More than two years later, in the summer of 2002, when he was no longer in Guatemala, Leopoldo Zeissig would tell me the story of Rubén Chanax Sontay’s emergence as a key witness.
Two weeks after Zeissig had taken over as special prosecutor of the Gerardi case, he was told that the National Police no longer wanted the responsibility of caring for Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván. Two big-bellied assistant prosecutors—Anibál Sánchez and Mario Castañeda—went to visit the men in their rooms in the Hotel Arlington, a sleazy place downtown. The assistant prosecutors found Chanax and El Chino Iván desperate from boredom and uncertainty about the future. It was then that Chanax said that he wanted something to do, that he wanted to work.
Throughout their confinement Chanax and El Chino Iván had stuck to their respective original stories, in those aspects where the stories coincided but also where they differed. But Chanax’s quiet, aloof, yet watchful demeanor left the prosecutors with the nagging impression that there was something he wanted to say. When Zeissig decided to give Chanax work washing cars, he told his assistants: “That son of a whore knows more.” They needed to cultivate a relationship with him. They would play good cop, bad cop, Zeissig decided, with himself cast as the bad cop. Anibál Sánchez began taking Chanax to the movies, the former vagrant’s great passion. Chanax always arrived at Zeissig’s headquarters accompanied by two police guards. But while he was washing cars in the lot, sometimes the police would go off for lunch or leave for other reasons. While the police were away, and later, when Chanax had finished with his chores, the prosecutors would let him come inside to watch cartoons and movies on television.
“He was introverted and timid at first,” Zeissig said. “But you could see that he was intelligent. He noticed what people wore. He’d say, ‘You’ve been wearing that tie for a week.’”
One day Chanax said to Anibál Sánchez, “Father Mario knew.” But that was all he said.
Special Prosecutor Leopoldo Zeissig
Zeissig called Chanax into his office and accused him roughly of knowing more than he’d told so far. That routine continued for several days. But Chanax remained stubbornly silent.
Then, one afternoon in late November, Chanax responded, “If I tell you what I know, they’ll kill us both.”
Zeissig waited for Chanax to explain what he meant, but he wouldn’t say anything more that day.
“This cabroncito has screwed us now,” Zeissig told his staff. He suspended their Christmas vacations so as not to interrupt the daily routine with Chanax.
One afternoon, Zeissig sat down with Chanax and showed him grisly crime-scene photographs taken inside the parish-house garage. “Look at Monseñor,” Zeissig told him. “He defended a just cause. If you want to have a good conscience, or if you have something to say, then we’ll defend you.”
After a long while, Chanax broke the silence: “He wasn’t the way he is in the photos.”
La gran puta, here it comes, thought Zeissig. And he waited.
“What happened,” Chanax finally said, “is that they moved him.”
“Who moved him?” asked Zeissig. “Did the firemen move him?”
“Not the firemen.”
“Who?”
“They’ll kill me if I tell.”
“Who will kill you?”
“You know who,” said the former park vagrant. And then he fell silent again.
“You have to let witnesses go at their own speed,” Zeissig told me. “We all choose our moments.”
ON JANUARY 17, 2000, a journalist named Pedro Pop published a brief story in Prensa Libre about Chanax and El Chino Iván. Pop wrote that they had been living in police custody at the Hotel Arlington, and that he had spoken to them. In the article, El Chino Iván complained bitterly about the prison-like conditions they were living under and asked to be taken out of the country. He said that he and Chanax feared for their lives. “But without a doubt, of the two indigents Chanax is the one who is most worried about his situation,” the reporter wrote, “because he has received threats from people who’ve said: ‘If you keep squealing, you’re going to die.’”
The story was a scoop, though it wasn’t all news to ODHA. The Arlington Hotel rented rooms cheaply to lovers by the hour, and once, when one of the young men from ODHA had slipped away there with his fiancée in search of that privacy so precious to young people still living at home with their parents, he had spotted Chanax, and police guards, in the lobby. But if it was true that Chanax had been threatened for “squealing,” to whom was he squealing, and about what?
ODHA’s lawyers were taken by surprise when they received a communication summoning them to the special prosecutor’s office at four in the afternoon on the very day the article appeared, to hear the official pretrial deposition of the protected witness Rubén Chanax Sontay. Suspecting a trick of some kind, they filed a motion to block the hearing, at least until they could learn more about what to expect. But Judge Flor de María García Villatoro declared their motion out of place.
The untimely appearance of the article in Prensa Libre—especially its revelation that Chanax was talking—had forced Zeissig to bring Chanax before the judge well before he wanted to. Chanax and El Chino Iván had told the reporter much more than they should have. Only frantic last-second telephone calls from Zeissig had persuaded him to refrain from printing more.
Chanax testified for seven hours that day, until nearly midnight. When he was finished, Judge García Villatoro asked Zeissig when he wanted to issue the arrest orders, and Zeissig asked the judge for a little more time. There was much to prepare. Arrangements had to be made for Chanax to go into exile. (He remained in the country until April.)
ODHA’s lawyers left the Public Ministry office that night knowing that what they’d just heard was “momentous.” As Mario Domingo later put it, they were feeling so excited but also frightened by what lay ahead that “we were carrying our balls in our hands.”
ON JANUARY 19, arrest orders, to be executed the next day, were issued against Colonel Lima Estrada; Captain Lima Oliva; Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva, who was no longer in prison; and Father Mario. All of them had been implicated by Chanax’s testimony. Another arrest order was issued for the parish-house cook, Margarita López. Leopoldo Zeissig’s superior, the attorney general, Adolfo Gonzáles Rodas, a holdover from the previous government—the same man who had backed the dog-bite scenario—wanted to charge the military men with murder, but Zeissig held out for what he considered the more accurate, if slightly lesser, charge: participation in an extrajudicial execution, a premeditated crime of state. Gonzáles Rodas insisted that Father Mario be charged with homicide, and Zeissig relented, thinking that he would be able to modify the charges later.
Usually, a judge sends arrest orders directly to the police, but Zeissig asked if he could deliver them. He wanted to add pressure to the situation. The new chief of police, however, made it clear that he was extremely reluctant to arrest the military men. Zeissig returned to Gonzáles Rodas and asked him to speak directly to President Portillo.
“I can’t do that,” the attorney general answered. “Go back to the police. You’ll see, they’ll do it.”
“You know how things are in Guatemala,” Zeissig responded. He argued that if they didn’t move quickly, the men might easily be tipped off and given time to escape.
The attorney general finally agreed to speak to President Portillo the next day, during their weekly Thursday meeting. Edgar Gutiérrez, now a member of Portillo’s government, told me what happened. “The chief of police went to the president’s office,” he said, “and the president called me. When I arrived, he showed us the arrest orders. The president, with the order in his hand, said, ‘Look, if you use conventional methods to capture these people, they’re going to get away. Choose the most trustworthy people you have, don’t use telephones or radios, and order a surprise operation to capture them.’”
It would be President Portillo’s most direct intervention in the Gerard
i case.
At four o’clock that afternoon, Zeissig received a call on his cell phone from his wife: the news had broken on television that a police operation was under way in Colonia Lourdes. Captain Lima was arrested at home. His father, Colonel Lima Estrada, was apprehended at a house in another part of the city.
The operation to capture Obdulio Villanueva at his small rural farmhouse lasted from five to ten in the morning on January 22, during which time the suspect engaged the police and soldiers who came to arrest him in a gun battle that lasted two hours. Father Mario, who was still in Houston, Texas, returned to Guatemala to turn himself in weeks later, while court orders were being prepared for his extradition.
In the ensuing weeks, Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva’s lawyers presented proof that their client had been freed from prison, having served his sentence, two days after the murder of Bishop Gerardi. But prosecutors found some of his old cellmates who explained that Villanueva had frequently received visits from military officers, and that he was sometimes allowed to sleep outside the prison, in hotels in Antigua—the beautiful old town is a major tourism destination, with majestic ruins of churches and convents from a colonial-era earthquake. Unfortunately, none of the prisoners was willing to say this on the record. Finally, there being no evidence against him other than Rubén Chanax’s testimony, the judge ordered Obdulio Villanueva freed.
Mario Domingo and Nery Rodenas had by then sheepishly confessed to Leopoldo Zeissig that the earlier witness from the EMP, the presidential waiter Aguilar Martínez, had also implicated Obdulio Villanueva in the crime, but that ODHA’s lawyers had asked him to withhold that information from his deposition, because it seemed incredible. Zeissig was furious. Even if they’d instructed Aguilar Martínez not to mention Villanueva, ODHA still should have informed him. Then he and his assistants could have quietly begun investigating months before anyone else learned that Villanueva was a suspect. Chanax’s testimony and the subsequent arrest orders, Zeissig presumed, had given Villanueva’s protectors enough time to cover their man’s tracks and ensure the silence of other prisoners.
But there was one small breakthrough. Zeissig managed to establish that Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva had remained on active duty, drawing a salary as a member of the EMP, while he was in prison.
THE LIMAS’ DEFENSE TEAM was led by Julio Cintrón Gálvez, an elderly lawyer with a long record of courtroom successes on behalf of military clients. Like many extremely conservative Guatemalans, Cintrón regarded human rights cases against the military as a leftist stealth tactic for continuing the country’s internal war by nonmilitary means. “This is an ideological struggle of the communists against the anticommunists,” he said. His younger colleague, Roberto Echeverría Vallejo, had been a member of the three-judge tribunal that had presided over the trial of Obdulio Villanueva for murdering the milkman. The judges had so reduced the homicide charges against Villanueva that he’d ended up spending less than a year in prison. Among other lawyers and courthouse reporters, Cintrón was regarded as a master of the kind of legal ploys that had long characterized the practice of criminal law in Guatemala, and Echeverría Vallejo was an adept young protégé.
At a pretrial hearing in March the two defense lawyers, along with Father Mario’s defense lawyer, José Toledo, arrived with what Zeissig referred to, metaphorically, as un gallo tapado, a hidden rooster. Unveiled, the rooster crowed. Echeverría stunned ODHA’s lawyers by presenting Judge Flor de María García Villatoro with a document signed by Archbishop Próspero Penados withdrawing the Catholic Church’s backing of ODHA as its legal representative, and thus as a co-plaintiff with the prosecution. It looked as if ODHA was about to be removed from the case. While Judge García Villatoro went over the papers, Echeverría watched the crestfallen Nery Rodenas and Mario Domingo with a satisfied smirk. Cintrón launched into a taunting tribute to the glorious Guatemalan Army, which had defeated the guerrillas, only now to defeat their enemies again—the now “extinct ODHA,” he said—in the courtroom.
“Puta muchá, just like that, you’re gone,” one of the prosecution lawyers cracked sardonically, and there was sympathetic laughter.
Leopoldo Zeissig asked to see the document signed by the archbishop, and he immediately noticed some interesting details. It was a Wednesday, but the document had been signed on Sunday, then notarized that same day. Zeissig pointed out to Judge García Villatoro that lawyers in a case involving the interests of the state couldn’t be removed from a legal process, such as the current hearing, without prior notice. Since ODHA’s lawyers were already in attendance, they couldn’t be removed now.
Zeissig had won ODHA some time. But the lawyers had no explanation for Archbishop Penados’s betrayal. Nery Rodenas, tears in his eyes, declared himself ready to resign. During the lunchtime recess, he and Mario Domingo hurried over to see the archbishop. It turned out that he didn’t even know what he’d signed. The previous Sunday, Father Mario’s mother had gone to visit the archbishop in the company of the three defense lawyers, along with Monseñor Hernández. Since the death of Bishop Gerardi, Archbishop Penados had been in failing health and broken in spirit, probably clinically depressed. Monseñor Hernández explained to him that the document they wanted him to sign committed the Church to desisting from accusing Father Mario of involvement in the murder of Bishop Gerardi. There was no need for him to read the document, Monseñor Hernández said. The archbishop could trust him. And so the archbishop had signed.
The ODHA lawyers went to Bishop Ríos Montt, who issued a new mandate naming ODHA as the Church’s legal representative in the Gerardi case, and on April 10, nearly two years after Bishop Gerardi’s murder, Judge Flor de María García Villatoro ordered the rearrest of the former EMP specialist Obdulio Villanueva. On May 18, she ruled that the case against the two Limas and Villanueva should proceed to trial. And she immediately became the target of death threats.
RONALTH OCHAETA was still living in Costa Rica when Villanueva was arrested. He read about the arrest in a newspaper than he left spread open on the kitchen table, and his youngest son idly picked it up. The little boy was thunderstruck. The photograph in the newspaper was of one of the thugs who had broken into their house, he excitedly told his father, one of the men who had trained a gun on him and the maid as they sat roped together on the couch.
III
THE TRIAL
WITNESSES
I would have wished to live and die free, that is to say, subject to law in such a way that neither I nor anyone else could shake off the honorable yoke.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “A Discourse on Inequality”
1
NO MILITARY OFFICER HAD ever been convicted of a human rights crime in Guatemala. Nor had any military man ever been charged with participating in a politically motivated crime of state such as extrajudicial execution, the crime for which the two Limas and Sergeant Major Villanueva were to be tried. Father Mario was accused of homicide and Margarita López of having withheld evidence. The trial, which was to be heard by a three-judge tribunal, was delayed for over a year while the defense filed various legal motions. It got under way in March 2001, and I went down to Guatemala a few weeks later.
Mynor Melgar was the lead lawyer representing ODHA, which, as co-plaintiff on behalf of the Church, was permitted to assist the special prosecutor in the case against the military men—although not in the cases against Father Mario or the parish-house cook. “So far, in the context of what you can hope to accomplish in a Guatemalan courtroom, I think we’re doing well,” Melgar said to me when I arrived. “The crime laboratories here don’t have many resources,” he explained, “and there’s little capacity for doing good forensics. Usually, the only real evidence you take to trial is the testimony of witnesses. And people can buy witnesses, intimidate them, they can kill them. That makes trying cases in Guatemala very complicated.” Most of the important witnesses in the Gerardi case had made written statements and then fled the country.
Mynor Melgar
had left the country too, along with his wife and children. In 1999, he spent nine months in Berkelely, California, studying at the University of California’s Institute of Latin American Studies and giving volunteer legal advice to Guatemalan immigrants in the Bay Area. But Melgar, unlike most of the other exiles, had returned. “How nice that you’ve come back just to die,” an anonymous voice said in one of the first of many threatening telephone calls he received. A few months later, in December 2000, a man held a pistol to Melgar’s head while he knelt in the bathroom of his own home, in the presence of his wife and two uncomprehending little sons. The intruder said that he wasn’t going to pull the trigger. He had been told just to issue a warning.
Melgar’s soft-spoken, cheerfully bantering manner hid a basically reserved nature and a composed and incisive intelligence. When he was intensely engaged, his face settled into an expectant, slightly bemused expression and his eyes held an avid glow. Melgar grew up in El Gallito, Guatemala City’s most notorious barrio, where cocaine and crack are sold openly in the dirt streets and where chop shops for stolen cars are dug like caves into the walls of ravines, their entrances covered by day with tin sheeting and brush. In accordance with the sometimes straight moral logic of those living crooked lives—a theme that would figure in the testimony of some key witnesses in the trial—Melgar was something of a folk hero in El Gallito. Not many people from there went to college, and given Melgar’s roots and litigation skills, he could easily have become a wealthy narco defense lawyer or even a member of the Oficinita. Instead, he won national and international renown by taking on the Guatemalan Army in case after case. He was the special prosecutor in the Myrna Mack murder case, which resulted in the conviction of the EMP operative who stabbed her to death. He’d won another conviction for murder against Ricardo Ortega, a notorious carjacker who was protected by military officers. And he was the prosecutor in the (stalled) case against military personnel who ordered and carried out the massacre of 350 civilians in the community of Dos Erres in 1982.
The Art of Political Murder Page 20
