Journalists and writers
Fernando Linares Beltranena, conservative lawyer and journalist.
Dina Fernández, columnist and editor at Prensa Libre.
José Rubén Zamora, publisher of elPeriódico.
Claudia Méndez Arriaza, reporter for elPeriódico.
Bertrand de la Grange, coauthor of Who Killed the Bishop?
Maite Rico, coauthor of Who Killed the Bishop?
Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian novelist and conservative columnist. Writes article critical of the prosecution in El País, February 2004.
Miscellaneous characters
Martha Jane Melville Novella, Father Mario’s wealthy friend and patron.
Blanca Lidia Contreras, married to Monseñor Hernández’s brother. Came from Canada to make a statement against Ana Lucía Escobar and Father Mario.
Luis Carlos García Pontaza, Ana Lucía Escobar’s boyfriend. Reputed leader of Valle del Sol gang. Killed in prison January 21, 2001.
Arlene Cifuentes, Colonel Lima’s niece. Makes anonymous phone call to archbishop’s office implicating the Limas in murder.
Chronology of Events
1944 Democracy established in Guatemala.
1954 President Jacobo Arbenz, the second democratically elected president in Guatemalan history, is overthrown in a coup engineered by the CIA.
1959 Cuban revolution.
1960 Civil war in Guatemala begins when a large portion of the army attempts an unsuccessful coup against a government backed by the United States. Young Army officers take to the countryside to wage guerrilla war. A counterinsurgency campaign supported by the United States will lead to the deaths of some 10,000 civilians in the next decade.
1965 Pope John XXIII opens first session of Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. Limited use of the vernacular in the liturgy was endorsed and relation of the Church to the modern world was explored.
1967 Juan Gerardi Conedera appointed bishop of Verapaz.
1968 Pope Paul VI opens the Latin American Bishops’ Conference in Medellín, Colombia, which encourages the Church’s role in socioeconomic reform.
1974 Gerardi made bishop of El Quiché diocese.
January 31, 1980 Thirty-six protesting Mayan peasants from El Quiché are massacred in the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City.
March 24, 1980 Archbishop Romero is assassinated by ARENA (El Salvador’s ruling far-right party) while celebrating Mass.
July 1980 Gerardi escapes assassination attempt and closes El Quiché diocese.
November 22, 1980 Returning from a trip to the Vatican, Gerardi is denied entrance into Guatemala and goes into exile in Costa Rica.
1982 Military coup in Guatemala. General Efraín Ríos Montt, an evangelical Protestant, takes power. Worst human rights violations of the civil war period take place during his regime.
1983 Ríos Montt deposed by his defense minister, General Oscar Mejía Victores.
1983 Archbishop Próspero Penados del Barrio appointed by Pope John Paul II as chief Guatemalan prelate. Bishop Gerardi, who comes back from exile in Costa Rica, is made auxiliary bishop and general vicar of the Guatemala City archdiocese.
1986 Vinicio Cerezo elected president; first civilian president in thirty years.
1989 Founding of Archdiocese’s Office of Human Rights (ODHA).
1990 Myrna Mack Chang, young activist anthropologist, is murdered.
1994 Historical Clarification Commission, a UN-sponsored truth commission for Guatemala, is established.
1994 Recovery of Historical Memory Project (REMHI) established under Bishop Gerardi’s direction.
1995 Last known massacre by Guatemalan Army, in Xamán, Alta Verapaz. Twenty-five Mayan peasants are killed.
December 1996 UN-monitored Peace Accords for Guatemala are signed.
September 1997 Historical Clarification Commission begins its work in Guatemala.
April 24, 1998 REMHI report, Guatemala: Never Again, formally presented.
April 26, 1998 Murder of Bishop Gerardi in garage of San Sebastián parish house.
April 30, 1998 Carlos Vielman, a homeless man, is arrested for Bishop Gerardi’s murder.
May 18, 1998 Adolfo González Rodas becomes attorney general and head of Public Ministry.
July 22, 1998 Father Mario Orantes and Margarita López, the cook at the parish house, are arrested. Father Mario’s German shepherd, Baloo, is also taken into custody.
July 27, 1998 Carlos Vielman is freed from prison.
September 17–18, 1998 Exhumation of bishop’s body to check for dog bites.
December 17, 1998 Celvin Galindo takes over as special prosecutor for the Gerardi case, replacing Otto Ardón.
January 12, 1999 A taxi driver, Diego Méndez Perussina, testifies to ODHA about what he saw the night of the murder.
February 1999 Monseñor Efraín Hernández resigns as chancellor of the Curia; Edgar Gutiérrez and Fernando Penados leave ODHA.
February 12, 1999 Taxi driver testifies before judge.
February 18, 1999 Father Mario is provisionally released.
February 25, 1999 Final report of the UN Historical Clarification Commission, Memory of Silence, is published.
May 28, 1999 Ronalth Ochaeta’s resignation as director of ODHA is announced. Nery Rodenas becomes new director. Ochaeta moves to Costa Rica.
August 25–26, 1999 Jorge Aguilar Martínez of EMP (the presidential waiter) testifies before judge and goes into exile.
September 25, 1999 Baloo dies.
October 7, 1999 The special prosecutor Celvin Galindo and his family flee into exile.
October 15, 1999 Leopoldo Zeissig becomes special prosecutor.
December 26, 1999 Alfonso Portillo, a populist, wins runoff election for president. General Ríos Montt is elected president of the legislature. Edgar Gutiérrez will be appointed head of the government’s Secretariat of Strategic Analysis.
January 17, 2000 Rubén Chanax testifies about what he saw the night of the murder.
January 19, 2000 Arrest orders are issued for Colonel Lima Estrada, Captain Lima Oliva, Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva, and Father Mario. Arrest order is reissued for the parish-house cook, Margarita López.
January 21, 2000 The Limas are arrested.
January 22, 2000 Obdulio Villanueva is captured in a gun battle.
February 9, 2000 Father Mario, threatened with extradition, returns to Guatemala from Houston, Texas, and checks himself into a private hospital to avoid prison.
April 24, 2000 Rubén Chanax goes into exile.
September 14, 2000 Third Sentencing Court decides that the Limas, Sergeant Major Villanueva, Father Mario, and Margarita López should be tried together.
November 28, 2000 Carlos García Pontaza of the Valle del Sol gang is arrested.
January 29, 2001 Carlos García Pontaza dies in prison.
March 23, 2001 Trial begins.
June 8, 2001 Trial ends. Colonel Lima Estrada, Captain Byron Lima, and Sergeant Major Villanueva are each sentenced to thirty years in prison. Father Mario gets a twenty-year sentence. Margarita López is freed.
July 2001 Leopoldo Zeissig goes into exile. His assistant, Mario Leal, succeeds him as special prosecutor.
August 2001 The European journalists Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico publish an article in the Mexican and Spanish magazine Letras Libres critical of the prosecution and in support of the defendants.
October 3, 2002 Colonel Juan Valencio Osorio is convicted of intellectual authorship of the murder of Myrna Mack.
October 8, 2002 Verdicts in the Gerardi case are overturned on appeal.
November 30, 2002 Mario Domingo and Jorge García visit Rubén Chanax in exile in Mexico City.
February 12, 2003 Supreme Court reinstates the verdicts in the Gerardi case. A new hearing of the appeal is ordered. Obdulio Villanueva is killed during riots in Centro Preventivo.
September 2003 Jorge García becomes special prosecutor.
March 2003 Rodrigo Salvadó an
d Arturo Aguilar visit El Chino Iván in exile in Costa Rica.
May 7, 2003 Verdict against Colonel Osorio in the Myrna Mack case is overturned.
November 2003 Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico’s Who Killed the Bishop? Autopsy of a Political Crime is published in Mexico.
December 2003 Oscar Berger, former mayor of Guatemala City, wins presidential election. Former president Álvaro Arzú becomes mayor of Guatemala City.
February 22, 2004 Mario Vargas Llosa publishes an article on the Gerardi case in El País.
April 26, 2004 Inter-American Court of Human Rights finds the Guatemalan state guilty in the Myrna Mack case.
March 22, 2005 Appellate court upholds verdicts against the Limas, although it lessens their culpability.
January 12, 2006 Convictions in the Gerardi case are upheld by the Supreme Court.
January 23, 2006 The mutilated corpse of Darinel Domingo, the younger brother of the ODHA lawyer Mario Domingo, turns up in the morgue.
May 16, 2006 The Constitutional Court meets to hear final defense motions (known as amparos in the Guatemalan legal system). The defense lawyers do not appear.
September 25, 2006 Three thousand government troops conduct a dawn raid on the Pavón prison. Seven prisoners are killed.
April 25, 2007 Constitutional court uploads verdicts against Limas and Father Mario.
Photo Credits
Frontispiece: Courtesy of ODHA
Page 13: Courtesy of ODHA
Page 73: Courtesy of Sandra Sebastian
Page 159: Courtesy of Moises Castillo/El Periodico
Page 191: Courtesy of Sandra Sebastian
Page 209: Courtesy of Moises Castillo/El Periodico
Page 244: Courtesy of ODHA
Page 255: Courtesy of Moises Castillo/El Periodico
Page 293: Courtesy of ODHA
Sources and Notes
The material presented in this book is the result of eight years of firsthand reporting. I returned to the same questions, incidents, and testimony and discussed them, time and again, with individuals whose understanding of the case developed and changed. Most of the evidence has been, at the least, double-sourced. I tried to stay as close as possible to the people most intimately involved in investigating the case. They include members of ODHA, especially from the legal team and the Untouchables, and members of the Public Ministry, particularly Leopoldo Zeissig, the prosecutor most responsible for developing the case presented in 2001 at the trial. Another important source, beginning with our first conversations in the summer of 2005, was Rafael Guillamón, MINUGUA’s chief investigator. Guillamón had never spoken to a journalist before, at least not for attribution. With the exception of his comments of January 2000 to Prensa Libre’s Pedro Pop, the witness Rubén Chanax had also not spoken to a journalist prior to our conversations. Nor had Leopoldo Zeissig told his story “on the record” before we met in South America, where he was in exile.
Guatemalan journalists, especially those from elPeriódico—including Claudia Méndez and the newspaper’s owner and editor, José Rubén Zamora—were enormously helpful to me.
The unpublished manuscript of a richly detailed account of the case, El Caso Gerardi—crónica de un crimen de estado, by Mario Domingo, was an indispensable source of information. I am extremely grateful to him for sharing it with me.
The official, court-certified transcripts of statements and depositions given by witnesses and, in some cases, suspects, to judges and prosecutors were crucial for assembling an accurate account of the legal process, as was the 292-page verdict—which provided a complete record of the trial—written by the tribune of judges who tried the Gerardi case in 2001.
The Annual Reports of the UN Verification Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA) provide an authoritative record of the Gerardi case and of developments and incidents in Guatemala, especially pertaining to the peace process and human rights generally, from 1997 to 2004.
The U.S. State Department Annual Country Reports on Human Rights in Guatemala can be read at http://guatemala.usembassy.gov/.
The REMHI report. Guatemala: Nunca Más. Informe del Proyecto lnterdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, 4 vols., Oficina de Derehos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala, 1998. An abridged one-volume version is available in English: Archdiocese of Guatemala, Guatemala: Never Again, Orbis, 1999. The report is available online in Spanish, French, and German, at www.odhag.org.gt/INFREMHI/Default.htm.
Guatemala: Memory of Silence, Report of the UN Commission for Historical Clarification, February 1999, is available online at http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/toc.html.
Important background readings on Guatemala’s civil war include the following.
Ricardo Falla, Masacres de la Selva: Ixcán Guatemala (1975–1982), Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 1992. (English edition, Westview, Boulder, Colo., 1994.)
Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 2004.
Robert H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala, University of Texas Press, 1982.
Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1982. (Rev. and expanded ed., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2005.)
Steven Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, Times Books, New York, 2006.
Beatriz Manz, Paradise in Ashes, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005.
Jennifer Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2000.
Jean-Marie Simon, Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny, Norton, New York, 1987.
David Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993.
Daniel Wilkinson, Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Mass., 2002.
I. The Murder
The information about the Alliance for Progress years and the murders of Guatemalans who studied in the United States under U.S. AID study grants comes from Stephen M. Streeter, “Nation-Building in the Land of Eternal Counterinsurgency: Guatemala and the Contradictions of the Alliance for Progress,” Third World Quarterly, vol. 27, 2006. Regarding anticommunism as the pretext for antireform repression in Guatemala, Streeter wrote: “The communist threat was in fact a rationalization for bolstering armed forces against a popular revolution against the oligarchy.”
In Bitter Fruit, Stephen Schlesinger and the New York Times reporter Steven Kinzer wrote: “As the 1980s began, the position of Guatemala’s ruling generals and their civilian backers remained unchanged. By now, the 14,000-member Guatemalan armed forces had become a wealthy caste unto itself. It claimed its own bank, ran an investment fund for its members, and launched industrial projects. Its leaders owned vast ranch acreage and regularly sold protection to large landowners…. Meantime, death squads linked to the Army reached into every sector of national life. Street-corner murders of lawyers, schoolteachers, journalists, peasant leaders, priests and religious workers, politicians, trade union organizers, students, professors and others continued on a daily basis…. The intention of the military leaders was essentially to destroy the political center. Anyone not supporting the regime was almost by definition a leftist, and therefore an enemy.”
Regarding the Guatemalan Army’s counterinsurgency strategy in the countryside, Jennifer Schirmer, a scholar who seems to have had unique access inside the Guatemalan military establishment, wrote that although “[t]he guerrillas were not irrelevant to the Army’s plans … it didn’t matter if the guerrilla was present in the area of a ‘killing zone’ or not: all were to be eliminated” (The Guatemalan Military Project).
The quotations from Bishop Gerardi’s early writing are from Monseñor Juan Gerardi—Tesitigo Fiel de Dios, Guatemalan Episcopal Conference, 1999.
An interview with Archbisho
p Quezada Toruño that includes his account of going to meet Bishop Gerardi at Guatemala City’s airport was published in 30 Dias, April 2004. This periodical is a Spanish-language version of the Italian Catholic church magazine 30 Giorni.
There was some confusion regarding the arrival of Monseñor Hernández and Ana Lucía Escobar at San Sebastián on the night of the murder. Monseñor Hernández identified the car in which he was driven to San Sebastián as a red Mazda 323. However, Ana Lucía Escobar said at the trial that it was a Nissen 323 (a model that does not exist). Rubén Chanax apparently misidentified the Mazda and said that the car he saw drive up to the parish house was a reddish Toyota. Chanax also described seeing two young people get out of the car: a youth and a young woman with straight hair worn in a ponytail. Apparently the woman was Ana Lucía Escobar. But before parking, Escobar said, they had let Monseñor Hernández out of the car and he’d gone directly inside. Those minor discrepancies were later invoked to raise suspicions about Monseñor Hernández and Ana Lucía’s involvement in the crime.
II The Investigation
The National Security Archive at George Washington University, www.gwu.edu, is particularly useful. See especially the archive’s Electronic Briefing Book No. 11, on U.S. Policy in Guatemala, 1966–1996, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB11/docs/. For a report on Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, written by Kate Doyle and Michael Evans from declassified U.S. documents, see Electronic Briefing Book No. 25, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB25/index.htm. For the Death Squad dossier, see Electronic Briefing Book No. 15, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB15/press.html.
The illegal activities of the EMP anti-kidnapping commando unit were described in MINUGUA’s seventh annual report (1997) and in Inforpress Centroamericana, October 10, 1997. Since 1972, Inforpress Centroamericana has published a weekly information bulletin, with an English-language counterpart, Central American Report. Both are available at www.inforpressca.com.
Narco trafficking: In 2003, when the United States revoked the visas of a group of powerful generals and others reputedly linked to narco trafficking and crime mafias, Fernando Linares Beltrana was included in the group. The visa of General Francisco Ortega Menaldo, who was a former head of the EMP and the Guatemalan military officer most frequently linked to narcotics trafficking, was also revoked. Linares Beltrana was General Ortega Menaldo’s defense attorney. The official reason given for revoking his visa was that he was “a known helper, assistant, or conspirator with others in the illicit trafficking of controlled substances or chemicals.”
The Art of Political Murder Page 37