Читать книгу The Art of Political Murder - Francisco Goldman - Страница 13
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ОглавлениеSOON AFTER ARRIVING at the parish house on that final Sunday evening of his life—after Ronalth Ochaeta dropped him off—Bishop Gerardi, without even changing his clothes, went out again. Father Mario later recounted that when he left his bedroom for the six o’clock Mass, on the short walk down the corridor to the sacristy and the church, he passed the garage and saw that both of the bishop’s vehicles—a beige Toyota Corolla and a white VW Golf—were parked there. When he headed back to his room about forty-five minutes later, the VW Golf was gone. But there was nothing unusual about that. As he did every Sunday night, Bishop Gerardi had picked up his sister Carmen at her home—the same house where they’d spent their childhood, in Candelaria, one of the city’s oldest and most venerable barrios. The Gerardis had grown up across the street from the home of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, whom they had known as children. There was a statue of Asturias in a traffic island in front of the two houses.
Bishop Gerardi and Carmen went to the home of their nephew Javier, where they watched television and had a simple dinner of plátanos, beans, and cheese. Then the bishop drove his sister back to Candelaria, arriving there—as she was able to recall later, because she’d asked him the time—at twenty minutes before ten. They lingered in the car awhile, talking, before saying good-bye. Carmen watched her brother drive off in the direction of the church of San Sebastián. At that hour, investigators later calculated, with the streets empty of traffic—by day they were usually impossibly jammed—it was a drive that the bishop could have made in five minutes, and probably in no more than eight.
So a few minutes before ten, Bishop Gerardi drove up Second Street and turned left into the driveway that runs between the San Sebastián complex and a tree-filled park. The complex includes, in a row, a Catholic school building, the parish house, the garage, and the church. The park is traversed by a paved walkway leading from Sixth Avenue to the raised plaza in front of the church doors. At night, the park is dark and quiet, and the neighborhood, which bustles by day, because it is so close to the downtown business area and government buildings, is mostly deserted. Shops were shuttered, offices and school buildings were empty, and the heavy wooden doors of faded residences were securely locked. San Sebastián is an old parish, dating nearly to the founding of the city in the late eighteenth century, but the church itself, which is of modest size, with two bell towers, one at each corner, was twice destroyed by earthquakes and twice rebuilt during the past century. A remnant of the colonial era, a statue of the Virgin of Sorrows of Manchén, her chest pierced by numerous swords, her pale polychrome face ethereally sad, lips parted to expel a gentle sigh of pain, stands in a side chapel.
A dead-end side street, Callejón del Manchén, extends two blocks, between Third and Fifth streets, from alongside the church of San Sebastián to the rear of the old National Palace. At the intersections of Callejón del Manchén and Fourth and Fifth streets, guarded security gates protect the presidential residence, which is situated between them. The very wealthy and patrician President Arzú, who is descended from Spanish colonial viceroys and archbishops, was the first Guatemalan president to choose to live in his own home instead of in the presidential residence, which was being used for business and formal ceremonies. Also inside those gates were the headquarters of the Guatemalan Army’s Presidential Guard and the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP), or Presidential Military Staff. In recent decades there was probably no city block in all of Central America more forbidding or generally feared than that one on Callejón del Manchén, where the EMP and its notorious military intelligence unit, formerly known as El Archivo, were situated. The EMP and the Presidential Guard, aside from overseeing the personal security of the president and his family, sheltered, among its approximately 500 members, an elite anti-kidnapping commando unit. During the war years, there were rarely any survivors of the EMP’s interrogation and torture sessions. (According to declassified U.S. documents, Guatemalan Military Intelligence—G-2—and the Archivo, though technically separate, worked hand in hand.) Looming on the other side of Fourth Street, just outside the gates and only about 200 feet from the church, is the modern white-concrete and black-glass multistory building of the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis (SAE), a government information-gathering agency that up until 1998, at least, was also integrated into the military’s intelligence structure.
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 Abarrotería 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 one-quetzal 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.
The bolitos El Monstruo Jorge and Pablo el Loquito didn’t seem to have anything useful to communicate to investigators about that night either. But no one will ever be able to discover if it was simpy alcohol and drugs that erased whatever memories they might have had or if simple fear played a role. Within just a few years the two indigents, like virtually all of the other bolitos who were sleeping outside the parish house on that Sunday night—with the exception of Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván—would be dead.
USUALLY, ON ARRIVING back at the San Sebastian parish house on Sunday nights after his dinner with his family, Bishop Gerardi would phone Juana Sanabria, the parish administrator and his longtime close friend, to let her know that he had arrived safely. On Saturday nights, Bishop Gerardi customarily dined with Juana Sanabria and her teenage daughter in their home, and then they would watch a movie starring Cantinflas, the classic Mexican comedian, on television. Perhaps nobody was closer to Bishop Gerardi than Juana Sanabria and her daughter. But sometimes Bishop Gerardi forgot to call, so when ten o’clock passed that Sunday without any message, Juana Sanabria at first tried to reassure herself that there was no reason to worry. She couldn’t restrain her anxiety, however, and, at ten-thirty she phoned the parish house. For the next hour or so, Juana Sanabria said, she phoned every fifteen minutes, and then, worried about disturbing Father Mario, she gave up.
For a long time it was generally believed that Juana Sanabria had called the bishop’s private line, in his bedroom, which was why, according to Father Mario, he couldn’t hear it ringing. But the sacristan said that the telephone in the bishop’s bedroom could be heard throughout the house. Later, Juana Sanabria testified that she had called three different numbers at the parish house that night. She understood the dangers that came with having published the REMHI report, and she’d noticed, that last Saturday night when Bishop Gerardi was in her home, that he was preoccupied, so much so that he hadn’t even stayed for the Cantinflas movie, which always made him laugh. Juana Sanabria would testify that when neither Bishop Gerardi nor anybody else answered any of the parish house phones on Sunday night, she was overcome with fear and foreboding, and began to weep.
At about half past midnight, perhaps somewhat earlier, the front door of the parish house opened and Father Mario stepped out in his bathrobe and pajamas. Rubén Chanax told investigators later that morning that the priest called out to the row of sleeping bolitos: “Muchá”—which can be short for muchacho, or muchacha, or, as in this case, the plural of those (boys, or youths)—“did any of you see who came in or went out?” One of the bolitos, who was known as El Pitti, and who liked to drink only lethal quimicazo and so had forgone the presumably spiked beer, answered, “Don’t worry, Father, Monseñor went in a while ago.”
Rubén Chanax said that he got up from his blanket and approached Father Mario and told him that he’d seen a muchacho come out of the garage and that this muchacho had been naked from the waist up. According to Chanax, the priest said, “Ah, then stay here, because I’ve phoned the police.” Chanax’s many subsequent testimonies would never vary regarding what he told the priest, but the first police investigators dispatched to the scene of the murder would report Father Mario’s own account of that moment following his discovery of the body in the garage: “He went to the parish house door, interrogating the ‘bolitos’ who slept in the external part, to the right of the garage, if they had seen anyone coming in or out, the interrogated answering in the negative.” Two days later, in a declaration given to the special prosecutor assigned to the case, the priest would again give the impression that the bolitos had answered by saying they had seen nothing unusual, leaving Chanax out of his account. But Father Mario’s two subsequent declarations, on May 15 and on July 22, would coincide, at least in that one respect, with Chanax’s.
Father Mario later told investigators that he had spent Sunday afternoon, after the midday Mass, in his bedroom, watching television and dining on his favorite food, fried chicken delivered from Pollo Campero, a popular fast-food chain. After the evening Mass, he took his eleven-year-old German shepherd, Baloo, for a brief walk in the park. A female parishioner who’d attended the Mass asked to speak with him, and he brought the dog inside and went back and spoke to the woman for about ten minutes. At about that time, the choir members who’d sung in the evening Mass left the church. Back in his bedroom, Father Mario changed into his pajamas at his usual hour, around seven-thirty, and went to the parish house kitchen to take medicine for a severe migraine condition. In the kitchen he spoke briefly to Margarita López, the cook, and to the sacristan, Antonio Izaguirre. Usually Margarita López, after serving breakfast, had Sundays off and went to spend the day with her family, but on this Sunday, because of a bad chest cold, she had stayed in the parish house. She and the sacristan shared an evening meal and Margarita López retired to her bed. Around eight-thirty, the sacristan went home. Father Mario fed Baloo, washed up, sat down at his computer, and logged on to the Internet. At about twenty minutes before ten, he said, he turned on the air conditioner and watched television in bed. (In later statements, he would say he was wearing headphones.) A Spanish television show that he wanted to see was on at ten-thirty. He watched the news, but drifted off to sleep, he calculated, at around ten-twenty. He woke half an hour later, turned off the television and lights, and went back to sleep.
At around midnight, Father Mario said, he turned over in bed and was awakened by a light shining through the glass pane over his bedroom door. “Maybe you turn over in bed,” he explained during that first statement to prosecutors in the parish house two days after the murder, “and púchica”—the inoffensive, popular version of another common though more vulgar exclamation: puta! (whore)—“what’s going on, and then I said, what’s going on, and I got up, right, and I went to turn off the light and I said to myself, Monseñor forgot to turn off the light again.” Bishop Gerardi was supposed to turn off the light in the corridor when he got home. But when Father Mario went out, leaving Baloo behind in his room, he saw that more lights were on at the end of the corridor. “And that,” he said, “seemed strange to me.” The corridor, about thirty feet long, ran the length of the house, from the bedrooms of Father Mario and the bishop, past two small patios, the kitchen, and the cook’s bedroom, directly into the garage, which is in an open area at the end of the house that connects to the church. The priest continued: “But look, licenciado”—the proper form of address for a lawyer—“sometimes, maybe because of the affection you feel for someone, you don’t want to believe that the dead person is that person, right, and so in the first place, like I told you, I didn’t recognize him, you saw how he was, right, he was unrecognizable, so I didn’t recognize him, and with so many bolitos here coming inside …”
When Father Mario stepped into the garage, he found Bishop Gerardi lying on his back in a pool of blood between the Toyota Corolla and the wall. His mouth was open and his brutally battered face was covered with blood. His legs were crossed at the ankles, and his hands, “his manitas,” said Father Mario to the investigators from the prosecutors’ office two days later, “his little hands were, I don’t know how they were but yes, right, his little hands were how you saw them, he had them like this”—crossed at the wrists and resting on his chest—“and that did seem strange to me, the way he had them crossed, just the way you saw him, that’s how I found him, and also, the sweater was there.” Near a water tank in the garage, a blue sweatshirt had been left on the floor. A triangular concrete paving stone lay not far from the body and some blood. There was blood everywhere.
Father Mario said that he thought, “Maybe there was a fight here inside, and one of the bolitos died.” He said that he then went back down the corridor to the front door of the parish house, which was double-locked as always, and he unlocked it and stepped out and that was when he “asked the bolitos if they’d seen anything, some fight, some argument or anything, and they said no Father, don’t worry Father, Monseñor went in a while ago, and then that’s what killed me, and I went to my room to get a flashlight, because I didn’t think the light was sufficient, not in the garage or anywhere, and I went back and shined it in his face until I realized it was him, and when I realized it was him, I phoned Monseñor Hernández, the chancellor of the Curia.”
First, though, he woke the cook, Margarita López, knocking on her door. “Margarita, I told her, ‘They killed Monseñor.’ And then the cook came out and she went to see, she’d been here working for Monseñor for as long as he’d been here, she was his servant, and it was really terrible for her, she began to cry.”
AT ABOUT ONE O’CLOCK in the morning, Ronalth Ochaeta was awakened by the ringing of the telephone in his living room. It wasn’t uncommon for the Ochaetas to receive calls in the middle of the night, anonymous voices speaking insults and threats or making weird, menacing sounds. Usually Ronalth’s wife, Sonia, got up to disconnect the phone, but this time she didn’t want to get out of bed, so Ronalth did. Instead of unplugging the phone, he answered it, and he was surprised to hear the voice of Dr. Julio Penados, who asked how he was, where he was, and then said, “I don’t know how to tell you this …” Ochaeta’s first thought was that Archbishop Penados must have died. “They killed Juanito,” Penados said.
What? How? Impossible?
“They attacked him when he was coming into his house and killed him.”
Ronalth Ochaeta said he was on his way to San Sebastián, and he hung up. A moment later the phone rang again. It was Dr. Penados, telling him to stay put, that he was sending his son Fernando over to pick him up. In a daze, Ochaeta went back into the bedroom. Sonia was sitting on the bed with the lights on. “What happened?” she asked, and he answered calmly, “They killed Monseñor,” and added, a moment later, “Hijos de la gran puta”—sons of a big whore. Sonia wailed, “I’m afraid! Don’t go, please don’t go!” and began to sob.
From far away on the Tulum Zu highway, empty of traffic at that hour, he heard the engine of a speeding car and knew it was Fernando Penados, on the way to pick him up.
FERNANDO PENADOS, the archbishop’s twenty-eight-year-old nephew, had been awakened by his father and told of the murder of Bishop Gerardi. The bishop had been Fernando Penados’s mentor. Fernando’s family had always hoped that he would become a priest. As an unruly teenager with all too secular interests he’d even been sent to live in the Archbishop’s Palace in the cathedral, where his family arranged for him to have a seminarian as a roommate. “To see if he could influence my behavior,” Penados would tell me later. “But in the end I didn’t comprehend much of the process in which I was immersed. And the seminarian decided to leave the seminary.” Penados, who kept his hair short, almost in a crewcut, and wore dark sunglasses all the time and T-shirts that showed off a weight lifter’s biceps, had an improbably grandiloquent but often playful way of speaking. It wasn’t until he was twenty and went to work for Bishop Gerardi at ODHA that he found what felt like a true calling.
When describing his years working under Bishop Gerardi, Fernando Penados frequently used the phrase “my formation.” Investigating human rights cases was “a part of my formation,” as was this or that memorable conversation, beginning with the two-hour monologue Bishop Gerardi had delivered on Guatemalan political realities during what was supposed to have been his job interview in 1990. Bishop Gerardi frequently took trips abroad to represent ODHA in various international forums, and Fernando Penados occasionally accompanied him. He relished the closeness they shared on those trips, especially on the long flights to Europe. “They were a part of my formation, those ten hours in the air, something I took advantage of,” he said. “Talking about how he saw the Army, the war, the civilian sector, the inner workings of the Church, always accompanied by a pair of wiskitos.” They would sip their whiskeys and talk, Penados said, “about the everyday problems that arise. Well, maybe not so everyday. For example, when I was working with him there was a period when I was going through a divorce. I talked about how difficult it was within my family, which was so conservative. He was at my wedding. I was married by the archbishop and two priests, in the cathedral. They really had me roped up!” He felt that Bishop Gerardi understood him and gave him helpful advice.
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.
AS 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.
DURING HIS YEARS as executive director of ODHA, Ronalth Ochaeta often displayed a temperamental and pugnacious personality that struck some as supercilious. He made enemies and, sometimes, mistakes. But he also, as the coming months would show, often made headway where a more restrained or passive personality might not have. When Ochaeta stepped into the kitchen of the parish house, Monseñor Hernández, a small, plump figure with a rabbit-like face and slanted, almond-shaped eyes, said to him, “This is what happens for trying to investigate the past.” And Father Maco, the priest whom Ana Lucía had gone to pick up at La Candelaria, said, “Yes, I was never in agreement with that.” Ochaeta snapped, “You were never in agreement with anything that Monseñor did, so don’t give me stories.” Monseñor Hernández broke in, “Well, what are you going to do now?” And Ochaeta answered, incredulously, “What am I going to do? You mean what are we going to do!” A third priest, a Spaniard whose surname was Amezaga, a Church conservative, stared at Ochaeta and then said, “But you in ODHA have the experience and should know what to do.”
Then a furious Fernando Penados stormed into the kitchen and said, “Ronalth, come out here! These people are already altering the crime scene! They’re shit! I asked them to widen the area inside the security cordon and they don’t want to!”
The first policemen to arrive had hung yellow tape around an area enclosing the body and the two cars. Even the bloody footprint had been left outside the perimeter of that first cordon, as well as other footprints at the back of the garage. Various crime-scene specialists had arrived soon after, as had the lawyer Axel Romero, the bishop’s nephew, among many others. People were walking around the body, and into and out of the garage and parish house. Some were even ignoring the yellow tape, stepping over it, and eventually it was knocked down. The tape itself became stained with blood. People tracked blood throughout the house.
Fernando Penados shouted at the police, ordering that the cordon be made wider. They obeyed, but then moved it back again. “Of course, later they made it much bigger,” Penados recalled later, “but by then the crime scene was totally contaminated.” Penados went outside and began shouting and kicking at the somnolent bolitos to wake them up, because surely they had seen or heard something.
THE CROWD GREW. Edgar Gutiérrez, from ODHA, was there, as was Helen Mack. Years before, Gutiérrez, who was an economist, had worked for a foundation with Helen’s sister Myrna, the young anthropologist murdered by the EMP’s Archivo. Before her sister’s death, Helen Mack, whose physical resemblance to the character Peppermint Patty in “Peanuts” was often remarked on, was a shy, sheltered real-estate agent from a religiously devout Chinese-Guatemalan family. She belonged to the ultraconservative Roman Catholic order Opus Dei, no less. Helen Mack was still working in real estate and finance, but she was also the founding director of the Myrna Mack Foundation. Her long and still ongoing pursuit of justice for her sister’s murder had made her Guatemala’s most formidable and admired human rights activist. Intelligent and seemingly fearless, Mack projected a focused and even cold implacability along with the most disarming emotional vulnerability, often breaking into heartrending tears when discussing her sister’s murder or having to address the press after yet another discouraging reversal in the courts. Eloquent in public, in private she was usually considerate and kind but also straightforward, blunt, and often astonishingly salty. In that way she resembled Bishop Gerardi, with whom she’d worked closely over the years. Fernando Penados liked to say that it was his dream to one day be head of the Presidential Guard, but only when Helen Mack became president.
Jean Arnault, the French head of the United Nations Peace Verfication Mission, which was assigned to monitor Guatemala’s compliance with the Peace Accords, also arrived on the scene. The multinational mission, which was referred to by its Spanish acronym, MINUGUA (min-U-gwa), was a ubiquitous presence in Guatemala. Arnault was accompanied that night at San Sebastián by Cecilia Olmos, a Chilean working at MINUGUA’s headquarters in Guatemala City, and Rafael Guillamón, a veteran investigator from Spain with years of expertise in Arab counterterrorism. Guillamón, who was in his early forties, was broad-shouldered and compact, with a scruffy reddish beard. He was MINUGUA’s chief police investigator, and he and his small team of two other agents reported solely to Jean Arnault.
The prosecutors of the Public Ministry were assigned cases according to a numeric rotation system, and that weekend Prosecution Unit 6, which was led by Otto Ardón Medina, was on duty. Gustavo Soria, one of the assistant prosecutors from Unit 6, had arrived at San Sebastián shortly before his boss that night. Ardón, a lugubrious, retiring man, mostly hung back and watched the younger, comparatively sleek and self-confident Soria direct the police.
Outside the garage, the groggy indigents told the police that Rubén Chanax had information. He was the only one among them who didn’t drink, they said, and so he’d “seen everything.” Chanax told the prosecutors and the police about the shirtless man who’d stepped out of the garage. He was whisked away to a police station, and his long journey as a protected witness, in the custody of the National Police and the Public Ministry, began.
Back inside the house, Ronalth Ochaeta was struck by Father Mario’s seemingly preternatural serenity, and by how neatly dressed he was, all in black, in a black leather jacket, his hair looking recently washed and combed. He abruptly asked the priest what had happened, and Father Mario again launched into his story. Later, when Ochaeta asked if he could use the bathroom in the priest’s bedroom, Father Mario said no, and directed him to another bathroom in the house. Ochaeta watched Father Mario going into his bedroom and thought it was odd, the way he opened the door just enough to be able to slide in sideways.
The attorney general, the head of the Public Ministry (a presidential appointee), arrived and embraced Ochaeta. “Hijos de puta, this has all the marks of los de allí enfrente,” he said—“of those from just over there.” He obviously meant the EMP’s military intelligence unit. He telephoned another prosecutor from his office, Fernando Mendizábal de la Riva, who came to the church and, soon after arriving, remarked to Rafael Guillamón, MINUGUA’s chief investigator, “This looks like the work of esa gente—those people.” In Guatemala such euphemisms are easily understood. But Mendizábal de la Riva was known to be a friend of General Marco Tulio Espinosa, who until his recent promotion to head the Army High Command had been the head of the EMP, and was now seen as the most powerful figure in the Guatemalan Army. So even people with powerful political appointments, like the attorney general, and a friend of the Army’s most powerful general, were capable of spontaneous observations that later they would most likely deny having made. Even politically compromised and complicit people do not always behave predictably, just as, of course, the most disciplined and intricately plotted crime does not always turn out exactly according to design.
Nery Rodenas, the coordinator of ODHA’s legal team, lived well outside the city with his wife and small children, and he didn’t have a telephone, so someone from ODHA drove to his house and brought him back to San Sebastián. Rodenas had studied law at the public university, San Carlos, at the same time as Ronalth Ochaeta. But while Ochaeta made his name in political circles as a member of the University Students’ Association, Rodenas was the leader of a Catholic students’ group. He had converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism as a teenager. Tersely soft-spoken, Nery Rodenas had the melancholy eyes, rosebud mouth, plump cheeks, and somewhat stiff but gentle air of a clerk in a Botero painting. Of all his colleagues at ODHA—at least the ones I was to get to know—Rodenas was the only devout, practicing Catholic.
Nery Rodenas reached the church of San Sebastián sometime between two and two-thirty in the morning and pushed his way through the crowd gathered in front of the garage door. All around him people were weeping, or conversing in hushed tones, or taking notes and snapshots as Gustavo Soria and the police worked inside the now re-expanded security cordon. Rodenas turned around and saw a man—short, brown-complexioned, with a mustache—taking photographs with a flash, and he realized that he had seen him before. The man wasn’t a photojournalist. Rodenas had seen him in the old colonial city of Antigua, at the trial of the accused murderer of a twenty-year-old milkman named Haroldo Sas Rompich.
THE PRESENCE of the short man who was taking photographs was one of hundreds of threads of evidence that would eventually be woven into the investigation and prosecution of the murder of Bishop Gerardi, Guatemala’s “crime of the century”—the most important, and certainly the most bizarrely spectacular, passionately contested, and convoluted legal case in the country’s history. Years later Rodenas and others would still be pulling on that particular thread, investigating and debating its significance.
One day in February 1996, President Álvaro Arzú, not even a month into his term as president, and his wife had been horseback riding through the countryside near Antigua, accompanied by their EMP bodyguards in a caravan of vehicles and horses, when the milkman Sas Rompich drove into their path in the 1984 Isuzu pickup in which he made his daily rounds. It is possible that Sas Rompich was at least a little drunk. Earlier, he’d stopped at a small country store to drink a few beers to help lighten a hangover, and now he was on his way to the farm where he picked up his milk. Captain Byron Lima, of the EMP Presidential Guard, alertly rode his horse into the path of the oncoming pickup, holding out his hand for the driver to stop, but the pickup kept on coming forward, and the horse reared, throwing its rider, who broke his arm. The pickup then crashed into a parked car by the side of the road. Apparently confused and panicked, the milkman accelerated, then rocked into reverse, and another officer jumped onto the pickup’s running board and reached in for the ignition, trying to bring the vehicle under control. Someone else shot out the rear tires. A guardsman drove his car against the front of the pickup, blocking it, and someone went right up to the pickup with a nine-millimeter pistol in his hand, reached in through the window, and fired three bullets into the milkman, including one into his ear, killing him instantly.
The government subsequently announced that the president’s bodyguards had heroically prevented an attempted double assassination of President Arzú and his wife. No one could deny that the milkman had given the first couple a scare. The first lady had turned and galloped her horse into a nearby field, leaping a fence. In the past, the declaration of a threat to the president would have been enough to put an end to the matter. The legal system, the press, and all relevant actors would have asked no more questions. But in the new climate established by the Peace Accords people were willing to entertain the idea that the president’s security guards might have displayed a reckless disregard for human life, perhaps even committed murder.
ODHA lawyers represented the victim’s family at the trial of the guardsman, Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva, who was accused of having murdered the milkman. Mario Domingo’s account of the incident, which was also the prosecution’s, as narrated above, was based on the testimony of the sole civilian witness: a youth who was out riding his bicycle when, as he was about to overtake the slow-moving presidential caravan, he was ordered to dismount and walk alongside.
At the trial, members of the EMP and other military types crowded the courtroom. The short, dark photographer that Nery Rodenas saw the night of Bishop Gerardi’s murder had turned up daily to focus his camera on the people from ODHA and others who had come to observe the unprecedented trial of a member of the president’s security force. He was also seen outside the courthouse photographing the license plates of automobiles. Suspecting that the photographer was not a journalist, Ronalth Ochaeta asked the judges at the trial to demand that he identify himself. The photographer’s identification card revealed that he was from the EMP. In the end, Obdulio Villanueva received a five-year sentence for the murder of the milkman. ODHA had asked for the maximum penalty under the circumstances, thirty years.
That night in the church of San Sebastián, Nery Rodenas sought out Ronalth Ochaeta and Fernando Penados and told them that there was a man from the EMP taking pictures inside the garage. When Jean Arnault, the head of MINUGUA, dispatched his investigators to look into the matter, the photographer identified himself as a member of the director of the National Police’s advance security. By then, Nery Rodenas and some of the others had noticed that the photographer wasn’t alone. A tall, thin man who wore a red baseball cap, with the bill pulled low over his face, accompanied him. Later the man was seen in the park, talking into a portable radio.
Ángel Conte Cojulún, the director of the National Police, arrived at San Sebastián at three in the morning. When he was informed that his advance security had been inside the parish house taking photographs, he responded that he didn’t have any advance security. Accompanied by the MINUGUA investigators, Conte Cojulún went to speak with the suspicious men, who insisted on talking with him alone. After a few minutes, the two men left the park, and Conte Cojulún spoke to Fernando Penados. “Listen, Fernando, they’re with the EMP,” he said. “Don’t make such a big deal out of it.”
AT 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.
WHEN 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.
THE 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 1994 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.
