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 Journal-ism—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 offiers 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 respons
e 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.”
Along with Dr. Reverte Coma’s deductions about Baloo, the cast of the dog’s teeth, and the photographs, Ardón had other circumstantial evidence that made it hard to dismiss out of hand his decision to arrest Father Mario. In one of the priest’s declarations he had admitted that Baloo, as a young dog in Germany, had “received the normal training they give to any German shepherd that is going to compete in ‘shows’ for the breed.” That included being trained to attack a forearm. A sheet of paper had been found in Father Mario’s bedroom with commands in German, spelled out phonetically, and their translations, including, “Fass!” “Attack!” and “Ous!”—apparently a command to growl. But when asked if his dog had ever bitten anyone, the priest answered, “Never,” and said, “The most he’s ever done is growl at people he doesn’t know when they come close to me, because when I’m with him in the street or the park, he’s defending me.” In two of his statements, Father Mario admitted that Baloo sometimes growled at people in the parish house, especially the parish secretary, but never at Bishop Gerardi, and in another, his first statement, he claimed that “the dog never growls, even if he hears footsteps nearby”—this was why, he said, Baloo had kept silent while the murder was taking place.
The most damning testimony against Baloo was in an account of an interview given to prosecutors by a bolito, Arni Mendoza, alias El Pitti, on June 12. “Monseñor [Gerardi] was a very good person, totally the contrary of Father Mario Orantes,” the transcript of the interview said, “because on the twenty-fifth of Apr
il of this year Father Mario turned and ordered his dog to attack him [El Pitti] and it bit him and tore through his pants leg.” The bolito had also testified that on the night of the bishop’s murder, at approximately nine o’clock, he had seen a white car, a Mercedes Benz, parked on Second Street. He saw the same car three days later. Getting out of it was “a priest whom he suspects of having been involved in the crime.”
Press accounts, which were usually based on fragmentary information and hearsay, about the “mystery witness”—the taxi driver—always described the car with plate number P-3201 as a white Mercedes. It was a closely held secret among the Untouchables and others at ODHA that the white car with the four-digit military plate had actually been a Toyota Corolla. There had been a white Mercedes Benz at the church the afternoon and the night of the murder, but that car, it was eventually discovered, belonged to an elderly, conservative Spanish priest named Amezaga, who had first come to San Sebastián that day on a routine matter.
El Pitti’s declaration seemed designed to link Father Mario to the shirtless man whom the mystery witness had seen next to the white car, but his testimony wasn’t credible, and not only because of its convenient timing. He had never mentioned being bitten by Baloo in his earlier declarations to police or during an extensive interview with MINUGUA. And this was the same bolito who had turned up outside the cathedral during Bishop Gerardi’s funeral ceremonies to shout that the murderer was El Chino Iván. Years later, Rafael Guillamón, the investigator from MINUGUA, told me that in his opinion El Pitti’s declaration about the dog bite had been entirely cooked up by Ardón’s assistant Gustavo Soria.
The Art of Political Murder Page 10