The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  In March, there had been more evidentiary hearings at the San Sebastián parish house. Father Mario was instructed to re-create his movements on the night of the murder. “Bueno, Father. Put yourself in your room at ten PM and walk us through what happened from there.” The priest reenacted being awakened in his bed by the light in the corridor, going out to turn it off, heading down the corridor to the garage, and discovering the lifeless body he claimed he did not recognize as Bishop Juan Gerardi’s. Then Father Mario began to walk in circles. “In circles and circles,” Leopoldo Zeissig, then one of Celvin Galindo’s assistant prosecutors, recalled later. Finally, the priest put on his eyeglasses. For about twenty minutes, in a nonsensical pantomime, Father Mario attempted to re-create not recognizing the bishop and not knowing what to do. Both of Bishop Gerardi’s cars had been parked in the garage, indicating that he was home, whether the priest had heard him arrive or not. Father Mario perambulated all over the parish house, back down the corridor to his room to fetch a flashlight, back to the garage, out the front door to ask the bolitos if they had seen anybody, finally to the door of the cook’s room. “But he never knocked on Bishop Gerardi’s bedroom door,” Leopoldo Zeissig said, “either to check to see if he was home, or to inform his superior that there was a corpse in the garage.” Father Mario never even paused before that door as if to think about whether or not to wake him.

  Ana Lucía Escobar also put on a riveting show, leading prosecutors and ODHA’s lawyers on a trek through the parish house as she re-created her movements on the night of the murder. She said that she was studying to become an actress, and during questioning from the prosecutor Galindo, she provided long vivid accounts of her “mistaken” prior arrests. In response to another question, she replied that at home she referred to Monseñor Hernández as “Dad.”

  Darío Morales, the photographer from the EMP seen taking pictures inside the parish house that night, was summoned to the proceedings as well. He repeated the account he had given previously to Otto Ardón, saying that he had received a call from Major Escobar Blas at three o’clock in the morning, ordering Morales to meet him in the park across the street from San Sebastián. Morales denied taking pictures or entering the parish house or the garage. There was more than one lie in Morales’s account, though not all the lies were yet evident.

  Major Francisco Escobar Blas wasn’t expected to show up at the evidentiary hearing. He’d been sent to Chile on a military scholarship. But he surprised everyone by appearing on the second night. He had shaved off his mustache and “looked made of stone,” Mario Domingo observed. Major Escobar Blas was a karate expert with a tough, menacing presence and a crushing handshake. His stare was so oddly dramatic and cold that he seemed to be wearing eye makeup, like a silent film actor.

  “I’ve been ordered to tell what I know about the murder of Bishop Gerardi,” Escobar Blas said in a slow, deep voice. “All I can tell you about the murder of Bishop Gerardi is that I know nothing.” He testified that he didn’t remember what he was wearing that night at San Sebastián. He said that he’d been sleeping in his home when he received a call at about three in the morning from another commander of a Security Services corps in the EMP, telling him that there had been a fight at San Sebastián and that someone had died and that he should go and check it out.

  It was a torturously slow interrogation. After every question put to him, the major arduously copied it into a little notebook he’d placed upon a small wooden table, leaning closely over the table as he wrote, and then he would straighten up and give a curt or evasive answer. He was wearing a watch enclosed in an unusually thick black band made from some synthetic material. The lawyers wondered later if perhaps the thick watchband concealed a listening device or monitor through which the major was receiving instructions on what to say.

  The man who had accompanied Darío Morales to the church of San Sebastián the night of the murder, the man in the red baseball cap who was seen talking into a radio, had been described as tall and thin. Major Escobar Blas was square, muscular, and not very tall.

  FOUR DAYS LATER, on March 23, Judge Henry Monroy fled into exile. In addition to the Gerardi case he had been presiding over Helen Mack’s seven-year attempt, stalled by previous judges, to bring the officers who had ordered her sister’s killing to trial. Judge Monroy had been receiving threats, and he felt that the Supreme Court was not supporting him in his attempts to oversee thorough investigations that could result in bringing military men to trial in either case. Later, from exile in Canada, Monroy revealed that earlier, when he was deciding on whether to free Father Mario or to bring him to trial, he’d received a visit from an emissary of President Arzú, Howard Yang, head of the SAE. “Yang told me that he had instructions from Álvaro Arzú,” said Monroy, “that Mario Orantes should be sent to trial, but only him.”

  The day that Monroy left Guatemala, Special Prosecutor Galindo announced that he was investigating a political motive in the crime.

  IN APRIL, the head of the EMP, Colonel Rudy Pozuelos, a strikingly fastidious figure in suit and tie instead of his military uniform, and Artillery Major Andrés Villagrán, also from the EMP, testified before the new judge in the case, Flor de María García Villatoro, a tall young woman with large eyes and luxurious black hair falling to her shoulders. In her brief career she’d established a reputation for strict impartiality, with a record of decisions that left lawyers on both sides of the Gerardi case initially nervous about what to expect. García Villatoro had a diploma on her wall from DePaul University, in Chicago, where she’d taken a course in human rights law. Her office was cheerfully feminine, with vases of flowers, pretty paintings, and a dish of candies for visitors. Mario Domingo said that after his first visit there he experienced a rare, if still guarded, sensation of optimism.

  The most important revelation in that hearing was provided by Major Villagrán, who testified that on the night of April 26, he had seen Captain Byron Lima in the EMP headquarters sometime between the hours of eight and ten. This contradicted Captain Lima’s statement that after paying his credit card bill at around eight-thirty at the Sports Grill he had lingered with friends for another three hours before heading back to the EMP barracks to sleep.

  Major Villagrán would later withdraw his testimony, saying that he had been mistaken.

  RONALTH OCHAETA’S DAYS AT ODHA were coming to an end. In early March, he had undergone emergency surgery for severe ulcers and internal bleeding. The operation was bungled, and he was so close to dying that he was given extreme unction. He convalesced at home for a month and a half. His first day back at ODHA was April 16. He was going to stay only a few hours. Nery Rodenas picked him up. Ronalth’s wife, Sonia, who was a lawyer, was away from the city on business and the Ochaetas’ four-year-old son was at home with the maid. As Ronalth and Nery Rodenas drove away from the house they noticed three men standing across the boulevard, well dressed, with short hair, but tough-looking.

  Not long afterward, at ten o’clock, Ronalth was summoned to the telephone. It was his sister, yelling frantically that he should come home immediately, that armed men had broken into his house.

  Ronalth Ochaeta and several colleagues from ODHA raced to his house in three cars. His son was in a state of shock, not able to cry or utter a word. The maid told Ronalth that ten minutes after he had left that morning, the men had pressed the buzzer of the house. The maid answered by intercom, and a voice from outside said that they had “work” to deliver to Ronalth Ochaeta. She told them she wasn’t allowed to answer the door, and they said, “It doesn’t matter, we’ll leave it in the living room.” The maid responded that the door was locked. Over the intercom, the voice answered, “We have a key.”

  She ran downstairs and found the three men already inside. They shoved her onto a sofa, struck her, and aimed a pistol at her. Ochaetas’ son screamed, “Don’t kill her!” and tried to kick one of the men, and they flung him aside. One of the men held a pistol on the boy and the maid and warned that if they di
dn’t stay quiet, he would shoot. They were clumsily tied together with blankets and rope. While one man remained in the living room, the other two ransacked the house. It seemed as if they were searching for something specific, yet all they took were some of Sonia’s jewels and the family’s passports. They drank beer from the refrigerator. After forty minutes they left, but first they said, “Tell Ochaeta that we left this job for him in this box. He knows what’s going to happen if he keeps fucking around.” Inside the cardboard box was a concrete chunk similar to the one that had supposedly been used to strike Bishop Gerardi in the garage.

  The street out front filled with reporters, police, people from MINUGUA, emissaries from foreign embassies, and so on. The police stayed for seven hours. Later the sloppy manner in which the crime was carried out was commented on by some, and even aroused suspicion—why would the intruders have left behind the beer cans they drank from? But the men may have been confident that they had nothing to fear from a police investigation. Eight years had passed since the murder of the police detective José Mérida, who had tried to investigate the EMP’s role in Myrna Mack’s murder, and since then no successor—not a single one—had dared to follow any trail of evidence past the security gates on the Callejón del Manchén.

  That night, as he held his weeping wife in his arms, Ronalth Ochaeta felt a great emptiness. The house was under twenty-four-hour armed protection, but of course the Ochaetas could not live that way indefinitely. The bishops, Amnesty International, diplomats—everyone was telling Ochaeta that it was time to put his family first, and leave the country, at least for a while.

  They moved out of the house, and during the time they remained in Guatemala they lived in the residence of a foreign embassy, with protection provided by MINUGUA. One day an Italian policeman from MINUGUA told Ronalth that Jean Arnault, the head of the UN Mission, said that there was a woman who knew him and who wanted to speak to him about what had happened. “Who is she?” Ronalth asked, and the Italian policeman answered that it was confidential, that she was also under MINUGUA’s protection.

  A few days later, a meeting was arranged in a café. Ronalth did, indeed, know the woman. She was Arlene Cifuentes, a woman previously involved in progressive political circles. She wanted to know all the details of what had happened during the break-in at his house. Ronalth asked why, and she said that the same thing had happened to her, and she thought the same people were behind it.

  “Do you remember a woman phoning the archbishop’s office and giving the name of Byron Lima?” she asked. “Well, that was me.” She told him that Jean Arnault knew the whole story. Captain Byron Lima was her cousin, the son of her aunt, her mother’s sister. “He’s crazy,” she said. One day the captain’s father, Colonel Lima, had driven to her house and rammed his car into the garage door. Enraged and cursing, he demanded to know why she’d phoned the archbishop. How, he shouted, could she defend that communist son of a whore Gerardi?

  The people who had broken into her house hadn’t stolen anything. She had also been receiving telephone threats, warning that she knew what would happen if she didn’t stop talking. Her young daughter was briefly abducted at a shopping center, which drove her to seek the protection of MINUGUA. She and her children were living now in Jean Arnault’s private residence.

  Ronalth had the impression that MINUGUA was encouraging Arlene Cifuentes to testify in the case. He also urged her to do so. But Cifuentes said that she was frightened. She didn’t believe that anyone would dare to prosecute the Limas; she feared that they would get away with whatever they had done and she would be left vulnerable to their anger.

  Ronalth asked why she was so sure the Limas had been involved in the bishop’s murder. She repeated the story that ODHA had already heard from another source, about the colonel’s distraught wife coming to see her sister, Cifuentes’s mother, Meche, after the bishop’s murder, and telling Meche about the conversation she’d overheard between other military officers and the colonel in his little shop.

  On June 30, Ronalth and his family flew to San José, Costa Rica, where he had accepted a job with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Months later, Arlene Cifuentes’s story leaked out. Guatemalan newspapers began reporting that a secret witness, supposedly living in Jean Arnault’s house, someone close to the Limas, was preparing to testify in the Gerardi case. And then her name got out.

  Arlene Cifuentes convened a press conference in the Guatemalan National Congress and announced that she knew absolutely nothing about the Gerardi case or about any involvement on the part of her military relatives. She said that she had no idea why people were trying to implicate her in the case.

  As Ronalth wrote to me in an e-mail: “And kaput.” Cifuentes retreated back into her private life and silence.

  Years later I spoke with Rafael Guillamón, the Spanish investigator for MINUGUA, who had befriended Arlene’s mother, Meche. He told me that she had frequently spoken about Captain Lima’s extortions, and of his participation in threatened kidnapping plots against her daughter.

  During this interregnum in the case the diminutive lawyer Mario Menchú, reemerged in the press, now calling for prosecutors to investigate Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez. It was as if, offstage, a new scenario was already being developed to replace Valle del Sol, should that one falter: Ronalth and Edgar Gutiérrez had embezzled money from ODHA, and when Bishop Gerardi found out the two had organized his murder.

  Shortly before he left for Costa Rica, Ronalth was warned by an employee of ODHA named Guillermo Monroy that the Public Ministry was investigating him, along with Edgar Gutiérrez and Helen Mack, for narco trafficking. Perhaps the plane, registered in Colombia, that had mysteriously crashed on Mack’s father’s farm had been part of this “investigation.” Monroy said he had heard that Ronalth and Edgar Gutiérrez were going to be accused of laundering the proceeds of their drug dealing through ODHA and Helen Mack’s real estate business.

  During the summer of 1999, when Helen Mack and I both, for separate reasons, happened to find ourselves in Madrid, we decided to visit the Professor Reverte Coma Museum of Anthropological Forensics, Paleopathology, and Criminology. The museum was not listed in the phone book or in any tourism guide, but a friend helped us locate it at the Complutense University medical school, where Dr. Reverte Coma was now a professor emeritus. The museum, which consisted of two rooms, was situated at the far end of a long corridor on the top floor of one of the campus’s outermost pavilions, adjacent to a room holding a collection of some 2,000 skulls heaped in piles atop long tables. Among the trinkets, fetish objects, and artifacts of crime displayed in the museum were a shriveled human fetus on a leather necklace “confiscated from a hippie,” and a long cord made from condoms tied together, ingeniously fashioned by a prisoner to use in an attempted prison escape. Rubber snakes and cheap Indian masks like those sold in the gift shops at Guatemala City’s airport were exhibited in a glass case full of objects purportedly connected to witchcraft and voodoo. A mural displayed portraits and rudimentary facts about famous serial killers, including New York’s Son of Sam. The phrase “The Greatest Serial Killer of All: Abortion” appeared in bold letters.

  The balding, benevolent-seeming Dr. Reverte Coma, with his snowy brows and mustache, was present that day, in a white lab coat. He was clearly delighted to have visitors. An ordinary shop mannequin’s detached head, brightly colored like a map to represent different sections of the singular brain of Spain’s most notorious serial killer, was on a table. “This is my invention,” the eminent forensics specialist proudly announced, pressing a button. The microwave oven dish on which the head was mounted slowly began to revolve.

  Dr. Reverte Coma did not recognize me from nearly a year before, when we had met on the morning of the exhumation of Bishop Gerardi’s corpse. But as we were leaving, he asked us to sign the museum guest book, and when he saw Helen Mack’s clearly printed signature, his bright blue eyes lost their friendly sparkle and he stiffened. I asked about his par
ticipation in the Gerardi case, and he asserted that it was at a most delicate stage right now, most delicate and interesting, and that he was not allowed to discuss it.

  RODRIGO SALVADÓ AND ARTURO AGUILAR had been unsure how to proceed after Fernando Penados and Arturo Rodas left ODHA, but they started by carefully sifting through boxes filled with random information that had never been followed up, and they found several provocative leads that had somehow been missed. One involved a man who, in 1998, soon after the murder, had turned up at ODHA, presenting himself under the pseudonym Aníbal Sandoval. Fernando had not been interested in the man’s information, but Rodrigo and Arturo thought that it was worthwhile to try to find him again. Apparently he was a former military man, and from the way he had introduced himself, it seemed that he worked—or at least had worked in 1998—as a private security guard. On the off chance that the man might use the name Aníbal Sandoval in his working life, they made inquiries with several of Guatemala’s numerous private security firms: Wackenhut, Grupo Golán, and Sistemas Israelíes de Seguridad, to name only the most well known. Because of the natural secrecy of private security firms and the hostility with which most of them regarded human rights groups, the two young men received little cooperation.

  The man had given an address in the department of Chimaltenango, a few hours’ drive from the capital, and Rodrigo and Arturo went out there in ODHA’s beat-up Suzuki Samurai mini-jeep. A woman who answered the door at the house said that Aníbal Sandoval no longer lived there, but that she thought he was employed by Don Bang, an immense Korean-owned textile plant on the Pan-American highway. A uniformed guard at the plant affirmed that Aníbal Sandoval did work there but that it was his day off.

  So Rodrigo and Arturo returned on another day. This time when they called at the security gate the guard on duty, a different one, replied that he was Aníbal Sandoval. He was a slight, well-built, self-possessed Mayan-featured man with dark, penetrating eyes. He was clearly disconcerted by his visitors: the lanky, ponytailed Rodrigo, and the burly slacker Arturo, with his close-cropped hair and earring, both in their early twenties. They explained why they were there and he at first denied that he’d ever approached anyone at ODHA, but they persisted, and he finally relented. Yes, he’d come by ODHA’s office, he said angrily, and with the good intentions of giving them some information. As a former member of the Guatemalan Army, he’d been taking an obvious risk in doing so, but the person who dealt with him at ODHA had told him that his information didn’t have much to do with the case. He said he wasn’t interested in another meeting with ODHA now.