Whenever the defense lawyers said something especially outrageous, nuns sitting in a row in the courtroom were unable to contain themselves, gasping in horror, and whispering in chorus, “Shameless!” “Qué bárbaro!” “How could he say such a thing?”
The august, silver-haired Julio Cintrón, with his deep velvet voice and ice-blue stare, made a seething and grandiloquent closing argument. His point was that you couldn’t convict someone of being an accomplice in an extrajudicial crime if you didn’t know who had committed the crime. Who, after all, was this “Hugo” mentioned by Rubén Chanax and Jorge Aguilar Martínez and presumably spotted by the taxi driver?
During a recess, while I stood in front of the spectator section, near the cordoned-off area where the trial was conducted, I heard a stream of expletives spoken in a deep voice behind me: hueco, faggot, and so on. I looked back and saw Captain Lima turning away from me, and I asked, heatedly, if he’d been speaking to me. He fixed me with a cold glare that quickly became contemptuous and said, with forceful but measured diction—as if I’d insulted him but he was determined to display his lofty superiority—that he had nothing to say to a person such as me, and he walked away. A young woman sitting in the front row, horrified, said that I had indeed been the target of his invective, and the women sitting alongside her nodded. They looked at me with frightened expressions. I thought, with a sinking feeling, Oh, no, what have I done now? After lunch, Leopoldo Zeissig told me that Lima’s defense lawyers had tried to have me expelled from the courtroom for provoking their client. (I assume that it was my closeness to ODHA and my piece in The New Yorker, which had been excerpted in elPeriódico, that drew Lima’s scorn.)
No matter how inept its arguments might seem, the defense was cheered on by the many right-wing zealots who came to the trial to show their support. One of them was an elderly but sprightly woman—her surname was something like Von Lutten—who, as far as I could tell, never missed a session. She wore her unruly gray hair loose around her shoulders and dressed flamboyantly, like a mad old hippie, in a purple or pink blouse and tights pulled over twig-thin legs. The ODHA lawyers nicknamed her the Pink Panther. In decades past she’d published a newspaper column that people who remembered it described as either extremely right-wing or fascist. She thought the defense lawyers were wonderfully clever. Whenever they unleashed a zinger, she turned her painted face toward the prosecution table and, with a sneering grin, laughed like a Mexican death skull.
The side of the courtroom where presumably leftist supporters of the prosecution sat was called Woodstock by Guatemalan reporters. It was filled with human rights activists, “solidarity” types in sandals, progressive nuns in secular dress, and Franciscan friars in austere brown smocks. Were they as frightening to others as the Pink Panther was to me? Did their passivity hide another kind of violence? Did they (we?) truly want justice or simply another kind of vindication, a symbolic revenge for decades of rampant, unpunished murder?
PROCEEDINGS ENDED on the morning of June 7 with Captain Byron Lima, in uniform for the occasion, addressing the court. He could easily have testified the previous afternoon, following the defense’s closing arguments and the brief personal statements of other defendants, but the judges had decided to adjourn until the next morning. Under Guatemalan law, the judges had twenty-four hours after the formal end of the trial’s proceedings to write and render their verdict, and it was believed that they had adjourned in order to give themselves an extra night to deliberate.
As he took his seat at the witness table and folded his hands on top of it, Captain Lima was the picture of an officer and a gentleman. He denied the charges against him and spoke with pride of his years of military service. He described how he’d earned the various medals he was wearing and asked how anyone could believe that he would throw away a brilliant military career by participating in such a sordid crime. And then he demonstrated how detached from ordinary human reality soldiers like him must become, inside their violent, paranoid, honor-obsessed world. His statement devolved into what appeared to be a series of personal accusations and threats. ODHA was merely bent on revenge, he said, and Leopoldo Zeissig had joined the case in search of personal fame. Captain Lima went down the line of lawyers at the prosecution table, boring in one at a time with a hard stare. “You, Mario Domingo”—the sweet-natured, emotionally high-strung ODHA lawyer looked as if he were shaking in his shoes—“you’re here because you want revenge against the Army for having destroyed your village in Huehuetenango.” ODHA, said Captain Lima, “has no integrity. I won’t lie; they are people who can be bought.” The only lawyer who seemed unaffected by Lima’s bizarre performance was Mynor Melgar, who had grown up around tough guys in El Gallito. He stared back at Captain Lima with a cocked eyebrow and a slight wise-guy smirk of his own.
It was late morning when the session ended. Judge Cojulún, wearing a bulletproof vest under his suit jacket, announced that the court would deliver its verdict at eleven-thirty that night. The prosecutors went back to their office and ordered a large paella for lunch. Zeissig told everyone to go home and take a nap. The ODHA lawyers and the Untouchables came to my hotel, and we sat around the pool. As usual, they made chistes at each other’s expense. Melgar said that Nery Rodenas, who was lying half out of the water in the hot tub, looked like a sad hippopotamus, and everyone laughed. And then they fell silent and seemed lost in their own thoughts. Lima’s speech had cast a certain pall.
I was back inside the courthouse, in the press area, by eight. At ten the guards let spectators in through the metal detectors, and the courtoom quickly filled, row after row. A small forest of cameras on tripods had sprung up in front of the area where the lawyers and defendants sat. The foreign press had returned to Guatemala for this night, and everywhere you looked there were Indian women in traditional clothing. There were so many scruffy, mainly North American, spectators who would ordinarily sit in the Woodstock area that they overflowed into the side of the auditorium claimed by supporters of the defendants. Father Mario’s mother came down the aisle carrying a magnum of champagne and went through the door into the defense team’s private area. Guatemalan reporters passed around sheets of paper on which they marked their predicted verdicts, as if in an office pool. The lawyers and the defendants slowly drifted in, and by eleven-thirty they were at their usual seats. Captain Lima was in full dress uniform, the medals on his chest glittering in the camera flashes. Father Mario had donned his priest’s collar. Heavily armed police commandos in bulletproof vests stood in rows against the walls. The U.S. ambassador, Prudence Bushnell, made a surprise appearance.
By two o’clock in the morning, the judges still hadn’t appeared. Rumors swirled. Captain Lima was obviously upset, reportedly because he’d just been told that he was the only defendant who hadn’t been acquitted. I had a knot in my stomach that kept me awake, climbing up and down the stairs, fidgeting in my chair. Indian women slept in their seats the way they do on long bus trips: torso turned sideways, a hand perched on the seat back, a cheek laid atop it. The young American backpacker types had a way of sleeping that made novel use of the rows of raked seating. They sat on the floor, legs crossed beneath the seats, arms crossed on top of the seat in front, head resting on arms. Foreign reporters spread their suit jackets out on the floor and lay down for a nap. Couples slept in embraces. The nuns, used to praying at all hours perhaps, were wide awake. We were like passengers in steerage in a crowded hold, on a long transatlantic crossing. But it felt appropriate, somehow, to have to stay up all night waiting, keeping a weary vigil, to find out whether or not justice was going to be done, and Guatemalan history made.
In court for the verdict: Father Mario, Obdulio Villanueva, Captain Lima Oliva, and Colonel Lima Estrada
The U.S. ambassador had slipped away long ago, though the embassy’s human rights officer remained. I found Helen Mack and sat beside her for a while. The defense lawyers formed into a belligerant chorus line, arms around each other’s waists, and enunciated anot
her bellowing protest, threatening to withdraw their clients. At five o’clock a court employee came out and took away the water bottles in front of the judges’ seats. Did that mean something was about to happen?
Half an hour later the judges trooped out, looking exhausted and grim. People were picking themselves up off the floor, standing in the aisles stretching, rubbing their eyes, sitting forward in their seats, crowding into the camera pit, adjusting their tripods and cameras. Soon everyone was back in place. The young court secretary took her place at the raised podium in a corner and, just like that, she began to read out the verdict. Her voice was breathless and rushed. Judge Cojulún looked over at her, made a reassuring gesture with his hand, and gave her a brief smile. She read in an excited, ringing voice. I wasn’t sure that I’d caught the words correctly. Was the priest guilty? His lawyer, José Toledo, sat slumped and scowling. Father Mario Orantes was guilty! “Culpable!” And then she was reading out the rulings against the military men. Nery Rodenas, dark circles under his eyes, glanced up to where Fernando Penados and I were sitting and sent us a small, fleeting, almost furtive smile.
It took nearly an hour to read the whole verdict, in which the judges’ reasoning was carefully laid out, ruling by ruling.
“What was the accused doing in that shop?” the judges asked in the verdict about Colonel Byron Lima Estrada. After taking into account that the colonel, as the leader of a powerful war veterans’ group, had been particularly threatened by the REMHI report—which had named him in three places—and that he was connected, as former commander of the Chiquimula military base, to the license-plate number the taxi driver had seen, a license that had originally been assigned to that base, and taking into account as well the colonel’s belated and unconvincing attempts to manufacture an alibi for that night, the judges had decided that it was “by all lights logical” to assume that Colonel Lima Estrada “had knowledge of what was happening in the San Sebastián parish house.” They wrote that his criminal liability “was not confined to whatever control he had over what was going on in the vicinity, but rather that his participation began much earlier, when he contracted military informers to monitor Monseñor Gerardi.” Even if he only had knowledge of the murder happening half a block away, the judges wrote, he also had criminally complicit “dominion” over the crime—i.e., the power to prevent it.
All of the accused except Margarita López, the cook, were going to be found guilty. A unanimous ruling.
A Guatemalan reporter in the row in front turned to me with a frightened expression and said that Captain Lima was eyeing the weapon loosely slung across the front of a policeman behind him, and that he could easily snatch it away. I looked over and saw that this was true: Captain Lima had turned his head and was looking at the weapon. So, even now, crazy fear. Horrified imaginings of a lethally suicidal Captain Lima spraying the courtroom with automatic weapon fire. But the beautiful, full-throated, intoxicating young voice just kept going on, its every vehement Culpable! striking like a slap. Thirty years in prison for each of the military men, twenty years for Father Mario Orantes. When Pope John Paul II had declared that hell is not an actual place but a spiritual state of man, he could have been thinking of Father Mario, sitting in his wheelchair while so many stared at him, looking as if he were being consumed by invisible flames.
The young court secretery’s rising and falling, resonating voice announced that the court was ordering a criminal investigation to be opened against others, including the possible “intellectual authors” of the crime. Colonel Rudy Pozuelos of the EMP, Major Escobar Blas, and Major Villagrán were among the seven military men named. The three men on trial were convicted not as individual criminals or murderers but of having taken part in a politically motivated act of state-sponsored murder.
It had been a long-planned operation, an elaborately staged crime and cover-up. There were probably stakeouts in the park that night (such as a couple seen snuggling on a bench in the dark) and getaway drivers to scoop up the EMP specialists and intelligence operatives as they fled out through the various exits of the church of San Sebastián while the shirtless Hugo allowed himself to be seen, quietly igniting rumors of a crime of passion. But nobody had planned on an alert, pot-smoking taxi driver with a knack for memorizing license-plate numbers to drive right into the heart of the operation.
Helen Mack, overcome with emotion, burst into tears at the first reporter’s question put to her. But we were already rushing out of there. Standing on the curb with the Untouchables in the gray dawn light, we spotted Special Prosecutor Zeissig’s three-car caravan. A window came down a bit and a hand emerged to give us a thumbs-up as the cars drove off.
On the way to my hotel we stopped at a convenience store to buy beer, and three of the four original Untouchables—Fernando Penados and the two who were still on the job, Rodrigo and Arturo—and Helen Mack and I celebrated. Helen kept crying. She had been trying to win an investigation of the intellectual authors of her sister’s murder for years, and the judges in the Gerardi case had granted it in a single motion. “Their cases go step and step, Monseñor’s and Myrna’s, one helping the other,” she said. We turned on the television to watch the news, and when that was over, a women’s breakfast show came on, the female host announcing that it was a day of joy because justice had finally come to Guatemala.
I thought, This is how a country changes. But I also thought, and told my friends, “Enjoy this moment. Another one like it might never happen again.” So much had to come together perfectly for this victory to happen. Their courage and competence aside, it was also significant that the prosecution and the judges were relatively young, all under forty, and hadn’t believed what older, more experienced people believed: that you could never get a verdict like this in Guatemala. The judges represented a generation of legal professionals many of whom had been at least partially educated abroad, some in the United States. They were too young to have been corrupted, demoralized, or made cynical.
Judge Eduardo Cojulún received a threat as soon as he was back in his office after the verdict. The phone rang, and a voice said “Ojo! Watch out!” In the ensuing weeks the judges received so many threats that Cojulún openly discussed with reporters the possibility of leaving the country. But he refused to yield to fear, and even kept going out for his morning jogs, until he was intercepted by a man who jabbed a hand as if it were a gun into Cojulún’s abdomen and said, “Hello, Judge, I’m your personal security.” Judge Yassmín Barrios—after enduring such provocations as finding thugs with shaved heads inexplicably standing in her patio one day; and another day seeing a man crouching like a gargoyle on the cornice of a neighboring house, aiming a machine gun at her; and finally seeing a military helicopter buzzing and hovering low over her house, with men inside photographing her when she came out into her patio—was escorted with her mother out of the country by MINUGUA on a Sunday in July. They were headed to Spain, where she planned to study for a while. She had rented out her house and sold her car. Two weeks later she changed her mind and came home.
THE EARLY PROMISE—dim as even that had seemed—of President Portillo’s government had quickly faded. Portillo had not been able to free himself from the influence of military strongmen and mafiosos any more than any of his predecessors had. Portillo’s EMP was as criminal as Arzú’s—it was just a different clique of corrupt officers. No one believed that Portillo, whatever his true intentions, had much control over his own administration. Abroad and in Guatemala, the attempts to bring General Ríos Montt to justice for war crimes had stalled, and he remained the president of the Congress and the real leader of the FRG Party. The vice president of the Congress had accused human rights organizations of being “behind a plot to destablize the country.”
In 2000, when Edgar Gutiérrez had become head of the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis, he’d found the agency’s files on the Gerardi case ransacked and emptied. But President Portillo said that he had ordered an internal investigation into the Gerardi
case, and he promised to share the results. If—as seems likely—such an investigation was ever conducted by Portillo’s government, no one in ODHA or the prosecutors’ office ever saw a report of it. Fairly or not, ODHA’s lawyers blamed Gutiérrez for Portillo’s failure to deliver on his promise. The government finally issued a two-page report stating that it had no information about the case beyond what had already been produced by the Public Ministry.
Leopoldo Zeissig, after twenty-one months of enduring constant threats, resigned as special prosecutor and left the country with his wife and child. Just before leaving, he granted an interview to Claudia Méndez. “The defense is criticizing you for having on your side a vagrant, a taxi driver, and an EMP specialist who was by turns a waiter and a janitor. The defense is heavily criticizing them for being of such a low level,” she said. Zeissig responded, “At ten at night in San Sebastián’s park, you’re not going to find lawyers and engineers. Let’s talk about the military officers, who are supposedly of a higher level. What happened when they testified at the trial? They lied.”
The defense lawyers’ continual harping through the media about the “low level” of the witnesses—most were men with Indian features and surnames—also played all too easily on widespread and deep Guatemalan class and racial prejudices and insecurities.
WITHIN WEEKS OF THE VERDICT, ODHA was dug in again, preparing for a battle to recuse one of the judges, Wilewaldo Contreras, who would try the appeal. “Because he’s a corrupt judge,” Melgar said to me, “who has made money in exchange for freeing criminals. Also, he is a personal friend of Cintrón, and of the group of lawyers defending the Limas, and from a good source we know he’s disposed to reverse the sentence. What we don’t know is in exchange for what.”
The Art of Political Murder Page 26