The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  Jean Arnault, the French head of the United Nations Peace Verfication Mission, which was assigned to monitor Guatemala’s compliance with the Peace Accords, also arrived on the scene. The multinational mission, which was referred to by its Spanish acronym, MINUGUA (min-U-gwa), was a ubiquitous presence in Guatemala. Arnault was accompanied that night at San Sebastián by Cecilia Olmos, a Chilean working at MINUGUA’s headquarters in Guatemala City, and Rafael Guillamón, a veteran investigator from Spain with years of expertise in Arab counterterrorism. Guillamón, who was in his early forties, was broad-shouldered and compact, with a scruffy reddish beard. He was MINUGUA’s chief police investigator, and he and his small team of two other agents reported solely to Jean Arnault.

  The prosecutors of the Public Ministry were assigned cases according to a numeric rotation system, and that weekend Prosecution Unit 6, which was led by Otto Ardón Medina, was on duty. Gustavo Soria, one of the assistant prosecutors from Unit 6, had arrived at San Sebastián shortly before his boss that night. Ardón, a lugubrious, retiring man, mostly hung back and watched the younger, comparatively sleek and self-confident Soria direct the police.

  Outside the garage, the groggy indigents told the police that Rubén Chanax had information. He was the only one among them who didn’t drink, they said, and so he’d “seen everything.” Chanax told the prosecutors and the police about the shirtless man who’d stepped out of the garage. He was whisked away to a police station, and his long journey as a protected witness, in the custody of the National Police and the Public Ministry, began.

  Back inside the house, Ronalth Ochaeta was struck by Father Mario’s seemingly preternatural serenity, and by how neatly dressed he was, all in black, in a black leather jacket, his hair looking recently washed and combed. He abruptly asked the priest what had happened, and Father Mario again launched into his story. Later, when Ochaeta asked if he could use the bathroom in the priest’s bedroom, Father Mario said no, and directed him to another bathroom in the house. Ochaeta watched Father Mario going into his bedroom and thought it was odd, the way he opened the door just enough to be able to slide in sideways.

  The attorney general, the head of the Public Ministry (a presidential appointee), arrived and embraced Ochaeta. “Hijos de puta, this has all the marks of los de allí enfrente,” he said—“of those from just over there.” He obviously meant the EMP’s military intelligence unit. He telephoned another prosecutor from his office, Fernando Mendizábal de la Riva, who came to the church and, soon after arriving, remarked to Rafael Guillamón, MINUGUA’s chief investigator, “This looks like the work of esa gente—those people.” In Guatemala such euphemisms are easily understood. But Mendizábal de la Riva was known to be a friend of General Marco Tulio Espinosa, who until his recent promotion to head the Army High Command had been the head of the EMP, and was now seen as the most powerful figure in the Guatemalan Army. So even people with powerful political appointments, like the attorney general, and a friend of the Army’s most powerful general, were capable of spontaneous observations that later they would most likely deny having made. Even politically compromised and complicit people do not always behave predictably, just as, of course, the most disciplined and intricately plotted crime does not always turn out exactly according to design.

  Nery Rodenas, the coordinator of ODHA’s legal team, lived well outside the city with his wife and small children, and he didn’t have a telephone, so someone from ODHA drove to his house and brought him back to San Sebastián. Rodenas had studied law at the public university, San Carlos, at the same time as Ronalth Ochaeta. But while Ochaeta made his name in political circles as a member of the University Students’ Association, Rodenas was the leader of a Catholic students’ group. He had converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism as a teenager. Tersely soft-spoken, Nery Rodenas had the melancholy eyes, rosebud mouth, plump cheeks, and somewhat stiff but gentle air of a clerk in a Botero painting. Of all his colleagues at ODHA—at least the ones I was to get to know—Rodenas was the only devout, practicing Catholic.

  Nery Rodenas reached the church of San Sebastián sometime between two and two-thirty in the morning and pushed his way through the crowd gathered in front of the garage door. All around him people were weeping, or conversing in hushed tones, or taking notes and snapshots as Gustavo Soria and the police worked inside the now re-expanded security cordon. Rodenas turned around and saw a man—short, brown-complexioned, with a mustache—taking photographs with a flash, and he realized that he had seen him before. The man wasn’t a photojournalist. Rodenas had seen him in the old colonial city of Antigua, at the trial of the accused murderer of a twenty-year-old milkman named Haroldo Sas Rompich.

  THE PRESENCE of the short man who was taking photographs was one of hundreds of threads of evidence that would eventually be woven into the investigation and prosecution of the murder of Bishop Gerardi, Guatemala’s “crime of the century”—the most important, and certainly the most bizarrely spectacular, passionately contested, and convoluted legal case in the country’s history. Years later Rodenas and others would still be pulling on that particular thread, investigating and debating its significance.

  One day in February 1996, President Álvaro Arzú, not even a month into his term as president, and his wife had been horseback riding through the countryside near Antigua, accompanied by their EMP bodyguards in a caravan of vehicles and horses, when the milkman Sas Rompich drove into their path in the 1984 Isuzu pickup in which he made his daily rounds. It is possible that Sas Rompich was at least a little drunk. Earlier, he’d stopped at a small country store to drink a few beers to help lighten a hangover, and now he was on his way to the farm where he picked up his milk. Captain Byron Lima, of the EMP Presidential Guard, alertly rode his horse into the path of the oncoming pickup, holding out his hand for the driver to stop, but the pickup kept on coming forward, and the horse reared, throwing its rider, who broke his arm. The pickup then crashed into a parked car by the side of the road. Apparently confused and panicked, the milkman accelerated, then rocked into reverse, and another officer jumped onto the pickup’s running board and reached in for the ignition, trying to bring the vehicle under control. Someone else shot out the rear tires. A guardsman drove his car against the front of the pickup, blocking it, and someone went right up to the pickup with a nine-millimeter pistol in his hand, reached in through the window, and fired three bullets into the milkman, including one into his ear, killing him instantly.

  The government subsequently announced that the president’s bodyguards had heroically prevented an attempted double assassination of President Arzú and his wife. No one could deny that the milkman had given the first couple a scare. The first lady had turned and galloped her horse into a nearby field, leaping a fence. In the past, the declaration of a threat to the president would have been enough to put an end to the matter. The legal system, the press, and all relevant actors would have asked no more questions. But in the new climate established by the Peace Accords people were willing to entertain the idea that the president’s security guards might have displayed a reckless disregard for human life, perhaps even committed murder.

  ODHA lawyers represented the victim’s family at the trial of the guardsman, Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva, who was accused of having murdered the milkman. Mario Domingo’s account of the incident, which was also the prosecution’s, as narrated above, was based on the testimony of the sole civilian witness: a youth who was out riding his bicycle when, as he was about to overtake the slow-moving presidential caravan, he was ordered to dismount and walk alongside.

  At the trial, members of the EMP and other military types crowded the courtroom. The short, dark photographer that Nery Rodenas saw the night of Bishop Gerardi’s murder had turned up daily to focus his camera on the people from ODHA and others who had come to observe the unprecedented trial of a member of the president’s security force. He was also seen outside the courthouse photographing the license plates of automobiles. Suspecting tha
t the photographer was not a journalist, Ronalth Ochaeta asked the judges at the trial to demand that he identify himself. The photographer’s identification card revealed that he was from the EMP. In the end, Obdulio Villanueva received a five-year sentence for the murder of the milkman. ODHA had asked for the maximum penalty under the circumstances, thirty years.

  That night in the church of San Sebastián, Nery Rodenas sought out Ronalth Ochaeta and Fernando Penados and told them that there was a man from the EMP taking pictures inside the garage. When Jean Arnault, the head of MINUGUA, dispatched his investigators to look into the matter, the photographer identified himself as a member of the director of the National Police’s advance security. By then, Nery Rodenas and some of the others had noticed that the photographer wasn’t alone. A tall, thin man who wore a red baseball cap, with the bill pulled low over his face, accompanied him. Later the man was seen in the park, talking into a portable radio.

  Ángel Conte Cojulún, the director of the National Police, arrived at San Sebastián at three in the morning. When he was informed that his advance security had been inside the parish house taking photographs, he responded that he didn’t have any advance security. Accompanied by the MINUGUA investigators, Conte Cojulún went to speak with the suspicious men, who insisted on talking with him alone. After a few minutes, the two men left the park, and Conte Cojulún spoke to Fernando Penados. “Listen, Fernando, they’re with the EMP,” he said. “Don’t make such a big deal out of it.”

  AT SOME POINT during that long night, Helen Mack and the bishop’s protégés from ODHA, Ronalth Ochaeta, Edgar Gutiérrez, and Fernando Penados, huddled together on the ground in one of the inner patio gardens of the parish house and had a conversation, which, as the situation developed over the next few days, resulted in a decision that ODHA should form its own team to document the case. Experience had taught them that it would be naive to assume that an investigation conducted by the government would not be biased, or that it would go after the most obvious suspects, the people in the Army, or with ties to the Army, most threatened by the REMHI report.

  The idea that ODHA should form its own team seems to have been Helen Mack’s. She also suggested that night that forensic anthropologists from ODHA should attend the autopsy of the bishop’s body. ODHA teams were participating in the exhumations of clandestine graves and massacre sites then being conducted throughout the country, and Ochaeta phoned two of the forensics specialists.

  Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez agreed that they shouldn’t leave the parish house until the bishop’s body was taken to the morgue. “I just sat there,” Ochaeta recalled. “I’d get up, sit down, get up. Edgar too. Nobody said anything. I think an hour, an hour and a half went by. We just looked at each other without saying anything.”

  Helen Mack, though, was in constant motion. She had gone to fetch her friend Dr. Mario Iraheta, a respected forensics specialist, and bring him to San Sebastián. Now she came to sit with the men from ODHA. “Chafas cerotes hijos de la gran puta,” she burst out. Chafas is slang for military officers; cerotes is a common Guatemalan vulgarism, something like little pieces of shit. “Chafas cerotes hijos de la gran puta!” she repeated several times. “Estos pisados fueron—those assholes did it.” Then she took out her cigarettes and sat smoking in silence.

  In the parish house garage, Dr. Iraheta worked alongside Dr. Mario Guerra, head of forensics for the Judicial Morgue. They carefully washed the murdered bishop’s wounds, cleaning the blood from the face, which had received repeated blows with some hard object—apparently, the triangular chunk of concrete—delivered with almost inconceivable ferocity. The most obvious wounds were fractures in both cheeks and around and across the nose, bloody bruises over the right eye, and multiple bruises in the back of the skull. The left ear was a particularly excoriated mass. On the bishop’s neck there were bloody scratches that indicated a struggle—marks that might have been caused if the zipper of his jacket was pulled against his skin while he fought to free himself, or perhaps when a thin gold chain, affixed to a religious medal, was torn from around his neck.

  Bishop Gerardi had apparently received the first blows as he emerged or was pulled from the car. Axel Romero discovered a lens from the bishop’s eyeglasses in the pocket on the inside of the door on the driver’s side. There was blood inside the car, and grains of concrete. The keys were missing, and the Public Ministry towed the car away that night. Later, when ODHA was told that they could take the car back, Nery Rodenas went to get it, bringing the spare set of keys left behind at the parish house. When the car’s ignition was turned on for the first time since the night of the bishop’s death, the air conditioner and radio came on simultaneously. The bishop hadn’t had the chance to turn either off. The assailants must have reached in, switched the ignition off, and yanked out the keys.

  Sometime before dawn, when the firemen took Bishop Gerardi’s body to the morgue, Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez walked over to the ODHA offices. They had to prepare a statement. In a few hours, people would be awakening to the shocking news of Bishop Gerardi’s murder. Everyone—the press, the government, the diplomatic community, all of Guatemala—would be waiting for the reaction of the Catholic Church and of ODHA. They had to think about what they were going to say.

  Father Mario said later that he approached a crime-scene specialist from the Public Ministry, asked for permission to clean up the garage, and was told to go ahead. Margarita López; the sacristan, Antonio Izaguirre; and Julio Trujillo, whose job it was to tend to the venerated statue of the Virgin of Sorrows of Manchén, set to work mopping up the bishop’s blood and cleaning the garage. Trujillo found more bloody footprints in the entrance of one of the little offices at the back of the garage, but he was told to keep mopping, and he did.

  When the cleaning up of the garage—the destruction and washing away of evidence that might have still remained at the crime scene despite the earlier chaos and carelessness—became a scandal in the press, Father Mario repeatedly insisted that someone from the Public Ministry had told him that it was OK. The priest couldn’t identify that person by name but said he was a tall man with a beard. By then Father Mario had become the focus of much speculation and suspicion, public and private. So when no one from the Public Ministry stepped forward to take responsibility for the “error,” or to identify the “bearded man,” many assumed that the priest was lying, and that he had ordered the cleanup of the garage entirely on his own.

  Edgar Gutiérrez told me later that while he realized that people say the opposite about Father Mario’s demeanor that night, he personally did see the priest quietly weeping. Others described feeling strangely chilled when, after Bishop Gerardi’s body was taken to the morgue and the garage and house had been mopped and cleaned, the priest emerged from the parish house, expressionless, immaculately dressed and groomed, to walk his German shepherd, Baloo, in the park.

  Margarita López laid the bishop’s robes out on his bed, and later that morning Father Mario took the clothing to the funeral home. He oversaw the dressing of the bishop’s corpse and assisted the undertakers in reshaping the ruined face so that it would resemble the living one as much as possible.

  At about six in the morning El Chino Iván, roused from his night of soporific-induced deep sleep, had told the police of his encounter with the shirtless man, and had handed them the quetzal bill that he said the stranger had paid him in exchange for two cigarettes. Then El Chino Iván slipped away, disappearing into the city. Two days later, he would turn up at MINUGUA’s office, claiming that he feared for his life, and soon after he joined Rubén Chanax in the subterranean life of a protected witness in the custody of the Guatemalan police.

  Meanwhile in the early morning hours of April 27, in the Public Ministry, Rubén Chanax was giving the first of his many official statements. He wouldn’t get a chance to sleep until ten o’clock that night, twenty-fours after he had walked out of Don Mike’s. Along with the prosecutors, observers from MINUGUA, and the di
rector of the police, three of the young men from ODHA were present for Chanax’s interrogation. He seemed a little frightened but calm, Nery Rodenas recalled, and clearly wasn’t muddled by alcohol or drugs. Once again, Chanax described the shirtless man. He had brown skin, big eyes, a big round face, a wide mouth, a small mustache, a light beard, and curly hair, cut short, “military-style.” When challenged by his interrogator about the haircut, Chanax insisted that he had spent thirty months in the Army and could recognize a military haircut when he saw one. According to El Chino Iván’s later testimony, the shirtless man’s hair was not curly, and he didn’t have a beard.

  Rubén Chanax told his interrogators that about ten nights earlier a man known to the indigents as El Chino Guayo had turned up at the church to sleep, and that he’d asked what time Bishop Gerardi usually returned to the parish house at night. Chanax claimed to have answered that he didn’t know. El Chino Guayo was described by some of the other indigents as a crackhead with a violent temper who sometimes started loud fights outside the parish house. The police went to El Chino Guayo’s house at six in the morning, and though the youth, the son of an Army man, was in some ways an interesting character, he turned out to be the first of many apparently false leads.

  WHEN THE PARISH HOUSE was finally calm and empty of people, Otto Ardón, his assistants, and some police specialists were able to conduct a more relaxed and relatively thorough inspection. They found blood drops in a little room by the garage where ironing was done, and more on the wall outside it. They found specks and small stains of blood on other walls; there were still more traces of blood that they missed and that ODHA would find later.