The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  The Vatican had finally named a new archbishop, elevating Monseñor Quezada Toruño from Zacapa. When Quezada Toruño was bishop of Zacapa, his diocese was the only one that declined to participate in REMHI. Within days of taking his new job, the archbishop convened a meeting of bishops to vote on whether or not to shut down ODHA. Nine voted in favor, nine against—a clear sign of how severely the prosecution of Father Mario and the scandalous revelations surrounding the Gerardi case had split the Church. Archbishop Quezada demanded a full audit of ODHA’s accounts, but in the end he ruled that ODHA woud stay open and continue its mission, including its role as co-plaintiff in the ongoing Gerardi case.

  IV

  THE THIRD STAGE

  PURGATORY

  For five years. Isn’t quick to say. And isn’t it long to live. And lonely.

  —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

  1

  THE EUPHORIA OF THE SPRING of 2001, when the guilty verdicts were read, did not last long. Almost immediately the results of the trial were called into question. In the fall, two European journalists, Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico—the journalists who during the trial had extolled the virtues of Dr. Reverte Coma, the Spanish dog-bite theorist—published an article in the Mexican and Spanish magazine Letras Libres accusing the prosecution and ODHA of being “the intellectual authors of a conspiracy” that had made the defendants “sacrificial lambs.” The defense lawyers in the Gerardi case, according to the article in Letras Libres, considered the prosecution witnesses “less than ideal.” The authors quoted one of the Limas’ lawyers, Roberto Echeverreía Vallejo: “The whole case rested on fabricated witnesses. It’s truly a monstrosity.” And they repeated, with no sign of irony, the remark of a military officer to the effect that “it’s another Dreyfus case.”

  In their article and in later writings about the case, de la Grange and Rico seemed unaware of the effort involved in ODHA’s search for each of its witnesses. The EMP waiter Aguilar Martínez, the former G-2 spy Oscar Chex, and even the taxi driver were represented by the European journalists as having simply appeared at ODHA’s door.

  But there was little public response from ODHA to the accusations. Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez were large personalities who had known how to present ODHA’s position to the public. After they left ODHA, there was no one who could handle such tasks. Even Mynor Melgar, who was implacable in the courtroom, had a shy demeanor outside of it. Melgar returned to the Public Ministry as a prosecutor early in 2002, and the face of ODHA was projected by the soft-spoken, even retiring Nery Rodenas and the excitable Mario Domingo, who swallowed his consonants and spoke so quickly that people had trouble understanding him. The Gerardi case was complex and bewildering. In hindsight, ODHA’s failure to cultivate relationships with Guatemalan journalists, to help them understand how the case had been assembled, was a costly mistake.

  There was virtually no support for the verdicts in the trial in the Guatemalan press, other than occasionally in elPeriódico, where Claudia Méndez worked as a reporter. And this wasn’t only because the media were owned and run by conservative elites, people sympathetic to the military and to former president Arzú. President Portillo’s government had turned out to be the most corrupt—and that is saying something—and despised administration in recent Guatemalan history. Even people on the political left had a grudging attitude toward the verdicts in the Gerardi case after President Portillo tried to claim the outcome as an achievement of his presidency. (Judge Cojulún publicly rebuked Portillo for “taking a bow by tipping someone else’s hat.”) And many thought that Edgar Gutiérrez, who had been so closely identified with ODHA’s investigation, had “betrayed” the human rights community by taking a prominent post in Portillo’s government. The terrain had been well prepared for a public-relations disaster when, in November 2003, Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico’s book about the case, ¿Quién mató al obispo? Autopsia de un crimen politico, (Who Killed the Bishop?—Autopsy of a Political Crime), was published. The book was treated as a major turn of events, and its charges were ceaselessly trumpeted.

  In 1998, de la Grange and Rico had published another book, Marcos, la genial imposture, that purported to unmask Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, as a malevolent fraud; this was pretty much the position of the Mexican government. Their central thesis about the Gerardi case was that the Limas and Villanueva had been falsely accused and that prosecution witnesses had fabricated their testimony in exchange for personal gain, usually a one-way trip into a financially well-compensated exile, a life of ease. Ana Lucía Escobar, Monseñor Hernández, and the Valle del Sol gang played a central role. And, of course, Dr. Reverte Coma’s dog-bite theory got its due. Edgar Gutiérrez and Ronalth Ochaeta were depicted as corrupt masterminds and conspirators. De la Grange and Rico more or less floated all the scenarios as simultaneous possibilities without offering any serious evidence to prove or connect them. A conspiracy of breathtaking scope was alleged, involving an enormous number of people and without any institutional oversight, any chain of command, or any central authority to enforce their obedience and guard their silence.

  In February 2004, Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America’s most admired novelists and easily its most famous political pundit, would weigh in on the Gerardi case in Spain’s leading newspaper, El País. Vargas Llosa, a political conservative and avowed Thatcherite, had run for president of Peru in 1990, losing the election to Alberto Fujimori. Since then he’d resided mostly in Europe, and he had become a Spanish citizen. The opinion essays that he regularly published in El País were reprinted throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He seemed to draw the information for his piece on the Gerardi case exclusively from de la Grange and Rico’s book, which was like writing about Senator John Kerry’s experiences in the Vietnam War if one had read only Unfit for Command, the attack by the Swift Boat veterans. It wasn’t a formal book review, although it was certainly a rave. Through their “rigorous investigation, tireless comparisons and scrupulous analysis,” wrote Vargas Llosa, the authors of Who Killed the Bishop? had exposed a sinister scheme at the heart of the Gerardi case to “cover up for the truly guilty ones, sacrificing innocents and engendering a monumental distortion of the truth, … an operation in which a handful of little scoundrels, opportunists, and petty politicians reaped excellent personal rewards.”

  Vargas Llosa accepted the idea that Baloo had left bite marks in Bishop Gerardi’s skull and that poor witnesses, particularly Rubén Chanax, had gone, “thanks to the crime, from living on nothing and in the streets to being maintained and protected abroad by the state. Their testimony was continuously molded—altered, twisted, adapted—throughout the process in such a way that they seemed submissively subject to the dictates of the archbishop’s human rights group, ODHA, whose actions throughout this story are supremely suspicious, to say the least.”

  Vargas Llosa wrote that “the first prosecutor of the case, Otto Ardón, who tried to follow this lead”—the dog bites—“received so many attacks and threats that he had to resign and fled the country.” It was a through-the-looking-glass version of the Gerardi case. Otto Ardón never “fled” the country, at least not in the sense the word seems intended to imply. He took a brief vacation after the fiasco of the exhumation and then resigned from the Public Ministry. He was never in exile. (Indeed, Ardón was soon spotted working in Guatemala City, in the law office of Irvíng Aguilar, Obdulio Villanueva’s defense lawyer.) The prosecutors Celvin Galindo and Leopoldo Zeissig, who had investigated the involvement of the military in the crime, were the ones who had actually fled real threats, going into exile, although de la Grange and Rico claimed that the threats were exaggerated. They portrayed Zeissig as never having been subjected to anything more frightening than a single ambiguous call, with music playing, on his cell phone.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2002, I had flown down to the South American city where Leopoldo Zeissig was then residing with his wife and small child. Dry, sandy-look
ing Andean mountain slopes, like enormous dunes, closely surrounded the city, making it feel like an impermanent place, overly vulnerable to avalanches and winds, though in fact it was one of the oldest cities in the Americas. We met in the lobby of the hotel where I was staying and spoke there for the duration of an entire working day and much of the next. Zeissig had a job with the legal staff of a German foundation and was also attending law school, studying the consolidation of the rule of law in emerging democracies.

  After the verdict, Zeissig said, he had phoned the attorney general, Adolfo González Rodas. Zeissig had been promised a job with a lower profile after the trial, and he told González Rodas that his successor would inherit the Gerardi case in good shape. The next morning, however, he was stunned to read in Prensa Libre that, according to the attorney general, he would be staying on as special prosecutor of the Gerardi case. He met with González Rodas and was informed that he was the only one qualified to lead the case forward into its next, highly perilous stage, which would include pursuing criminal investigations against Major Escobar Blas, Colonel Rudy Pozuelos, and other EMP leaders that could eventually reach as high as General Espinosa and even the former president, Álvaro Arzú.

  Zeissig asked for a vacation to think things over. He was under pressure to arrest some of the EMP leaders immediately—before the verdicts could be appealed—on the basis of evidence that had emerged during the trial. But he didn’t feel the case was strong enough yet. He didn’t want to ask for arrest orders only to see the EMP officers go free in a few months. If an element of fear also influenced his hesitation, who could blame him? He was still receiving telephone threats. Then, in July, he learned that the Public Ministry was planning to discontinue his security detail. He decided that the time had come to take his family out of the country. They left on a Saturday morning. Zeissig didn’t want his security guards to notice he was leaving, so a friend went ahead to the airport, taking their two suitcases. Zeissig left his house carrying just his laptop, and he purchased one-way tickets to El Salvador at the airlines counter.

  Zeissig told me, indignantly, that the accusations against him, about fabricating evidence, were completely untrue. There was no stage of the investigation that hadn’t been verified by the UN mission. He’d never denied access to MINUGUA at any moment, so there was an independent record of every step he and the other prosecutors had taken. (By contrast, in 1999, in its ninth annual report, MINUGUA had reported that its verification efforts in the Gerardi case had been “obstructed” by Otto Ardón, “who systematically refused access to the case file.”)

  Leopoldo Zeissig grew up in Mixco, a large urban municipality five miles outside Guatemala City. He worked his way through law school (it took him twelve years), and when he graduated, in 1994, he took a job in the Public Ministry. He was an assistant prosecutor under Celvin Galindo, investigating homicides and kidnappings, when the bishop was murdered. He learned about the killing while watching CNN before going to work. His first thought was that it must be a political crime. “But how could such a thing have happened?” he remembers thinking. In postwar Guatemala, murders like that weren’t supposed to occur anymore. Later, when Otto Ardón’s dog-bite theory emerged, “it seemed incredibly strange to me. It was becoming a public joke. But I said, I can’t judge. I don’t know the case.”

  After Celvin Galindo took over the Gerardi case, on December 17, 1998, he and Zeissig met for dinner several times. They talked about the various scenarios, including the one involving Valle del Sol, the criminal gang. Galindo told Zeissig that the police considered the Valle del Sol scenario “burned”; that is, they had investigated the gang every which way, and as far as Bishop Gerardi’s murder was concerned, “there was nothing there.” Zeissig asked Galindo if he intended to investigate a political motive in the crime, and he answered, “Everything is on the table.” But Galindo was under pressure to prosecute Father Mario. In a meeting at the Conquistador Ramada hotel, the head of the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis, Howard Yang, pressured Galindo to take Father Mario to trial. (Yang was the man who had been dispatched by President Arzú to intimidate Judge Henry Monroy into charging only Father Mario for the murder.) Galindo yielded to the pressure and proceeded with the charges against the priest. But then Judge Monroy decided to free Father Mario, though provisionally, keeping him under investigation.

  On February 17, 1999—the day before Judge Monroy gave Father Mario provisional freedom—the taxi driver, Diego Méndez Perussina, testified before going into exile in Canada. “I think Celvin began to realize it was a political crime when the taxi driver gave his statement in front of Judge Monroy,” Zeissig said. It had been widely reported that Galindo was about to arrest members of the military, most probably Major Escobar Blas and Captain Byron Lima. I sensed that Zeissig now regretted not having charged the major himself. He believed that Captain Lima and Major Escobar Blas had been linked in criminal activities before Bishop Gerardi’s murder and that Escobar Blas, especially, had a grisly secret history, including, possibly, having been one of the masterminds of the kidnapping for ransom and subsequent murder of a wealthy college student named Beverly Sandoval Richardson, a widely publicized case. Captain Lima, who was part owner of a gun shop and shooting range, was alleged to have engaged in arms trafficking. Zeissig told me that he believed Captain Lima knew Ana Lucía Escobar and that he had provided logistical help to the Valle del Sol gang for bank robberies and kidnappings. (The Spanish investigator for MINUGUA, Rafael Guillamón, told me later that Ana Lucía and her gangster boyfriend, Luis Carlos García Pontaza, used to practice firing their weapons at Lima’s shooting range.) One of Zeissig’s early sources in the investigation was an underworld informer who said that Captain Lima and Major Escobar Blas had provided weapons to the gang. But when Zeissig pressed the informer to testify before a judge, the informer refused, because he feared being killed in reprisal.

  “That’s the big problem with being a prosecutor,” said Zeissig. “The truth commission could bring information out anonymously, but we have to bring it before a judge. Otherwise, what good is it?”

  We spoke about the often exasperating but dramatic days when Rubén Chanax had finally begun to talk. This was after Chanax and El Chino Iván had been transferred from the custody of the police to that of the Public Ministry as protected witnesses, when Zeissig decided to give Chanax work washing their cars as part of a strategy to gain his cooperation. Piece by piece, his story had come out, or anyway as much of it as he was willing to tell: Father Mario’s involvement, Captain Lima and Villanueva turning up in the black Jeep Cherokee to move the bishop’s body, and so on. Some days they didn’t talk about the case at all. “We’d just watch television,” Zeissig said, recalling that Chanax especially liked Pokemon cartoons. “He’d see the first scene, and then tell you the rest of the episode.” In the evenings, on the way back to the Hotel Arlington, Chanax’s police guards would always ask him what he and the prosecutors had talked about. His answer was always the same—they’d watched movies, watched television, told chistes, nothing more.

  During that time, soon after Chanax had finally begun to collaborate as a witness, Zeissig had given him another polygraph test, the first one that had been administered to him since the test given by the FBI, shortly after the crime. Chanax was asked four questions:

  1. Did you see someone come out of the parish-house garage? When Chanax answered yes, the test indicated that he was telling the truth.

  2. Did you see Father Mario Orantes kick the small garage door shut? Chanax’s affirmative answer seemed truthful.

  3. Did you see somebody move the cadaver? Chanax’s yes again seemed truthful.

  4. Do you know the person who came out without a shirt? Rubén Chanax answered that he didn’t know the shirtless man, and the polygraph machine indicated the symptoms of a lie.

  The shirtless man, Chanax finally admitted, was “Hugo,” and he told the prosecutors what he knew—at least some of what he knew—about him.


  But Rubén Chanax was becoming frightened. What if Military Intelligence found out that he’d been talking? Already Chanax had received a warning in the Hotel Arlington from someone who came in off the street and told him that if he kept squealing he was going to die. Sometimes Captain Lima jogged by and tried to catch Chanax’s eye when Chanax was at his window or in the doorway. One day Chanax briefly stepped out of the hotel to buy something in the little shop next door, and a man there said, “Be careful, because Byron Lima is watching.”

  It was the possibility of a stealthy visit from Hugo that terrified Rubén Chanax most. Hugo was apparently a notorious G-2 assassin. One of his nicknames was Multicolores, for his ability to disguise himself. Multicolores might come disguised as a policeman, as a salesman taking a room for the night, or as one of the lovers who used the hotel for inexpensive trysts. He took his victims by surprise, often strangling them with a piece of fishing line. Chanax begged the prosecutors to move him to another hotel. But Zeissig told him that moving would look suspicious. “They’ll suspect you’ve talked to us,” he said. “Go on like nothing has happened. Trust us. And whatever you do, don’t tell El Chino Iván that you’ve talked.”

  Chanax had told the prosecutors that on the night of the murder El Chino Iván stayed behind in Don Mike’s store, that is, away from the park, longer than he’d admitted. Maybe El Chino Iván had never even seen the shirtless man. Maybe Chanax had told El Chino Iván about what he’d seen that night, and then El Chino Iván had elaborated his own versions, or so Zeissig suspected. El Chino Iván still dreamed, as when he’d first turned himself into MINUGUA, of going to the United States. It was unclear what Rubén Chanax hoped for, other than to stay alive and out of prison. Up to that point, he hadn’t asked to be taken anywhere, other than to the movies. One day he said to Zeissig, “You’ve given me the importance as a human being that I deserve.”