The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  The day after the encounter in the Burger King, El Chino Iván’s father phoned MINUGUA’s investigators to say that his son had information about the Gerardi case and that he was frightened. El Chino Iván—who was tall, fair-skinned, and well spoken—soon turned up at MINUGUA headquarters and told Rafael Guillamón that Rubén Chanax had told him that he was with G-2, Military Intelligence. He said that Chanax often boasted about his knowledge of weaponry and that he had said that in ninety days a limpieza social, or social cleansing, of the park—an operation, usually carried out by police, in which undesirables were “eliminated”—was going to begin. El Chino Iván asked for protection. His father wanted him to go to the United States, but it was his immediate fate to pass into the custody of the police as a protected witness alongside Rubén Chanax.

  When Guillamón interviewed Chanax, he asked about El Chino Iván’s assertion that he worked for G-2. Chanax admitted telling him that, but said that he’d been lying. He only wanted to frighten his friend, to keep him from robbing and breaking into cars near the park. Chanax said that he had been shanghaied into the Army when he was sixteen, like so many other poor Guatemalan boys. He remembered the names of his commanding officers and squad leaders. There was really no reason to doubt that he had a military past, and that, like some of the others who lived in the park, he had drifted into the life of the homeless after being discharged. Later Chanax told someone else in MINUGUA that El Chino Iván worked for military counterintelligence.

  Were these claims simply fantasies and boasts? Apparently Chanax did not repeat them to Otto Ardón and his prosecutors or to the police.

  THE FIRST PIECE OF EVIDENCE that pointed, however circumstantially, to a military connection to the crime was the license-plate number that the taxi driver had given to Father Quiróz. The minister of the interior had asked Ronalth Ochaeta for the name of the witness who had taken down the plate number, claiming that without this information he couldn’t attempt to identify its owner. But Arturo Aguilar and Rodrigo Salvadó had already hired, with Ochaeta’s permission, a tramitador, someone whose job it is to undertake bureaucratic procedures—guiding paperwork through red tape, knowing when to grease a palm—on behalf of others, an occupation that is a Latin American institution. The tramitador took care of the necessary business at the registry of motor vehicles and discovered that the license-plate number had once been attached to the Chiquimula military base.

  The Chiquimula base had been shut down the year before, and the vehicle that bore license-plate number P-3201, a pickup truck, was now registered to the Army High Command in Guatemala City. ODHA passed this information to the commission appointed by President Arzú, and from one day to the next, according to Ronalth Ochaeta, all records of the plate vanished except for the documents ODHA had in its possession. When Ochaeta complained that the Arzú commission was not cooperating in regard to the information, the Defense Ministry issued a statement explaining that the pickup had been sold, but then was forced to acknowledge that the pickup had been sold without the license plates. Finally it was acknowledged that one of the two plates numbered P-3201, which should still have been in the possession of the Army High Command, was missing.

  On April 28, the same day Mynor Melgar learned of Father Quiróz’s encounter with the taxi driver, an anonymous telephone call had been received by a receptionist at the archbishop’s office. A woman said to tell Archbishop Penados to investigate “Colonel Lima Oliva,” and then she said, “Investigate the Limas.” She described herself as a friend of the archbishop and of Monseñor Quezada, a prominent bishop with a conservative reputation, but she would not give her name. This was just one of countless anonymous tips that reached ODHA. The legal team and the Untouchables had quickly learned that information arriving in this manner was often intended to mislead, and so far almost none of it had proved useful.

  There was no Colonel Lima Oliva in ODHA’s database. But there was a Captain Byron Lima Oliva in the EMP’s Presidential Guard. Indeed, he was the officer who had been thrown from his horse and broken his arm during the incident in 1996 that cost the milkman Sas Rompich his life. And there was a recently retired Colonel named Byron Disrael Lima Estrada, who turned out to be the father of the young Lima in the EMP. Colonel Lima Estrada lived in the Colonia Lourdes, a comfortable neighborhood where military officers make their homes. The retired colonel was said to run a little grocery store out of his garage.

  Colonel Lima Estrada was a most unlikely shopkeeper. In 1988, he had commanded the Chiquimula military base—the same base to which plate number P-3201 had formerly been assigned. That immediately caught ODHA’s eye. The colonel had had an exemplary military career during the cold war period. A number of files on him held by the U.S. Defense Department and the CIA had been declassified, and the records were posted on the National Security Archive Web site maintained by George Washington University. Colonel Lima Estrada was an anticommunists’ anticommunist and a legendary counterinsurgency officer. The colonel’s visceral hatred of communists was explained by his painful personal history: his father, a military officer who had led a lethally repressive operation against university students after the coup in 1954, was assassinated by left-wing guerrillas in the 1960s. Lima Estrada was a graduate of Guatemala’s Escuela Politécnica, the training academy for Army officers. He had studied at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, and also took an elite U.S. military course in counterespionage and “special operations” in Panama.

  During the 1970s, Lima Estrada was an officer in the Regional Telecommunications Center, a special political-intelligence unit inside the presidential palace, described in the National Security Archive as a predecessor of the EMP’s “notorious ‘Archivo.’” By 1981 he’d been promoted to the rank of colonel. According to one declassified U.S. intelligence report, in the early 1980s Colonel Lima Estrada “was extremely successful as commander of the most important Mil Zone (20 Quiché).” Apparently he’d assumed his command in El Quiché just after Bishop Gerardi had closed the diocese there. At least five massacres of Mayan peasants by the Guatemalan Army occurred under Colonel Lima Estrada’s command in El Quiché. In an interview given to the Wall Street Journal in 1981, the colonel named Napoleon and Hitler among his heroes. Later he commanded an airborne special forces unit that played a central role in counterinsurgency campaigns and also, according to the National Security Archive, “founded an elite ‘Kamikaze’ Counterinsurgency Tactical Unit to carry out political executions and other hits, directed by the president and his key intelligence advisers.” Those advisers met in secret to decide the life and death of Guatemalans under the auspices of a group known as CRIO (Centro de Reunión de Información y Operaciones) that was later revived, according to the National Security Archive, under the government of General Mejía Víctores, which took power after a coup against General Ríos Montt in 1983.

  During that era of massacres in the countryside, the Guatemalan Army received fulsome public support from President Ronald Reagan, who famously declared General Ríos Montt the victim of “a bum rap.” In 1983, three Guatemalan U.S. Aid workers were killed, and even the U.S. ambassador said that they had been murdered “by the presidential intelligence unit, the ‘Archivo,’ in reprisal for recent U.S. pressure on human rights in Guatemala.” From 1983 to 1985, in the government of General Mejía Víctores, Colonel Lima Estrada was the director of Military Intelligence, G-2. In 1999, less than a year after the murder of Bishop Gerardi, the National Security Archive procured and published an extraordinary dossier, a “logbook” kept by G-2 of death-squad operations in the years when Colonel Lima Estrada was at the agency’s head, documenting the cases of 183 murdered civilians, with individual photographs, from August 1983 to March 1985. That example of G-2’s zeal for record keeping might seem puzzlingly self-incriminating, though it is hardly the first instance in world history of criminally repressive and even murderous government entities displaying an earnest faith in the self-absolving guarantees of bureaucratic procedure and ord
er.

  Soon after Guatemala’s first democratically elected civilian president in decades, Vinicio Cerezo, came to power, in 1986, Colonel Lima Estrada found himself languishing in the military backwater of the Chiquimula base, in the dry eastern lowlands. He seemed to be out of the game, far from the remaining war zones or the internecine machinations of the capital, where Defense Minister General Héctor Gramajo was consolidating his own position and pushing aside hard-line officers whom he considered excessively hostile to Guatemala’s democratic opening. From Chiquimula, Colonel Lima Estrada soon emerged as one of the leaders of a failed coup against President Cerezo’s government. His punishment was to be sent to the country’s embassy in Peru as military attaché, where he continued to be involved in coup plotting from afar, and then to Nicaragua. The declassified reports also reveal that charges of corruption were leveled against Colonel Lima Estrada only two weeks before the attempted coup. It was alleged that in the mid-1980s he had participated with two other officers in defrauding the Army of 1.5 million quetzales, and this at a time when the national currency still had a strong value against the dollar.

  Colonel Lima Estrada, by his institution’s standards, had had a spectacular career, yet he had never been promoted to the rank of brigadier general. The reason, according to declassified reports, was political. “Lima is very strong-willed and highly outspoken,” wrote the author of a U.S. intelligence report. “That coupled with his very conservative philosophy and ideology makes him a bit dangerous in a budding democracy.” He belonged to a group of influential active and retired Military Intelligence officers known informally as the Cofradía (as the secretive religious brotherhoods in Mayan villages and towns are also called), and to the larger, and official, group of retired officers and war veterans known as AVEMILGUA (Association of Military Veterans of Guatemala). It was on behalf of the latter organization that the colonel had turned up to testify to the truth commission after the Peace Accords in 1996. That had been a defiant performance. When the commission members turned on their tape recorders at the beginning of the session, the colonel opened his jacket and showed them an electronic device he was carrying. “I’m recording also,” he said. He denied, during that brief, blustery session, that during the war the Guatemalan Army had been guilty of any illegal transgressions against the lives or physical integrity of anyone whatsoever. The retired officers met regularly with General Marco Tulio Espinosa, the head of the Army High Command, to discuss their concerns about how the Peace Accords might affect the Army and the officers who had fought and won the war, especially given the increasingly vehement, amnesty-defying calls for a reckoning and prosecution of past human rights violations.

  Another tip, two tips really, linking Colonel Lima Estrada to the Gerardi murder would filter down to both OHDA and MINUGUA from, I learned later, his sister-in-law, in whom his wife had confided. The wife was distraught because she had overheard a conversation between her husband and other retired officers in the little store in Colonel Lima’s garage. She heard the officers say to her husband, shortly before the murder, “No te rajes, Lima,” or, “Don’t get cold feet on us.” And she’d heard her husband reply, “We had to do much worse things during the war.” The day after the murder he got very drunk. When the wife realized the significance of what she had heard, she went to her sister, Meche, who told the story to her doctor, Carlos Pérez Avedaño, who in turn told two friends. One of those friends phoned ODHA. The other, an architect named Sergio Búcaro, brought the information directly to President Arzú, who was his friend and neighbor. Arzú told Búcaro to go to the EMP. A few months later, Búcaro was named Guatemala’s ambassador to the Vatican. Rafael Guillamón at MINUGUA believed that Búcaro had been rewarded for keeping silent about what he knew.

  There was not nearly as much information available about the colonel’s son, Captain Byron Lima Oliva. He was one of the young officers in charge of President Arzú’s security detail. About thirty, tall, dark, athletic, handsome, possessed of a striking intensity and verbal facility, he was said to be well regarded by most of his fellow officers, but he was also dogged by rumors of a dangerous emotional volatility. He was a former Kaibil special-forces soldier who had first seen combat at the age of seventeen in some of the campaigns of the 1980s. The Kaibiles are an elite commando force known for their cruelty. Their motto is, “If I go forward, follow me. If I stop, urge me on. If I turn back, kill me.” Their involvement in massacres of civilians is well documented, and REMHI’s report recommended that they be disbanded.

  Captain Lima had belonged to the controversial anti-kidnapping commando unit of the EMP to which his father, the retired colonel, reportedly served as an adviser. Given the inability of the police and the Public Ministry to confront Guatemala’s skilled, ruthless kidnapping rings, the EMP had been called on to perform much of the police work in high-profile or especially delicate cases. Alhough many kidnapping rings were known to involve military men and police, the unit had some successes, but it had also been implicated in disappearances and was accused of making off with ransom payments.

  The Untouchables discovered that on April 26, the Sunday that Bishop Gerardi was murdered, Captain Lima had flown into Guatemala City on American Airlines flight 927 from Argentina via Miami, landing at one in the afternoon. (He had been in Argentina arranging advance security for a presidential visit.) Captain Lima claimed, in a statement to prosecutors, that he had been with a friend, Erick Urízar, in a bar called the Sports Grill until eleven-thirty that night, and had gone directly from the bar to his barracks in the EMP headquarters, arriving around midnight. But ODHA had conducted a check of credit-card receipts and discovered that, although the captain had indeed been in the bar, he had paid his bill at eight-twenty-two. Captain Lima then explained that although he had paid the bill at the earlier hour, he and Urízar had run into two people they knew and had sat with them in the bar until eleven-thirty. On another occasion, he said that after arriving back at EMP headquarters, he had eaten cake with someone there at around eleven. Other EMP members would give conflicting accounts of whether and when they had seen Captain Lima that night. He claimed that he didn’t learn of Bishop Gerardi’s murder until the next day, despite his having spent that night in the barracks, within blocks of the church of San Sebastián.

  A month after Bishop Gerardi’s murder, Captain Byron Lima Oliva was sent to Cyprus as the sole Guatemalan member of an Argentine military detachment of UN peacekeepers.

  THE CHURCH WANTED to keep its distance from President Arzú’s High Commission, but Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez, accompanied by Helen Mack, attended some of the sessions. One of these sessions, they discovered when they arrived, was intended to be a serious discussion of the case against Carlos Vielman, the alcoholic indigent who was still under arrest. “We became very belligerent,” Ronalth told me later. They derided the case, and one of the commission members, Gustavo Porras, a former guerrilla ideologue who had been a key architect of the Peace Accords and who was now President Arzú’s personal secretary, responded defensively. Porras looked like a caricature of a nineteenth-century radical intellectual: thin, pallid, arrogant, with a large bulb of a forehead. He began to speculate that the bishop’s murder might have arisen from a plot inside the Cofradía, the brotherhood of mostly retired Military Intelligence officers, to destabilize President Arzú’s government. Gutiérrez answered that this could be, but only if they had employed the logistical advantages, infrastructure, and the authority of the EMP. This led to more heated words, the exact nature of which is in dispute. Ronalth Ochaeta recalls that Jean Arnualt had to physically step in, trying to calm the angry men. Soon afterward, the High Commission ceased to meet or even to exist.

  ODHA believed that the early evidence and leads in the case—the unexplained presence of the two men from the EMP at San Sebastián on the night of the murder, the license-plate number, the activity the taxi driver had glimpsed on the street by the church, the anonymous tips about the Limas—indicated that
the murder was carried out by, or at the very least aided by, a clandestine intelligence unit, most likely from within the EMP. But some members of President Arzú’s inner circle were convinced that they had access to far better information than was available to ODHA. They knew that a different spin could be put on the crime, shifting responsibility from the Army to the Church. In this version, which would soon be developed by prosecutors, the murder was a domestic crime of passion, un lío de homosexuales. That is how, according to witnesses, it was described by none other than General Marco Tulio Espinosa, the head of the Army High Command, at a cabinet meeting the morning after the murder. This piece of highly confidential information, for the moment too explosive and too disrespectful to be made public to a shocked, grieving, largely Catholic nation, was passed by President Arzú and members of his government and military officers to influential businessmen and media figures. It went through diplomatic back channels and soon began sprouting, in whispers and innuendo, everywhere.

  The homosexual angle was played up most grotesquely by Mario Menchú, an abrasive, hustling defense lawyer of little particular accomplishment or renown who offered his services, at no charge, to the indigent Carlos Vielman. As a defense lawyer, he could hardly have been more ineffective, but he displayed a talent for getting himself into the newspapers, and he also aroused suspicions. Instead of asking that Vielman’s friends from the cantina La Huehueteca be called to testify about his client’s whereabouts on the night of the murder—the most obvious defense—why did Menchú take another tack?

  “I’ve been consulting medical forensics specialists,” the agitated lawyer announced at an impromptu press conference, “and they say these kinds of crimes have something to do with passion. Why? Because the aggressor causes the total destruction of the face and head, true? Even the destruction of the genital organs. How many blows did Monseñor Gerardi receive in his face? … This also has something to do with, for example, the sexual deviations, … such as homosexuality, necrophilia, eating cadavers, pedophilia.” Menchú implied that the deviant he had in mind was Father Mario. “Why don’t they want to interrogate Mario Orantes?” he asked. “Why doesn’t he want to help?” He said that an exhumation of the body and an examination of the bishop’s genitals would prove his theory.