The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (the mammoth book of ...)

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Little effort is made to identify the victims. They have often been taken far from the place where they were abducted and subjected to unimaginable tortures before being killed. Many are so badly mutilated they are unrecognizable. In Guatemala, there is no fingerprint or DNA database, no crime or victim profiling and no real forensic science. No one investigates and witnesses do not talk. It can take a woman’s family months to trace their daughter to the morgue. Some are never claimed. They are simply designated “XX”, or “identity unknown” and buried in unmarked communal graves.

  Guatemala is a lawless country where people kill with impunity. This began in the 1950s when the United Fruit Company, fearful of losing its holdings under government land reforms, encouraged CIA efforts to foster a military coup, destabilizing the country. Left-wing guerrillas took to the hills. Civil war raged for 36 years. Large areas of the countryside were razed and the rural population, mainly Mayan Indian, were massacred. Villagers were herded into churches, which were set on fire. Whole families were sealed alive in wells. Politicians were assassinated with impunity. Women were routinely raped before being mutilated and killed. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open and foetuses strung from trees. Life became very cheap indeed.

  By the time the UN brokered a peace deal in 1996, over 200,000 had been killed, 40,000 “disappeared” and 1.3 million had fled the country or became internal refugees—all this in a country of little over ten million. Today the graves of entire massacred villages are being exhumed, yet no one has ever been held responsible for these crimes.

  In 1998 the Catholic Church published a report saying that 93 percent of those who had perished in the preceding decades of genocide had died at the hands of the armed forces and paramilitary death squads. Ronald Reagan described the accusation of genocide as a “bum rap” and the bishop who wrote this report was bludgeoned to death on his doorstep. To placate foreign outrage, three army officers were convicted of his murder.

  Once the civil war was over, the paramilitary squads were stood down and those in the army responsible for the sadistic repression were eased out. Three generations of killers now walk the streets of a country awash with guns. There are at least 1.5 million unregistered firearms in Guatemala and an estimated 84 million rounds of ammunition were imported in 2005 alone.

  Many former paramilitaries found employment in the police force, corrupting it. Drug traffickers have moved in and organized crime has moved into the highest ranks of the government. In 2003, Amnesty International labelled Guatemala “a corporate Mafia state” controlled by “hidden powers”—an “unholy alliance between traditional sectors of the oligarchy, some new entrepreneurs, the police, military and common criminals”.

  In 2005, the ombudsman’s office issued a report saying it had received information implicating 639 police officers in criminal activities in the past 12 months. The crimes range from extortion and robbery to rape and murder. As most of the population is afraid to report crime committed by the authorities, this figure is almost certain to be a considerable underestimate of police complicity.

  “A key element in the history of Guatemala is the use of violence against women to terrorize the population,” says director of the Centre for Legal Action on Human Rights Eda Gaviola. “Those who profit from this state of terror are the organized criminals involved in everything from narco-trafficking to the illegal adoption racket, money-laundering and kidnapping. There are clear signs of connections between such activities and the military, police and private security companies, which many ex-army and police officers joined when their forces were cut back.”

  Guatemala also has a particularly “macho” culture. A man can dodge a charge of rape if he marries his victim—provided she is over the age of 12. A battered wife can only prosecute her husband if her injuries are visible for over ten days. Having sex with a minor is only an offence if the girl can prove she is “honest” and did not act provocatively. And in some communities it is accepted that fathers “introduce” their daughters to sex.

  Then there are the pandilleros—the gangsters who live in the poorest barrios of Guatemala city. Vicious infighting takes place between rival street gangs—known here as maras, after a breed of swarming ants. This makes Guatemala City one of the deadliest cities in the world, with a murder rate five times higher than even Bogotá in war-torn Colombia, per capita.

  The country’s largest gang, the Mara Salvatrucha, has now spread throughout Central America and northwards. From California, its tentacle have reached out across the United States. In 2005, it was held responsible for two killings in Long Island and is increasingly making its presence felt on the East Coast. In Guatemala, young women are often the victims of inter-gang rivalries. Usually the authorities dismiss the casualties as prostitutes.

  But 19-year-old Manuela Sachaz was no prostitute. She was a baby-sitter, who had recently arrived in Guatemala City to look after Anthony Hernandez, the 10-month-old son of working couple Monica and Erwin Hernandez. Together they shared a small apartment on the second floor of a block in the Villa Nueva district of Guatemala City.

  On 23 March 2005, the child’s mother Monica Hernandez came home from work. She had no key to the apartment and there was no answer from Manuela inside. She went to see her mother Cervelia Roldan to ask her if she had seen Manuela. She had not and together they went back to the apartment together and started calling out Manuela’s name, but there was no answer.

  A middle-aged police officer lived in a nearby apartment. He came to the front door of his apartment block.

  “It was about five in the afternoon,” Cervelia Roldan recalled, “but he was wearing just his dressing gown. He seemed very agitated and told us to look for Manuela in the market.”

  When Erwin Hernandez arrived home and again got no answer, he broke a window and opened the apartment door. Inside he found the body of the baby-sitter and their child. Manuela was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. The baby was sitting in a high chair, his breakfast still on the table in front of him. Both had been beheaded. The nanny had also been raped and mutilated. Her breasts and lips had been cut off, her legs slashed.

  Three days later their police neighbour shaved off his beard and moved away.

  “Neighbours told me later how he used to pester Manuela,” says Cervelia. She claims that, after the double murder, Manuela’s bloodstained clothing was found in the policeman’s house. The authorities dispute this. They say the blood on the clothing did not match that of the baby or his nanny.

  Cervelia says she has seen the policeman in the neighbourhood several times since the killings.

  “He laughs in my face,” she says. “What I want is justice, but what do we have if we can’t rely on the support of the law?”

  In mid-December 2001 Maria Isabel Veliz was just a happy teenage girl with a part-time job in a shop. Earlier that year she had celebrated her 15th birthday by attending a church service wearing a white dress with flowers in her hair. She had a deep religious faith.

  “Sometimes my daughter would visit me at work and pretend she needed to use my computer for her homework. But what she really wanted was to leave me a note telling me how much she loved me,” said her mother Rosa Franco, a secretary who had been studying for a law degree.

  “She was proud of what I was trying to do,” said Rosa, who was left to raise her daughter and two younger sons alone. In a note written on Valentine’s Day that year, Maria told her mother to “always look ahead and up, never down”. That has been almost impossible since the day her daughter disappeared.

  Rosa remembers every detail of the day her daughter vanished.

  “As usual, she did not want breakfast—she wanted to stay thin—though I persuaded her to have a bowl of cornflakes before she left for work,” Rosa said. “I had given my daughter permission to work in a shop during the Christmas holidays, as she wanted to buy herself some new clothes. I wasn’t well that day and went to sleep early. When I woke up the next day and my daughter wasn’t th
ere, I went to the police to report her missing. They said she’d probably run away with a boyfriend.”

  That night, while watching a round-up of the news, Rosa recognized the clothing Maria Isabel had been wearing when she left for work the day before. The body of her daughter had been found lying face down on wasteland west of Guatemala City. Her hands and feet had been bound with barbed wire. There was a rope around her neck. Her hair had been cut short and all her nails had been bent back. Her face was disfigured from numerous punches, her body punctured with small holes. She had been raped and stabbed.

  When Rosa went to the morgue and discovered the brutal details of her daughter’s injuries, she fainted.

  “When I collapsed, they told me not to get so worked up,” says Rosa, who later suffered a heart attack.

  Rosa then began pushing the authorities to find her daughter’s killers. She gave them telephone records showing that Maria’s mobile phone had been used after her death. And she tracked down witnesses who had seen her daughter being pulled from a car. The police accused Rosa of meddling and denounced her daughter publicly as a prostitute. Such smear tactics are often used to intimidate the families of murder victims.

  Undeterred, Rosa continued to demand that the police investigate the death of her daughter. Instead they merely increased the level of intimidation. Rosa’s teenage sons are often followed home from school. Cars are parked outside her house day and night, their occupants watching—undeterred even when a journalist visited to check out her story. Human-rights workers told the Sunday Times that such surveillance was a sign that the murder had a connection with officialdom and organized crime.

  “I’m afraid,” Rosa said. “But when I see reports of more and more murders of girls and women, I know what other mothers are going through. I vow I will not give up my fight.”

  In 2006, BBC correspondent Olenka Frankiel went to Guatemala to investigate the killings there. She found 21-year-old Claudia Madrid lying dead in the gutter. She had been shot while out for a walk with her children.

  “Investigators walk past her husband in the morgue as he waits to identify her body,” said Frankel. “They will never question him.”

  The husband was phlegmatic.

  “It’s the fashion here to murder women,” he said. “They never investigate such third class crimes.”

  Also in the morgue were two refuse sacks containing the body of a woman cut into 19 pieces and found in the street.

  “Her decapitated head lies in the road,” said Frankiel. “Police remove her limbs from the plastic bags to show the press. If no one comes to identify her she will be classed XX, and buried in an unmarked grave.”

  Then there was the naked swollen body of another woman found in a dried up river bed.

  “Her mouth hangs open,” said Frankel. “Her eyes and a gash in her skull have been pecked by vultures. An investigator says: ‘She was probably a prostitute.’ He points at her hands. ‘Red nail varnish,’ he says… In Guatemala, the victim is always to blame. Another XX.”

  Olenka Frankiel came across a dental technician whose neighbours ran to tell him they had seen kidnappers force his 20-year-old daughter into a car. He went to the police and begged them to put up road blocks to help save her. They told him nothing could be done for 24 hours. By then she was dead. Her body was found, mutilated and covered in teeth marks. She had been shot numerous times.

  “I don’t want to live,” he told human-rights activist Norma Cruz. “I wish someone would shoot me.”

  “There is total indifference from the authorities to these crimes,” says Cruz.

  Months later, the man returned to the home he and his family had abandoned in fear and found the blood-and saliva-stained clothes his daughter was wearing when she was killed. This treatment of vital evidence is commonplace. It is routinely contaminated and returned to the families, or buried with the victim.

  The police were no more helpful when Nancy Peralta went missing just a few months after Maria Isabel Veliz. When Nancy’s younger sisters Maria Elena and Liliana reported that the 30-year-old accountancy student had not returned home from university in February 2002, the police told them to come back a few days later if she did not show up. The following day, their father read that the body of an unidentified young woman had been found on the outskirts of Guatemala City. He phoned the morgue but was told that it could not be that of his daughter as her physical description did not match. However an item of clothing on the body recovered was the same as one she had been wearing when she left home. When he went to the morgue to check, he found his daughter had not only been killed, but her body had been horrifically mutilated. She had been stabbed 48 times and her head was practically severed.

  “When I talk to the police, they refer to my sister jokingly as ‘the living dead’,” says Nancy’s sister Maria Elena, who is now studying law in the hope of bringing her sister’s murderer to justice. “They insisted that she was not dead as some other student had assumed her identity to enrol on a new university course. They showed no interest in investigating what had happened.”

  One complaint of the Peralta family and Rosa Franco is that even the most basic forensic tests that could help identify the murderers were never carried out at the morgue. Morgue chief Dr Guerra complains of the lack of a forensic laboratory on site and the absence of DNA-testing facilities in the country. If they were taken, sample would have to be flown to Mexico or Costa Rica for analysis.

  “Until a few years ago, the US helped train our workers in forensic science,” said Guerra. “But now that help has stopped.”

  Police Chief Mendez, who runs a special unit set up in 2005 to look into the murder of women, explained why less than 10 percent of cases are investigated and, of the 527 murders of women in 2004, only one resulted in prosecution.

  “Women are coming out of their homes and participating in all aspects of society more,” he said. “Many men hate them for this—This is a country with many machistas.”

  Nearly 40 percent of the women killed are listed as housewives and over 20 percent as students.

  Mendez says that the mutilations of women killed are the result of “satanic rituals” used as initiation ceremonies for new gang members. The Ministry of the Interior claims that Manuela Sachaz and Anthony Hernandez could have been murdered because Manuela was a gang member—even though the 19-year-old had only recently arrived from the countryside and had little, if anything, to do with the barrios.

  Believing that the Guatemalan authorities are being deliberately obstructive, the Peralta family and Rosa Franco are planning to take their cases to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights set up in 1959. But most victims’ families have neither the know-how or resources to launch such a legal fight. Instead they sit in queues waiting to talk to human-rights workers and beg for news about what is being done to bring those who murdered their loved ones to justice. The answer is usually nothing.

  Despite the frequency of the killings, the Guatemalan police rarely admit that they have one or many serial killers on their hands. However, in 2000, they conceded that a man that they dubbed as “Guatemala’s Jack the Ripper” was at large on the streets. In three months he strangled five prostitutes and they believed that he may also have killed streetwalkers in El Salvador and even Los Angeles. The killer uses plastic sheeting to strangle his victims and is fond of scrawling angry, moralistic messages on their backs in blood-red marker.

  The killer began his work in Guatemala City on 27 January when police discovered the body of an unidentified prostitute who had been strangled in a run-down, pay-by-the-hour hotel downtown. On the victim’s back, the killer wrote he “didn’t like it, but couldn’t help killing” and that his spree of murders had already taken the life of two prostitutes in Los Angeles. Authorities in California said they had no record of similar killings.

  The body of Roxana Jamileth Molina was discovered two weeks later in a dingy hotel room on the western edge of Guatemalan capital. She had been strang
led. On 6 March, the owner of a hotel nearby led police to the remains of another strangled unidentified prostitute.

  Four days later, the killer’s fourth victim was found in downtown Guatemala City. On the woman’s body, etched on her back in flowery handwriting, was written: “Death to all the dogs. Seven down, three to go.” More had plainly died. Then on 29 March, the body of a fifth strangled prostitute was found in Huehuetenango, 80 miles northwest of Guatemala City.

  For once, they put officers on the streets at all hours, warning prostitutes and passing out computer-generated composites of the man they suspect was behind the killings. The pictures was compiled from witnesses who said they had seen the suspect enter various hotels with prostitutes who were later found murdered. The killer was depicted as a short, olive-skinned, 35-year-old man with sunken brown eyes and closely cropped black hair. The police said he had a Salvadorean accent and uses the last name Blanco.

  “Everyone is scared,” said Rosa, a prostitute who charges $5 a trick to support her two children. “They all say, ‘I wonder if the next man I go with could be this killer.’ What we do is dangerous… this killer is hunting us.”

  Even so, the prostitutes refuse to co-operate with the police. Although prostitution is not illegal in Guatemala, they have as much to fear from the police as their clients.

  At one time, Enio Rivera, the director of Guatemala’s national police force, claimed that the authorities were so close to an arrest that the suspect left the country.

  “We’re afraid our suspect has fled to El Salvador,” Rivera told reporters in April 2001. “We have been in close contact with authorities there because we are convinced this man will kill again.”