The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  Fernando Penados knew from experience that investigating the murder of a priest is always a delicate matter. Priests are expected to live purer lives than other people, and when evidence to the contrary turns up it is assumed that such “disappointing” personal behavior must have something to do with the crime. (The something like this that connects to the something like that.) The investigation of Bishop Gerardi’s murder, Fernando knew, wasn’t going to be an exception. The “documentation” by ODHA of the murder on behalf of the Church was exposing elements of the lives of the clergy that were not very attractive.

  “Our responsibility was to get the facts, but we were worried about what position the bishops would take when confronted with them,” Fernando told me. Nevertheless, when he warned Bishop Mario Ríos Montt, Gerardi’s successor as the head of ODHA, that a full investigation into the murder meant opening the Guatemalan Catholic Church to further embarrassment and scandal, “Monseñor Ríos said, ‘If we have to purify the Church in order to get to the bottom of this crime, then we’ll purify the Church.’”

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  OTTO ARDÓN HAD, clearly, decided to pin the murder of Bishop Gerardi solely on Father Mario and to ignore ODHA’s insistence that Military Intelligence was involved. It didn’t help that in July, following the priest’s arrest, Ronalth Ochaeta was quoted as saying, “From the time of Jesus, the Church has always had its Judases.” People inside ODHA were annoyed with Ronalth for playing into Ardón’s hands. But he told me that he didn’t regret his statement about Judases. “I believe that Mario knows more,” he said. “Of that I am sure.”

  Ronalth Ochaeta had been involved in human rights issues since the early 1980s, when he was a young graduate of the law school at the University of San Carlos and was teaching some courses there. Antigovernment guerrilla organizations were recruiting students—“crassly co-opting them,” in Ronalth’s words—with free flights and junkets to Mexico, and the government was cracking down. More than a dozen student leaders “disappeared” or were simply murdered. Ronalth Ochaeta did legal paperwork for students who were in danger and wanted visas to the United States, and he would spend hours arguing on their behalf with embassy functionaries. Then he realized that he was being followed, that he was under surveillance, and he canceled the classes he was teaching, began staying away from the university, and started a small law practice in Guatemala City.

  As a lawyer, Ochaeta traveled frequently to Cobán, the provincial capital of Alta Verapaz, where he had grown up, to work with his brother in the pastoral social office, a charity and aid group. It was there that he met Myrna Mack Chang, the young anthropologist, who frequently came through Cobán to meet with Church officials regarding the plight of displaced internal refugees, the subject of her research and activism. Around this time, Archbishop Penados was looking for young people to work with Bishop Gerardi, who was setting up what would become ODHA. Gerardi had been the bishop of Verapaz when Ronalth was a boy and had given Ronalth his First Communion and had also shut down the school in which he studied. When Ronalth finally went to see Bishop Gerardi for a job interview, he described their last encounter, eighteen years before. “So it’s you!” laughed Gerardi. “And what happened to you after I closed your school?” The bishop told Ronalth that working in human rights would be dangerous, and that there wasn’t any money yet to pay him. Ronalth said that the money didn’t matter, that he had his law practice, and that he would work for the bishop part-time. After nine months, as international donations made ODHA more solvent, the bishop asked what he thought a fair salary would be for full-time work. Ronalth said more than a law professor at the University of San Carlos earned, and less than a judge, and Gerardi agreed.

  Ronalth Ochaeta worked with Bishop Gerardi until 1993, when he and his new family were forced by threats into exile. He spent a year studying for a master’s degree at the University of Notre Dame law school in South Bend, Indiana, and then returned to ODHA. He said to me that his years with Bishop Gerardi were “a long tortuous path where the occasional joy of saving a life compensated for the daily grind of feeling utterly impotent in our work.” Ronalth was worn out. He had assumed that he would leave ODHA after the REMHI report was published, but the murder of the bishop had changed everything. The dark cloud of fear in which years of human rights work had submerged his wife, Sonia, and their two small children at last seemed too much to ask of them, and of himself. One evening, in a moment of unguarded pessimism, he said to me that Bishop Gerardi’s murder had left him feeling that everything—the years at ODHA, REMHI, fighting for human rights in Guatemala—had been futile.

  OTTO ARDÓN HAD BEGUN suggesting that Bishop Gerardi had actually been assaulted in or on the threshold of Father Mario’s bedroom, that the bishop had stumbled on something that Father Mario didn’t want him to see. “Who were the people who carried Monseñor Gerardi from the spot where he was attacked to the spot where he died?” Ardón had demanded of Father Mario during the interrogation on the day of his arrest. The priest answered that he didn’t know, because he had found the bishop dead in the garage.

  I went one morning with Ronalth Ochaeta to the church of San Sebastián, to look at the crime scene. There were lit candles and a vase of flowers along the garage wall, facing the spot where Bishop Gerardi’s body had lain, his head in a pool of blood. There had been double streaks of blood smeared to that pool from a larger one near where Gerardi’s Volkswagen Golf was parked, indicating that the bishop’s body had been dragged about twelve feet. Ronalth speculated that the double streaks were made by the bishop’s buttocks dragging along the floor while his body—which was bulky—was hoisted by two people, one holding him under the arms, the other by the legs. The bishop’s blood-soaked jeans had been tugged down well below the line of his underpants, as would happen to someone pulled along like that. Ronalth’s theory was that the killers were worried that the blood might seep outside, under the garage doors, to where the bolitos were sleeping. But the prosecutors were arguing that the blood streaks had been made with a mop, in order to plant misleading evidence.

  The small, narrow footprint had been found not far from the body, pointing to the rear of the garage. After it had been wiped away, the footprint had turned up again during the first week of May, when prosecutors—with some assistance from the FBI on at least one occasion—had twice performed tests inside the parish house with Luminol, a chemical that reacts to traces of seemingly invisible blood by emitting a bright blue glow. Luminol detects the iron particles of hemoglobin and also reacts to other organic matter, but with a glow different from that caused by blood. The Luminol had revealed more bloody footprints leading into the small library inside the house, and at the entrance to the ironing room, and traces of bloody handprints on the library’s glass-topped desk. There were also blood drops on the floor of the VW Golf. The blue glow took the shape of fingerprints near the garage door, and of splatter marks and wiped smears on the wall opposite the driver’s side of the parked car. The Luminol exposed blood drops and smudges along the corridor of the house and in front of Father Mario’s bedroom door. The prosecutors claimed that Baloo had left some of those marks. Luminol testing inside Father Mario’s bedroom found traces of more blood, or of “organic matter,” near his closet, and stains on the soles of his Gucci loafers.

  Of course, it was possible that the Luminol reactions in the priest’s room indicated nothing more than unsurprising traces of a very bloody crime scene, along with the ordinary secretions of daily life, even something like a forgotten nosebleed. Luminol can identify blood but gives no definite indication of when it might have been deposited. Father Mario had insisted that he’d been very careful not to get blood on his shoes, though it was more than possible that he could have done so anyway, and he insisted that Baloo had not left the bedroom on the night of the crime. From prison, Father Mario, through his lawyer, explained that the drops of blood attributed to Baloo could be a result of the aged dog’s multiple infirmities: Baloo’s prostate bled spora
dically, as did his claws, from the effort of walking on arthritic hind legs.

  There had also been traces of blood (surely Bishop Gerardi’s blood) found on the steps leading to a short hallway that connects the garage to the sacristy and the church, and a smudge, as if left by the light brush of a fingertip, on the wall of that hallway. That little smudge had remained there, unnoticed or ignored by prosecutors, for a long time. Recently it had been carelessly whitewashed during routine maintenance of the parish house. Ronalth Ochaeta speculated that those traces and the smudge were from the same person who had left the footprint while stepping away from the bishop. The footprint seemed a key piece of evidence in support of one of the few theories on which the prosecutors and ODHA agreed: that there was more than one perpetrator. There was the man who had left his sweatshirt on the floor and stepped out naked from the waist up through the little garage door, and who was wearing boots. Then there was another person, perhaps the owner of the shoe that had left the bloody footprint, who could have fled through the back of the parish house garage into the church and out through any number of exits. But for that to be true, Ronalth explained, someone had to have unlocked the door and gate connecting the parish house to the church.

  We were interrupted by the arrival of a group of girls from the Sacred Family School. The students came into the garage double-file, first-graders first, high schoolers in the rear, singing the hymn “No podemos avanzar sin la ayuda del Señor.” They carried candles and colorful homemade paper kites, a traditional symbol of communion with the dead in Guatemala. The kites had photographs cut out of newspapers and headlines about Bishop Gerardi and the REMHI report glued to them, and hand-printed messages. The girls laid the kites down in a pile near the candles and the vase of flowers along the wall, and then they went into the church to pray (up the steps and down the hallway where the bloody smudge had been, through the door and gate that were always locked at night). The students were part of the first generation of Guatemalan children being taught to say out loud that it is wrong for the state to murder. The first generation that might actually have a chance to learn about Guatemala’s past, and to distinguish old lies from new truths. By the time the last kite had been laid down, Ronalth’s eyes were overflowing with tears. He told me that he and his wife still hadn’t told their five-year-old son that Monseñor was dead.

  Several of the kites in the pile next to the flowers were decorated with photographs of the bishop’s funeral Mass. Tens of thousands of spectators had watched a procession of priests and nuns follow the body around the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral. People fell silent when they saw the coffin, and then broke into long, steady applause as it slowly circled the plaza. One kite was decorated with a newspaper photograph of Father Mario as a pallbearer, staring sternly ahead. I picked up another kite, on which an adult, probably a parent of one of the girls, had written, in crayon, “¿Y el sacerdote, qué? … And what about the priest? Good if the authorities tie those military men to the crime, but the participation of Father Mario Orantes should not be discounted.” That kite was decorated with another photograph of Father Mario, slumped in a chair at the police station, an image of utter misery.

  Bishop Mario Ríos Montt, San Sebastián’s new parish priest and Gerardi’s successor at ODHA, stepped into the garage. Bishop Ríos was a squat, somewhat penguin-like figure, but energetic, with a stentorian voice and a booming laugh. He had a curious history. He was the brother of the former dictator General Efrain Ríos Montt, who had presided over some of the worst atrocities of the 1980s. In interviews, Bishop Ríos refused to discuss his brother in personal terms, instead stressing generally his belief in “reconciliation as the consequence of justice.” He had kept out of the public eye for years, and apparently regarded the fight for the truth about the murder as a final mission in life. “If I accomplish that,” he told me later, “I believe I will have finished my work.” It was he who had told Fernano Penados that if it turned out that the Church was in need of purification, then they would purify it.

  Father Mario’s insistence that he hadn’t at first recognized the body as that of Bishop Gerardi had always seemed unlikely. Bishop Gerardi was a tall man in a country where most people are not. And the description of the body in the police report from that night is of a man who is recognizably the bishop: “white-skinned, curly gray hair, wide forehead, long face, bushy eyebrows.” Father Mario said that he had retrieved a flashlight from his room and shined a light on the bishop’s face until he realized who it was. He had needed the flashlight, he said, because the light in the garage was insufficient. Bishop Ríos and Ronalth discussed that, perplexed, and Ríos flicked on the lights. Two long fluorescent tubes came on in the garage ceiling, and even by daylight, with the doors partially open, the garage was illuminated brightly. He asked us if we thought the light was sufficient.

  “Father Mario sabe algo,” he knows something, said Ronalth.

  “Sabe algo,” Ríos gruffly agreed, and then he flicked off the light and headed back into the parish house, repeating, in a lamenting singsong, “Mario, Mario, Mario….”

  WHAT REALLY HAPPENED that night? If, as everyone at ODHA believed, Father Mario was not the murderer, why did he continue to give implausible, contradictory accounts of what went on? What could be so terrifying or shameful that the priest would endure imprisonment and offer only the most pathetic denials? Had he let a homosexual lover into his room, and was the lover one of the killers? Had the killers tricked Father Mario into collaborating in a less nefarious deed, telling him, for example, that they were just coming in to steal some papers related to REMHI? Two of the San Sebastián parish housekeepers told Rafael Guillamón that a week or so after the bishop’s murder Father Mario had remarked to them that Gerardi had been killed because “he was the jefe of all the guerrillas.” That was the sort of flippant comment any right-wing Guatemalan might have made in order to justify the bishop’s murder. The bishop himself had told Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez some years before that he had heard stories about Father Mario’s being an Army informer. He had joked that the priest could do less harm close by, where Gerardi could keep an eye on him. As for Father Mario’s sexual orientation, there were only rumors.

  On the morning of August 7, copies of a three-page document printed on paper to which UN Refugee Commission logos and German headings had been pasted—including a quotation in German from Euripides—arrived by fax at a number of locations in Guatemala City. The office of the Myrna Mack Foundation received one, as did the newspaper Prensa Libre. Reporters from the latter immediately brought it to ODHA’s attention. The document was apparently an internal memo, an intelligence analysis of Bishop Gerardi’s murder, addressed to a lieutenant colonel in the EMP. It named the Limas and implicated other officers in the execution, bungling, and cover-up of the murder of Bishop Gerardi. The document said that Captain Byron Lima Oliva’s mission had been to steal “information related to REMHI” from the parish house, “not the physical destruction of Mon. Gerardi.” Captain Lima was described as having lost control of the operation, whereupon he phoned his father, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, who arrived in a car previously assigned to him, when he was the commander of the military base in Chiquimula.

  The document was composed by a person who knew certain information—some details of the crime and the names of officers—that only someone close to the hermetic EMP, if not inside it, would know. (Some of those names would emerge at later stages of the investigation into the crime; others would not.) Perhaps most astonishingly, it mentioned that Captain Lima had “left his sneaker print at the crime scene.” How did the writer know that the bloody footprint—which wasn’t, in fact, from a shoe in Captain Lima’s size—was a sneaker print? Had the EMP photographer who was alleged to have been in the garage that night photographed it? Had he seen and reported it? The FBI report that would identify this print as having been left by the sole of a NIKE Air Top Challenge—an athletic shoe that was discontinued by Nike in 1991
—wouldn’t be submitted to Guatemalan prosecutors until January 1999.

  Perhaps a military officer who was dismayed by the recklessness of the crime and the risks it posed to the EMP’s reputation and position had written the document. It referred to the “degrading of the Presidential Guard” and lamented that “now with this act we are seen as violators of the Peace Accords.” Or maybe it was someone who didn’t like the Limas and their “faction”—if there was a faction—and their influence inside the EMP. (The document also mentioned the money Lima and others had reportedly stolen when they were in the anti-kidnapping commando unit.) Perhaps, some would charge later, it was the true culprits, intending to misdirect suspicion toward the Limas, who had written the document. Perhaps more than one officer had worked on the anonymous note. Perhaps it was written in revenge by military men, formerly close to President Arzú, whose power and influence had been usurped by General Espinosa and his cohort at the EMP. In any case, the authors knew some things about the crime, but were wrong about others.

  The day the document arrived at ODHA, Bishop Ríos personally marched over to the office of Eduardo Stein, the foreign minister, and attempted to show it to him, but Stein was busy. Later, when journalists asked Stein about this, he said that he personally wouldn’t give any importance to such a document.

  THE UNTOUCHABLES WERE TRYING to identify the two members of the EMP seen at the church on the night of the murder, and they were still looking for the taxi driver. They had driven Father Quiróz, the priest the taxi driver had visited, to taxi stands all over the city in a futile attempt to identify the putative witness. Finally the priest, fed up with the tedium of basic police work, refused to accompany them on any more outings. At the end of August, a taxi driver named Carlos García was found murdered, wrapped in plastic garbage bags, a bullet through his forehead and his body marked by signs of torture; the body had been tossed into one of the deep ravines outside Guatemala City. The taxi driver’s family said that García had recently been receiving death threats. It turned out that he had once been briefly imprisoned on a drug charge. When Father Quiróz was shown a photograph of the murdered man, he told Fernando Penados that he was “seventy percent sure” it was the same one who had come to see him in his church. Father Quiróz had himself begun to receive threatening telephone calls and was frightened nearly out of his wits.