role in future speculations about the crime. Fernando Penados asked Ana Lucía—he'd known her since childhood—“¿
Qué pasó
?” and remained behind a moment, talking with her, while Ronalth Ochaeta went into the house. Ochaeta walked down the corridor connecting the priests' bedrooms to the kitchen and garage, which was already full of people. The cook, Margarita López, intercepted him, wailing,
“
Se nos fue!
Se nos fue!
” He's been taken from us! Just then Father Mario approached. Father Mario was a bulky, phlegmatic, yet refined-looking person, and he had a serene expression on his thin-lipped, pale face. His eyes were magnified by the lenses of a large pair of designer glasses. “And without my having asked him anything,” Ochaeta recalled later, the priest launched into his story of how he had found the bishop's body—the light that woke him, the body he hadn't recognized, and so on. “There he is, lying in the garage, do you want to see him?” asked the priest. Ochaeta said no, and turned into the kitchen, where Monseñor Hernández was huddled with two other priests.

A
S CHANCELLOR
of the Curia—something like the chief administrator of the archdiocese—Monseñor Efraín Hernández was third in the Church hierarchy, behind Archbishop Penados and Bishop Gerardi. His parish was El Calvario, a massive old church located at Eighteenth Street and Seventh Avenue, in one of downtown Guatemala City's busiest and seediest districts. Monseñor Hernández shared the parish house with his longtime cook, Imelda Escobar, and several of her relatives, including her daughter, Ana Lucía, and a nephew named Dagoberto Escobar. It was
Dagoberto who, around midnight, had answered the phone when Father Mario called about the bishop's murder. Monseñor Hernández had been asleep since around ten. When he came to the phone, he asked Father Mario, whom he had known since Mario was a child, if he had called the police and firemen. When Father Mario answered that he hadn't, Hernández told him to do so immediately.

Ana Lucía Escobar, La China, said later that she was awoken by her mother, and that she dressed as quickly as she could, and that she then drove Monseñor Hernández, along with her cousin Dagoberto, to the church of San Sebastián. She said that she remembered glancing at the digital clock in the car and noting that it was a little past midnight, and that they made the drive quickly.

After telephoning Monseñor Hernández, Father Mario made other calls, to his parents and to friends in Houston, Texas, where he often went for medical treatment. He phoned the distraught Juana Sanabria at ten minutes past midnight. When Father Mario told her that the bishop had been killed, and that he was in the garage, she suggested that maybe he was only badly wounded, but the priest repeated that Monseñor was in the garage, and said that she should come immediately and to bring her parish house keys. “I fell apart and couldn't utter a word,” she would recount later, “and my legs went weak, and my body wouldn't respond, the news had such a horrible impact, and then I said, Father, I don't feel well.” So he told her to stay where she was. She turned on the radio and sat listening to the live coverage from San Sebastián that soon commenced. But first she had her daughter phone the bishop's nephew, Axel Romero, a lawyer, who remembered receiving the call at precisely twelve-fifteen. Romero phoned Father Mario at the parish house to verify the terrible news, and the priest asked him to come right over.

When Monseñor Hernández arrived at San Sebastián, Father Mario led him into the garage. Hernández asked the priest if he'd
given the bishop the last rites, and when he answered that he had not, Hernández performed the holy sacrament.

Ana Lucía Escobar told me later, over the telephone, in her small, softly melodic voice, that Monseñor Hernández then came to get her in the parish office. “He took me by the arm and walked me down the corridor, and he said, ‘Monseñor is dead, do you want to see him?' At first I said yes, but when we got there, and I saw the blood, I said no, and went back.” Ana Lucía was put to work making telephone calls to inform church authorities and others of the bishop's death. First she phoned Archbishop Penados. Ronalth Ochaeta's cell phone was turned off. Then she phoned Dr. Julio Penados. Using a church directory that was in the office, she phoned bishops, members of the Episcopalian Conference, and other parish priests. The people who received those calls telephoned others in turn and the news of Bishop Gerardi's murder, invariably met with exclamations of incredulity and shock, was quickly relayed throughout the city, the country, and beyond. Telephone records would reveal that one of the calls from the parish house was made to a pay phone outside a military academy in San Marcos. The likeliest explanation was that it was a wrong number: the pay phone's number was only one digit off from the telephone number of the Bishop of San Marcos, Álvaro Ramazzini. Still, the day after news of the mysterious call appeared in a newspaper, the phone itself vanished, torn from its post.

Monseñor Hernández sent Ana Lucía to pick up Father Maco, Marco Aurelio González—“the priest with the two Saint Bernard dogs,” as Ana Lucía described him—at the church of La Candelaria, because the priest didn't drive.

At twelve-forty AM, the firemen of Substation 2 had received a telephone call from Father Mario, who didn't identify himself, informing them of a dead body in the San Sebastián parish house. Five minutes later, a detachment of firemen left in an ambulance.

At twelve-forty-eight, Father Mario finally phoned the police. He and one of the
bolitos
, El Monstruo Jorge, waited outside the
church, and when they saw a police car passing in front of the park—it was now ten past one—they shouted and waved their arms, but the car kept on going. Five minutes later the firemen arrived and went into the garage, where they found Monseñor Hernández praying beside the bishop's body. One of the firemen also knelt to pray.

The police arrived fifteen minutes later. A video taken by firemen provides a relatively composed look at what would, within half an hour, be a chaotic and overrun crime scene. The camera moves as slowly as a deep-sea diver's cinematography around the garage, which is illuminated by fluorescent lights. The white VW Golf is parked on the right side of the garage, behind the beige Toyota. The bishop is lying on his back in the narrow space between a potted palm by the garage wall and the front tire of the Toyota. There is a large pool of blood around his head. His body is partially covered by a rumpled white sheet, and the cuffs of his jeans and his big shoes, the left foot crossed oddly over the right, protrude from underneath. There is a smaller pool of blood on the floor near the VW's front door, which is slightly ajar. The triangular concrete chunk lies beside it on the polished, speckled stone floor, close to an upright, empty Pepsi bottle. Crumpled pages of newspaper are strewn about. Two vivid, parallel streaks of blood on the floor lead away from the VW to where the body lies, ending at the bishop's shoes. The blue sweatshirt is on the floor. And a few feet from the body, near the bishop's head, planted as if it were the last step of someone lifting off into flight, there is a bloody footprint.

In the kitchen, the refrigerator had been left open, and it appeared that at least one of the intruders had drunk from a half-filled pitcher of orange juice that had been full when Margarita López had gone to bed that night. A half-eaten raw hot dog was found in the dirt of one of the potted palms in the garage. An assistant prosecutor assigned to the case would deduce later that night that the piece of hot dog might have been left there by a stray cat that was frequently seen about the house.