The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  Fathers were fewer in number—rural men in straw cowboy hats and frayed clothing, with sad, wrinkled faces. There was one wealthy woman, like a movie star, blond, light-skinned, in dark glasses, holding a swaddled baby, accompanied by her uniformed Indian maid, who carried a cooler in one hand and a bassinet in the other. And then there were the boys, the patojos, the cholos or jomies, gang youths, or wannabe cholos and jomies, affecting the universal made-in-USA gangster style—baggy clothes, basketball shoes, do-rags—a noticeable spring to their step as they reached the outside air, some of them performing little circling, backward glances at the prison before leaving, as if amazed not to be incarcerated there, or at least not today. Teenage bad girls who hadn’t been allowed inside because their clothing didn’t meet the dress code (hems had to fall below the knees and no cleavage was permitted, or shorts or even pants) lingered around the gates, with their tattoos and lipstick and attitudes. They flirted with the boys: “Oye Gato, you’re the one who belongs in there. You’re next, jajajaja.”

  Lawyers, of course, came and went, and the occasional priest. And a group of evangelicals in polyester suits with padded shoulders, carrying Bibles and electric guitars and organs in cases, members of the 30 percent of the population that was now Protestant. (Seventy years ago there were only 2,000 Protestants in the country.) When I asked if they’d come to pray with the prisoners, they made fun of me, reciting a little nursery rhyme. I’d used the verb Catholics use for prayer, rezar, apparently implying merely rote recitation, whereas the verb they employed, orar, indicated direct communication with God.

  Now and then the gates swung open, and a pickup roared in or out in a cloud of dirt, carrying handcuffed prisoners to and from the courts. A kidnap gang called Los Pasaco, just days before condemned to death by lethal injection, returned from a hearing, and two of the members stood up in the rear of the pickup to curse at the reporters running after them, shouting questions. Two platoons of soldiers, carrying automatic weapons, arrived and filed inside to carry out a search.

  I spent much of the afternoon on a stool at Doña Lucy’s, a food stand facing the gates. Doña Lucy also rented conservative clothing to female visitors whose apparel didn’t pass the prison dress code. It wasn’t a good business, she confided, because often women turned up in clothes worth even less than those she rented and then didn’t return to claim them, absconding with Doña Lucy’s goods.

  Finally Marta Nájera de Orantes came out. She was a diminutive, steely-haired woman, forced by her new circumstances into a nearly professional air of sharp-eyed, protective reserve. She apologized for her lateness and said her son wasn’t feeling well. His migraines, ulcers, and colitis had all recently worsened. While in detention, Father Mario had been moving between prison and a private hospital where, under heavy guard, he had developed complications from asthma that led to a pulmonary infection. He’d lost weight and had been having fainting spells.

  Señora Orantes arrived at the prison every morning before dawn, bringing her son healthy vegetarian meals, and she stayed until late afternoon, when she had to go home to prepare supper for her nearly invalid husband. Father Mario had given the impression that he didn’t want to talk to journalists, although his lawyer had tried to schedule a press conference once and it had been canceled by the prison authorities. Señora Orantes told me that her son was silent so as not to jeopardize his treatment. He did receive regular visits from Catholic prayer groups, who came to declare their belief in his innocence and lend spiritual support. Even Doña Lucy had been inside to see the priest. She described him standing on his feet for hours with his mother at his side while the group she was with, led by a nun, sang and prayed for his freedom and “for everything to become clear.” When he felt up to it, Father Mario gave Masses for prisoners and heard confessions. I remarked to his mother that they must be very different from the confessions of the genteel congregation at the church of San Sebastián, and she smiled sincerely and said, “Yes, I imagine.”

  Otto Ardón’s difficulties in pinning the murder solely on Father Mario, on the basis of the dog-bite scenario, was the beginning of the end of his term as special prosecutor. Ardón had his supporters, but he had also become a widely ridiculed figure. He finally agreed to at least make a procedural gesture in the direction of investigating the EMP. He summoned all the officers listed in the anonymous document faxed to various organizations in August, the document purportedly from a disaffected military man. The interrogations of the officers took place, officially, at the Public Ministry, but they were actually held in a hotel suite. It was a fairly meaningless and perfunctory event, although much later, when Ardón was no longer the special prosecutor and Judge Figueroa no longer had jurisdiction over the case, the record of their testimony would come back to haunt some of those men.

  Captain Lima told his story about having been in the Sports Grill with his friend Erick Urízar until midnight the night Bishop Gerardi was murdered. His father, Colonel Lima, said that he had been at home resting with his wife and youngest son. He claimed that it had been years since he’d set foot in the park and church of San Sebastián. Darío Morales, who had finally been identified as the EMP photographer who was spotted in the parish house that night, could no longer deny having been there, but he said he’d arrived at around a quarter to four in the morning. He identified Major Francisco Escobar Blas, the commanding officer of the Services Division in charge of presidential security, as the man who had accompanied him. This was not true, although that was not known yet. Another member of the EMP confirmed his friend Captain Lima’s earlier account of having eaten cake with him at eleven PM, contradicting the captain’s most recent version of having returned to the EMP headquarters after midnight.

  WHEN ARTURO AGUILAR, the youngest Untouchable, went to Otto Ardón’s office to deliver some routine paperwork, Ardón came to the door in his stocking feet and launched into a speech about how everyone except him was trying to profit from Bishop Gerardi’s death. “Everybody has forgotten about Monseñor,” he railed, “and people are only looking after their own interests. I’m fucking angry [como la chingada] and I’m going to send you all to shit and you can stuff those papers up your ass.” And then the special prosecutor slammed the door. (He’d slammed the door in my face too, when I’d shown up for an interview he’d earlier promised to grant me.)

  On October 21, Judge Figueroa formally charged Father Mario with the murder of Bishop Gerardi. Two days later, Jean Arnault, the head of MINUGUA, broke the UN mission’s “diplomatic silence” on the Gerardi case when he announced at a press conference that the suspicions of a politically motivated murder and an official cover-up “are a perfectly reasonable hypothesis” that “in our judgement is fully justified…. If we think of the recent history of Guatemala, we know that groups exist that have both the capacity and the motive to carry out a political crime that has the appearance of a common crime.” Otto Ardón took a month’s vacation, and when he returned in December he submitted his resignation.

  AS 1998 DREW TO A CLOSE, at a ceremony marking the second anniversary of the Peace Accords, President Arzú went through with his long-promised public apology on behalf of the government for the suffering the years of war had inflicted on the Guatemalan people. Although the admission and the apology were in many respects praiseworthy, the timing struck observers as questionable. It was widely interpreted as a ploy to preempt the impact of the UN Commission of Historical Clarification report that was due out two months later. Rumors were swirling that the UN report was going to accuse the Guatemalan Army of genocide. Also in December, President Arzú directed his brother Antonio to contact Bishop Ríos Montt with an offer. Father Mario would be freed if the Church agreed to drop all claims against the Army and the government in the Bishop Gerardi case.

  When the ten-volume report of the UN truth commission, Memory of Silence, appeared in February 1999, it painted an even darker picture than the REMHI report had, finding the Army responsible for 93 percent of the 200,0
00 civilian deaths that had occurred during the thirty-six-year internal war. The guerrillas were said to be responsible for 3 percent. The report formally charged the Guatemalan Army with having commited acts of genocide against the rural Maya. Genocide is, under international law, a crime against humanity, for which there can be no amnesty. In March, President Bill Clinton visited Guatemala and, with President Arzú sitting in stony silence beside him, made an extraordinary apology for the decades of U.S. support of military dictatorships. “It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong,” he said. “And the United States must not repeat that mistake.”

  Unclassified diplomatic cables reveal that the U.S. embassy’s opinion of how the Guatemalan government handled the Gerardi case, which had initially been positive, had changed. The cables show that U.S. diplomats did not disagree with MINUGUA’s recent public criticisms. One of the cables says that Otto Ardón is “accused of incompetence, malfeasance, and losing evidence during his tenure.” Ardón had been replaced as special prosecutor by Celvin Galindo, a sharp-dressing, thirty-nine-year-old former soccer star. Galindo was reputed to be politically ambitious, which might turn out to be a good thing, or a bad one. But ODHA’s lawyers and investigators believed that they now had a prosecutor they could work with.

  When I went with the Untouchables to visit Galindo in his cramped little office in the suburb of Mixco, he told me he was reluctant to proceed to trial against Father Mario. “So much evidence and potential information has been lost,” he said. “Eight months have been wasted. Ardón left me with no case.” He admitted that he was feeling pressure to free the priest. “Public opinion is not convinced of the participation of Father Mario,” he said. But Galindo still suspected the priest of covering something up. “He knows more than he has told,” he said. “We have to find a way to get him to help us.” If the priest went to trial and was acquitted, he would be immune from ever again being arrested and tried for Bishop Gerardi’s murder, and would lose all incentive to reveal what he knew.

  IN THE LAST WEEKS of 1998, a new scenario had emerged that implicated Monseñor Hernández, the chancellor of the Curia, and Ana Lucía Escobar, known as La China, the pretty twenty-four-year-old daughter of Monseñor Hernández’s housekeeper. Ana Lucía Escobar turned out to be a figure of lurid tropical melodrama. A year earlier, she had been arrested for belonging to a kidnapping and crime ring, but—as is customary when a young criminal has a powerful or wealthy sponsor or connection, in her case Monseñor Hernández—she and other members of the gang were released for lack of evidence. The new theory about the murder of Bishop Gerardi was that Ana Lucía and her gang, who were called Valle del Sol for the neighborhood that was their base, had been trafficking in stolen Church icons, artwork, and relics, with the complicity of Father Mario. Bishop Gerardi had been murdered by the gang because he had found out what was going on.

  A former judge named Juan Carlos Solís Oliva, who happened also to be Colonel Lima’s stepson, announced that he was conducting an “independent” investigation of the Valle del Sol scenario. Solís Oliva was chronicling his findings in the afternoon daily La Hora, and he had written that the sources of much of his information were four intelligence agents who supposedly had conducted the EMP’s internal investigation into the murder. Solís Oliva said that he met with them regularly, although he didn’t know their names. They used aliases. He had been introduced to them by Major Francisco Escobar Blas, the man who had been identified, for the moment, as the companion of the EMP photographer who showed up at San Sebastián the night of the murder.

  But the most important source of the allegations against Monseñor Efraín Hernández and Ana Lucía, although this was not yet widely known at the time, was a Guatemalan woman who lived in Canada and who went by several names, including Blanca Lidia Contreras, and who had once been married to Monseñor Hernández’s brother. In August she had traveled from her home in Canada to testify before Otto Ardón. Her trip had been arranged by a man named Luis Mendizábal, an unofficial adviser to President Arzú.

  Blanca Lidia Contreras thought she knew—or so she said—why Bishop Gerardi had been murdered. It was because of two letters that she had written to the bishop and sent from Canada to Guatemala with a friend to be hand-delivered. Blanca Lidia claimed that when she heard of Bishop Gerardi’s murder, she’d connected the dots, and realized that her well-intentioned letters could be the source of the crime. After calling the Guatemalan embassy in Ottawa and not receiving the response she’d hoped for, she phoned President Arzú and the first lady directly. That, she claimed, was how she had found herself in contact with the presidential adviser Luis Mendizábal.

  Blanca Lidia Contreras said that Ana Lucía’s mother, Imelda Escobar, had come to work as a housekeeper for Monseñor Hernández in the early 1970s, when he was parish priest of a church called Esquipulitas. Imelda Escobar was a poor but handsome woman with five children. Blanca Lidia Contreras, by virtue of her position as Monseñor Hernández’s sister-in-law, was close to the workings of the parish house, and she noticed that the new housekeeper soon began showing signs of wealth, dressing her children in expensive clothes and enrolling them in expensive schools. Then, in 1974, Imelda Escobar became pregnant with Ana Lucía, and she implied, Blanca Lidia said, that Monseñor Hernández was the father of the child. What Imelda Escobar actually, allegedly, said to her was: “Congratulations, you’re going to be an aunt!”

  Blanca Lidia’s testimony was rife with tales of lurid happenings years earlier, when Monseñor Hernández was the Esquipulitas parish priest and the Orantes boys were among his parishioners. She described young Mario and Ana Lucía and her friends romping naked on a church altar—an entertaining image, though perhaps not an entirely credible one, considering the eleven-year age difference between Father Mario and the girl. Blanca Lida described young Mario riding around with Imelda Escobar’s gangster children in cars full of guns. She said that Mario used to bring Imelda Escobar porno films. She said that Imelda Escobar would let the adolescent Mario and his brother Sergio drink alcohol in the parish house with her sons, and that she allowed “grown women” to lock themselves in rooms with the boys to entertain them. She said that Imelda Escobar practiced witchcraft. That Imelda had placed relatives in housekeeping positions in parishes throughout the country and through that web operated her ring of stolen Church valuables. That Imelda and Ana Lucía traveled to Houston and Egypt, where they had bank accounts and did business. She also said that El Calvario, the church where the Escobars and Monseñor Hernández lived now, was a center of drug trafficking, child prostitution, and gambling, and a criminal lair for Ana Lucía’s gangster friends.

  Throughout her testimony—apparently culled from decades of family gossip, some of it, I would guess, true, but much probably exaggerated or invented—Blanca Lidia Contreras painted a picture of the chancellor of the Curia, Monseñor Hernández, trapped in an earthly hell, constantly threatened with exposure by his criminal housekeeper and their daughter, and sometimes drugged. Ana Lucía was said to have threatened to identify Monseñor Hernández as her father if he didn’t use his influence to help her and her friends. Indeed, people at ODHA had witnessed some of the titanic tantrums the tempermental vixen had thrown when she demanded his help in getting her out of some scrape. They had seen her nearly carried out of his office after having been given tranquilizers.

  Blanca Lidia Contreras told the prosecutor that the letters she wrote Bishop Gerardi asked for his help in disentangling her former brother-in-law (she was by then divorced), Monseñor Hernández, from his criminal housekeeper and her gangster daughter. She said she believed that Bishop Gerardi had been murdered because those letters had fallen into the wrong hands. She refused to identify the friend who, supposedly, had delivered the letters, saying that she feared for the friend’s safety.

  Several people told me that they had h
eard the stories about Ana Lucía being Monseñor Hernández’s daughter. There is a saying in Guatemala, “Hijo negado, pinto y parado,” meaning that if you deny that someone is your child, the child will grow up looking just like you. Ana Lucía was small of stature and pretty, and she shared Monseñor Hernández’s dark complexion, soft round face, and vivid, nearly Asian eyes.

  Ana Lucía Escobar

  Fernando Penados’s assessment of the church of El Calvario, home of the chancellor of the Curia and his housekeeper’s brood, was that “there are several of dubious genetic origin living there.” Fernando said that Ana Lucía’s identification papers had always listed her father as unknown, but that in the fall of 1998, when stories of her suspected involvement in the Gerardi case got around, a man came forward to say that he was the father. Fernando didn’t believe that Ana Lucía had had a direct role in Bishop Gerardi’s murder. He remarked that she was guilty of just about every crime but that one.

  I talked to Ana Lucía Escobar on the telephone a few times. Her voice was sweetly girlish and lilting. She denied all the accusations against her and said that she had broken up with her boyfriend of several years, a member of the Valle del Sol gang named Luis Carlos García Pontaza who had a history of arrests for such crimes as bank robbery and possession of drugs and unregistered weapons. The only time she seemed surprised was when I mentioned Blanca Lidia Contreras. I realized that Ana Lucía had no idea that Blanca Lidia had come from Canada to testify against her.