The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  A new taxi driver, Hans Pérez, soon surfaced, first inside the prison where Father Mario was being held and then back out on the streets. Pérez had been taped in prison, where he made both credible and ludicrous assertions about the involvement of the military and gangs in Gerardi’s murder. He mentioned a white Mercedes Benz and implicated the gang of satanists who used to hang around San Sebastián park and also—more significantly, it turned out—a young delinquent from the so-called Valle del Sol gang. The Untouchables tried to follow up on some of those leads. Looking for a military agent whom Pérez linked to the satanists, Fernando Penados and I went to the second-rate bordello where he was said to hang out and wasted a few hours drinking beers, waiting to see if he would show up. Hans Pérez repeated his story in the press, to the police and the Public Ministry, and to anyone else who would listen, which was highly suspicious. “In a country like this,” Fernando said, “it’s not credible for someone to be going around implicating the military like that.”

  Had someone planted Hans Pérez? The same people who had murdered Carlos García? The Untouchables, who had dismissed him at first, tried to find him again, hoping to discover what the real story was. But Hans Pérez had dropped from sight.

  NERY RODENAS AND MARIO DOMINGO, meanwhile, had regained their composure after that dispiriting day in the San Sebastián parish house with the autopsy photographs and the casts of Baloo’s teeth. They had studied the photographs further and had some questions. If Baloo’s upper teeth had made those bites, where were the bites made by the bottom teeth? Dr. Reverte Coma had identified a tear-like bruise in the bishop’s earlobe as the spot where the lower teeth had sunk in. But could Baloo unhinge his jaws like a python to envelope nearly the bishop’s entire head? And, most strikingly, the top of the arc of the alleged bites was pointed in the direction of the ear.

  Mario Domingo was scathing. “So they’re saying that this poor chucho”—it means dog in Guatemala—“has a snout made of rubber if he can twist it around into a shape like that.” The other lawyers laughed at his chiste. Domingo physically resembled a cross between Popeye and a Chinese monk, with a perpetually cranky expression and a lively glint in his eye, an effect amplified by his eyeglasses. He often spoke so quickly, swallowing consonants, that people unaccustomed to listening to him had no idea what he was saying. When he laughed, he laughed quietly but with all his body, his face intensely flushing the color of strawberry juice.

  The ODHA lawyers were in a difficult position. As co-plaintiffs in the case, they were supposed to be on the side of the prosecution. And they weren’t at all convinced of Father Mario’s innocence. But on August 24 they asked that Bishop Gerardi’s body be exhumed to see if the dog bites were there or not. The Public Ministry blinked first and said that it needed more time to prepare. On September 7 the judge in the case ruled that Dr. Reverte Coma’s theory about Bishop Gerardi’s having been bitten by a dog shortly before, during, or even after his murder was so compelling that a new autopsy was required.

  WHEN PEOPLE IN GUATEMALA said that the murder of Bishop Gerardi was “the perfect crime,” they didn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t think they knew who had done it. Most, at least in 1998, thought the Army had done it. But it was much harder to understand why.

  Edgar Gutiérrez told me that it had never even entered his mind that Bishop Gerardi might be killed. “Why would a seventy-five-year-old bishop, on the verge of retiring, become the target of assassins? It made no sense.” Only later did he realize what “a complex chess move” the murder had been. Gutiérrez was one of the people who always referred to the murder as “a masterpiece,” “a work of diabolical genius.”

  If one looked at the situation only in the old way—the way that preceded the Peace Accords—then the Guatemalan Army had every reason to want to kill Bishop Gerardi: his murder would be interpreted as a warning, as a clear statement that the Army would not tolerate threats to its position. But for the crime to be “perfect,” the Army would have to get away with it officially, and it would have to accomplish much more than just terrorize the Army’s traditional opponents in human rights circles and the Church. One step toward that goal would be to disguise it as the consequence of a domestic conflict or a robbery or such. This strategy had often worked in the past: the assassination, in 1994, of the president of the Constitutional Court, Epamonidas González (after he had ruled to extradite an Army lieutenant colonel to the United States to face drug trafficking charges), which was made to look like a carjacking gone awry; the assassination of the newspaper publisher and politician Jorge Carpio Nicolle on a lonely mountain road, seemingly the act of a predatory highway robber; the murder of my former colleague the young, elegant Malaysian-British journalist Anson Ng (who had been reporting for the Economist on the involvement of some Guatemalan generals in the BCCI banking fraud scandal), apparently a robbery or sexual crime in a hotel room; and, of course, the murder of Myrna Mack Chang in 1990. The EMP had even employed hot dog vendors to stake out Mack’s office and study her comings and goings. Whenever people said that Bishop Gerardi’s murder couldn’t have been a political assassination because it had all the markings of a domestic or common crime, they were displaying their unfamiliarity with how political murders are carried out in Guatemala. But precisely because such methods were familiar, in order to really create a masterpiece and also get away with the crime, the plotters of Bishop Gerardi’s murder would have to be much more inventive.

  “I don’t like this case, it’s shuco,” gross, dirty, Otto Ardón confided to a courthouse reporter in Guatemala City, and the homophobic content of the remark was obvious to her. It was another little dart, one more strategic salvo. Get it into the press, into the rumor mill, into the public consciousness, and it won’t matter when later it turns out not to be true. What people would have been talking about in the meantime was not the content or repercussions of Guatemala: Never Again. They would have been debating, joking, and amusing themselves about the man without a shirt and the carnivalesque “dog-and-priest” show. Would people even notice that the Public Ministry was refusing to conduct any serious investigation of the Army’s role in Bishop Gerardi’s murder?

  What if a crime could be created in which as soon as one false scenario was rebutted, another one was ready to take its place? In the case of Bishop Gerardi, there would always be one more thing like this that could be made to seem as if it must have had something to do with that.

  One effect of Bishop Gerardi’s murder, whether intended by the murderers or not, was to encourage President Arzú not to pursue many of the Peace Accord reforms that were opposed by the Army and hard-line conservatives. “The president’s discourse keeps getting harder and closer to the Army,” Edgar Gutiérrez noted. The insistence by human rights activists—and ODHA was not the only such group in the country—on accountability was seen by Arzú as a disruption of the normalization process. The murder of Bishop Gerardi and its aftermath coincided with a ferocious campaign by the government against human rights organizations in general and the Catholic Church in particular. In September, in a speech to graduating military cadets, President Arzú called human rights activists “nearly traitors to the fatherland.” It is not only in Guatemala that such language invites and summons violence against its target.

  4

  BY MID-SEPTEMBER, all across the country, automobiles displayed bumper stickers reading “Free Baloo!” It was reported that prosecutors had sequestered the dog somewhere on the steamy southern coast but that he so missed Father Mario that he had stopped eating, and that this led to such a severe decline in his health that he was brought back to the city for a brief reunion with his master. Now Baloo was being held at some secret location. It was also said that the prosecutor and his men had worn the dog out to the point of death trying to train, or retrain, him to respond to the German attack commands written out on the sheet of paper found in Father Mario’s room. This didn’t seem completely far-fetched to Father Mario’s cheerful, pie-faced youn
g lawyer, José Toledo. “They wanted to retrain him to be a killer, but they couldn’t, because the dog isn’t any good anymore!” Toledo laughed. Too old and sick to be a killer dog now!

  I laughed too, and said I’d thought that was just a rumor. “Rumor!” echoed the lawyer, and then he added, “Of course, if I were the prosecutor, I’d do it too.” Another blast of nervous laughter. “To prove my theory. Sometimes in this life, lawyers use strategies that are not totally moral, true? And prosecutors are no exception,” he said. “They’re convinced that Father Mario has information he doesn’t want to give. They want to put pressure on the Father. Maybe he’ll get desperate, bored, and give them something. But he doesn’t know anything.”

  A few nights before the exhumation of Bishop Gerardi’s body, I took a taxi to the San Francisco de Asís veterinary clinic, in the industrial outskirts of Guatemala City, in the hope of being able to see Baloo. José Toledo had confided to me that the dog was being kept there. There was only one plainclothes security man posted in the small parking lot, and no sign of activity inside the building. I knocked at the door, a small window slid open, and the sympathetic face of the night-shift veterinarian appeared. He said I couldn’t see Baloo, that I wasn’t even supposed to know Baloo was there, but he agreed to let me come in and talk about the dog. The veterinarian told me that Baloo had been extremely ill when he arrived at the clinic. He was dehydrated and showed signs of neglect. Instead of bathing and grooming the dog as Father Mario used to do, his handlers from the Public Ministry had occasionally just hosed him down. His hindquarters were almost paralyzed from spondylitis, a degenerative, arthritis-like condition of the spinal column, for which he was being treated with regular doses of anti-inflammatory medicines. Baloo was doing much better now.

  We talked about what Baloo was fed in the clinic (Purina Proplan), how many times a day he was walked, the size of his cage, and so on. If I wasn’t going to be allowed to see the celebrity patient, I wanted to be able to accurately report the conditions of his confinement. In my notebook, the veterinarian helped me sketch the patio where Baloo was being kept. I drew a large cage in the corner. He touched the page with his finger and said, “No, there are four cages,” and traced their layout. So Baloo shared the patio with other dogs. “Then people who come to visit their own dogs get to see Baloo?” I asked. And he said, “Yes, but they don’t know they’re seeing Baloo.” I said, “What if I pretend I’m just going back there to visit my sick Chihuahua, and you don’t have to say anything? I’ll just look around and see if I can spot Baloo.” The veterinarian thought it over for a moment, and then, to my surprise, he said, “Bien.”

  We walked down a corridor, past the one orderly on duty, while in a rather theatrical voice the veterinarian began giving me a tour of the clinic, including a stop into the postoperative recovery room (dogs with plastic cones around heads, baleful stares), and then into a darkened patio lined with large cages. Three of the cages had dogs in them, and two of the dogs were German shepherds. I walked up to one of them, cooing, “Hola,” and “Qué buen perro,” and the dog—long, lean, and handsome—jumped up onto the wire mesh, wagging his tail. When I went over to the other cage, where a thick-necked German shepherd sat regally, the dog bared his fangs and growled so menacingly that I stepped back. The veterinarian nodded toward the dog and said, “Perro bravo.” Mean dog.

  We had agreed that he wouldn’t identify Baloo. “Which one of those two dogs is older?” I asked. The veterinarian just laughed.

  Mean Baloo or nice Baloo? Had Baloo indeed bitten the bishop’s head and thumb, as claimed by Dr. Reverte Coma and the prosecutors? During those days leading up to Bishop Gerardi’s exhumation, few people in Guatemala were not taking that question seriously. Not only the issue of Father Mario’s freedom but also the course and character of the entire Guatemalan peace process seemed to hinge on the answer.

  AT SIX IN THE MORNING on Thursday, September 18, people began assembling in the Spanish colonial courtyard of the building where ODHA has its office. The exhumation of the bishop’s corpse and the autopsy were scheduled to last two days. Experts from the United States who had volunteered, pro bono, to attend on ODHA’s behalf had flown in the day and night before, but now it wasn’t at all clear that they would be allowed to participate. They had been unexpectedly confronted with a hopelessly convoluted credentialing process. The previous morning, Judge Isaías Figueroa, a wily veteran of the court system, had dropped a bomb, claiming that all experts had to present themselves to him by three in the afternoon, and had to have already been credentialed as members of the Guatemalan professional associations their expertise corresponded to; but this was impossible to do in one day. Meanwhile, Dr. Reverte Coma had quietly arrived in the country ten days before.

  “Those shits had this cake already baked,” Ronalth Ochaeta fumed. The ODHA lawyers frantically worked the telephones, arguing with various court and government officials that in fact Guatemalan law required such credentialing only for participation as a foreign expert in an actual criminal trial, not for a pretrial evidentiary proceeding. (ODHA’s telephones were thoroughly tapped, subject to sudden storms of static and continual disconnections. People there were always slamming down phones and muttering, “Puta, they kidnapped the call.”)

  At this point, only the San Francisco attorney and private investigator Jack Palladino—fresh from a controversy raised by the independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr and congressional Republicans over his role in “opposition research” for President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign—who had arrived in the judge’s quarters before the three PM deadline on Wednesday, could participate, and even Palladino could participate only as a “forensic photographer.” Standing by in the courtyard were Dr. Robert Bux and Dr. Norman Sperber. Bux was the deputy chief medical examiner of Bexar County, Texas, which includes the city of San Antonio; he was a veteran of over 1,200 autopsies of homicide victims and of two separate clandestine exhumations from mass graves in Bosnia, and the author of a not irrelevant article published in the December 1992 issue of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, “Death Due to Attack from Chow Dog.” Norman Sperber was the chief forensic dentist for California’s San Diego and Imperial counties, with 2,000 forensic examinations behind him and criminal investigations of more than 500 bite cases, including fourteen involving dogs. Sperber had developed the Dental Division of the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, and had been an expert witness in high-profile homicide cases in the United States, including the trials of serial murderers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Jack Palladino’s clients included not only President Clinton but the hip-hop entrepreneur Suge Knight, the cofounder of Death Row records, who in 1998 was in prison for parole violations. Among the murders Palladino had investigated were the People’s Temple case, the murder-suicide of more than 900 members of a religious cult in Jonestown, Guyana; and the notorious murder of the Hollywood entertainment company executive José Menendez and his wife by their two sons.

  Thursday morning the American specialists huddled with their Guatemalan counterparts, Dr. Guerra of the Judicial Morgue, who had performed the original autopsy, and Helen Mack’s friend Doctor Mario Iraheta, who would be ODHA’s forensics specialist at this second autopsy. They talked quietly, speculating on the likely condition of Bishop Gerardi’s corpse, and on how dry conditions might be in the crypt and inside the coffin.

  I spoke to Dr. Reverte Coma in an office off the courtyard. He was seventy-nine years old, bald, and had a white mustache, bushy white eyebrows, brilliant blue eyes, and pale skin that seemed nearly translucent. Leaning back in his chair with arms folded across his chest—a characteristic posture, it turned out—he began telling me of his long history in Central America, particularly in Panama. When the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza (the elder) was mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet in 1956, he was flown to the Canal Zone on orders of the White House, and there, Reverte Coma told me, he had participated in the failed surgery t
o save Somoza’s life. In 1992, he was the Spanish delegate to an exhumation sponsored by the UN in El Mozote, El Salvador, where more than 1,200 peasants had been massacred by the Salvadoran Army.

  Suddenly our conversation was cut off by a hulking man in a beige suit, demanding to know if I was a journalist. He was a bodyguard from Safari, a private security company. A little later, in the courtyard, I stood next to a pair of Safari’s young security agents, outfitted like commandos in full battle gear, as they ostentatiously scrutinized the red-tiled rooftops for signs of a sniper willing to resort to a last-second assassination in order to prevent Dr. Reverte Coma from proving his theory about the dog bites.

  Bishops in their dark suits and red caps; prosecutors, including Otto Ardón; people from ODHA and the Church; lawyers and Guatemalan forensics experts representing all parties in the case; the mortician who had originally embalmed Bishop Gerardi; and of course the ubiquitous observers from MINUGUA, including Rafael Guillamón, were gathered around Judge Figueroa and Ronalth Ochaeta—probably the two shortest men present—as they faced off like a pair of fighting roosters in the middle of the courtyard to resolve the issue of the American experts’ participation. Judge Figueroa had privately told Ronalth that if he would agree to expel MINUGUA’s observers from the proceedings, on the grounds that they would leak information to the press, he would allow ODHA’s foreign experts to participate. But Ronalth had rejected any such deal, thinking that MINUGUA’s presence would ensure that whatever happened at the exhumation might not be publicly misrepresented later. (I was the only journalist present.)