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 academicparents 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 fo
r 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 foot-wear 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 bui
lding 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 Canache said that he was muscular, a common soldier type. Most notably, in light of evidence that would eventually emerge, Marco Tulio and El Canache both mentioned seeing a large black vehicle, which one of them identified as a Jeep Cherokee.
El Canache, 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 Canache 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 Art of Political Murder Page 8