The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  II

  THE INVESTIGATION

  THE UNTOUCHABLES AND

  THE DOG-AND-PRIEST SHOW

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

  —Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power”

  1

  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 Sprin
g, 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 Ferna
ndo 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.’”