The Art of Political Murder (9 page)

A
T SOME POINT
during that long night, Helen Mack and the bishop's protégés from ODHA, Ronalth Ochaeta, Edgar Gutiérrez, and Fernando Penados, huddled together on the ground in one of the inner patio gardens of the parish house and had a conversation, which, as the situation developed over the next few days, resulted in a decision that ODHA should form its own team to document the case. Experience had taught them that it would be naive to assume that an investigation conducted by the government would not be biased, or that it would go after the most obvious suspects, the people in the Army, or with ties to the Army, most threatened by the REMHI report.

The idea that ODHA should form its own team seems to have been Helen Mack's. She also suggested that night that forensic anthropologists from ODHA should attend the autopsy of the bishop's body. ODHA teams were participating in the exhumations of clandestine graves and massacre sites then being conducted throughout the country, and Ochaeta phoned two of the forensics specialists.

Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez agreed that they shouldn't leave the parish house until the bishop's body was taken to the morgue. “I just sat there,” Ochaeta recalled. “I'd get up, sit down, get up. Edgar too. Nobody said anything. I think an hour, an hour and a half went by. We just looked at each other without saying anything.”

Helen Mack, though, was in constant motion. She had gone to fetch her friend Dr. Mario Iraheta, a respected forensics specialist, and bring him to San Sebastián. Now she came to sit with the men from ODHA. “
Chafas cerotes hijos de la gran puta
,” she burst out.
Chafas
is slang for military officers;
cerotes
is a common Guatemalan vulgarism, something like little pieces of shit. “
Chafas cerotes hijos de la gran puta!
” she repeated several times. “
Estos pisados fueron
—those assholes did it.” Then she took out her cigarettes and sat smoking in silence.

In the parish house garage, Dr. Iraheta worked alongside Dr. Mario Guerra, head of forensics for the Judicial Morgue. They carefully washed the murdered bishop's wounds, cleaning the blood from the face, which had received repeated blows with some hard object—apparently, the triangular chunk of concrete—delivered with almost inconceivable ferocity. The most obvious wounds were fractures in both cheeks and around and across the nose, bloody bruises over the right eye, and multiple bruises in the back of the skull. The left ear was a particularly excoriated mass. On the bishop's neck there were bloody scratches that indicated a struggle—marks that might have been caused if the zipper of his jacket was pulled against his skin while he fought to free himself, or perhaps when a thin gold chain, affixed to a religious medal, was torn from around his neck.

Bishop Gerardi had apparently received the first blows as he emerged or was pulled from the car. Axel Romero discovered a lens from the bishop's eyeglasses in the pocket on the inside of the door on the driver's side. There was blood inside the car, and grains of concrete. The keys were missing, and the Public Ministry towed the car away that night. Later, when ODHA was told that they could take the car back, Nery Rodenas went to get it, bringing the spare set of keys left behind at the parish house. When the car's ignition was turned on for the first time since the night of the bishop's death, the air conditioner and radio came on simultaneously. The bishop hadn't had the chance to turn either off. The assailants must have reached in, switched the ignition off, and yanked out the keys.

Sometime before dawn, when the firemen took Bishop Gerardi's body to the morgue, Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez walked over to the ODHA offices. They had to prepare a statement. In a few hours, people would be awakening to the shocking news of Bishop Gerardi's murder. Everyone—the press, the government, the diplomatic community, all of Guatemala—would be waiting
for the reaction of the Catholic Church and of ODHA. They had to think about what they were going to say.

Father Mario said later that he approached a crime-scene specialist from the Public Ministry, asked for permission to clean up the garage, and was told to go ahead. Margarita López; the sacristan, Antonio Izaguirre; and Julio Trujillo, whose job it was to tend to the venerated statue of the Virgin of Sorrows of Manchén, set to work mopping up the bishop's blood and cleaning the garage. Trujillo found more bloody footprints in the entrance of one of the little offices at the back of the garage, but he was told to keep mopping, and he did.

When the cleaning up of the garage—the destruction and washing away of evidence that might have still remained at the crime scene despite the earlier chaos and carelessness—became a scandal in the press, Father Mario repeatedly insisted that someone from the Public Ministry had told him that it was OK. The priest couldn't identify that person by name but said he was a tall man with a beard. By then Father Mario had become the focus of much speculation and suspicion, public and private. So when no one from the Public Ministry stepped forward to take responsibility for the “error,” or to identify the “bearded man,” many assumed that the priest was lying, and that he had ordered the cleanup of the garage entirely on his own.

Edgar Gutiérrez told me later that while he realized that people say the opposite about Father Mario's demeanor that night, he personally did see the priest quietly weeping. Others described feeling strangely chilled when, after Bishop Gerardi's body was taken to the morgue and the garage and house had been mopped and cleaned, the priest emerged from the parish house, expressionless, immaculately dressed and groomed, to walk his German shepherd, Baloo, in the park.

Margarita López laid the bishop's robes out on his bed, and later that morning Father Mario took the clothing to the funeral
home. He oversaw the dressing of the bishop's corpse and assisted the undertakers in reshaping the ruined face so that it would resemble the living one as much as possible.

At about six in the morning El Chino Iván, roused from his night of soporific-induced deep sleep, had told the police of his encounter with the shirtless man, and had handed them the quetzal bill that he said the stranger had paid him in exchange for two cigarettes. Then El Chino Iván slipped away, disappearing into the city. Two days later, he would turn up at MINUGUA's office, claiming that he feared for his life, and soon after he joined Rubén Chanax in the subterranean life of a protected witness in the custody of the Guatemalan police.

Meanwhile in the early morning hours of April 27, in the Public Ministry, Rubén Chanax was giving the first of his many official statements. He wouldn't get a chance to sleep until ten o'clock that night, twenty-fours after he had walked out of Don Mike's. Along with the prosecutors, observers from MINUGUA, and the director of the police, three of the young men from ODHA were present for Chanax's interrogation. He seemed a little frightened but calm, Nery Rodenas recalled, and clearly wasn't muddled by alcohol or drugs. Once again, Chanax described the shirtless man. He had brown skin, big eyes, a big round face, a wide mouth, a small mustache, a light beard, and curly hair, cut short, “military-style.” When challenged by his interrogator about the haircut, Chanax insisted that he had spent thirty months in the Army and could recognize a military haircut when he saw one. According to El Chino Iván's later testimony, the shirtless man's hair was not curly, and he didn't have a beard.

Rubén Chanax told his interrogators that about ten nights earlier a man known to the indigents as El Chino Guayo had turned up at the church to sleep, and that he'd asked what time Bishop Gerardi usually returned to the parish house at night. Chanax
claimed to have answered that he didn't know. El Chino Guayo was described by some of the other indigents as a crackhead with a violent temper who sometimes started loud fights outside the parish house. The police went to El Chino Guayo's house at six in the morning, and though the youth, the son of an Army man, was in some ways an interesting character, he turned out to be the first of many apparently false leads.

W
HEN THE PARISH HOUSE
was finally calm and empty of people, Otto Ardón, his assistants, and some police specialists were able to conduct a more relaxed and relatively thorough inspection. They found blood drops in a little room by the garage where ironing was done, and more on the wall outside it. They found specks and small stains of blood on other walls; there were still more traces of blood that they missed and that ODHA would find later.

The evidence recovered from the garage that morning included the discarded sweatshirt, which would turn out to have some bloodstains and a few human hairs; the concrete chunk, also bloodstained; some sheets of rumpled newspaper; and a few fingerprints and handprints that might be related to the crime.

As they were leaving San Sebastián for the morgue that morning, the MINUGUA investigators were startled to hear one of the few female indigents, a woman known as Vilma, chanting in a slurred way that the bishop had been murdered by
huecos
—homosexuals.

T
HE AUTOPSY
got under way at about nine in the morning. Dr. Mario Guerra, head of forensics for the morgue, and the other doctors who performed and observed it were hardly facing a deep forensic mystery. “Fourth-degree facial cranial trauma” was listed as the official cause of death. A fracture and cuts on one thumb, plus the marks on his neck, seemed to indicate that Bishop Gerardi had put up a brief, furious struggle.

On the back of the bishop's head were four distinct punctures, in the shape of an arc. Rafael Guillamón, who monitored the autopsy for MINUGUA, thought they looked like marks left by a blow delivered with “brass knuckles.”

The assistant prosecutor, Gustavo Soria, came into the autopsy room and said that an anal swab—to check for signs of recent homosexual penetration—was to be performed on the bishop's body. “Orders from above!” said Soria. When Guillamón recounted this story to me many years later, he snorted sardonically that the orders, coming from Military Intelligence, of course, were from General Espinosa, the former commander of the EMP who had recently been promoted to head of the Army High Command. “Soria worked with Military Intelligence,” Guillamón said.

Was Guillamón correct? People had turned up that night, at the church and elsewhere, he said, like actors walking onto a stage to perform their roles. Some knew their roles in advance. Maybe others had arrived at the church, assessed the situation, and quickly understood what their roles should be. But were some of the people whose actions later seemed suspicious merely grossly incompetent? Were some fated to be suspected because of their intrinsic oddness, or because they had other secrets and vulnerabilities? Who were the actors in the crowd outside and inside the church of San Sebastián that night? Were any of the indigents and
bolitos
actors in the sense that Guillamón meant? Was Vilma, the female indigent chanting that the bishop had been murdered by “fags,” an actress? The chancellor of the Curia or La China—Ana Lucía Escobar? The parish-house cook? Even someone from ODHA? And who had the important “offstage” roles? General Marco Tulio Espinosa (“the most powerful man in the Army”)? Or even President Arzú? All would eventually be targets of suspicion.

It was obvious, at least if the accounts of both Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván were true, that the man without a shirt had
meant to be seen, or did not mind being seen, by at least two of the park's indigents when he stepped out of the garage that night. He left a sweatshirt behind on the floor. Was that to make it seem as if the terrible act of violence had somehow involved an act of love or lust? So that later, when witnesses spoke up, it would suggestively connect the shirtless man, the sweatshirt on the floor, the murdered bishop? But why, if it really was the same man, did he come back minutes later wearing a shirt? And where did the stranger go?

Those were some of the questions, based on the most obvious early information available, that were contemplated in the first hours and days after the murder, which made headlines across the world. Denunciations of the crime and calls for justice poured in from political and religious leaders, including Pope John Paul II. It was widely assumed, of course, that the bishop was killed in retaliation for the REMHI report, though it was hard to believe that his enemies could respond with such reckless brutality, no matter how threatened or angered they were.

How realistic was it to expect that the murderers would ever be brought to justice? Guatemalans had only to look at the region's recent history of “unimaginable” homicides to feel discouraged. Though a UN truth commission in neighboring El Salvador had confirmed what had been widely alleged since the crime occurred, that Archbishop Romero had been murdered by government assassins, no charges had ever been brought in that case, nor had any serious criminal investigation been sustained. To the north, in Mexico, the murder of Cardinal Posadas in 1993 remained unsolved, as did the assassination of the reformist presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, in 1988. The more shocking the crime, it seemed, the more powerful or powerfully connected the criminals, and in Latin America powerful people almost never end up in prison.

Nevertheless, as Ronalth Ochaeta said in the statement given to reporters that first morning, it was inconceivable that a crime of such magnitude could occur only hundreds of feet from some of the government's most sophisticated security units and surveillance apparatus and remain unsolved for long.

THE UNTOUCHABLES AND
THE DOG-AND-PRIEST SHOW

Peace would then be a form of war, and the State a means of waging it.

—Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power”

T
HE CHURCH OF
S
AN
S
EBASTIÁN
was my mother's church when she was young. During her adolescence she gave handwriting lessons in its school for boys. When I was an infant, my grandparents and my mother brought me to the church of San Sebastián to be baptized. My mother married an American from a Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant family, and though I spent my early childhood bouncing between Guatemala and the United States (and between religions) I grew up mostly in Massachusetts. In the 1980s, when my grandparents were no longer alive, I returned to Guatemala frequently and lived in their house, once for an unbroken stretch of about two years, in an upstairs apartment that had belonged to my unmarried great-aunt. I was in New York in the spring of 1998 and followed the story of Bishop Gerardi's murder and its repercussions from there. By late summer the case had taken several astonishing turns, culminating with the controversial arrest, on July 17, of Father Mario, whose behavior the night of the murder had immediately aroused suspicion. Margarita López, the cook, was also arrested, and Father Mario's aged German shepherd, Baloo, was taken into police custody. A renowned Spanish forensics expert claimed to have discovered evidence of dog bites on Bishop Gerardi's skull.