The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  “WHAT HAPPENED IS THAT Monseñor saw something extraordinary in the parish house that night as he pulled his car into the garage. And that was precisely what led to his death, because what he saw was something that was supposed to be hidden. That started an argument between Monseñor and his assailant, and his assailant ordered Baloo to attack and then he assaulted Monseñor with some blunt instrument, maybe a crowbar…. This murder was committed by one person and a dog, because the corpse had a dog bite in the back of the skull.” Mario Menchú, the defense attorney, gave this succinct account of the situation four days after the the arrest of Father Mario and one day before his hapless client, the alcoholic and lame indigent Carlos Vielman, was finally released from jail.

  Margarita López, the parish-house cook, was also soon given “provisional” liberty. Two years later, in October 2000, Carlos Vielman died of cirrhosis of the liver. El Pitti had died the year before, of AIDS.

  2

  FATHER MARIO WAS, at thirty-five, still a young priest for such a relatively quiet, genteel, centrally located parish as San Sebastián, the kind usually reserved, I was told, for bishops with overloaded schedules, like Bishop Gerardi, and old priests on the verge of retirement. Yet Father Mario had already been at San Sebastián for eight years. His duties were relatively light. He’d shared four daily Masses, six on Wednesdays, with Bishop Gerardi. His base monthly salary was 500 quetzales, about seventy-four dollars, plus fourteen quetzales for each Mass. He met and prayed with rosary groups, conducted the occasional group catechism class, heard confessions—the routine duties of a parish priest. The first Saturday of every month he made the rounds of the neighborhood to take confession from parishioners who were too old or infirm to come to church. He was said to have a sympathetic bedside manner with the gravely ill.

  When I asked the sacristan, Antonio Izaguirre, whom Bishop Gerardi used to affectionately call Tonomono (Tono is short for Antonio, and mono means cute, or monkey)—he had the disheveled, sweet-natured, lonesome air of someone who would have had trouble handling a more demanding job—if Father Mario often left the church to do charity work, the sacristan could barely restrain a laugh. Father Mario, he said, rarely left his bedroom. He was “obsessed,” the sacristan told me, “with talking on the phone.” But Father Mario was also known for the reticent brevity of his sermons. He struck some people as lazy, others as highly intelligent. Many found him unsociable, barely acknowledging Bishop Gerardi’s friends when they visited; others recalled him as gregarious and said that when he did go out, he liked to attend the dinner parties of close friends, especially those of an extremely wealthy woman in late middle age, Martha Jane Melville Novella, whom he had chosen to be “godmother” at his ordination and who gave him a birthday party every year.

  Father Mario’s relationship with Bishop Gerardi was described by some as friendly enough, though perhaps a bit perfunctory, and by others, including by some of the bishop’s relatives, as warmly affectionate. They added that Father Mario liked searching the Internet for obscure theological texts that he knew would delight his superior. Once, Fernando Penados told me, when he was working at the Public Ministry, he’d asked Bishop Gerardi for some Franciscan robes for an undercover operation he was organizing near the church of Candelaria, and it was Father Mario who had procured them.

  Father Mario’s bad health—he had migraines, asthma, colitis, and ulcers—was the usual explanation for his assignment to San Sebastián, along with his intimacy with Monseñor Efraín Hernández, the chancellor of the Curia. During their boyhood, Hernández had been like a second father to Mario and his older brother, Sergio, who was also a priest. Father Mario had studied at the Liceo Javier, a prestigious school run by Jesuits that was a breeding ground for young political activists and radicals in the 1970s and 1980s, but he became a seminarian in the conservative Salesian order. Later he was a simple diocesan priest. His family was connected to the most conservative wing of the Guatemalan Church. His mother was related to a well-known cleric—Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arrellano, an aggressive anti-communist who collaborated with the CIA in the lead-up to the coup of 1954. An old schoolmate recalled that Mario’s brother, Sergio, was nicknamed El Nazi because of his authoritarian personality and love of all things military.

  Father Mario’s schoolmates recalled also that he had wanted to be a priest since childhood. Yet something about him seemed poignantly unsuited for the austere demands of the priesthood, at least as most people conceive of that calling. There was the striking babyishness of his speech, including an overuse, even by Guatemalan standards, of diminutives. And though, as Father Mario, in his own defense, later pointed out, diocesan priests don’t take a vow of poverty, the disconcerting number of possessions in his bedroom did not seem in keeping with spiritual transcendence of the seductions of the material world. Father Mario slept in a king-size bed imported from England, made up with luxurious sheets and bedding. Most of the furniture in the room was mahogany, including shelves holding some 600 books, mainly theological, and an entertainment unit that supported a JVC television with a thirty-six-inch screen, a VCR, and a Pioneer laser-disk player. When prosecutors and police searched the room on the day of the arrest, they found approximately ninety video-cassettes (Jurassic Park, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Bordello of Blood, boxed collections of Lethal Weapon, Frankenstein, James Bond thrillers, and comedies with the Three Stooges—the last, according to Mario’s mother, his favorite performers). He had a Macintosh 6500/300 computer, an Epson Stylus 800 color printer, a collection of fifty CD-ROMS, a JVC stereo with four ambient speakers, and approximately 200 CDs of mainly classical music and soft Latin romantic pop in the style of Julio Iglesias. He had a reclining armchair and a computer chair upholstered in magenta leather. In his closet were sixty shirts, most either from Ermenegildo Zegna or custom-made in London; twelve leather jackets; twelve pairs of Italian shoes; twenty pairs of slacks and fifteen sweaters, all with designer labels; four Dunhill belts; at least six sets of pajamas; and four bottles of Dunhill cologne. He had three expensive watches, one a gold Cartier found with a receipt for more than $3,500. Along with the Walther pistol in his drawer there were several cartons of bullets, which were described as a gift from his brother Sergio and which Father Mario said he had been intending to sell. There was a framed autographed photograph of a beautiful woman who turned out to be his ordination godmother, Miss Martha Jane Melville Novella. But many of the things found in the room reflected Father Mario’s affection for Baloo. There was a stuffed felt dog on the striped bedspread, and the bedroom dresser displayed trophies that Baloo had won in dog shows, as well as a number of framed photographs of the dog. Also found in the room were photographs of Baloo with an erection, or, as Fernando Penados phrased it when describing it to an eminent Church figure, “in his maximum expression.” Fernando had then held his hands up, wide apart, and asked the prelate, “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

  Otto Ardón confiscated many of Father Mario’s belongings during twelve separate searches of his room conducted in the weeks after his arrest. Some of his clothes and a pair of Gucci shoes were sent by Ardón to Washington, D.C., for testing at the FBI crime lab, along with other pieces of potential evidence, including the cushion Baloo had slept on.

  BALOO, WHO WAS BORN in Germany and cost $2,500, was also a gift to Father Mario from his brother, Father Sergio. (Bishop Gerardi’s nickname for the pricey thoroughbred was Pecado, “Sin.”) In 1992, Father Sergio had assumed the prestigious post of rector of the Colegio San José de los Infantes, which stood alongside the Metropolitan Cathedral. During his tenure, which lasted only four years, he ran up mostly unaccounted-for bills, on the school’s bank account, of 4,008,000 quetzales (then nearly $650,000). Part of the money was spent on guns: high-caliber Colts, Tauruses, and Jerichos. The priest gave guns away, and he sold them. The guns were now a problem, because a number of those bought and registered in the school’s name were missing. Bills of sale for other missing weapons had
been found as well, along with a cache of guns that were never registered at all. In the wake of Father Mario’s arrest, the chief of police had personally come to the school and taken away all the documentation relating to the weapons.

  One reason that Father Sergio had armed himself so heavily, at least initially, may have been a problem he was having with parents over the issue of school military marching bands. Known as “war bands,” they had been omnipresent in the streets of Guatemala City—every school seemed to have its own war band—for as long as any living person could remember, marching and rehearsing dreary martial music for the September 15 Independence Day parade and other patriotic events. Father Sergio’s predecessor as rector of the Colegio San José de los Infantes had made the mistake of suspending the bands and was driven from his post by angry parents. In 1998, about 50 percent of the school’s 1,100 students were the children of military officers. When Father Sergio took over in 1992, he had reinstated the war bands, and he even organized a trip to Miami for teachers and students to buy new uniforms and instruments; it was one of the first outlays that led to the enormous debt he left behind at the school. The rector who eventually succeeded Father Sergio, José Mariano Carrera, told me that the war bands, with their fervent militarism and patriotism, were a powerful symbol of the anticommunist, pro-military, pro-oligarchy Church of the 1950s, epitomized by the Orantes brothers’ cold warrior great-uncle, Archbishop Rossell. The war bands were an expression of the peculiar character of certain sectors of Guatemalan society, and the battle over them was a parable of a clash of local values and beliefs, backward versus modern—easy to imagine as a comic provincial novel with sinister undertones.

  The parents of the students at Colegio San José de los Infantes must have been happy with Father Sergio at first. But then President Arzú and his education minister, as a gesture toward demilitarizing Guatemalan society, banned school war bands. The Colegio San José de los Infantes moved from its old quarters alongside the cathedral to a new modern complex on the outskirts of the city. Supposedly, Father Sergio began to receive threats from the parents of students angered by the long commute to the new campus, and by the end of the war bands.

  But the guns, and the millions of quetzales in debt—these were discovered later—weren’t the reason that the young priest was dismissed from his post. Father Sergio “was having problems of the Lewinsky sort,” the new rector, José Mariano Carrera, told me. “As I understand it, his being removed was due to denunciations by various female teachers before the ecclesiastical Curia.” Teachers and, it turned out, the mothers of some students, had accused Father Sergio of sexual harassment.

  Father Carrera, who was in his sixties, told me that he had been looking forward to retiring to a small coffee farm, but after it became clear that Father Sergio had plunged the venerable school into chaos, Archbishop Penados, an old friend, had asked Carrera to take over. At the time we spoke, only 1 million quetzales of the debt had been paid off. Now the school’s accounts were being overseen by a board, but when Father Sergio had been there he could write checks drawing on the school’s accounts whenever and for as much as he wished, with no oversight. “Sergio was loved here,” Carrera said. “Before he left, he gave away four pistols to his friends at the school. And, of course, dogs.” (Sergio had bought four pedigreed German shepherds that lived in his house at the school, and he bred them.) The new rector had also discovered an account at the Popular Bank of Florida in the name of both Orantes brothers, Sergio and Mario.

  Father Mario traveled to Houston at least twice a year to receive treatment for his migraines and other ailments at the Methodist Hospital there. Carrera told me that Baloo also went to Houston. “I know that dog traveled to the United States one time,” he said. “It was paid for with this school’s money. Sergio took the dog to Houston on a plane, so that his brother wouldn’t be sad.” In Houston, Father Mario reportedly stayed in an apartment owned by his wealthy ordination godmother.

  Monseñor Hernández, the chancellor of the Curia—the Church’s highly placed power broker, the man to see in Guatemala City if you needed a bureaucratic snag resolved, the man with connections and influence everywhere—had handled Father Sergio’s dismissal from the post of rector very discreetly, arranging for his transfer to another parish, with a certificate stating that he had run the Colegio San José de los Infantes responsibly. “Monseñor Hernández is like Richelieu,” Carrera said. “He’s in charge of the ecclesiastical government’s business.” The new rector paused a moment, as if to reflect silently on the ethical dilemma he was presenting. “Archbishop Penados said we have to show that we’re not hiding anything,” he continued, as if arguing with himself. “What information we have, we have to give…. What seems so strange to me is that, well, these are priests. One has to have confidence in their sanctity. If Hernández knew about what Sergio was doing, he should have told the other bishops. Archbishop Penados should be able to believe in his priests—believe in them and love them.” Carrera paused again. “The archbishop is very tired. I feel bad for him. The man he most trusted was Gerardi. His absence has been very painful for him, with good reason.”

  Shortly after Father Sergio’s problems at the school became known, he left Guatemala. At the time of the murder, he was a Jesuit novitiate at a seminary in Panama. “Sergio is very intelligent,” Carrera said. He characterized Father Mario’s godmother as “a dangerous woman.” And, he said, “I’ll tell you that, personally, I am afraid of Sergio.”

  The rector then gave voice to the thoughts that inevitably arose from the conversation we’d been having. “If you absorb this information, you’re going to notice that something like this”—he meant Father Sergio and what had happened at the school—“can seem to have a connection to a crime like that.” He meant Bishop Gerardi’s murder. “And that’s crazy, no?”

  Something like this can seem to have a connection to a crime like that. That would be the seemingly irresistible logic behind so much of the suspicion, speculation, and tendentiousness that was beginning to envelope the Gerardi case, and that was only a small fraction of what lay ahead. So much could be made and so much would be made to seem to connect. That endlessly exploitable situation was what the ODHA lawyer Mynor Melgar was referring to when he said of those who plotted the crime that when they considered who Bishop Gerardi was sharing the parish house with—Father Mario—“they must have felt like they’d won the lottery.”

  MARTHA JANE MELVILLE NOVELLA, Father Mario’s great friend and patron, was an unmarried woman from the family that owns Guatemala’s cement monopoly. She was known for her elegant beauty and iron sense of privacy as well as for lavish charity to the most conservative wing of the Church. She also made accomplished recordings of herself singing religious music, which she gave out to family and friends. José Toledo, the lawyer who had soon replaced García Pimentel as Father Mario’s representative, told me that Melville Novella and Father Mario met when she audited a theology class in which he was a Salesian seminary student. A Guatemalan who had married into the Novella family and who asked to remain anonymous said that relatives had confided that Melville Novella was obsessed with the priest and that on her frequent trips to Europe she zealously shopped for gifts for him. Melville Novella was the likeliest source—his brother Sergio’s bank accounts were another—of the many expensive items found in Father Mario’s bedroom. Bishop Gerardi used to tease the priest about the way he “exploited” that “poor woman.”

  A Guatemalan woman, a self-described “observer” of Guatemalan society, told me that when they were both in late adolescence, Martha Jane Melville Novella was “the most beautiful woman in all Guatemala.” Melville Novella’s first boyfriend, the woman told me, was an aristocratic polo player, “with the dark skin and handsome looks of a Bedouin. He was beautiful. He drove a gray Jaguar. You’d see them here and there and they were the most beautiful pair of novios anyone had ever seen. They were together from the time she was fifteen until she was in her twenties, bu
t they never married.” Later Melville Novella married a man who became a politician. But as soon as they returned from their honeymoon, the Guatemalan society observer told me, the couple separated. An aura of mystery and secrecy subsequently enveloped the heiress.

  One evening I phoned Martha Jane Melville Novella. I gave my name to the maid who answered the phone, then listened to a long train of footsteps recede and then return across what I imagined to be a highly polished floor. The maid asked the purpose of my call. I answered that I was a journalist from New York, then listened to the footsteps go away and come back again. The maid said that her mistress wasn’t in.

  THE FABULOUSLY WEALTHY WOMAN from the family with a cement monopoly, a financial supporter of the most conservative wing of the Church, and the middle-class mother of two priests who was herself the niece of a politically conservative and powerful prelate, Archbishop Rossell, and who perhaps saw the Church as a place where her sons could advance in society just as her uncle had advanced—these were Guatemalans who would naturally prefer the old Church, close to the military and ruling establishment, cozy with privilege, over the modern, more activist one, with its “Preferential Option for the Poor” and its Bishops’ Conference that issued pro-reform pastoral letters such as the “Clamor for Land” in 1989.

  “The Orantes were always very disrespectful to my uncle,” Fernando Penados told me. He said that Father Mario’s mother, Marta Nájera de Orantes, was so angry at Archbishop Penados over the removal of Sergio from the prestigious post of rector of the Colegio San José de los Infantes that she refused to speak to him at Monseñor Gerardi’s last birthday party. Two weeks after the bishop was killed, Father Mario went to see the archbishop and asked to be elevated to the post of parish priest at the church of San Sebastián. When the archbishop declined to grant his wish on the spot, Father Mario angrily departed without even saying good-bye.