The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  Most of the suspicion that fell on Ana Lucía for her role in the Gerardi case centered on her presence at the parish house on the night of the murder. She and her cousin Dagoberto had turned up with Monseñor Hernández, the first person Father Mario had telephoned. Her account of that night—that her mother woke her at about midnight, that she drove Monseñor Hernández and her cousin from El Calvario to San Sebastián, arriving minutes before the firemen—hadn’t been credibly contradicted by anybody.

  Juan Carlos Solís Oliva, the former judge and stepson of Colonel Lima, continued to write about his independent investigation into Gerardi’s murder. But he would soon fall out with his military and government contacts and give a statement to prosecutors explaining how he had sold the theory about Valle del Sol to Otto Ardón, who was an old friend from law school. In September 1998, as the dog-bite scenario was falling apart, a distraught Ardón had met with Solís Oliva in a Burger King. “He had big circles under his eyes, and physically he’d deteriorated tremendously,” Solís Oliva would recount of that meeting with the special prosecutor. “He told me that he couldn’t sleep, that he was under pressure, and he wept, right in front of me he started weeping, and he said, ‘Look, Juan Carlos, you’ve always been a strategist, I’ve always admired you,’” and he asked for help. Solís Oliva offered the Valle del Sol scenario.

  By May, when he gave his statement to prosecutors, Solís Oliva was claiming that his former collaborators in the EMP, particularly Major Escobar Blas, had threatened to kill him, and he had gone on the run, changing houses every night. Solís Oliva called Escobar Blas “a pathological killer,” although he also declared that he remained convinced of the innocence of his stepfather, Colonel Lima, and his half brother, Captain Lima. He identified Escobar Blas as a member of the Cofradía, the elite brotherhood of present and former Military Intelligence officers in which his stepfather was a leader. Solís Oliva testified that his informants at Military Intelligence had shown him the very letters that Blanca Lidia Contreras had meant to be delivered to Bishop Gerardi. He said the EMP had intercepted those letters.

  That was a curious claim. How had the EMP come into possession of the letters? Had Father Mario found them, and then passed them on to the EMP? But why would the priest do that, if the letters incriminated him? Did the EMP send somebody into the parish house to steal the letters, either shortly before or immediately after the murder? Was it possible that the letters shown to Solís Oliva were forgeries?

  Years later, in the spring of 2005, shortly after Monseñor Efraín Hernández’s death from cancer, I received a phone call from a woman speaking in French who turned out to be Blanca Lidia Contreras. She had somehow gotten hold of my number, but it was the wrong number. She was mistaking me for a French reporter who had by then emerged as one of the military’s strongest defenders in the Gerardi case. Blanca Lidia Contreras was highly entertaining to speak to on the telephone, but she did seem to nurture an obsessive desire for vengeance against Imelda Escobar. She said that after the Guatemalan earthquake of 1976, Imelda Escobar had really begun enriching herself, stealing foreign aid for earthquake victims donated through the Church. Ana Lucía, she said, was the sort of little girl who ripped up flower beds and tore the heads off baby ducks.

  Blanca Lidia had phoned me (thinking I was the friendly French reporter) because she wanted to draw attention to Imelda Escobar’s alleged financial misdeeds in the aftermath of Monseñor Hernández’s death. I put her in touch with a newspaper reporter in Guatemala City. Blanca Lidia and the reporter had a number of friendly and animated conversations—it’s hard to imagine a dull conversation with Blanca Lidia—but when the reporter tried to press her about the identity of whoever had supposedly delivered the letters to Bishop Gerardi, Blanca Lidia withdrew, and cut off all communication.

  Luis Mendizábal, the presidential adviser who arranged Blanca Lidia’s trip to Guatemala to testify to prosecutors in the late summer of 1998, was later linked, in a long investigative report published in a newspaper in El Salvador, to the Salvadoran ARENA party leaders who ran death squads and engineered the assassination of Archbishop Romero in 1980. Mendizábal was the liaison in Guatemala for the founders of ARENA; he introduced the Salvadoran Roberto D’Aubuisson to the leader of Guatemala’s ultra-right MLN (“the party of organized violence”), Mario Sandoval, who became D’Aubuisson’s mentor. ARENA, actually constituted in Guatemala in 1980, was closely modeled on the MLN. In Guatemala, Mendizábal owned a clothing boutique whose back rooms were rumored to have been a meeting place for MLN death squads in the war years. In 2000, the Guatemalan newspaper elPeriódico would report that Mendizábal was a member of a clandestine group known the Oficinita, which acted as a liaison between the Army, the government, and powerful hard-line conservatives in the private sector. Allegedly formed by General Espinosa in the late 1990s, the Oficinita was intended primarily to subvert, from inside the legal system, prosecutions that threatened the military and its supporters.

  Were the letters that Blanca Lidia Contreras supposedly wrote to Bishop Gerardi actually a ruse in which she collaborated in exchange for being invited by Luis Mendizábal to come to Guatemala and, on the record, wage her vendetta against Imelda Escobar? Solís Oliva saw the letters, and he described their handwriting and salutations, although that is not the same as having them examined by a handwriting expert. But suppose Blanca Lidia really did write the letters? Those letters provided powerful supporting evidence for the Valle del Sol scenario, and many people were desperate to discover just that sort of evidence. Why weren’t the letters passed to the special prosecutor, Otto Ardón, during the time he was thrashing around for any such evidence? Why did the letters never turn up again in the Gerardi case?

  The theory that Ana Lucía Escobar and the Valle del Sol gang murdered, or participated in the murder of, Bishop Juan Gerardi would prove to be the Frankenstein monster in this case. It was a good story, a seductive story, too good a story to dismiss, even too good not to wish, as a tabloid editor might, for it to be true. But like ODHA’s legal team, some later prosecutors on the case, and others, I eventually—years later—came to believe that the scenario might have been entirely fabricated. Perhaps the sinister Valle del Sol gang was only a group of young delinquents, including Ana Lucía, and not a true organized crime gang at all. The old family ties and perhaps the friendship between Father Mario and Ana Lucía were just another circumstance that would have made the murderers feel they had won the lottery. Solís Oliva’s confession that his ludicrous investigation was essentially phony should have been revealed immediately. But it wasn’t. He had confided to a judge and lawyers, not the public. The propaganda machine ground on, until the Valle del Sol scenario became the most popular explanation of who killed the bishop.

  In early February 1999, Monseñor Hernández resigned as chancellor of the Curia. He said that he was retiring not because of what was being said about the Gerardi case, but simply because “in less than two months I will be sixty-five, and I’m tired.” At the same time, in a move that would have repercussions for the case later, Edgar Gutiérrez resigned from ODHA and REMHI.

  DURING THE SECOND WEEK of January, the taxi driver had given a deposition to prosecutors. The taxi driver’s name was Jorge Diego Méndez Perussina, and he was the nephew of General Roberto Perussina, a former minister of defense. He had quit working and was living at home with his wife and children, receiving support and some protection from ODHA. He was a scruffy, jittery, but affable man with something of the high-strung hilarity, and even the look, of a pudgy Dennis Hopper. He’d been a drug user from the age of twelve.

  On the night of Sunday, April 26, 1998, at around ten o’clock, Méndez Perussina had picked up some transvestites who asked to be taken to Ninth Avenue, near the Red Cross headquarters in Zone 1, where there was a seedy gay bar in an alley. Instead of turning down Fifth Street, he mistakenly turned down Third—a fateful error—and when he reached Ninth Avenue his passengers said, “Let us off here, papito,�
�� and he did. He turned left onto Ninth, and then left onto Second Street, driving toward the church of San Sebastián.

  The block-long stretch of street alongside the park was isolated and dark at that time of night. A good place to pull over and smoke some marijuana, perhaps even laced with something stronger, and that is what Diego Méndez Perussina did. He opened up his glove compartment, prepared his joint, lit it, and inhaled, and when he looked up he noticed a strange scene at the end of the block. A white Toyota Corolla was parked with its door open, and some men, including a shirtless man, were standing outside it. The shirtless man had a military-style haircut and was about five feet six inches tall. Another man had his hands on the shirtless man’s shoulders, as if detaining him in some way. Méndez Perussina thought he saw a mark, perhaps a scar or tattoo, on the shirtless man’s arm. Until very recently in Guatemala, four-digit license-plate numbers, especially in certain combinations, had belonged to police or military vehicles. In an almost instinctual act—in case he should ever see the same car again when the urge was on him to get high in his taxi—he memorized the number. He rolled up his window, and suddenly another car, a gold Toyota Corolla, with no license plates, sped past him on Second Street, through the Sixth Avenue intersection, and turned onto Fifth Avenue, left, against the one-way traffic. He thought that the gold Toyota must be part of whatever police operation was going on.

  When Diego Méndez Perussina’s family discovered what he’d seen and that he was apparently willing to testify about it, he began receiving visits from relatives he hadn’t seen in years, including General Perussina and a cousin assigned to a section of the Ministry of Defense formerly known as “Vulture Central.” They suggested that if ODHA released the videotape of the statement he had already given to the Untouchables, he should retract it. When they learned that he had been speaking with MINUGUA too, they said they no longer wanted anything to do with him. The day before he was to give a statement to the special prosecutor, Méndez Perussina was forced into a car by three men who drove him around blindfolded for two hours. When the car stopped so that one of his abductors could place a call from a phone booth, Méndez Perussina managed to fling himself out the door and ran to a nearby hospital. I saw him the next day. He had raw, wet scrapes on his palms and knees.

  Méndez Perussina thought that the abduction had probably been more of an attempt to terrify him than an actual thwarted “disappearance,” and the idea of having to go into exile for his own safety after testifying seemed to dismay him as much as any other of his current prospects. “I don’t want to go,” he said to me, his eyes filling with tears. “Why should I have to leave for doing the country a favor?”

  THERE WERE OTHER DEVELOPMENTS in the case. Around midnight on December 29, Captain Byron Lima, back from Cyprus for good, had been arrested—after an anonymous telephone call to the police—outside his car on a deserted street for creating a disturbance and carrying a weapon without a license. He was drunk, or perhaps on drugs. He gave false answers about his identity, and he was carrying false identification cards. The policemen who had participated in the arrest told me that he had warned them that they would soon know what it was like to wake up in bed with the barrel of a pistol pressed to their foreheads. They said Lima strode outside the police station, still handcuffed, and announced, “I’m looking for where I’m going to put the bombs when I get out. I’m going to blow all this to shit.” He was released to military authorities within hours of his arrest.

  During the first week of January, one member of the Valle del Sol gang had been murdered, and the police announced that they had captured two others. The day before, Fernando and I had gone to a police hospital to interview Elser Omar Aguilar, a twenty-two-year-old former member of the gang who was quietly being lined up to testify about Ana Lucía Escobar’s criminal past. She claimed that she didn’t know him, but Elser said that he’d been her lover. He said that he’d met her when he was stealing cars with Carlos García Pontaza, who became her lover later. He said that Ana Lucía had paid the rent on the house in Valle del Sol that the gang used for kidnappings, and that he used to give her cocaine, to which she was addicted. He implicated her in a kidnapping gone awry, in which Ana Lucía was supposed to distract a security guard while the victim was abducted from inside his office, but the kidnappers failed to capture their prey, and another member of Valle del Sol killed the security guard with an M-16 that Elser claimed to have sold to the gang.

  Elser Omar Aguilar was awaiting trial for murder, and he had briefly been in the same prison wing as Father Mario. He described the priest rocking out to tapes of Guns ’n’ Roses and teasing gay inmates. When Fernando asked if he thought it was possible that Ana Lucía and Carlos García Pontaza could have had something to do with Bishop Gerardi’s murder, Elser said he didn’t know. “But to give you an example,” he said, “if someone contracts me to murder someone, I’m going to do it the way I like to do it. I’m not going to beat him in the head. Two bullets with an unregistered gun…. But these people like money. If they were paid to do it, they were paid well.” The price for murdering Bishop Gerardi, he guessed, would be at least 200,000 quetzales ($30,000).

  About a year after Fernando Penados and I spoke to Elser Omar Aguilar, he was kidnapped from the hospital where we’d visited him. He turned up murdered, stuffed into the trunk of an abandoned automobile.

  ONE AFTERNOON ARTURO AGUILAR, the youngest Untouchable, and I paid an uninvited visit to Father Mario and his mother in his room at the Ciudad Vieja hospital, where he was being treated for a pulmonary infection. An armed guard stood in the stairwell outside. Father Mario was wearing a bathrobe and pajamas and had grown a beard. The bathrobe looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a while. There was a sodden air of depression, of barely repressed hysteria, in the room. The priest kept his eyes riveted on the floor the whole time we spoke. He gestured angrily when I mentioned Ana Lucía and insisted that he’d never met her until she turned up with Monseñor Hernández at the parish house on the night of the murder.

  On Ash Wednesday, February 17—I was back in New York—the new judge assigned to the case, Henry Monroy, provisionally freed Father Mario, saying that he was still subject to investigation. The judge also ruled that the taxi driver’s testimony was pertinent. The ODHA lawyers had advised Méndez Perussina to leave the fact that he had pulled into Second Street to smoke pot out of his statement. The day after the judge’s ruling, the taxi driver’s name appeared in the newspapers for the first time, and his mother received a phone call from her brother, General Perussina, saying that her son was going to be killed and should flee the country immediately. He left a week later, without his wife—with whom his relationship was acrimonious and who refused to accompany him—or any of their children.

  Father Mario was convalescing at his parents’ house. His mother went to the San Francisco de Asís clinic to pick up Baloo, and a crowd of reporters watched the dog being led to the car, but they were not permitted to witness Baloo’s reunion with the priest. The night-shift veterinarian told me over the phone that a more technologically advanced cart that would help Baloo walk was being built in the United States.

  6

  FERNANDO PENADOS HAD LOST Ronalth Ochaeta’s confidence. He was too secretive. Whenever Ronalth or ODHA’s lawyers asked if they could speak to his sources, or even know who they were, Fernando said no. Then Ronalth discovered that Fernando was using ODHA’s money to pay off the sources. Rodrigo Salvadó and Arturo Aguilar, the two youngest Untouchables, knew that Fernando had contacts in Military Intelligence, but even they didn’t know who these contacts were. Fernando was trying to be a one-man version, it seems, of the sort of criminal investigations team the Church hadn’t allowed him to form in the first place. But it could be that Fernando was paying money to someone who was taking advantage of him. And it would turn out later that there were many important leads that he had ignored or overlooked. Rafael Guillamón, the investigator from MINUGUA, told me he had discovered that Ferna
ndo had at one point obtained a record of his cell-phone calls. He had apparently been trying to penetrate MINUGUA’s investigation of the murder. Guillamón suspected that Fernando trafficked in information with his sources in the EMP and elsewhere, and not always to ODHA’s benefit.

  Whatever his mistakes, Fernando Penados had made crucial contributions to the Gerardi case and had helped establish ODHA’s investigation as a force to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, when the Untouchables’ contract was up, Fernando was told that there was no longer money to pay him. Only Rodrigo Salvadó and Arturo Aguilar were kept on.

  I was still in New York. The New Yorker published my piece, and I moved on to other things. ElPeriódico published an abridged translation. I tried to keep up with the Gerardi case, logging on to the Guatemalan newspapers’ Web sites every day. But I knew that the real information wasn’t appearing there. Whenever I left Guatemala, the country turned into a ship lost at sea without radio contact. There was no way to keep in touch or to stay informed. People in Guatemala, especially if they were involved in certain kinds of work, always worried that their phones were tapped, that their mail was opened, that their e-mails were intercepted, not entirely without reason. In Guatemala, even late-night drunken e-mailers are discreet.

  Major developments in the case, I eventually noticed, were always preceded by an especially frustrating period of silence. I thought I was able to recognize when one of those was occurring, and then I would be anxious for days or weeks. Once or twice a year, at least, I managed to get to Guatemala and would catch up. On one trip I found Fernando Penados flat broke but still trying to investigate the case on his own, borrowing money to pay his sources, and persuading the other former Untouchable, Arturo Rodas, who was now working at Avis Rent-A-Car, to lend him cars so that he could get around the city.