The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

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  “CHANAX’S TESTIMONY WAS CONTROVERSIAL,” Leopoldo Zeissig said to me as the trial was drawing to a close. “The defense questioned his credibility. They said he was drugged, coached, bought. It’s the defense’s job to try to destroy him. And it’s up to the judges to decide if they did. The defense interrogated him for four hours. If someone’s going to lie, it usually shows up fairly quickly. He told what he knew, and he never lost his composure or contradicted himself.” Zeissig said that the prosecutors had always suspected that Chanax probably knew far more than he’d told. The Public Ministry could not offer a witness the same sort of protections or deals that such a witness might receive in a federal case in the United States (as when a lower-ranking mafioso testifies against his bosses).

  The defense was unrelenting in its efforts to propagate the idea that the entire case depended on Rubén Chanax alone, and that he’d lied. “Chanax miente!” Chanax lies! (The defense lawyers had shouted it so often, with such theatrical indignation, that it became a drinking toast for ODHA. Lift your beer and cheerfully bellow: “Chanax miente!”) The defense’s strategy was not only to play through the media to the public, to plant the idea that “the case is leaving many doubts,” but also to leave “handles” in the trial record that a sympathetic judge might want to grab on to if the case was appealed. (“The witness himself admitted he wasn’t seguro!”)

  But it wasn’t true that the prosecution’s case depended on Chanax. There was another witness whose testimony was also crucial—Jorge Aguilar Martínez, the waiter from the EMP. His pretrial declaration, made in the summer of 1999, was read into the record by a court secretary. He was now in exile, in a foreign political asylum program.

  ODHA found Jorge Aguilar Martínez because Rodrigo Salvadó and Arturo Aguilar, the two remaining Untouchables, kept looking through old tips and leads that Fernando Penados, for one reason or another, had never pursued. They found an anonymous hand-printed letter from someone who wrote, essentially, that he or she knew someone who knew someone in the EMP who knew something about the Bishop Gerardi case, giving some details. Four months later ODHA had received another letter, unsigned, though it was believed that the author was same person who had written the first one. But this time the letter had been delivered in an envelope that bore the logo of a labor union, and the person who’d delivered the letter had left his name—Luis Flores. (I have changed his name.) The name seemed familiar to Mario Domingo, who before coming to ODHA had worked as a labor lawyer. Rodrigo and Arturo made repeated visits to the union office, but Luis Flores was never in. What followed was like the patient work of ants.

  Rodrigo and Arturo finally found Flores, who confessed that he got the letter from his sister, “Doña Lupita,” who ran a “people’s pharmacy” that dispensed medicine free or at reduced prices in a poor neighborhood. Doña Lupita didn’t want to talk to them, nor did the woman who had given the letter to Doña Lupita. But the Untouchables were persuasive, and after six weeks of cajoling they drove out to the pharmacy one afternoon and met a curly-haried woman with a round face and small, frightened eyes who said that she was the wife of a member of the EMP who had been on duty the night of Bishop Gerardi’s murder. “I don’t want my husband to know I’m here,” she said. “This is very delicate.” She said that her husband had written the letters because his conscience was troubled over the crime, but she couldn’t tell them anything more. The Untouchables pressed their case. “Take your time deciding,” Arturo remembered saying, “but we’re very interested in what your husband can tell us. They killed a bishop. Our country can’t go on this way.”

  As they drove back into the city, Rodrigo and Arturo savored a thrilling sense of expectation. For the first time, they had a chance to talk to someone who was inside the EMP on the night of the murder.

  There were many more frustrating weeks of canceled meetings, meetings that went nowhere, and others that seemed to bring them tantalizingly close to the source of the information—the husband from the EMP. But by then Doña Lupita’s husband had forbidden her to host any more meetings with ODHA in their home. Mario Domingo came with them to a meeting in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel—the Untouchables had chosen it because they thought they were unlikely to be recognized there, among the foreign tourists and business travelers. He told the wife of the man from the EMP that if her husband really had information on the crime, he and his family would have to leave the country for their safety. This might be traumatic, but it could also provide an opportunity for a better life, especially for their children. The wife began to weep. She was frightened and confused. She said she didn’t know what she was doing there, that she shouldn’t have come. The attention she was attracting made the Untouchables cringe. “But I don’t want to leave the country!” she wailed.

  After the meeting at the Marriott, the wife seemed to have decided to break off communications. The Untouchables waited nervously but patiently. Finally, a call came. There was another meeting in the lobby of another hotel, where they were given a letter sent by the husband. He was President Álvaro Arzú’s personal waiter, he said. Sometimes he also had janitorial duty or was sent to work in a little office near an EMP entrance. He’d been on duty in that office the night that Bishop Gerardi was murdered. He named five people from the EMP who he said were responsible for the crime: Major Escobar Blas, Captain Lima, a man named Galeano, the EMP commander Rudy Pozuelos, and Obdulio Villanueva. He also named Howard Yang, the head of the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis, not because he’d seen Yang that night but because nothing happened in the EMP without Yang knowing about it. And he wrote that on the day before the murder President Arzú had been visibly nervous and drinking more than usual.

  The next meeting was in the Hotel Camino Real. The Untouchables waited in a little lounge area, facing the pool. Jorge Aguilar Martínez arrived with his wife. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt; his dark, bird-like eyes flitted about nervously. “He looked incredibly frightened,” Arturo recalled. Aguilar Martínez was thirty-three years old. His first year in the EMP he’d worked in intelligence, in the Archivo. But before going into the Army he’d been a butcher, and he also knew how to cook, so he was put to work, briefly, as a dishwasher before being promoted into the officers’ kitchen. Eventually he’d been a cook and waiter for five consecutive civilian presidents, from Vinicio Cerezo to Álvaro Arzú. He worked in the presidential residence, but also accompanied presidents on their trips around the country and even abroad. Later Aguilar Martínez would produce a photo album with pictures of himself in the company of all those presidents. He would also confess to resentment over the bad treatment he’d lately received at the EMP. Aguilar Martínez may have been motivated to write those first letters out of conscience, but he also had personal grievances.

  The Untouchables brought Aguilar Martínez to a priests’ residence in the city where he met with ODHA’s lawyers and videotaped an unofficial statement about what he’d seen on the night of April 26. They gave a copy of the tape to Jurgen Andrews, the human rights officer at the U.S. embassy. “With this witness the U.S. embassy was really good,” Arturo Aguilar said. The Army would have to think twice before harming him. Nevertheless, soon afterward the Untouchables got a call from Aguilar Martínez. A few days earlier he’d been ordered to do some cleaning in the offices of the EMP’s anti-kidnapping commando unit. In one room, taped to the wall, he said, were photographs of ODHA’s Suzuki jeep with Arturo sitting in it. One of Aguilar Martínez’s commanding officers came up to him while he was cleaning in a corridor. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t want to find out that you’ve been talking babosadas,” stupidities, and added, “You know what happens to people who talk.”

  The moment had arrived for ODHA to get Aguilar Martínez and his family into hiding. His wife packed in a frantic rush, in half an hour fitting everything she could into a few suitcases. Arturo and Rodrigo drove her and their five children to where Aguilar Martínez was waiting. ODHA had accepted an offer from a grou
p of nuns to hide the family in their residence.

  That was a terrifying night for Aguilar Martínez. He heard a car parked outside the nuns’ residence, engine idling, men’s voices—at any moment, he thought, they would break in and grab him. It wasn’t until four in the morning that the car finally drove off. ODHA moved the Aguilar Martínez family to the Archbishop’s Palace.

  A fews days later, on August 25, 1999, Aguilar Martínez gave his pretrial deposition in the ODHA offices, before Judge Flor de María García Villatoro. The two assistant prosecutors from the Public Ministry who were present were taken by surprise by the testimony. Lawyers for Father Mario and Margarita López, and the ODHA legal team, among others, were present also. The day after that, Aguilar Martínez, his wife, and their children were driven to the airport in a caravan of eight vehicles: two each from ODHA, MINUGUA, and the Public Ministry and one each from the U.S. embassy and the international Interpol police. Throughout the operation, the U.S. embassy’s human rights officer phoned repeatedly to check in, presumably knowing that calls to ODHA’s cell phones would be heard where it most counted.

  The family, along with Rodrigo, Arturo, Mario Domingo, and an armed Interpol agent, were booked on a flight to El Salvador, but they lost the Interpol agent’s protection when the airline refused to allow him on the plane with a weapon. At the Salvadoran airport, because of a problem with Aguilar Martínez’s daughter’s passport, the family was on the verge of being sent back to Guatemala, although finally that terrifying mix-up was resolved too. On the long ride into the Salvadoran capital—they would spend the night in yet another convent there before flying on to their final destination—Aguilar Martínez surprised the young men from ODHA when, describing his feelings at the airport during the contretemps over his daughter’s passport, he compared the experience to something he’d read by Jorge Luis Borges: Inside a single moment, you can live many lives.

  IN HIS DEPOSITION, JORGE AGUILAR MARTÍNEZ stated that he had belonged to the EMP since 1989 and had received training in basic security duties: “the norms which the EMP gives you as a specialist.” (“Specialist” is the term used to indicate members of the Army who have stayed on beyond the thirty months of soldiering required of all recruits and have been contracted as office workers, chauffeurs, cooks, mechanics, security guards, etc.) On Saturday, April 25, 1998, the day before the bishop was murdered, Aguilar Martínez had been at the service of the president. The next day, from six in the evening until dawn, he was subchief of Services, under the command of Captain Alvin Dubois, in the Services Office. He said that his job that night was to write down the names of the people who came and went and the license-plate numbers of their vehicles. The Services Office was near the Guard Command entrance to the EMP’s central complex. It was a small office, Aguilar Martínez said, with two facing desks.

  The soldier who turned the post over to him at six reported Sin dieciocho, “No eighteen,” military jargon signifying no problems. Sometime between eight and eight-thirty, a red Isuzu Trooper carrying Major Escobar Blas, chief of the EMP’s Protection Services Division, Specialist Galeano, and three other men from the unit “that used to be called G-2” stopped at the gate on its way out. Aguilar Martínez clarified: G-2 had long been a name for the military’s intelligence and counterintelligence services, but later the EMP began to use other names: the Protection Services and the Center for Analysis. If that seemed confusing, it was undoubtedly meant to be.

  Specialist Galeano was driving the Isuzu Trooper. Escobar Blas got out from the passenger side, approached the office’s small window, and asked Aguilar Martínez if Captain Dubois was there. He said that he was, and Major Escobar Blas said, “Affirm that we are leaving, and everything is sin dieciocho.”

  When Aguilar Martínez was about to record Escobar Blas’s and the Isuzu Trooper’s exit, including the license-plate number, Captain Dubois said, “Please omit that.” He told Aguilar Martínez that this night he was not to register the comings and goings of vehicles and specialists, as he normally would have been required to. He was only to man the telephones in the office, which included a private line for Major Escobar Blas. He was also told to make sure that absolutely no one entered the “presidential patio,” as the EMP’s sealed-off section of Callejón del Manchén, behind the presidential residence, was called.

  Shortly after nine, Aguilar Martínez began receiving telephone calls every three or four minutes, reporting, “Sin dieciocho.” Finally a call arrived from someone who said, “Dieciocho … a bomb in front of the José Gil drugstore,” which the judges interpreted, they wrote later, as “code words whose meanings were understood … by Major Escobar Blas.” Between ten-twenty and ten-thirty, a black Jeep Cherokee with tinted windows and no plates drove into the EMP grounds. “In this vehicle were Captain Lima,” Aguilar Martínez testified, “a young man I knew only as Hugo, and three more people who were dressed completely in black, wearing black caps with visors that covered their eyebrows, and dark glasses.” When he got out of the jeep, “Captain Lima went down the corridor that leads directly to Colonel Rudy Pozuelos’s office.” Captain Lima was wearing casual civilian clothes.

  Colonel Pozuelos was the head of the EMP. In the chain of command, only President Arzú was higher. Though it was a weekend, and he was off duty, Colonel Pozuelos had arrived at EMP headquarters at five that afternoon. Now he came back down the corridor with Captain Lima, got into the black Jeep Cherokee with the others, and they left. Five minutes later a phone call reported a “dieciocho,” meaning danger, a problem. Captain Dubois rang an alarm, and everybody in the EMP that night, according to Aguilar Martínez, spilled out into the presidential patio. “It looked like a market,” he recalled. At one-thirty in the morning, the men milling outside learned that Bishop Gerardi had been murdered at the church across the street from the Third Street exit of the Callejón del Manchén, just outside the EMP’s gates.

  That Monday morning, at a meeting in the patio of the presidential residence, Aguilar Martínez said, “They told us, the specialists, that we were strictly prohibited from talking about or revealing anything that had happened the day before. When questioned, Aguilar Martínez also said that in the EMP motor pool there was a white Toyota Corolla like the one the taxi driver had seen, and that it was the custom to switch the license plates of cars used in operations.

  Aguilar Martínez recalled that when he’d first met Hugo, in 1990, Hugo was a member of the G-2 and was giving karate classes to the Presidential Guard. He said that Hugo was discharged in 1995 because of problems with drugs and alcohol. Aguilar Martínez described the tattoo on Hugo’s arm, which the taxi driver had also perhaps glimpsed—parachute corps’ wings around the word “Kaibil,” the Army special-forces unit.

  Aguilar Martínez’s claim that he had seen Obdulio Villanueva get out of the black Jeep Cherokee was not included in the evidence presented at the trial. ODHA had asked him to omit that “problematic” detail in his pretrial deposition, and it wouldn’t have seemed credible to introduce it now. In any case, the prosecution was satisfied with Aguilar Martínez’s deposition as it was and saw no reason to summon him from exile to testify further. (Much later, of course, when ODHA lawyers learned that Aguilar Martínez, like Rubén Chanax, probably knew even more than he’d told about the operation, they would lament not having called him.) The defense did not want to summon Aguilar Martínez to testify either. Mario Domingo said later that this was beause the defense lawyers were afraid of what he would reveal.

  Prior to the trial, the prosecution had subpoenaed the EMP’s payroll records and the ledgers and books in which the comings and goings of people and vehicles were recorded. Judge García Villatoro and several prosecutors met at the EMP to examine them. Colonel Rudy Pozuelos had received the visitors. Pozuelos was immaculately turned out, in a crisply ironed uniform and with perfectly combed hair. Even his fine hands made an impression. For a Guatemalan military officer, he seemed to be an unusually refined person. Colonel Pozuelos described the w
orkings of the president’s security staff, including the position of personal waiter and chef—the man who cooked for the president also had to serve him—which, for obvious reasons, could go only to the most highly trusted individuals. It was a position, he claimed, never held by Jorge Aguilar Martínez, who never rose above assistant. Aguilar Martínez had indeed been on duty on the night of April 26, 1998, he said, but not inside the EMP. He was working as a concierge in the National Palace, a position to which he’d been demoted as punishment for stealing eighteen pounds of meat from the presidential kitchen.

  Judge García Villatoro asked if she and the lawyers could have some time to inspect the records alone, and when they did so they noticed that the punishments meted out to EMP specialists for even minor infractions—fifteen days in the brig merely for answering a telephone incorrectly—were severe. It was hard to believe that Jorge Aguilar Martínez had merely been demoted to concierge for stealing meat from the presidential kitchen. Indeed, the EMP records revealed that Aguilar Martínez, at the end of April 1998, and later, was still on the payroll as a cook, not as a concierge or janitor.

  On the night of the murder, the Guardia de Prevencion gates, at the entrances to the EMP and Presidential Guard headquarters, were manned by Presidential Guardsmen at both the Fourth Street and the Fifth Street entrances. But inside those gates, the entrance to the EMP’s central complex, known as the Guard Command—where all the comings and goings from the EMP were kept track of and recorded—was under the authority of Artillery Major Andrés Villagrán, the highest-ranking EMP officer officially on duty that night. Major Villagrán was the chief of the EMP’s Services Division, which was an entity distinct from the Services Office where Aguilar Martínez claimed to have been. The Services Office was about thirty-five feet farther in, though traffic at the Guard Command checkpoint could be monitored from there. (The hermetic EMP had groups with nearly overlapping names: Security Services, Protection Services, Administrative Services, etc. These services were in turn divided into A and B sections. There were three Services Offices—one in the EMP, a second assigned to the Nationl Palace, and a third assigned to the Presidential Guard. It was like an elaborate shell game. It would take the prosecutors and ODHA years to straighten all this out.)