Rodrigo and Arturo tried to convince him of their seriousness and of how much they valued whatever he could tell them. Finally the security guard agreed to speak with them, although not there in front of the gates, with cars and trucks roaring past on the highway and workers coming and going. He would meet them on a day when he didn’t have to work. Aníbal Sandoval’s real name was Oscar Chex López.
They met in a Pollo Campero fried-chicken restaurant in the municipal capital of Chimaltenango, on a corner of the tree-shaded central plaza. Chex’s condition was that they buy him a meal and a soda, so that it would look as if they were just meeting for lunch. Over the next month or so they met eight more times in the same restaurant. They always began the meetings chatting about general topics, as Arturo recalled later: “the situation in the country, the high price of basic necessities, mujeres de tragos”—loose women—“before getting around to talking, a little more deeply every time, about what Oscar knew in relation to the murder of Monseñor Gerardi.” By then they were meeting once or twice a week, and they decided to switch their meeting place to a steak house on the outskirts of town. Oscar Chex told them that he had spent twenty-seven months in El Quiché in the early 1980s, for some of that time under the command of Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, and had participated, he said, in about ten battles, including a guerrilla ambush in which twenty-five of his fellow soldiers were killed. During the latter stage of his tour, he’d been trained to conduct interrogations, especially of wounded guerrillas. Chex was a native Kakchiquel-speaker, but he could also speak K’iché, which has a similar grammatical structure, and he understood Mam as well. It was then that he was recruited into Military Intelligence.
Chex had joined the Intelligence Department of the Army High Command in 1992 and, after a period of training, had been given his first assignments, including tailing people who were under surveillance. Among them was Bishop Gerardi. He was then assigned to the Directorate of Technical Intelligence, located in Zone 13, near the Army’s main telecommunications center. Chex was put to work translating and transcribing tape recordings of intercepted telephone conversations of people who spoke in Mayan languages, including the Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú and another prominent Indian leader and congresswoman, Rosalina Tuyuc. The telephone espionage, he told Rodrigo and Arturo, was conducted in Department 111 of the Directorate, where fifteen to twenty devices used to intercept and record conversations were kept running night and day. Many of the devices were portable. From the Indian Sector of the Directorate, Chex had been transferred to the Religious Sector, spying on a number of prominent bishops, among others. He was put in charge of monitoring Bishop Gerardi’s telephones, both in the parish house and in the ODHA offices.
Chex told the two Untouchables that once, a few days before Christmas in 1993, he’d been on duty, monitoring the ODHA telephones, when he heard someone declaim from the ODHA offices, “Merry Christmas, orejas—informers—hijos de la gran puta!—sons of a giant whore” and other choice words before slamming the phone down.
“Rodrigo and I freaked out,” Arturo said to me. They knew that very story. A friend at ODHA called Panchito had recently told them how every Christmas for years he’d unleashed an obscene tirade into the telephone against the Military Intelligence agents he assumed were listening in on ODHA’s calls.
Eventually Chex had been unofficially promoted to the position of analyst in Department 112, where he processed transcribed recordings, converting and summarizing raw information into functional intelligence. File 27, begun in 1992, was assigned to Bishop Gerardi. Chex said that in his experience, such a numbered file was assigned to an individual only when that person was considered “an enemy of the State, and marked for elimination.”
Their conversations now entered an especially delicate stage—how to persuade Chex to give a pretrial deposition before the special prosecutor and judge overseeing the case, if doing so also meant that for his own safety he would have to go into exile. The Untouchables suggested Canada, usually a reliable option, and promised to explore that and other possibilities. Canada fell through, however, because it had a policy of not granting political asylum to former military men. Costa Rica declared that it was willing to help out, but it lacked a political asylum program, which usually includes helping to settle the refugee into a new life, with a place to live and, if possible, a job.
Oscar Chex offered to give ODHA documents that he said he’d taken with him from the Directorate, and that would substantiate his testimony. He said they were records of the intercepted communications of civilians who had been involved in the Peace Accord negotiations, possibly including transcriptions or recordings of Bishop Gerardi’s conversations. Rodrigo and Arturo agreed that they would like very much to see those documents.
The problem was that Oscar Chex wasn’t sure where he’d left them. Maybe they were at his father’s house, or he might have hidden them in the house of a landlady where he’d rented a room for a while, or in a house where he’d lived before that. The last-mentioned place was in the municipality of Patzicia, and the three men drove there in the Suzuki jeep, but they found nothing. Next they drove to Chex’s father’s house, in the rural town of San Juan Comalapa, at the end of a long muddy road that was accessible to vehicles only about halfway.
Chex’s father lived with his wife in a small, rustic abode with a dirt floor. Chex introduced Rodrigo and Arturo as contractors who were offering him work as a mason, a ruse that seemed to stoke his father’s suspicions. After a thorough search of the little house, Chex concluded that he hadn’t left the documents there either. Chex’s father insisted on accompanying the three men to their next destination—the woman’s house where Chex had rented a room. It was a tight squeeze for the four men inside the Suzuki Samurai mini-jeep. The woman lived in a small hamlet a long distance from San Juan Comalapa, and they drove through a rolling landscape where the harsh poverty of the Maya locals, with their scraggly corn plots, stood in striking contrast to the vast poultry farms, with rows of hangar-like coops, where Pollo Campero, the fast-food chain, raised its chickens.
“When we reached the hamlet,” Arturo recalled, “Rodrigo and I noticed that the stares directed our way were intense and suspicious, and that toward Chex they were downright hostile.” They found the woman at home. It was a typical little rural rancho of the altiplano, with cane and mud huts arranged around a dirt patio, one of which was used for storing corn. There, behind stacked sacks of corn, with Rodrigo and Arturo looking on hopefully, Chex found a red-twine net, like those used to carry oranges, stuffed with old papers, audiocassettes, and clothing. This was the cache that they were looking for.
It was late in the afternoon now, and the air had turned heavy, the sky dark and blustery. It began to pour as they were walking back to the jeep, where Chex’s father was waiting nervously. They climbed in, but they hadn’t driven far when one of the jeep’s tires blew out and they came to a halt.
“Now we were really in the shit,” Arturo said. “Stuck in the jeep with an Army spy and his father, with documents stolen from Military Intelligence, in pouring rain.” They opened the trunk and pulled out the tire and a crowbar, but there was no jack. They trudged from one little house to the next, asking to borrow a tire jack, and finally, about a third of a mile down the road of rushing mud and rain, they found someone who would lend them one, and they trudged back to the jeep to change the tire. Then they realized the jack was missing the lever that cranks the ratchet. Close by was a little store, attended, Arturo told me, by the most beautiful young Indian woman he had ever seen. She lent them a screwdriver, which they improvised into a lever. They returned the screwdriver completely bent, along with a promise—never fulfilled—to come back with a new one later.
They returned to San Juan Comalapa rain-soaked and cold. Chex’s father wanted to eat, and Rodrigo and Arturo wanted to look over the documents, to decide what to take back to Guatemala City. There, in a little cafeteria where they stopped for a meal and to go through
the papers, the two Untouchables learned the reason for all the hostile looks they’d been receiving. Oscar Chex had had some recent trouble with the law, a confusing incident, he said, in which he was innocent, but which had left him “stigmatized by the community.” When the locals had seen Chex with the two scruffy young strangers, they’d suspected that the trio must be up to no good. That was why Chex’s father had insisted on accompanying them. “Son, are you delinquiendo?”—are you out commiting crimes?—Chex’s father had asked him. If Chex’s father, known to the community as a solid citizen, hadn’t gone with them, they might well have been taken for delinquents on the prowl, attacked by a village mob, and even lynched.
The Untouchables eventually grew close to Oscar Chex and were even invited to his wedding to a young Kakchiquel woman who declared herself ready to follow Chex to the ends of the earth. Chex sometimes expressed remorse about his role in Military Intelligence, and, peripherally, the murder of Bishop Gerardi. “It was a job,” he would explain. “You have to eat….” Then he would fall silent, or even choke up. He told of the dirty tricks played in Military Intelligence on opposition political figures and human rights activists—informing wives, for example, about their husbands’ extramarital love affairs. He spoke about the training and aid received in the Directorate of Technical Intelligence from a pair of agents from the CIA.
In the first week of November 1999, Oscar Chex testified before Judge Flor de María Villatoro, the prosecutors, ODHA’s lawyers, and the requisite public defender. He and his young wife spent their last nights in Guatemala in a Catholic nuns’ residence and then were flown into exile, to another Central American country.
Chex’s testimony established that the Guatemalan Army had regarded Bishop Juan Gerardi as an enemy and had kept him under illegal surveillance since at least 1992.
ANOTHER WITNESS WOULD HAVE even greater impact on the Gerardi case. Specialist Jorge Aguilar Martínez was a member of the EMP’s Presidential Guard, where he said he had served as a personal waiter to President Arzú, and sometimes as a concierge or a janitor. On the night of April 26, 1998, according to his pretrial declaration, he’d been assigned to monitor the coming and going of vehicles from the EMP. He directly implicated Captain Byron Lima and some of his own commanding officers in the EMP in the crime.
But aspects of this witness’s testimony made the ODHA lawyers nervous. Among the soldiers Aguilar Martínez named as having probably participated in the murder of Bishop Gerardi was EMP Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva. How could that be? Obdulio Villanueva was in the Antigua Prison, serving out his sentence in the case of the slain milkman, Sas Rompich. When Aguilar Martínez finally gave his pretrial deposition before flying into exile, ODHA asked him to repress that dubious bit of testimony.
A number of EMP soldiers and military men, including both Limas, were among seventeen suspects who were required to give DNA samples to be analyzed by the FBI. But solving the Gerardi case, with its utterly contaminated crime scene and missed and mishandled evidence, meant relying on the most unscientific evidence, mainly the testimony of witnesses who each might have seen only a segment of the crime.
Celvin Galindo, several family members, and others in the prosecutors’ office were receiving telephone threats, and soon the acts of intimidation worsened. Men stalked Galindo’s children outside their school. Arlene Cifuentes had mentioned to Ronalth Ochaeta that targeting children was a signature element of the Limas’s modus operandi. Nery Rodenas’s children would also be trailed from school by thugs.
On October 6, Galindo and his wife and children suddenly went into exile. Only days earlier he’d announced that he was on the verge of indicting military men in the Gerardi case, but the FBI hadn’t provided the supporting evidence he’d been hoping for. There were whispers that Galindo had abandoned the case precipitately—that his life wasn’t really in danger, that such threats were a routine part of the job. Most parents, however, once they believe their children are in peril, wouldn’t hesitate a second about what to do.
A declassified diplomatic cable of the U.S. embassy from the time says that “Galindo’s tenure saw the investigation steadily build momentum as he focused increasingly on the mounting circumstantial evidence implicating the Presidential Military Staff [EMP] and its officers…. Early on October 7, HROFF [the embassy’s human rights officer] met with Galindo’s deputy, Anibál Sánchez, who confirmed that both he and Galindo believe the case is very close to being solved, but that they are prevented from exploring certain leads by lack of support from González Rodas [the attorney general] and the Public Ministry. As if Galindo’s resignation were not bad enough, Sánchez informed HROFF that the central offices of the Public Ministry had just ordered the Gerardi prosecutors’ security detail to abandon their posts.”
The next day, the U.S. embassy publicly expressed its concern for the safety of Judge Flor de María García Villatoro.
A FEW DAYS EARLIER, on September 29, more than a year after being taken into custody by the Public Ministry, Father Mario’s dog, Baloo, died. Soon afterward, the priest departed for Houston, Texas. Later in October, thirty-four-year-old Leopoldo Zeissig, the former assistant prosecutor under Galindo, took over as special prosecutor of the Gerardi case.
ALFONSO PORTILLO WAS ELECTED president in December 1999. Portillo was a controversial populist from the FRG Party—a party whose most popular and powerful figure was none other than the former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, who was constitutionally barred from running for president himself because of his past as a military dictator who had siezed power in a coup. President Portillo promised that he would resign if within three months his government couldn’t solve the Gerardi case. The president-elect named Edgar Gutiérrez, the former executive director of REMHI, to be the new head of the Section of Strategic Analysis, the SAE. Gutiérrez vowed to convert the SAE from a branch of Military Intelligence to a wholly civilian information-gathering and analysis agency at the service of the civilian government. That would make it the first Military Intelligence section to be demilitarized, as mandated by the Peace Accords. Gutiérrez took several present and past members of ODHA with him to the SAE, including Fernando Penados.
There was widespread expectation that the EMP would soon be disbanded, but this hopeful idea would be of short duration. President Portillo, his own considerable personal shortcomings aside, would turn out to be no less beholden to the military establishment and other entrenched murky powers than any of his predecessors. The real strongman of the FRG was General Ríos Montt, who was duly elected president of the Guatemalan legislature.
Ronalth Ochaeta soon joined his old colleague Edgar Gutiérrez in Portillo’s government as the ambassador to the Organization of American States in Washington. On visits to Guatemala around that time, I was present at long, noisy, excited, argumentative drinking sessions during which the propriety of accepting posts in Portillo’s government was discussed. I definitely agreed with those who said it was impossible for people with a past in human rights to join any government in which General Ríos Montt had such a commanding role. But Edgar Gutiérrez and others argued that Ríos Montt wouldn’t be around for long: that, after the UN truth commission’s genocide ruling, the several legal proceedings being filed, in Spain and Guatemala, against him and other former Guatemalan military dictators would soon discredit him and drive him from power, and they hoped into prison. They predicted an inside battle between dinosaurs and progressives for control of Portillo’s government. It was an unprecedented opportunity to learn the inner workings of power, they said, to move from the periphery to the center of political life.
Fernando Penados had no faith in Portillo whatsoever but, he told me, out of admiration for Edgar Gutiérrez and what he was trying to accomplish, he’d decided to follow Gutiérrez to the SAE. Others, like Mario Domingo and Nery Rodenas, were having none of it from the start. To them the whole idea of collaborating with a government in which General Ríos Montt had any role whatsoever stank of cyni
cal compromise and worse. But even they sensed that an opportune and decisive moment to push for results in the Gerardi case had arrived; that for the time being, at least during these first months of Portillo’s government, the investigation into the involvement of elements of President Arzú’s EMP, a case so quietly, secretively, and painstakingly developed over the past two years, could finally be pushed forward.
ALTHOUGH RELATIONS WERE CORDIAL between ODHA and the new special prosecutor, Leopoldo Zeissig, and his team, it could hardly have been called a collaboration at first. ODHA had trusted Celvin Galindo, and had felt betrayed when he fled, accepting a grant to study in Germany. (On a brief trip to Germany later that year Nery Rodenas found Galindo depressed, living with his family squeezed into a drab little apartment in a bleak German city, where his child’s bicycle had just been stolen from the courtyard.) They initially underestimated the chubby, prematurely silver-haired, goateed, quietly earnest, at times introverted Zeissig. The prosecution team had been moved from the far-flung office in Mixco to one at the edge of the old downtown, in Zone 2, a walled-in house with a yard that was already partly occupied by a Public Ministry organized crime unit. On previous visits there, Mario Domingo had been puzzled to see Rubén Chanax Sontay, the indigent from the San Sebastián park who was now a protected witness, washing cars in the parking lot. “He wanted work,” Domingo was told by one of Zeissig’s assistants when he asked about it, “and so we gave him some work.”
The Art of Political Murder Page 19
