The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  Leopoldo Zeissig said that when Rubén Chanax had to confront Obdulio Villanueva and then both of the Limas at evidentiary hearings in February and April 2000, Zeissig lost any doubt that his witness was telling the truth. He was convinced by the manner with which Chanax held his own, refusing to back down in the face of the military men’s often belligerent ire, accusations, and even ill-disguised threats. “I haven’t sold myself, and I haven’t been told what to say, and I’m not a liar, like you,” he’d defiantly retorted to Colonel Lima Estrada. “You were in the store! It’s not my fault you were there.” Captain Lima tried to discredit Chanax with a garrulous tirade aimed at exposing his confusion about, for example, what uniforms various EMP units wore, and finally, in an exasperated outburst, Lima had uttered his memorable threat, asking the former park vagrant and car washer what he would do if a video turned up implicating him in the crime. Chanax had responded, “If you say so, it’s because you know.” After that hearing, Zeissig had asked Rubén Chanax what he’d been referring to, and he’d answered, “Because they filmed it.”

  The prosecutors argued—and at the trial, the judges agreed—that Rubén Chanax’s basic story never varied. Over time he added to it, but without altering its core sequence. Eventually his reason for doing so would become clear. Chanax repressed details to avoid implicating himself in the crime. When he felt safe enough—seguro—he told more. These dynamics made him a dangerous witness, but since Guatemala had no equivalent of the U.S. federal witness protection program, he couldn’t, in exchange for total immunity, have revealed everything, including his own role in the crime, and then have been provided with a secure new life, even a new identity. Being a “protected witness” in Guatemala meant that he was safe from prosecution as long as there was a special prosecutor who was inclined to protect him. If a prosecutor with a different perspective took over the case, he might lose that protection.

  It was Rubén Chanax, Zeissig told me, who’d left the small, bloody sneaker print on the garage floor. (He’d washed the blood from his shoes in the park’s fountain.) There had also been footprints at the rear of the garage, not sneaker prints, leading into the sacristy, as if someone had fled that way. “The footprints going into the sacristy were never documented in the investigation,” Zeissig told me. “Ardón lost all that stuff.”

  It seemed strange to me that Otto Ardón, during those crucial first days, had never tried to match the sneaker print to Rubén Chanax. It was as if he knew that this particular witness shouldn’t be scrutinized too closely. If Chanax’s sneakers had matched the print, Ardón would have had someone to charge in the crime right away. But Chanax was unlikely to keep silent about what he knew while prosecutors marched him toward a possible death sentence as Bishop Gerardi’s murderer.

  “He was terrified we were going to accuse him too,” Zeissig said. “It was delicate. It’s not right to threaten a witness with prison if he doesn’t tell you the whole truth. It’s better to try to win his confidence, let him see that we can keep our word, and that, within what the law permits, we can get him out of trouble.”

  Once he’d given his pretrial testimony, Rubén Chanax had to leave Guatemala for his own safety. But he was not a promising candidate for any country’s political asylum program. He didn’t leave Guatemala until April 24, 2000, when the prosecutors finally sent him to Mexico City on a regular tourist’s visa. They bought him a suit and tie so that there would be less chance of his encountering any problems at passport control. Zeissig recalled that when he and his staff went to the airport to see Rubén Chanax off, “Some of the assistant prosecutors became sentimental.” When Chanax’s first ninety-day tourist visa expired, Jorge García of the Public Ministry’s Witness Protection Service went to renew it. (García would eventually succeed Zeissig as prosecutor of the Gerardi case.) Ninety days later, García renewed it again, but when that visa expired Chanax would become an illegal alien. Finally he was granted refugee status by the UN Refugee Commission, which provided a temporary solution.

  The prosecutors had rented a small room for Chanax in a poor neighborhood in Mexico City and had given him barely enough to live on—eventually they would only pay his rent of eighty dollars a month—but he soon found work, first as a carpenter, and then in a taco stand. The owner of the taco stand found out who he was and become protective of him. The owner also had a fleet of taco trucks that he sent to fairs outside the city, and Chanax sometimes was sent along to work in them. He called Zeissig at his office using a prepaid international calling card in different pay phones. He was happy to be working.

  Once Zeissig visited Mexico City and went to the taco stand. “He served us,” Zeissig recounted. “To see him working there, at the skillet … it made me feel … not tenderness…. I don’t know. Poor Rubén, I thought. There he is, finally working at an honest job.”

  Zeissig knew that the defense attorneys would call Rubén Chanax to testify at the trial. They were already boasting that they would be able to “destroy” him in court. But nobody could force him to come back to Guatemala, and Zeissig thought he might refuse.

  During Zeissig’s last visit to Mexico, Chanax asked, “If I testify, then I’ll have the opportunity to tell everything?”

  “What do you mean by everything?” Zeissig responded.

  “I want to clear my conscience,” Chanax said.

  So there’s more, Zeissig thought. “We’d intuited it, of course,” he recalled to me. “But how could you get him to say it? You can interrogate, but …”

  This was when Chanax first told Zeissig that he’d been contracted by Military Intelligence to spy on Bishop Gerardi long before the night of the murder. “Why do you think I slept in front of the garage door?” he asked. “He had to wake and move me to drive his car inside. That’s how I always knew when he came and went.” He told Zeissig the same story that would later stun (and outrage) the courtroom, about being contracted by “the colonel” to spy on Bishop Gerardi in “Operation Bird.” He told Zeissig that the park of San Sebastián was full of informers, though he never knew who they all were, or what role each one had. He said that El Chino Iván was an informer for Military Intelligence as well.

  “When he finally said, I was an informer, not a beggar,” Zeissig explained, “he was testifying against his own people. He was risking his life. He was taking the risk that they would find him and kill him.”

  As Rubén Chanax would later reveal at the trial, one of his calls to Zeissig from Mexico City had been intercepted and he heard a voice that he identified as Hugo, warning him against coming to Guatemala to testify. There were other signs that Chanax’s whereabouts and routine had been pinpointed. Chanax was forced to leave his job at the taco stand for more boring work as a janitor in an apartment building.

  Rubén Chanax had been flown back to Guatemala City, accompanied by Jorge García, on Thursday, April 27, 2001. That night he slept on a couch in the prosecutors’ office. Four security policemen from the Public Ministry, machine guns ready, guarded him, sleeping in shifts of two. When Zeissig arrived at seven in the morning he found his witness bathed and dressed in a suit and tie, apparently ready to go. But Chanax seemed extremely nervous. At breakfast his hands shook so much he could barely hold his fork. Zeissig decided that Chanax shouldn’t be sent to the witness stand until Monday. “I wanted him to be serene. I knew it was going to be a brutal cross-examination. ‘They are going to attack you,’ I told him. ‘You’re going to have to be very alert. We’ll be trying to protect you. But the judges will let them ask their questions. You have to go forward with the truth.’”

  They spent that weekend holed up in the office. They rented movies, sent out for food. Zeissig and his staff began working on their closing arguments. Monday morning they went to court. Zeissig left in his three-vehicle security caravan. He had sent Chanax ahead ten minutes earlier in a car the prosecutors had never used before, accompanied by three armed guards. When the court convened that morning, Zeissig rose and announced that the witn
ess Rubén Chanax Sontay was in the building. Not even ODHA knew he was coming. Mynor Melgar’s mouth, recalled Zeissig, dropped open in astonishment.

  “I HAD A JOB,” was how Leopoldo Zeissig summed up his experience as special prosecutor of the Gerardi case. “And if I believe in what I’m doing, I should do it right.” An unwanted exile seemed a high price to pay for having done that job. Zeissig missed his parents, relatives, and friends, his house, the camaraderie of the Public Ministry. He missed Guatemala.

  Captain Byron Lima, Zeissig told me, had a signature manner of announcing himself over the telephone in anonymous telephone calls: birdcalls. In the Kaibil commando unit that Lima had belonged to, soldiers became adept at mimicking jungle birdcalls. On the first Christmas Eve of his exile, when Zeissig picked up the receiver to answer the telephone, he heard a voice making eerie, high-pitched sounds. He felt certain that it was the captain phoning from prison in Guatemala City, just to let Zeissig know that he knew where to find him.

  “Merry Christmas, Byron,” Zeissig said into the phone, and hung up.

  2

  ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2002, a few months after I visited Leopoldo Zeissig in exile and we spoke in the hotel lobby in that arid South American city, the Fourth Court of Appeals overturned the verdicts in the Gerardi case. A new trial was ordered. The appellate court ruled that the three judges in the original trial had “overly relied” on Rubén Chanax’s courtroom testimony. It accepted the arguments of the defense about Chanax’s changing his pretrial testimony rather than expanding on it. (ODHA had lost the battle to recuse the most notoriously partisan and pro-military of the appellate judges, Wilewaldo Contreras.)

  Because a new trial had been ordered, the defendants had to stay in prison. Father Mario remained in custody in a private hospital. In a triumphant statement from the Centro Preventivo, Captain Lima proclaimed, “Organized crime killed Gerardi, and now it will be proved…. It should also be noted that the Public Ministry is contemplating criminal charges against the prosecutors Mario Leal and Leopoldo Zeissig for manufacturing false witnesses.” Lima called ODHA “a group of communists who don’t understand that the war has ended.”

  That night in New York, when I checked the messages on my answering machine, I heard a voice making strange noises, whooping and celebratory, somewhat like New Year’s Eve noisemakers—wooo-eeeeeee! wooo-eeeee—and drawn-out enough to sound mocking too. A jungle birdcall, possibly. Whoever made the call, without saying a word, hung up.

  It turned out that the ruling by the Fourth Court of Appeals was deeply flawed. For one thing, the appellate court was not supposed to rule on the quality of the proof that led to the verdicts but solely on whether the defendants’ right to a fair trial had been violated. This legal point aside, it was also soon shown that the appellate judges had not actually examined the testimony they deemed contradictory. Tipped off by MINUGUA, the prosecution lawyers discovered that the records of Rubén Chanax’s testimony had never even been requested by the appellate judges. They were still in the files. The judges had ruled on the substance of proofs they had never seen. Judge Wilewaldo Contreras’s court had issued a precooked ruling.

  On October 3, another Guatemalan court—Yassmín Barrios was one of the judges—found the former head of the EMP Archivo, Colonel Juan Valencia Osorio, guilty of having ordered the murder of Myrna Mack in 1991. (The man who stabbed her to death, Sergeant Noél Beteta, had been convicted in 1993.) But two other officers—another colonel and a general—were acquitted at the trial. Mynor Melgar was the prosecutor in the case. Helen Mack, after an eleven-year struggle, had at last won an unprecedented conviction against an active-duty colonel for being the “intellectual author” of a politically motivated crime of state, however diluted the victory was by the acquittals. Mack’s murder did not fall under the Army’s self-granted amnesty from prosecution for wartime crimes against human rights because it was a civilian homicide that had occurred outside any military context.

  Four months later, in February 2003, the Supreme Court reinstated the verdicts in the Gerardi case. The Fourth Court of Appeals was ordered to hear the appeal again, and this time to conduct the proceeding properly. ODHA initiated a new battle to recuse Judge Wilewaldo Contreras, who’d publicly referred to ODHA’s lawyers as his “enemies.”

  Judge Wilewaldo Contreras and the appellate court struck again in May, when they overturned the verdict in the Myrna Mack case, freeing Colonel Valencia Osorio. Later the Supreme Court reinstated that verdict too, but the damage was done. A truckload of soldiers arrived at the colonel’s house just before the prosecutors, including Mynor Melgar, got there to rearrest him. The colonel was smuggled aboard the truck, which drove off to an unknown destination.

  THE SAME DAY, February 12, 2003, that the Supreme Court upheld the verdicts in the Gerardi case, a riot broke out in the Centro Preventivo prison. Inmates in Sectors 1 and 2, members—cholos—of the infamous Central American youth gangs known as maras, attacked Sector 7. The cholos were armed with machetes, knives, and guns. Their target was Sector 7’s leader, Captain Byron Lima. By the end of the rampage, six prisoners were slain, three by decapitation, including the former EMP specialist Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva.

  The Limas’ supporters had portrayed them in the press as having cleaned up the prison and imposed a wholesome but tough military discipline on their fellow inmates. It was true that Captain Lima had been elected head of all the prison sectors, that he’d put up signs barring spitting, and that he insisted that prisoners follow new rules regulating at what hours they could play their stereos and radios. In the mornings he made inmates assemble and shout out, “Good morning, Guatemala.” The lethal riot could be seen, then, as a rebellion by depraved criminals against spit-and-polish military discipline.

  But there were other versions, other explanations, about what set off the riot in the Centro Preventivo that day. A full year before the incident, in January 2002, while the Gerardi case was in its first appeal stage, the president of the Penitentiary System Consulting Commission had received a letter from guards at the Centro Preventivo. The guards, who withheld their names, explained that they felt “obligated to denounce to you the corruption of our superiors and also we don’t want to be blamed for what could happen.” They accused the subdirector of the prison system, Colonel Barahona, of granting the Limas special privileges. “The Limas, being the military men they are,” the guards wrote, “have an ally in Colonel Barahona, who allows them to bring in prohibited items for the business they run in their sector. They gave an order allowing them to bring in as many such things as cigarettes as they want, but what the colonel doesn’t know is that inside those cigarettes they bring in drugs.”

  Two hundred cholos had recently been transferred to the Centro Preventivo following an outbreak of intergang warfare in another prison. In Guatemala, as elsewhere, narco capos go on directing their criminal enterprises from inside prisons, as do the heads of kidnapping, extortion, and car-theft rings. In the past, inside and outside the prisons, the maras worked for these often military-run mafias, providing foot soldiers, assassins, and such; in recent years, they had been asserting a new autonomy. The cholos in the Centro Preventivo wanted control over the prison crime rackets. They wanted those lucrative rackets for themselves. They didn’t want to submit to the Limas’ brutal reign. They wanted the Limas to submit to their brutal reign. Some had seen it coming: elPeriódico, citing prison authorities who refused to be identified by name, had earlier described the tension created by Captain Lima in the Centro Preventivo as a “time bomb” that had long been waiting to go off.

  The maras are usually described as having their origins in the gang culture of Los Angeles. Young combat veterans, deserters, orphans, the children of parents fleeing the Central American civil wars, especially El Salvador’s, formed gangs in Los Angeles to protect themselves and forge an identity of their own. After serving prison terms in the United States, many of them were deported back to their countries of origin. But mar
as have been a presence in Guatemala City since at least the 1970s, when the city’s poorest squatter slums began to be filled with people fleeing war and poverty in the mountains.

  Central America was flooded with weapons from the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies during the cold war. Thirteen-year-old boys hold up convenience stores with grenades, and adolescent carjackers and kidnappers go around armed with M-15s, Gallils, and AK-47 assault rifles—“logistical support” often supplied by their partners and crime bosses in the police and the military. In 2005 there were some 100,000 Central American gang members operating across five countries, including Canada and the United States, with at least half of them based in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. On both the Guatemalan-Mexican and Mexican-U.S. borders, maras have established dominion over the lucrative and treacherous business of transporting illegal migrants, while simultaneously preying on them. Maras are also employed by the Mexican and Guatemalan cartels on the narco routes through the same territories. They have a reputation for favoring weapons of stealth and silence over guns: machetes, daggers, lead pipes, even Asian martial arts weapons.

  The gang members rarely seem to splurge or launder money by purchasing ostentatious vehicles, houses, or other luxury goods. Instead, they reinvest their money in their businesses and the subsistence of their gangs. In Guatemala City there were said to be approximately 350 separate mara cells, embedded like spider nests in individual neighborhoods. There are gang members who tattoo their entire faces with Goth lettering and symbols. Other cells forbid tattoos that can’t be covered by clothing. The newspapers are full of stories about teenagers murdered by maras, who kill, it is often said, just for fun. Initiation rites often seem to require murdering a female victim, usually an adolescent girl. That was one reason that 665 women were violently murdered in Guatemala, mostly in the capital, in 2005. On the other hand, some maras, or at least some cells, claim to forbid violence against women.