The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  “We all want the truth,” Ronalth said. “This should be between scientists, not lawyers.” He pointed out that not letting ODHA’s experts take part would damage the legitimacy of the proceedings. The atmosphere couldn’t have been more grimly tense as Judge Figueroa nervously began polling those assembled around him. Only Ardón voted to ban the Americans. Figueroa was perspiring, and his resolve was obviously wilting. Suddenly he exploded at Ronalth Ochaeta, “What are you smiling at!”

  “Not at you, Judge,” Ronalth retorted.

  They argued back and forth for a moment. Then the judge reversed himself, but only partially. He said the American experts could be present at the exhumation and autopsy, but only as observers. They could not participate alongside the Spanish expert and the others at the autopsy table.

  Led by Bishop Ríos Montt, the assembly filed through a door into the cathedral, passed behind the nave into a corridor of the sacristy, went down a stairway into another courtyard ringed by priests’ and seminarians’ residences, and then through a door into the subterranean crypts. Some of those in attendance put on surgical masks. Jack Palladino later recalled that a chair was brought for Dr. Reverte Coma, as if to assign him a special status. Everyone else stood for the fifteen minutes it took two masons with hammers and chisels to work through the whitewashed plaster and crumbling brick of the crypt wall. Then workers from a funeral parlor—they were wearing white gloves—pulled out the long red-lacquered coffin, with handles that Palladino later compared to those of a Porsche briefcase. The coffin was placed on a stand and wiped off with a cloth, and the part of the lid at the end, the part over Bishop Gerardi’s head, was pulled open. Bishop Ríos said an Our Father. He leaned over the coffin to peer through the glass window, and the others pressed in around him.

  The coffin’s surface and the condition of the crypt had seemed promisingly dry. But now they saw that the bishop had grown a beard of dark green mold; his skin had turned black, but his face was covered with white mold—“like the white makeup in a Kabuki play,” Jack Palladino said—and patches of fungus, due to the high level of moisture inside the coffin during those first five months of death. The corpse was in a state of serious deterioration, and beetles, maggots, and other insects crawled all over it.

  THE BODY OF THE BISHOP was taken from the cathedral to the San Juan de Dios Hospital, where special-forces police wearing riot-shield helmets at first barred ODHA’s representatives and the American experts from entering. But Mynor Melgar, who had retained his affiliation with the Public Ministry, led the team around to a front entrance and through hospital corridors and finally into the room where X rays were being taken of the bishop’s skull and hands. Jack Palladino described the scene to me later. “Reverte was making pronouncements,” he said. “He would say, there’s a fracture, and then he pointed to the wrong finger. Iraheta got his notes out from the original autopsy and started explaining to him where the injuries were, and at that point I realized, This guy is just not competent.”

  Later that day, the corpse was transferred to the Judicial Morgue. The leathery, desiccated skin on the bishop’s face and skull had already been badly eroded. Both Dr. Bux and Dr. Sperber thought it unlikely that much reliable forensic information could be obtained at this point. No effort had been made to properly clean the head, and the Americans were shocked to see Dr. Reverte Coma use a scalpel to scrape away fungus and debris from the bishop’s face. “This is a very poor practice as use of such a harsh mechanical procedure is likely to disturb or destroy any remaining forensic evidence on the skin,” Palladino wrote in an affidavit he filed on the exhumation. Prohibited from participating in the autopsy, Bux and Sperber could only protest Reverte Coma’s actions through their interpreter, to Dr. Iraheta.

  Even as observers, by studying the X rays and photographs, the American experts were able to confirm much that the original autopsy had revealed: the cause of death was blunt trauma wounds to the head, most consistent with the chunk of concrete paving stone or some other hard object. But they also found that a fracture across the bridge of the nose had been caused by a hard, cylindrical object, like a pipe—supporting the theory that there were at least two assailants. Another blow had shattered the bishop’s jaw, unhinged it, and driven it back into his trachea. That might easily have caused him to drown in his own blood if the other blows hadn’t already killed him. Robert Bux said that there had been a complete crushing of the bishop’s facial bones. “He was struck in the face first, to incapacitate him and get him down, and then dragged, and struck again.”

  The forensics specialist who had presided at the first autopsy, Mario Guerra, had noticed, and Dr. Sperber and Jack Palladino confirmed, that the photograph of the bishop’s head used by Dr. Reverte Coma to match the cast of Baloo’s teeth had been blown up by 25 percent. In any case, according to Dr. Sperber, the marks didn’t have the rhomboid shape of dog bites; nor were there any traces of frenzied tearing. The lesions weren’t even alike and could easily have been caused by the irregular edges of the concrete chunk. Nor, as Mario Domingo had first observed, was there any credible evidence of an impression made by the lower jaw, which would have to be present for a bite mark to have been made with the top teeth too. The other contested wounds at the back of the head “were not dog bites,” according to the American experts, “but the very common stellate wounds typical of blunt trauma.” The wounds on the bishop’s hands and thumbs were “found to be consistent with defensive wounds but not to be dog bites.”

  At the autopsy table, Dr. Reverte Coma insisted that lesions caused by bites were still visible in the badly decomposed skin. Sperber asked him to indicate, with steel pointers, the area where this was true. Reverte Coma’s Guatemalan assistant kept pointing to a place where no mark at all was visible. “He was literally making this up!” Palladino said to me.

  Decisive evidence of a bite would have been marks of penetration in the skull. The dog’s two upper canines, each an inch long, were much longer than his very short incisor teeth. For four teeth to have left any mark at all on the skin, the two canines would have had to penetrate the layer of fatty flesh into the skull. A mere peeling back of the skin was enough to prove—at least to the satisfaction of Bux and Sperber—that the bone area in question was completely smooth.

  I WAS IN ODHA’S OFFICE later that afternoon when Palladino, in a billowing black suit, clutching his big, black Pentax 6x7 camera, burst in and cried, “Reverte Coma wants to cut off the head and boil it.” The Spaniard had kept a large industrial pot at a constant boil on a hot plate during the autopsy. “He wants to get down to what he knows, which is bones,” Palladino explained. Bishop Ríos Montt decided that Gerardi’s body had already been desecrated enough and adamantly forbade it.

  The next day Palladino was astonished when a member of Reverte Coma’s team approached him, carrying the bishop’s thumb. Palladino raised his camera, thinking the man wanted a photograph, but instead he lifted the lid from the roiling pot and dropped the thumb inside. Nobody seemed to notice that the thumb was missing until the autopsy was over and the corpse had been returned to the coffin. It was Bishop Ríos Montt who asked, loudly, “Where is Monseñor’s thumb!” Palladino had seen one of Reverte’s assistants take the now skeletal thumb out of the pot and place it in a little transparent vial. He had assumed it was for a forensic procedure.

  The prosecution team was gathered in a corner of the room, pretending not to know anything, but finally, with a guilty expression, Gustavo Soria produced a jar filled with alcohol in which scraps of Bishop Gerardi’s robes had been preserved. Bishop Ríos Montt was in a fury about the thumb by now, and someone from the prosecution team finally, rather sheepishly, handed over the vial containing the pilfered thumb, and it was laid in the coffin. Apparently—there seemed no other explanation—Dr. Reverte Coma had wanted the sacred scraps of cloth and the historic thumb to take back to Madrid to display in the Professor Reverte Coma Museum of Anthropological Forensics, Paleopathology, and Criminology. As d
escribed in a résumé of the Spaniard’s many accomplishments handed out to the press by the Public Ministry, the museum collection included: “historic craniums,” “murder weapons,” “the skulls of murder victims,” and “historic mummies.”

  The dog-bite theory would seem to have been demolished, but at a jammed press conference held at the end of the second and final day of the exhumation, Dr. Reverte Coma embraced Otto Ardón and gushed, “What a look of triumph you have! You can see it!”

  Reverte Coma’s performance at the press conference constituted, for me, one of the most bizarre episodes in the case. In a Castillian accent ringing with aristocratic Hidalgo haughtiness, he referred to the American experts as “very barbaric” and defended his hypothesis: “That is a dog bite here or in Peking!” He held out one hand and slapped it with the crooked fingers of the other to illustrate how a dog can bite with just its top teeth. “It’s their word against mine,” he said, defiantly crossing his arms over his chest, raising his chin, and sitting back in his chair. Then he got up to act out the crime. First he was Father Mario, saying “Fass” to the dog; next he was Baloo, pouncing; then he was a cowering Bishop Gerardi, covering his head with his arms to ward off the dog; then he was Father Mario again, stomping on the bishop’s face with his shoe. “The individual or individuals who kicked the bishop in the face hated him profoundly,” Reverte Coma announced. “They’ve wanted to give this the appearance of a political crime. Lie! This is a domestic crime and that is extremely clear!”

  A few days later, there was a story in a Guatemalan newspaper about how Reverte Coma had been expelled from the exhumation of the El Mozote massacre site for impeding the investigation with ludicrous interpretations. All those very small skeletons were not massacred children, he had suggested, but adolescent guerrillas—young recruits from a race of small, malnourished men—killed in battle. Belisario Betancourt, the former president of Colombia, who had presided over the UN investigation of El Mozote, happened to pass through Guatemala on unrelated business a few days later and confirmed the story. Reverte Coma was the author of some thirty books, among them From Macumba to Voodoo, The Curse of the Pharaohs, and Medical Anthropology and Don Quixote. There was nothing in itself revealing, of course, in Reverte Coma’s being a Don Quixote enthusiast. But his behavior—honor-obsessed, egotistical, cruel, seemingly deluded, and perhaps a touch mad—did make him seem like a character sprung from the darkest side of the Spanish fantastic imagination, from Cervantes to Goya.

  “Maybe Baloo was a ghost dog,” Jack Palladino cracked, “or else he was wearing sneakers.” The crime scene video of the parish-house garage taken the night of the murder showed a bloody footprint, he observed, but no paw prints.

  The American and Guatemalan experts who examined Baloo concluded that he was “extremely tame” and even “meek.” Norman Sperber wrote that in all the prior dog-bite cases he’d been called on to investigate, “the dog was sedated in order to accomplish the necessary examinations and impressions. The dog ‘Baloo’ is the only case in which an examination was accomplished without the need for sedation … due to the unusual docile and non-combative nature of the dog.” I watched a video of Baloo limping about at the evidentiary proceedings in the patio of the San Francisco de Asís clinic. The overall impression was of a decrepit, ailing, completely dispirited old dog.

  Yet this was the same thick-necked dog that had growled at me, the perro bravo. Could even the dog be dissembling? Bishop Gerardi’s sister, Carmen, who had lived for a time at the parish house while recovering from an illness, told me that Baloo was indeed bad-tempered and that whenever Father Mario was about to walk him, he would shout a warning, and everybody would dash into his or her room and close the door while the snarling dog plowed past—everyone except Bishop Gerardi, that is, because Baloo loved him, loved to sleep at his feet while Monseñor worked at his desk or read.

  IN THE COURTYARD on the morning of the exhumation, an elderly social worker from the Guatemalan Church had reminded me of the many exhumations that were taking place at massacre sites all over the country. “Even in death, Bishop Gerardi is a good pastor,” he said, “sharing the fate of his people, submitting to the mortification of allowing his bones to be exhumed in the cause of justice.” This had seemed more appropriate to the solemnity of the occasion than other remarks I’d heard that had strained for eloquence. But if Guatemala teaches you anything, it is never to poeticize or idealize reality. The prosecution, and its allies in the press, especially the newspaper Siglo Veintiuno, whose board of directors was made up of a small clique of the country’s wealthiest and most conservative families, tenaciously clung to Dr. Reverte Coma’s theories, which they claimed had been vindicated. “Charlatans, those gringos are charrrrr- latans!” the little lawyer Mario Menchú shouted when I visited him in his office, where, on the floor by his desk, he kept a plaster copy of the jagged triangular chunk of pavement that his client, the hapless bolito Carlos Vielman, had once been accused of wielding.

  Judge Figueroa decided that neither side had proved its case. How was he supposed to know who was right? Father Mario remained in prison, and Baloo went on living at the San Francisco de Asís clinic. The judge had ninety days from the date of Father Mario’s arrest in July to decide whether to charge the priest with murder and send the case to trial. The exhumation and dismemberment of the bishop’s cadaver seemed to have resolved nothing.

  During the following weeks, the press continued to report on Baloo’s confinement. When the dog’s health took a turn for the worse, it was reported that veterinarians thought it best that Baloo be put down. But the decision belonged to Father Mario, and he insisted on sparing the dog he affectionately referred to as mi gordito, “my little fatty.” A cart with wheels and a leather harness was built to help Baloo get around on his withered hindquarters.

  When the rumors of homosexuality and a crime of passion in the San Sebastián parish house had first appeared in June, an unprecedented “black snowfall” of ashes had blown over Guatemala City from the simmering Pacaya volcano, burying the town under an inches-deep blanket of soft, sooty powder that required a titanic cleanup effort. On the day after the exhumation, the phenomenon repeated itself. Though the ashes fell more lightly this time, looking like desiccated insect wings slowly drifting down from the sky, they were sufficient to close the airport. Helen Mack was going to drive Jack Palladino to El Salvador so that he could catch a flight from there, but before they set out we had lunch. Helen Mack was usually self-effacing and, in the Guatemalan manner, quaintly formal, though when discussing her foes and their provocations she often unleashed astonishing torrents of profanities, as she did at lunch that day.

  A few days earlier, a small plane registered in Colombia had crash-landed in flames on an airstrip on the Mack family’s sugar farm on the south coast, and the story, with incriminating insinuations, was trumpeted on the front page of Siglo Veintiuno. No cocaine was found, but that could have been because the fire had consumed it, or the police had made off with it. Like a practiced animal tamer, Helen Mack had moved quickly to defuse the situation: she contacted the U.S. embassy, with its busy DEA operation, so that officials could authoritatively clear the Mack family of any suspicion of having narco airstrips on their farm. Ronalth Ochaeta’s wife, Sonia, had recently sold her car through a used-automobile dealer, and right after it was sold, packages of cocaine were supposedly found in the car’s trunk. This, too, was broadcast in the press with suggestions that the Ochaetas were cocaine dealers and had carelessly left some of their product behind in the car before selling it. Later, Ronalth would endure something similar when ludicrously inflated assessments of the worth of a country house he was building would be used to suggest that he had embezzled funds from ODHA. However false the charges, the damage to public reputations was real and, for Ronalth and his family and others, became a part of the fabric of daily life.

  Guatemalans were skeptical about anyone who claimed to—or even seemed to—act from selfless or a
ltruistic motives, certain as they were that such people must be, at best, cynical opportunists. After all, one civilian president after another had turned out to be outrageously corrupt or cowed by the Army and its clandestine crime mafias. The police were so widely regarded to be criminal, cowardly, and inept that across the country mobs were taking the law into their own hands, lynching suspected thieves and delinquents. An especially perverse expression of cynicism was that many Guatemalans preferred to believe the best of those widely regarded elsewhere as monsters. Thus the former dictator General Ríos Montt, who was perceived by most foreigners as genocidal, was one of the most popular and supposedly “populist” democratic politicians in Guatemala, a symbol of “law and order.” On the other hand, when my mother visited some of her now elderly school friends in Guatemala, they assured her that Bishop Gerardi had been the jefe of all the homosexuals and maras—criminal street gangs. They were old women and widows, pious, relatively affluent matrons, gathering over coffee and cake for a sentimental reunion. Where did they get such notions?

  “Small countries have big politics,” Joseph Brodsky wrote. Some small countries have even bigger intelligence services. Intelligence services, of course, don’t just gather information; they also, when it serves their or their government’s ends, spread disinformation. Cocaine-stuffed planes, drugs secreted in the trunk of a young wife’s car, tapped telephones and threatening calls and opened mail, complicit journalists and judges, ubiquitous informers and infiltrators—the Army had many chess pieces to play with, and a very large board.