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 Arrobeteria 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 onequetzal 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 Hér
cules 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 Sebastián 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 wa
s 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.
The Art of Political Murder Page 4