Читать книгу The Art of Political Murder - Francisco Goldman - Страница 15

THE CHURCH OF SAN SEBASTIÁN 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.

The murder, which had at first seemed like a clear-cut political crime—a consequence of the REMHI report—had become a baroque story of perhaps perverse human passions. The mysterious shirtless man who appeared at the garage door was widely perceived to be a player in some as yet unresolved homosexual drama. As a writer I couldn’t resist, and toward the end of August I took a sort of assignment from The New Yorker to write an article about the case. An editor said that the magazine would take it “on spec.” I had to pay my own way, but I would receive a letter from The New Yorker that I could use as a press credential, and if eventually the magazine did want to publish the story, I would be paid for it and my expenses would be reimbursed.

GUATEMALA CITY is a uniquely ugly place. The mid-nineteenth-century American travel writer John Lloyd Stephens described it as “a mere speck in the middle of a vast plain,” but by 1998 it was a sprawling, choked, polluted, impoverished, claustrophobic metropolis with a population of 3 million and a level of so-called ordinary crime and a homicide rate that made it, even though Guatemala’s civil war was over, one of Latin America’s most dangerous and violent cities. Its best feature is its horizon: on a clear day, immense volcanoes seem to loom so near that you might think it an illusion, as if the light possesses a magnifying quality. Sometimes the volcanoes belch plumes of black smoke, covering the city in ashes, or a crater glows like a flaming planet in the night sky.

The first night I was in the city, a Saturday, I waited until eleven, maybe a little later, to take a taxi to the church of San Sebastián. I wanted to begin there at the same time of day that Bishop Gerardi had his final encounter in the garage. It can take an hour to drive the twelve blocks or so to the church from the Hotel Spring, the inexpensive pension where I was staying, because the traffic is so bad, but at night the darkened, empty blocks glide by. Late at night, downtown Guatemala City resembles a vast, grimy old cemetery. The streets are shadowy, with steel gates pulled down over the fronts of shops and businesses, making them look like long, deserted rows of dilapidated tombs.

The taxi dropped me off, and I stood outside the dark park, which ascends gently upward toward the church. I took a few tentative steps into it and stopped to stare at a bulky human figure silhouetted against the backdrop of the parish house, in the muted glow of a light over the door. The figure seemed to be staring back at me. I retreated to the sidewalk, annoyed at myself. Then I turned, walked back into the park, and stopped again. The figure came toward me. It was a young policeman in a bulletproof vest. He had a partner, also in uniform and with a similar vest, who had been sitting in the shadows, out of view. Laid out in a row of darkened humps, sleeping under ragged blankets in front of and near the metal garage door, were the bolitos, looking just as they must have that night when Bishop Gerardi drove his white VW Golf inside for the last time.

Suddenly a white van with scratchy rock music coming from a speaker on its roof drove up Second Street and stopped at the foot of the drive. One of the policemen ambled down to the van and returned with a young man carrying two plastic bags filled with rice and beans. He was from Eventos Católicos, the charity that brought food to the bolitos at night.

The indigents woke up, and one of them shouted, then another, a domino effect of waking bolitos. I saw their wild-haired heads turning, eyes blinking open in grime-blackened faces as they pushed themselves up off their cardboard beds.

“¡La policí-í-í-í-a!” one began to taunt, voice thick with false fright and real mockery. “¡Ayyy! ¡Ayyy! ¡La policí-í-í-í-a!” And then another, in a sarcastic singsong, cawing, “We didn’t see a thing! ¿Nosotros? Us? Who, us? We didn’t see aaaanything. We don’t know aaaanything.” Were these really the same bolitos who were in the park the night Bishop Gerardi was killed? I had been told that the bolitos had scattered to other parks, or dropped from sight. But some of them, apparently, had drifted back.

The next morning, Sunday, the previous night’s howling wraiths were sitting quietly on benches, looking like circus clowns who’d been shot out of cannons and stunned into a stupor by a hard landing. Car washers worked along the sidewalks. Bright orange flower petals had dropped from towering fuego del bosque trees and were spread prettily over the grass and concrete pathways. Since the murder, the park, which now had a twenty-four-hour police presence, had become a favorite make-out spot for adolescents. A female bolito, frumpy and dirty, with a sagging face and feral black hair, was sitting against the wall of the parish-house garage. She looked something like that inebriated woman, despondent and dazed, in the café in the famous Degas painting. She said her name was Vilma. This was the Vilma the investigators from MINUGUA had heard muttering about homosexuals having killed Bishop Gerardi.

The beloved bishop’s murder, followed by the arrest of Father Mario, and innuendos about a homosexual crime of passion, had, of course, hit like a succession of earthquakes in the old parish of mainly middle-class and poor residents, of old-fashioned manners and morality, where scandals are buried secrets within families. Father José Manuel, Father Mario’s replacement, a trim young man with a reserved and thoughtful air, told me that attendance, especially after the arrest, had fallen off drastically, though it was starting to come back now. “There’s been so much confusion,” he said.

None of the people I approached as that morning’s Baptism Mass let out wanted to discuss the crime or its impact on the parish. Only a man selling cotton candy would venture an opinion. Father Mario had been a very punctual priest, he told me, and would have finished the Mass half an hour earlier than Father José Manuel had. “And I’d be over at the church of the Recoleción by now,” he said, “selling to the people arriving for the noon Mass.”

That afternoon, I had lunch with a friend of a friend of mine in New York, Andy Kaufman, who had spent several years in Guatemala as a founding member of a forensics team that conducted some of the first exhumations of massacre sites in the country. Andy had also worked with MINUGUA and had helped ODHA set up its own exhumation unit. His friend was close to people in ODHA and was familiar with their version, though not the details, of the Gerardi case. During the four months since the murder, ODHA and the prosecutors from the Public Ministry had been, under great pressure, investigating the crime and pursuing theories about it, building their competing narratives. ODHA, Andy’s friend said, was firmly convinced that it had been a political assassination, most likely carried out by the military. Apparently, ODHA had some evidence of its own, including credible anonymous tips and a possible key witness who, unfortunately, neither ODHA nor anyone else could find. Nobody at ODHA believed the scenario involving dog bites, or that Father Mario had been the murderer.

After lunch that Sunday, I strolled through the mildly crowded downtown streets, thinking over what Andy’s friend had told me. I stopped at the Metropolitan Cathedral, where a Mass was in session, and stood at the side of the altar, behind a faded velvet cordon. A man was playing an organ and there was a choir consisting of a small number—five? eight? I no longer remember—of mostly middle-aged and elderly women of very humble appearance. One was dressed partially in Indian garb, with a woven shawl around her shoulders. She seemed prematurely withered and gaunt, her black hair roughly cut and greasy-looking. I especially remember the way she kept glancing at me, this stranger who was watching her and the choir too intently, her eyes filled with nervous fear. Her fear ignited, or rather revived, mine, like the disease the Indians call susto, a “fright” that you can catch like a cold, fear leaping from someone’s glance into your own, a low-grade contamination that felt so familiar that it was just like stepping back into the past, into the Guatemala of the war years and its suffocating atmosphere of paranoia.

I KNEW THAT I NEEDED to gain the confidence of people at ODHA, but it was not an opportune moment. A reporter from the Miami Herald had recently published a story alleging that Father Mario was a homosexual, citing an anonymous source close to ODHA. I learned later that the reporter had quoted from an off-the-record conversation, or so his source insisted. In any case, the incident had caused problems for ODHA, especially within the Church, and it fed a long-standing distrust of journalists, both Guatemalan and foreign. Andy Kaufman’s contacts were more immediately helpful at the offices of the UN mission, MINUGUA, and I quickly found an ally there in Cecilia Olmos, who had gone to San Sebastián the night of the murder with Jean Arnault, the director of MINUGUA, and Rafael Guillamón, its chief investigator. Olmos was a Chilean woman in her forties with a leonine mop of reddish hair. If the UN mission couldn’t help Guatemalans solve the Gerardi case, she said to me one day, then she didn’t see what reason it had for being in the country.

The ODHA office was in a Spanish colonial building nearly two centuries old in the Metropolitan Cathedral complex, two blocks from the headquarters of the Presidential Guard and four blocks from the church of San Sebastián. Its massive double wooden doors—they looked more like the gates to a medieval castle—opened onto a courtyard paved with rough gray stones where vehicles were parked. Visitors buzzed an intercom in the blackened stone frame of the entrance and, once admitted through a small door set in one of the larger ones, stepped into a vestibule where a receptionist sat behind bulletproof glass. An open corridor with a red-tiled roof ran around an interior courtyard, with offices, workrooms, and storage areas opening onto it.

On my first visits to ODHA I met with Ronalth Ochaeta, who was friendly enough and reasonably forthcoming, but careful. He phrased his answers to my questions as if he expected to see them printed in a newspaper the next day. He did, however, let me hang around a bit, and one day he introduced me to Fernando Penados, who was in charge of the murder investigation and was obviously the key person for me to talk to. But Fernando came off as intimidating and hermetic, and he rebuffed my first attempts to interview him. I got around that with the help of Cecilia Olmos, who fed me morsels of information from MINUGUA that I could drop. This went on for a while, until Fernando finally, he told me later, said to some of his colleagues, “How has that pisado—asshole—found out so much?” Which led to what would become many, many conversations.

Ronalth Ochaeta (front right), carrying the coffin of Bishop Gerardi

Fernando Penados’s tough-guy air seemed at odds with his upbringing as a possible prince of the Church, although it was leavened by a good-natured charm. There was also, I eventually realized, an impressionable side to Fernando—a touch of immaturity and romantic or overheated imagination—but he was hardly a naïf. He told me that during the discussions between ODHA and the Church about forming an independent team to investigate the bishop’s murder, he had proposed two options. “One, we can form a team that will be able to conduct a real criminal investigation,” he had said. “People with incredible experience in investigating cases, but who, because of their past, have their vulnerable points. If we pay them well, these people will find the person who came out of the garage without a shirt. Or, two, we can form an ODHA type of team, with clean, trustworthy people. People who don’t have experience in criminal investigations.” The Church authorities, said Fernando, “in the very logical and wise explanations that they gave me,” decided, of course, that they couldn’t pay the sort of people he was talking about. “They said, ‘We’ll have an ODHA-type team just to document the case.’”

ODHA supported many groups—REMHI, people working on legal and educational projects and on mental health programs for victims of the war’s violence, exhumation teams—and the legal office under which Fernando’s investigators worked had the smallest budget of any of them. His team, which had only four members, was called, half jokingly, Los Intocables, the Untouchables, which accurately evoked their youthful spirit of adventure while poking some ironic fun at their ambitions. Two of the Untouchables, Arturo Aguilar and Arturo Rodas, were physically large young men. Aguilar was a law student at Rafael Landívar University, a Jesuit school. He was only twenty and still lived at home with his parents, but he’d been doing volunteer work at ODHA since his adolescence. During a year as a high school exchange student in Madison, Wisconsin, he’d joined the football team, where he played center. Arturo Rodas was a childhood friend of Fernando’s who was working as the manager of a gas plant in Quezaltenango when Fernando contacted him. His nickname, inspired by his girth and pharaonic features, was El Califa. He was conservative in appearance, while the other Arturo, “El Gordo” Aguilar, was a devotee of indie rock and the writings of Charles Bukowski and wore an earring, close-cropped hair, and baggy grunge attire. They made a comical sight sitting side by side in the front seat of OHDA’s old Suzuki Samurai mini-jeep, like a pair of Babar the Elephant detectives.

The Untouchables’ fourth member, Rodrigo Salvadó, was a tall, thin twenty-two-year-old anthropology student who had been working with REMHI’s exhumation team one day when Fernando was leaving the ODHA courtyard in a jeep, on his way to the morgue, and realized he didn’t have any cigarettes. He would need to smoke at the morgue, because of the stench, and when he spotted Rodrigo smoking in the courtyard, he leaned out the window and asked if he wanted to join his team, and if so to get in the car. Rodrigo was handsome, with a long black ponytail, and the others had nicknamed him El Shakira, after the famous Colombian singer who was at the time raven-haired. The son of academic parents with leftist affiliations in the 1970s and 1980s, Rodrigo had lived on the run with his mother when he was a boy, continually changing houses in the political underground and in exile over the border in Chiapas and Mexico City before returning to Guatemala. Many of his parents’ relatives and friends were killed or had “disappeared.” Rodrigo was a remarkably unflappable and easygoing young man with a quiet, quick wit.

The ODHA lawyer Mario Domingo, with two Untouchables, Rodrigo Salvadó and Arturo Aguilar

Fernando had in the beginning perceived the mission of the Untouchables as collecting information that could be used to assess the claims of the prosecutors and the police, who had shown themselves to be more than reluctant to seriously investigate or follow up any lead that might implicate the Army, or to advance the scenario that Bishop Gerardi’s murder had a political motive. But before long Fernando, along with ODHA’s legal team, realized that instead of playing a merely defensive role, they might be able to make a case against the true killers. A lot of information flowed through ODHA. People who had something to say about the Gerardi case, whether their motives were sincere or mendacious, their information helpful, mistaken, or designed to mislead, seemed to contact the Church before contacting anyone else.

Investigating Bishop Gerardi’s murder quickly became an obsession and a way of life for the Untouchables, but one that merged with their usual lives—essentially those of young, unmarried, middle-class men who were far from puritanical or pious. After work nearly every day they would gather in a bar or nightspot, huddled together at a table over beers, eternally talking, it seemed, about the case, while, on occasion, young women made caustic comments over their shoulders before moving off in search of more attentive companions. “You go to bed thinking about this case,” Fernando once told me. “And at night you dream about it. And when you wake up in the morning, you’re still thinking about it.”

THE TRAIL OF EVIDENCE that ODHA’s investigators and lawyers would follow began on April 28, the day before Bishop Gerardi’s funeral, as a crowd of 20,000 people marched through the streets of Guatelmala City in protest against the murder. That afternoon, Mynor Melgar, who had recently joined ODHA as coordinator of its legal team, replacing the less experienced Nery Rodenas, after having served in the Public Ministry for most of the 1990s, was summoned to the office of the chancellor of the Curia. Melgar, a dark-skinned, broad-shouldered man with black hair combed straight back, large languid eyes, and a mustache, had a quiet, confident, seen-it-all affability. Though still in his early thirties, he was renowned as a prosecutor of human rights cases. He had been the special prosecutor in the Myrna Mack murder case, winning an unprecedented thirty-year conviction against Noél Beteta, the EMP operative who had stabbed the young anthropologist to death. In another unprecedented case, he’d won a murder conviction against Ricardo Ortega, a violent young carjacker protected by military officers who ran a car-theft ring.

Waiting in the chancellor’s office that day was the parish priest from the church of El Carmelo, in a working-class barrio in Zone 7. His name was Gabriel Quiróz, and he was obviously frightened and distressed. Father Quiróz told Melgar that as he was dressing to assist in the funeral ceremonies at the cathedral that morning, a man had come to see him. The man, who seemed nervous, said that he was a taxi driver and that on April 26 he’d been working the night shift. Sometime after ten—he wasn’t sure of the exact time—he’d driven past the church of San Sebastián and had seen a white Toyota Corolla parked nearby. Several men were gathered around the Toyota, including a man who was naked from the waist up. The Toyota’s license-plate number had four digits—the kind of number, the taxi driver knew, that was usually assigned to police cars or other official vehicles. The taxi driver thought a bust of some kind was going on, but the next day, when the murder of Bishop Gerardi was all over the news, he realized that he must have seen the shirtless man whom witnesses had described to the police. He had come to Father Quiróz because he didn’t know what to do.

Father Quiróz didn’t know the taxi driver’s name, nor did he recall ever having seen the man before. Maybe the taxi driver hadn’t given his name, or the priest, startled and himself frightened by the visit, hadn’t registered it. The taxi driver was light-skinned, with a mustache, a bit overweight, said the priest, and he apologized, because that was all he could remember. But he had the slip of paper on which the taxi driver had written the number of the license plate, and he handed it to Melgar, who unfolded it and read the hurried scrawl: P-3201. The priest told Mynor Melgar that when he walked the taxi driver to the door, he saw a white taxi waiting outside, with at least one other man inside it.

Melgar passed the piece of paper to Ronalth Ochaeta, who gave the number to the interior minister the next day, asking that it be checked out.

“Why does a person passing in a taxi memorize a license-plate number?” Fernando Penados asked, rhetorically, one day in early September, after I’d been in Guatemala for two weeks. “First, the hour. And second, because this person is no tame dove. The taxi driver notices these things because he has his past.” Fernando said that the taxi driver told the priest that he had once been arrested on a drug charge. Someone with that kind of experience tends to notice the same things that a good policeman does. If that sort of person sees a group of men and another man wearing no shirt standing by a car—indeed, the kind of car undercover policemen frequently use—on a dark street late at night, that person will memorize a license-plate number.

Four months after first learning of license-plate number P-3201, ODHA was still hunting for the taxi driver, hoping that he was not already dead. The taxi driver was the mystery witness Andy Kaufman’s friend had mentioned.

OTTO ARDÓN was appointed special prosecutor in the case. ODHA was granted co-plaintiff status, as legal representatives of Bishop Gerardi’s family and the Church. Thus ODHA was, theoretically, a partner of the prosecution. But what ODHA soon discovered about Ardón’s past did not inspire confidence. Until recently he had been a lawyer for the Guatemalan Air Force, and he was related to military officers. In 1996, when he was on a team prosecuting soldiers accused of massacring over 300 civilians, he was removed from the case after relatives of the victims complained that he blatantly favored the defense. (Mynor Melgar had eventually taken over as prosecutor of that case.) Indeed, many people began to suspect that Bishop Gerardi’s murder had occurred on the date it did because those who planned the crime knew that the investigation would fall to Ardón. He had only two assistant prosecutors working under him on the Gerardi case, including Gustavo Soria. By contrast, a case involving corruption and contraband rackets had twenty investigators assigned to it.

Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván, the two indigents who were taken into custody the night of the murder, had given conflicting descriptions of the shirtless man, which resulted in quite different composite sketches of the “suspect.” Nevertheless, the sketches had been widely published in the Guatemalan press as the face of Bishop Gerardi’s murderer. Chanax’s and El Chino Iván’s perusal of mug shots led to the arrest, three days after the murder, of Carlos Vielman, a young, alcoholic, sometime indigent. At the police lineup in which Vielman was presented to the witnesses, hidden in a row of other young men, Chanax said that the man without a shirt was not among them, but El Chino Iván positively identified Vielman as the man he had sold cigarettes to that night. Vielman was much shorter than the man both witnesses had earlier described, and he had tousled curly hair. One side of his face was grotesquely swollen from a dental infection. He seemed nearly retarded and had been imprisoned in the past, most recently for public drunkenness, though for only about five days. He had been released from jail less than a week earlier, and had celebrated by embarking on a drinking binge that lasted up to the moment of his arrest.

During the initial interrogation of Vielman, Otto Ardón had bellowed at him: “Confess that in the moment in which Monseñor Juan José Gerardi Conedera was entering the parish house … at about ten at night, you attacked him with a piece of concrete with which you gave him several blows until you caused his death!” Vielman, apparently utterly bewildered, responded with the same words throughout the interrogation: “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

It was almost inconceivable that Vielman, who was lame in one arm, could have wielded the heavy chunk of concrete. The church of San Sebastián was far from his usual stomping grounds by the bus terminal. And what reason could he have had for murdering Bishop Gerardi? Robbery didn’t seem a plausible motive. The bishop’s gold ring and his wallet with fifty dollars inside it had been left on his person. The only things that were missing were the keys to the parish house and to the bishop’s car, the chain from around his neck, and his cheap plastic Casio watch.

ODHA checked out Vielman’s alibi, which seemed solid. After sweeping up, as he often did, in La Huehueteca, a little cantina near the bus terminal, he’d been paid with a bottle of cheap cane liquor, which he shared with other indigent friends, and then he had slept there. Nevertheless, Otto Ardón continued to insist that Vielman was the perpetrator. Ardón may simply have been eager to arrest anyone and perhaps hoped that Carlos Vielman would provide an adequate scapegoat. Or perhaps he really was as incompetent as Edgar Gutiérrez said he was. Gutiérrez had been educated in Mexico as an economist and was responsible for much of the REMHI report’s shape and content. His gentle, soft-spoken demeanor belied an intensely cerebral and complex personality. Gutiérrez’s public calls for Ardón’s removal poisoned relations between ODHA and the prosecutors, although it is hard to imagine that a spirit of collaboration could ever have flowered between them.

The lethargic, seemingly diffident Ardón—the prosecutor bore a remarkable resemblance to an unsmiling Alfred E. Neuman, the cartoon character who is the face of Mad magazine—had been bemoaning to everyone his unlucky fate in drawing such a high-profile, implicitly dangerous case. He let it be known that he had nothing to gain from prosecuting it, that it would be bad for his career. Sometimes, in a tone of weary bravado, he said the pressures and complications of the case didn’t allow him to sleep at night.

VERY QUIETLY, HARDLY NOTICED, FBI agents had slipped into the country a few days after the murder and were aiding Ardón and the prosecutors. Rubén Chanax had passed a polygraph test the FBI administered in which the only question he was asked was if he had seen a shirtless man step out of the garage. El Chino Iván refused to take the test.

In late May, Ardón sent pieces of evidence to the FBI laboratories in Washington, D.C., to find out if the blood or hairs found in the blue sweatshirt corresponded to Vielman’s, or if any traces of Vielman’s body fluids or DNA were on the bishop’s clothes. The results of all those tests would be negative. It was to be an ongoing routine in the investigation. Guatemalan prosecutors would send evidence and samples to Washington and then wait with bated breath for the results, which on every occasion disappointed them. One reason was that the prosecutors were often requesting the wrong kind of information. There was a great deal of Bishop Gerardi’s blood in the garage, tracked all over the house, and left in traces on the walls, but there was not much in the way of incriminating evidence waiting to be discovered in it. And a great deal of potentially crucial evidence had been lost. The single, rather small, bloody footprint found by the bishop’s body, the first and seemingly most promising piece of evidence, was never matched, at least not publicly or officially, to the footwear of any named suspect or witness.

President Arzú responded to the crime by appointing a High Commission of notables, including Rodolfo Mendoza, the minister of the interior, to whom Ronalth Ochaeta had passed the license-plate number. The Church declined to participate, arguing that the work of investigating the crime should be left to those who were presumably better qualified: the police and prosecutors. The Church feared being trapped into sanctioning an official whitewash. It did not go unnoticed that military regimes of the past had typically responded to crises by appointing a political commission.

President Arzú, who was notoriously thin-skinned to begin with, was on the defensive. In his first public interview about the case, published in Prensa Libre, the country’s largest newspaper, Arzú pointed out that just days before in New York City a priest who had done social work in the Bronx had been murdered. “Why should the image of our country be stained,” he said, “and not that of the United States, when these two acts are equally reprehensible and painful?” Throughout the 1980s, when Guatemala was frequently sanctioned for its human rights record, Army and government spokespersons had customarily responded by pointing to the crime rate in New York City and indignantly asking why the UN, American liberals, and human rights organizations weren’t asking for sanctions against the United States as well.

DURING THOSE FIRST DAYS and weeks after the murder, the small team of UN investigators led by Rafael Guillamón, who reported directly to MINUGUA’s chief, Jean Arnault, quietly tried to identify and track down some of the indigents who had slept outside the San Sebastián parish house on the night of the murder. The exact number will probably never be known, but it seems that perhaps eight, though more likely ten or twelve, bolitos were sleeping in the open plaza in front of the church and by the garage that night.

Four nights after the murder, on April 30, three of the bolitos—El Chalupa, El Cachimba, and El Árabe—on their way out of the park to buy a bottle of alcohol, had reportedly been accosted by a group of men who had roughly interrogated and beaten them and even attempted to pull them into a white Mercedes Benz. On another night, shots were said to have been fired into the park.

Some of the bolitos had surprising backgrounds. Two of them, Marco Tulio Rivera and his brother Héctor, were the sons of a former director of the National Police. Marco Tulio had been thrown out of military school as a youth for drunkenness, but Héctor was a civil engineer who had graduated from the military officers’ training academy. Héctor would stay drunk for two months or so, living in the park, then would turn up sober on a highway building crew in the mountains, and then would repeat his odd cycle. He was one of those who said he’d slept through everything the night of the murder. Vilma’s “husband,” the bolito known as Ronco, was also an ex-soldier and claimed to be on the run from a mysterious pursuer.

The bolitos were hardly reliable interview subjects, fogged by drugs and drink and, on the night of April 26 specifically, by whatever soporific they had unwittingly ingested in their unlikely gift basket of cheese sandwiches and beer. Some may have pretended to remember less than they knew, some more. But Rafael Guillamón culled a number of interesting details from the bolitos. Years later, when the case finally went to trial, some of what he learned would seem hauntingly pertinent. Several of the bolitos might have been able to provide important corroborating testimony, had they still been alive. El Canche, Marco Tulio, and El Pitti, whose real name was Arni Mendoza Jeréz, claimed to have at least glimpsed the shirtless man who had stepped out of the garage. El Canche said that he was muscular, a common soldier type. Most notably, in light of evidence that would eventually emerge, Marco Tulio and El Canche both mentioned seeing a large black vehicle, which one of them identified as a Jeep Cherokee.

El Canche, who disappeared soon after his conversation with MINUGUA, said that he ran into El Chino Iván at a Burger King in downtown Guatemala City the day after the murder, and that El Chino Iván was clearly distressed. He told El Canche that he’d been hungry the previous night, and that finding the little door to the garage left open had entered through it and walked all the way to the parish-house kitchen, where he’d eaten from the refrigerator. Guillamón believed that was the likeliest explanation for the half-empty pitcher of orange juice in the kitchen and the piece of hot dog in the potted plant next to the bishop’s body.

The day after the encounter in the Burger King, El Chino Iván’s father phoned MINUGUA’s investigators to say that his son had information about the Gerardi case and that he was frightened. El Chino Iván—who was tall, fair-skinned, and well spoken — soon turned up at MINUGUA headquarters and told Rafael Guillamón that Rubén Chanax had told him that he was with G-2, Military Intelligence. He said that Chanax often boasted about his knowledge of weaponry and that he had said that in ninety days a limpieza social, or social cleansing, of the park—an operation, usually carried out by police, in which undesirables were “eliminated”—was going to begin. El Chino Iván asked for protection. His father wanted him to go to the United States, but it was his immediate fate to pass into the custody of the police as a protected witness alongside Rubén Chanax.

When Guillamón interviewed Chanax, he asked about El Chino Iván’s assertion that he worked for G-2. Chanax admitted telling him that, but said that he’d been lying. He only wanted to frighten his friend, to keep him from robbing and breaking into cars near the park. Chanax said that he had been shanghaied into the Army when he was sixteen, like so many other poor Guatemalan boys. He remembered the names of his commanding officers and squad leaders. There was really no reason to doubt that he had a military past, and that, like some of the others who lived in the park, he had drifted into the life of the homeless after being discharged. Later Chanax told someone else in MINUGUA that El Chino Iván worked for military counterintelligence.

Were these claims simply fantasies and boasts? Apparently Chanax did not repeat them to Otto Ardón and his prosecutors or to the police.

THE FIRST PIECE OF EVIDENCE that pointed, however circumstantially, to a military connection to the crime was the license-plate number that the taxi driver had given to Father Quiróz. The minister of the interior had asked Ronalth Ochaeta for the name of the witness who had taken down the plate number, claiming that without this information he couldn’t attempt to identify its owner. But Arturo Aguilar and Rodrigo Salvadó had already hired, with Ochaeta’s permission, a tramitador, someone whose job it is to undertake bureaucratic procedures—guiding paperwork through red tape, knowing when to grease a palm—on behalf of others, an occupation that is a Latin American institution. The tramitador took care of the necessary business at the registry of motor vehicles and discovered that the license-plate number had once been attached to the Chiquimula military base.

The Chiquimula base had been shut down the year before, and the vehicle that bore license-plate number P-3201, a pickup truck, was now registered to the Army High Command in Guatemala City. ODHA passed this information to the commission appointed by President Arzú, and from one day to the next, according to Ronalth Ochaeta, all records of the plate vanished except for the documents ODHA had in its possession. When Ochaeta complained that the Arzú commission was not cooperating in regard to the information, the Defense Ministry issued a statement explaining that the pickup had been sold, but then was forced to acknowledge that the pickup had been sold without the license plates. Finally it was acknowledged that one of the two plates numbered P-3201, which should still have been in the possession of the Army High Command, was missing.

On April 28, the same day Mynor Melgar learned of Father Quiróz’s encounter with the taxi driver, an anonymous telephone call had been received by a receptionist at the archbishop’s office. A woman said to tell Archbishop Penados to investigate “Colonel Lima Oliva,” and then she said, “Investigate the Limas.” She described herself as a friend of the archbishop and of Monseñor Quezada, a prominent bishop with a conservative reputation, but she would not give her name. This was just one of countless anonymous tips that reached ODHA. The legal team and the Untouchables had quickly learned that information arriving in this manner was often intended to mislead, and so far almost none of it had proved useful.

There was no Colonel Lima Oliva in ODHA’s database. But there was a Captain Byron Lima Oliva in the EMP’s Presidential Guard. Indeed, he was the officer who had been thrown from his horse and broken his arm during the incident in 1996 that cost the milkman Sas Rompich his life. And there was a recently retired Colonel named Byron Disrael Lima Estrada, who turned out to be the father of the young Lima in the EMP. Colonel Lima Estrada lived in the Colonia Lourdes, a comfortable neighborhood where military officers make their homes. The retired colonel was said to run a little grocery store out of his garage.

Colonel Lima Estrada was a most unlikely shopkeeper. In 1988, he had commanded the Chiquimula military base—the same base to which plate number P-3201 had formerly been assigned. That immediately caught ODHA’s eye. The colonel had had an exemplary military career during the cold war period. A number of files on him held by the U.S. Defense Department and the CIA had been declassified, and the records were posted on the National Security Archive Web site maintained by George Washington University. Colonel Lima Estrada was an anticommunists’ anticommunist and a legendary counterinsurgency officer. The colonel’s visceral hatred of communists was explained by his painful personal history: his father, a military officer who had led a lethally repressive operation against university students after the coup in 1954, was assassinated by left-wing guerrillas in the 1960s. Lima Estrada was a graduate of Guatemala’s Escuela Politécnica, the training academy for Army officers. He had studied at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, and also took an elite U.S. military course in counterespionage and “special operations” in Panama.

During the 1970s, Lima Estrada was an officer in the Regional Telecommunications Center, a special political-intelligence unit inside the presidential palace, described in the National Security Archive as a predecessor of the EMP’s “notorious ‘Archivo.’” By 1981 he’d been promoted to the rank of colonel. According to one declassified U.S. intelligence report, in the early 1980s Colonel Lima Estrada “was extremely successful as commander of the most important Mil Zone (20 Quiché).” Apparently he’d assumed his command in El Quiché just after Bishop Gerardi had closed the diocese there. At least five massacres of Mayan peasants by the Guatemalan Army occurred under Colonel Lima Estrada’s command in El Quiché. In an interview given to the Wall Street Journal in 1981, the colonel named Napoleon and Hitler among his heroes. Later he commanded an airborne special forces unit that played a central role in counterinsurgency campaigns and also, according to the National Security Archive, “founded an elite ‘Kamikaze’ Counterinsurgency Tactical Unit to carry out political executions and other hits, directed by the president and his key intelligence advisers.” Those advisers met in secret to decide the life and death of Guatemalans under the auspices of a group known as CRIO (Centro de Reunión de Información y Operaciones) that was later revived, according to the National Security Archive, under the government of General Mejía Víctores, which took power after a coup against General Ríos Montt in 1983.

During that era of massacres in the countryside, the Guatemalan Army received fulsome public support from President Ronald Reagan, who famously declared General Ríos Montt the victim of “a bum rap.” In 1983, three Guatemalan U.S. Aid workers were killed, and even the U.S. ambassador said that they had been murdered “by the presidential intelligence unit, the ‘Archivo,’ in reprisal for recent U.S. pressure on human rights in Guatemala.” From 1983 to 1985, in the government of General Mejía Víctores, Colonel Lima Estrada was the director of Military Intelligence, G-2. In 1999, less than a year after the murder of Bishop Gerardi, the National Security Archive procured and published an extraordinary dossier, a “logbook” kept by G-2 of death-squad operations in the years when Colonel Lima Estrada was at the agency’s head, documenting the cases of 183 murdered civilians, with individual photographs, from August 1983 to March 1985. That example of G-2’s zeal for record keeping might seem puzzlingly self-incriminating, though it is hardly the first instance in world history of criminally repressive and even murderous government entities displaying an earnest faith in the self-absolving guarantees of bureaucratic procedure and order.

Soon after Guatemala’s first democratically elected civilian president in decades, Vinicio Cerezo, came to power, in 1986, Colonel Lima Estrada found himself languishing in the military backwater of the Chiquimula base, in the dry eastern lowlands. He seemed to be out of the game, far from the remaining war zones or the internecine machinations of the capital, where Defense Minister General Héctor Gramajo was consolidating his own position and pushing aside hard-line officers whom he considered excessively hostile to Guatemala’s democratic opening. From Chiquimula, Colonel Lima Estrada soon emerged as one of the leaders of a failed coup against President Cerezo’s government. His punishment was to be sent to the country’s embassy in Peru as military attaché, where he continued to be involved in coup plotting from afar, and then to Nicaragua. The declassified reports also reveal that charges of corruption were leveled against Colonel Lima Estrada only two weeks before the attempted coup. It was alleged that in the mid-1980s he had participated with two other officers in defrauding the Army of 1.5 million quetzales, and this at a time when the national currency still had a strong value against the dollar.

Colonel Lima Estrada, by his institution’s standards, had had a spectacular career, yet he had never been promoted to the rank of brigadier general. The reason, according to declassified reports, was political. “Lima is very strong-willed and highly outspoken,” wrote the author of a U.S. intelligence report. “That coupled with his very conservative philosophy and ideology makes him a bit dangerous in a budding democracy.” He belonged to a group of influential active and retired Military Intelligence officers known informally as the Cofradía (as the secretive religious brotherhoods in Mayan villages and towns are also called), and to the larger, and official, group of retired officers and war veterans known as AVEMILGUA (Association of Military Veterans of Guatemala). It was on behalf of the latter organization that the colonel had turned up to testify to the truth commission after the Peace Accords in 1996. That had been a defiant performance. When the commission members turned on their tape recorders at the beginning of the session, the colonel opened his jacket and showed them an electronic device he was carrying. “I’m recording also,” he said. He denied, during that brief, blustery session, that during the war the Guatemalan Army had been guilty of any illegal transgressions against the lives or physical integrity of anyone whatsoever. The retired officers met regularly with General Marco Tulio Espinosa, the head of the Army High Command, to discuss their concerns about how the Peace Accords might affect the Army and the officers who had fought and won the war, especially given the increasingly vehement, amnesty-defying calls for a reckoning and prosecution of past human rights violations.

Another tip, two tips really, linking Colonel Lima Estrada to the Gerardi murder would filter down to both OHDA and MINUGUA from, I learned later, his sister-in-law, in whom his wife had confided. The wife was distraught because she had overheard a conversation between her husband and other retired officers in the little store in Colonel Lima’s garage. She heard the officers say to her husband, shortly before the murder, “No te rajes, Lima,” or, “Don’t get cold feet on us.” And she’d heard her husband reply, “We had to do much worse things during the war.” The day after the murder he got very drunk. When the wife realized the significance of what she had heard, she went to her sister, Meche, who told the story to her doctor, Carlos Pérez Avendaño, who in turn told two friends. One of those friends phoned ODHA. The other, an architect named Sergio Búcaro, brought the information directly to President Arzú, who was his friend and neighbor. Arzú told Búcaro to go to the EMP. A few months later, Búcaro was named Guatemala’s ambassador to the Vatican. Rafael Guillamón at MINUGUA believed that Búcaro had been rewarded for keeping silent about what he knew.

There was not nearly as much information available about the colonel’s son, Captain Byron Lima Oliva. He was one of the young officers in charge of President Arzú’s security detail. About thirty, tall, dark, athletic, handsome, possessed of a striking intensity and verbal facility, he was said to be well regarded by most of his fellow officers, but he was also dogged by rumors of a dangerous emotional volatility. He was a former Kaibil special-forces soldier who had first seen combat at the age of seventeen in some of the campaigns of the 1980s. The Kaibiles are an elite commando force known for their cruelty. Their motto is, “If I go forward, follow me. If I stop, urge me on. If I turn back, kill me.” Their involvement in massacres of civilians is well documented, and REMHI’s report recommended that they be disbanded.

Captain Lima had belonged to the controversial anti-kidnapping commando unit of the EMP to which his father, the retired colonel, reportedly served as an adviser. Given the inability of the police and the Public Ministry to confront Guatemala’s skilled, ruthless kidnapping rings, the EMP had been called on to perform much of the police work in high-profile or especially delicate cases. Alhough many kidnapping rings were known to involve military men and police, the unit had some successes, but it had also been implicated in disappearances and was accused of making off with ransom payments.

The Untouchables discovered that on April 26, the Sunday that Bishop Gerardi was murdered, Captain Lima had flown into Guatemala City on American Airlines flight 927 from Argentina via Miami, landing at one in the afternoon. (He had been in Argentina arranging advance security for a presidential visit.) Captain Lima claimed, in a statement to prosecutors, that he had been with a friend, Erick Urízar, in a bar called the Sports Grill until eleven-thirty that night, and had gone directly from the bar to his barracks in the EMP headquarters, arriving around midnight. But ODHA had conducted a check of credit-card receipts and discovered that, although the captain had indeed been in the bar, he had paid his bill at eight-twenty-two. Captain Lima then explained that although he had paid the bill at the earlier hour, he and Urízar had run into two people they knew and had sat with them in the bar until eleven-thirty. On another occasion, he said that after arriving back at EMP headquarters, he had eaten cake with someone there at around eleven. Other EMP members would give conflicting accounts of whether and when they had seen Captain Lima that night. He claimed that he didn’t learn of Bishop Gerardi’s murder until the next day, despite his having spent that night in the barracks, within blocks of the church of San Sebastián.

A month after Bishop Gerardi’s murder, Captain Byron Lima Oliva was sent to Cyprus as the sole Guatemalan member of an Argentine military detachment of UN peacekeepers.

THE CHURCH WANTED to keep its distance from President Arzú’s High Commission, but Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez, accompanied by Helen Mack, attended some of the sessions. One of these sessions, they discovered when they arrived, was intended to be a serious discussion of the case against Carlos Vielman, the alcoholic indigent who was still under arrest. “We became very belligerent,” Ronalth told me later. They derided the case, and one of the commission members, Gustavo Porras, a former guerrilla ideologue who had been a key architect of the Peace Accords and who was now President Arzú’s personal secretary, responded defensively. Porras looked like a caricature of a nineteenth-century radical intellectual: thin, pallid, arrogant, with a large bulb of a forehead. He began to speculate that the bishop’s murder might have arisen from a plot inside the Cofradía, the brotherhood of mostly retired Military Intelligence officers, to destabilize President Arzú’s government. Gutiérrez answered that this could be, but only if they had employed the logistical advantages, infrastructure, and the authority of the EMP. This led to more heated words, the exact nature of which is in dispute. Ronalth Ochaeta recalls that Jean Arnault had to physically step in, trying to calm the angry men. Soon afterward, the High Commission ceased to meet or even to exist.

ODHA believed that the early evidence and leads in the case—the unexplained presence of the two men from the EMP at San Sebastián on the night of the murder, the license-plate number, the activity the taxi driver had glimpsed on the street by the church, the anonymous tips about the Limas—indicated that the murder was carried out by, or at the very least aided by, a clandestine intelligence unit, most likely from within the EMP. But some members of President Arzú’s inner circle were convinced that they had access to far better information than was available to ODHA. They knew that a different spin could be put on the crime, shifting responsibility from the Army to the Church. In this version, which would soon be developed by prosecutors, the murder was a domestic crime of passion, un lío de homosexuales. That is how, according to witnesses, it was described by none other than General Marco Tulio Espinosa, the head of the Army High Command, at a cabinet meeting the morning after the murder. This piece of highly confidential information, for the moment too explosive and too disrespectful to be made public to a shocked, grieving, largely Catholic nation, was passed by President Arzú and members of his government and military officers to influential businessmen and media figures. It went through diplomatic back channels and soon began sprouting, in whispers and innuendo, everywhere.

The homosexual angle was played up most grotesquely by Mario Menchú, an abrasive, hustling defense lawyer of little particular accomplishment or renown who offered his services, at no charge, to the indigent Carlos Vielman. As a defense lawyer, he could hardly have been more ineffective, but he displayed a talent for getting himself into the newspapers, and he also aroused suspicions. Instead of asking that Vielman’s friends from the cantina La Huehueteca be called to testify about his client’s whereabouts on the night of the murder—the most obvious defense—why did Menchú take another tack?

“I’ve been consulting medical forensics specialists,” the agitated lawyer announced at an impromptu press conference, “and they say these kinds of crimes have something to do with passion. Why? Because the aggressor causes the total destruction of the face and head, true? Even the destruction of the genital organs. How many blows did Monseñor Gerardi receive in his face? … This also has something to do with, for example, the sexual deviations, … such as homosexuality, necrophilia, eating cadavers, pedophilia.” Menchú implied that the deviant he had in mind was Father Mario. “Why don’t they want to interrogate Mario Orantes?” he asked. “Why doesn’t he want to help?” He said that an exhumation of the body and an examination of the bishop’s genitals would prove his theory.

Mario Menchú’s innuendos about Father Mario’s sexual proclivities elicited a predictable uproar and condemnation. But the comments also sent doubt and comic titillation rippling through the vast, irreverent world of whispered rumor and gossip, probably the most effective form of media in a largely illiterate country. And Church spokesmen barely responded. Edgar Gutiérrez and others at ODHA already considered the crime-of-passion scenario to be a key element of the crime itself: not just a smoke screen but a trap set to ensnare the Church in such a way that the more the Church leaders and ODHA struggled against the charges, the more they would end up debilitating and dividing themselves. This was because the Church had serious vulnerabilities, and its enemies in the Army knew about them. As Edgar Gutiérrez remarked in an interview, “Mario Menchú says out loud what Military Intelligence is saying in whispers.”

In early June, Fernando Linares Beltranena, a conservative lawyer who had made his reputation defending accused military officers and narco traffickers and who also wrote a regular column for Prensa Libre, became the first of what would soon be a number of journalists and commentators to discuss the putative crime of passion and the possibility that Bishop Gerardi had been a homosexual. Linares wrote a column that was a particularly strained piece of devil’s advocacy: “Is it defamatory to describe Bishop Gerardi as a presumed homosexual?” he asked. “How do the homosexuals feel, whether confessed or in the closet, that their lifestyle should be called an insult or a dishonor? If there were a pro-gay association in Guatemala, they would have protested by now, like the American group defending Versace, recently killed in Miami. It’s true that priests take a vow of chastity, but not of castration, and their natural sexual impulse stays alive…. The dishonor to Gerardi is his cruel and vile assassination, not the suggestion of his presumably practicing a certain lifestyle.”

Dina Fernández, an influential columnist and editor at Prensa Libre and a graduate of Columbia University’s School of Journalism—I’d met her when she was a student there, and we’d become friends—had been responsible for Prensa Libre’s publishing, in its Sunday magazine, a summation of the REMHI report that appeared on the day the bishop died. She had recently given birth to her first child and was trying to be more cautious about what she wrote. Since the murder—and the columns she’d published in response to it—an armed bodyguard had been accompanying her everywhere. But she couldn’t stop herself from answering Linares’s column with a furious one of her own: “It awakens suspicions that the crime-of-passion version came, with the speed of lightning, from the most powerful man in the Army.” She was referring to General Marco Tulio Espinosa and his alleged comments about the murder being a consequence of a homsexual squabble. “As was to be expected, the calumnies made the murder seem banal, anesthetizing those who didn’t want to see it as the political step backward it implies,” Fernández wrote. “Find a copy of REMHI and read Noél de Jesus Beteta’s confession of his assassination of the anthropologist Myrna Mack: there it is explained very well how crimes planned in the EMP are executed to look like common violence.”

Although Dina Fernández hadn’t named General Espinosa, he answered with an indignant public letter denying her charge and portraying himself as an offended and faithful Catholic. He even invited her to his office for an interview. When Fernández arrived, General Espinosa, his chest bristling with medals, was sitting behind a vast desk flanked by three other military officers and a soldier who was videotaping the meeting. At one point, Fernández commented on the general’s collection of elephant figurines, about a hundred and forty of them, made of marble, glass, ivory, and so on. “The elephant has a long nose to sniff out danger,” General Espinosa said to her by way of explaining his collection, “big ears to be able to listen to everything going on around him, strong tusks for defending himself, a thick skin for resisting dagger thrusts, and a very short tail that nobody can grab hold of.” It could have been a maxim for operational survival in the cutthroat world of Guatemalan Military Intelligence.

General Espinosa had come out of the Air Force, and it was said that President Arzú had chosen him to lead the EMP because that branch of the military was less politicized than others, less contaminated by the military excesses and power struggles of the past. Colonel Rudy Pozuelos, Espinosa’s successor as head of the EMP, had also come out of the Air Force, as had other officers now at the top of the organization. Pozuelos was Espinosa’s relative by marriage.

SENSING THE WAY THE WIND was blowing, Fernando Penados had made several attempts to speak with Father Mario, and to offer him help from ODHA in arranging precautionary legal representation. After Mario Menchú’s insinuations appeared in the press, Ronalth Ochaeta also tried to reassure the priest. But Father Mario tersely rebuffed all of ODHA’s initiatives. In June he announced that he had contracted the services of Vinicio García Pimentel, one of Guatemala’s most prominent defense attorneys. García Pimentel had defended the EMP guardsman for the murder of the milkman Sas Rompich. He also represented the elderly Olga Novella, whose kidnapping for ransom by guerrillas on the eve of the 1996 Peace Accords had nearly derailed the signing. Olga Novella was quickly freed, and the guerrilla commandant who had carried out the kidnapping became the last “disappeared” person of the war, a circumstance for which the EMP’s anti-kidnapping commando unit was later revealed to be responsible.

Threatening telephone calls arrived regularly at ODHA’s offices. Nery Rodenas’s wife had recently given birth again, and when he picked up the phone—he had one now—it was often to hear a recording of a desperately wailing child. Threats were called in against the archbishop, who publicly denounced the obvious tapping of his private telephone line and the fact that ever since Bishop Gerardi’s death his mail had been arriving opened. Everyone in ODHA had always known that they were subject to surveillance and infiltrators, but the dangerous-looking men posted on the sidewalk outside their doors were becoming more brazen. A priest who had worked on REMHI and whose parish was in the notorious La Limonada slum began to receive threats and was forced to leave the country.

IN HIS FRUSTRATION that none of the blood evidence or the few fingerprints taken from the crime scene had been matched in the FBI labs to Carlos Vielman or anyone inside the parish house—the priest, the cook, the sacristan—Special Prosecutor Ardón requested that fingerprints be taken from every corpse that turned up in the Guatemala City morgues. A buried body missing both hands and the head was exhumed, and Ardón sent tissue samples from the corpse, known as “XX,” to the FBI as well.

One night in late May, at an evidentiary procedure conducted at the church of San Sebastián, Ardón turned up with the two protected witnesses, Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván, to reenact what they had seen on the night of April 26. A policeman played the role of the man without a shirt. Father Mario, other members of the prosecutor’s office, and people from ODHA and MINUGUA were also assembled outside the garage.

The small metal door in the garage scraped open, and the subdued fluorescent light from inside penetrated the darkness. A policeman-actor stepped into the narrow doorway, naked from the waist up, in jeans and boots. He hesitated and then took off, running across the park toward Second Street, just as Chanax had described.

The young Untouchable Rodrigo Salvadó, the anthropology student, told me later that the performance gave him goose bumps.

On June 18 Otto Ardón returned to the church of San Sebastián to take a statement from Father Mario, the fourth the priest had given. Two forensics specialists, one medical and the other dental, accompanied him. They tossed a blue plastic ball to Baloo, and after the dog had retrieved it a few times, the dental forensics specialist examined it and, apparently satisfied, placed the ball inside a plastic bag. They dipped the dog’s paws in ink and pressed them onto a piece of paper to make prints.

In July, Ronalth Ochaeta traveled to Madrid with Bishop Gerardo Flores to present the REMHI report there. It was a trip he had intended to take with Bishop Gerardi. In response to a reporter’s question about whether he thought the Guatemalan government was seriously investigating Gerardi’s murder, Ochaeta said that he feared the government was engaging in a cover-up, and that so far it had refused to investigate any of the information ODHA had passed on to it through the High Commission: the license plate, and the anonymous tips implicating the Limas. It was the first time that these pieces of potential evidence against the Limas and the military had been mentioned publicly. Archbishop Penados was said to be frantic with worry that when Ochaeta returned to Guatemala, he would be arrested for his comments. But he came back into the country without incident.

Declassified U.S. embassy diplomatic cables from 1998, dating from the immediate aftermath of the murder, reveal that early on in the case embassy officials regarded ODHA and its claims with skepticism. They regularly expressed sympathy and respect for President Arzú, and even seemed unsuspecting of the military: “The military vigorously denies that any of its members were involved in the murder.”

ON JULY 21, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited Guatemala and called for a thorough investigation into Bishop Gerardi’s “abominable murder.” He warned, “We don’t want to give the impression that impunity is something that Guatemalan society tolerates or will tolerate.” The next day, a detachment of some 150 special-forces policemen in black berets, armed with automatic rifles and wearing bulletproof vests, surrounded the park and the church of San Sebastián. It was as if they had come to lay siege to a terrorist cell. Otto Ardón was there too, of course, with a warrant for the arrest of Father Mario for the murder of Bishop Gerardi. But Father Mario wasn’t at home. It was his day off and he was at his parents’ house, having lunch. He was reached there by telephone and told to return to the parish house immediately, which he did, although the police wouldn’t let him past their security perimeter. He insisted that he lived there, but the police said that their orders were to not allow anyone in.

The attention of the assistant prosecutor, Gustavo Soria, was directed to the police line at the edge of the park and the tall, pudgy man wearing large-frame designer glasses, a white shirt with bold blue stripes, gray wool trousers, and a brown suede jacket. Pleading confusion and innocence, tears streaming down his face, Father Mario was handcuffed and led into a police van. Margarita López, the cook, was brought out of the parish house, sobbing loudly. She’d been arrested for destroying and concealing evidence, mainly because, on the priest’s orders, she’d helped mop up the crime scene. Baloo was also taken in that day, as material evidence. Baloo was a large dog, but his hindquarters were weak and he had to be shoved, practically hoisted, into the back of a pickup by dog trainers from a private security firm hired by the Public Ministry. On the pickup’s bumper someone had scrawled the words “MINUGUA OUT” with a black marker.

Portly Nery Rodenas, dripping sweat, and Mario Domingo came running all the way from ODHA’s offices as soon as they heard the news. They showed their identification and the police let them pass. Inside the house they found Pablo Coello, a Spanish Civil Guardsman appointed by MINUGUA to work with the prosecutors, directing the police in a search for evidence in the priest’s luxuriously appointed bedroom. Mario Domingo heard one of the policemen exclaim, “All these photos of Baloo! He has more photographs of the dog then religious images!”

Gustavo Soria called out that he had made a new discovery, and Mario Domingo joined the crowd outside the bedroom door, craning his neck to see. The assistant prosecutor, with a malicious smile, was pointing his index finger at a little drawer—he’d just closed it after looking inside—in a wooden table near the door. Theatrically, he reopened the drawer and, using a handkerchief, pulled out a black Walther .380 pistol. “Then, without using the handkerchief,” Mario Domingo wrote later, “he popped open the cartridge and raised the pistol to his eye.” The gun was loaded.

Two days later, Otto Ardón summoned ODHA’s lawyers to the parish house for their first formal meeting in three months. The prosecutors’ team had practically moved into the parish house by then. Forensics experts and a Public Ministry psychologist who had prepared a profile of the imprisoned priest were gathered there. Ardón, smoking like a film noir detective, gestured toward a table that was covered with photographs from Bishop Gerardi’s autopsy. He drew attention to a photograph that showed four small puncture-like wounds, in the shape of an arc, in the skin on the bishop’s skull. The arrest of Father Mario and Margarita López, and the incarceration of Baloo, had been precipitated by the conclusions of a forensic anthropologist in Madrid, Dr. José Manuel Reverte Coma, who had studied the autopsy photographs and had concluded that the marks could have been made only by a dog’s bite.

The Public Ministry’s dental forensics specialist pulled a plaster cast of a dog’s upper teeth and fangs, a model of Baloo’s teeth made from the plastic ball the dog had obligingly fetched for prosecutors at the parish house a month before. A transparent laminated sheet had been laid over one of the photographs on the table, which showed Gerardi’s skull. The locations of the four puncture wounds had been circled with a black marker. The forensics specialist set the plaster cast down on the transparent sheet, and the points of the teeth fit precisely over the arc of four tiny circles marking the wounds. A crushingly convincing presentation!

But there was even more proof, and there were more photographs. The puncture-like wounds at the base of the bishop’s index finger and on his thumb were also explained as a dog bite. The four parallel streaks on the bishop’s neck had been caused by Baloo’s claws. Some muddy smears on the bishop’s jeans had been left by the dog’s paws. A chest-high condensation of bloodstains on the inside of the bishop’s jacket had been formed by the weight of the dog’s front legs and paws. On and on it went. Then the psychologist spoke: the priest had an infantile personality, he reported, and was overly dependent on his mother.

Mario Domingo and Nery Rodenas, the two lawyers from ODHA, sat listening to the prosecution’s presentation, incredulous and downcast. Rodenas asked Otto Ardón when he had first begun to suspect the dog. “Don’t believe it was just my idea,” Ardón replied. He gestured toward his secretary, Noemi, a skinny, large-breasted young woman in a miniskirt. “She was the first to say, ‘Look, licenciado, I think these are dog bites.’” Just the other day, Ardón related, Noemi had had a dream in which she came to a fork in a dirt path and a man wearing a priest’s black cassock, but lacking a face, appeared to her and said, “Go on, go on, you’re on the right path.”