The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  A twenty-one-year-old cholo known as El Bocón (“Big Mouth”) told police investigators that the riot in the Centro Preventivo had been planned for two months. El Bocón described how the cholos made their way from Sectors 1 and 2, smashing open holes in the fortified doors. “Then the cholos got into Sector 8 and they opened a hole to get into 7 and that’s where Villanueva and another maje made their stand, fighting with the cholos, while the rest of us got out of there. And when I was out I realized that Psycho and Chopper from the Salvatrucha gang were decapitating Villanueva. When he tried to crawl out through the hole, he couldn’t because he was too fat and he got stuck, and then they grabbed his hair and cut off his head.”

  Colonel Valencia Osorio, who had been convicted of ordering Myrna Mack’s killing (this was three months before that verdict was overturned), crawled to safety through a hole smashed in a wall. But where were the Limas? The cholos were chanting, “We want Lima! We want Lima!” They hacked off the top of Villanueva’s skull with a machete. Psycho scooped up Villanueva’s brain matter with his hands and flung it into the faces of the cornered Sector 7 prisoners, screaming, “Bring us Lima!” But Lima was nowhere to be found. They seized on a felt soldier doll that Lima kept by his bunk. The cholos decapitated the doll and shoved its head inside Villanueva’s decapitated head, in through the neck and up, so that the doll’s face showed through the brain matter.

  Later Captain Lima said that when the riot erupted, he’d been in the administration building taking an engineering class. His father, the colonel, was in the infirmary.

  Some people found it suspicious that the riot in the Centro Preventivo had occurred on the very same day that the Supreme Court upheld the convictions in the Gerardi case. Amnesty International issued a statement speculating that Obdulio Villanueva’s murder was related to his potential as a witness against his as yet uncharged military superiors. Maybe the former EMP specialist had been killed because he was considered the weak link in the chain, the likeliest to talk? So much rested on the continued silence of the three convicted military men. But such speculations smacked a bit of wishful thinking and denial of certain nearly incomprehensibly dark realities (the maras).

  In the aftermath of the riot, Captain Lima announced that five cholo prisoners would be executed every day unless the gang members in Sectors 1 and 2 were transferred out of the Centro Preventivo. The prison authorities quickly acceded. Captain Lima and his father were to be transferred to another prison too, for their own safety, but the captain refused to abdicate his fiefdom. He insisted that he was needed in the Centro Preventivo, and that “a good captain doesn’t abandon his ship.” Despite his protests, the Limas, son and father, were transferred to El Boquerón, a maximum-security prison thirty miles west of Guatemala City.

  Nobody was ever indicted for the death of Obdulio Villanueva and the others murdered that day in the Centro Preventivo. Prosecutors at the Public Ministry and the police couldn’t find a single witness willing to testify before a judge. El Bocón, who had given his statement to the police in the immediate aftermath of the riot, refused to be a witness. More than two years later, on August 15, 2005, a nonaggression pact between incarcerated maras was broken in a prison in Escuintla, setting off nearly simultaneous attacks, coordinated by cell phone, in prisons across the country. Thirty-four gang members were killed that day, including the two who’d beheaded Villanueva: Psycho and Chopper.

  Legal authorities were too frightened of the Limas and their allies—when not colluding with them—to expose their illicit prison activities. Journalists, fearing reprisals, censored themselves. But the Public Ministry and the homicide division of the Criminal Investigations Section of the National Police produced a substantial file on the case. That file sheds some light on the Limas’ retail businesses in prison. The Limas sold everything from cell phones to bottled water. Prepaid phone cards that cost ten quetzales outside the prison cost double that inside. Inmates had to pay the Limas two quetzales per minute to use the prison’s public pay phones. There were 1,800 prisoners in the Centro Preventivo, and one can deduce how, over months and years, the prison businesses could accrue significant revenue. A prosecutor assigned to the case of the Centro Preventivo riot, who didn’t want to be identified, estimated that Captain Lima was earning 50,000 quetzales a month, approximately $8,000, from his prison shopkeeping alone.

  He may have been earning considerably more. After all, Captain Lima had been elected sector chief of all sector chiefs. By his own admission, he controlled the prison, all but the cholos of Sectors 1 and 2. After the riot, the police reported that the entire prison was infested with weapons. Who, logically, had control of weapons trafficking inside the prison? In the summer of 2004 an assistant prosecutor assigned to the Gerardi case told me that when Lima was still a prisoner in the Centro Preventivo he’d been spotted during a stakeout, dressed in street clothes, entering a warehouse allegedly used by drug traffickers.

  Before the trial, Captain Lima had seemed to come close to confessing his role in the Gerardi case several times. He was one of only three military men arrested in a plot that had undoubtedly involved many more, including higher-ranking officers. Compared with his father, Colonel Lima, who was probably one of those in on the plot to kill the bishop from the start, the son might have had a relatively minor operational role. In the captain’s interview with Claudia Méndez before the trial, you can sense his anger, self-pity, and frustration. Only four days after the bishop’s murder, he had been sent abroad to join the prestigious UN mission to Cyprus. Then he’d suddenly been recalled, and forbidden by his superiors to leave Guatemala. About a year after the murder, Rafael Guillamón, the chief investigator for MINUGUA, received a telephone call in his office from Captain Lima, asking for a meeting. They agreed to meet in the Hotel Melia, where Captain Lima asked Guillamón what he could do to fix his situation regarding the Gerardi case. Guillamón answered that if he was willing to tell all he knew, MINUGUA would guarantee his protection. Lima insisted on speaking personally with the mission chief, Jean Arnault. But no such meeting ever occurred. Guillamón had a theory about Captain Lima. It was just a theory, but a compelling one. He speculated that Lima had received an offer similar to the one the doomed Valle del Sol gangster Carlos García Pontaza had received: a free hand to commit crimes, in Lima’s case from prison, with a guarantee of impunity and logistical support. For García Pontaza, the deal had been contingent on his agreeing to implicate his former girlfriend, Ana Lucía Escobar. In Captain Lima’s case, the quid pro quo was his continued loyalty to the military and his silence regarding coconspirators in the crime. It seemed likely that sooner rather than later the military men convicted in the Gerardi case would win an appeal from a corrupt court and go free. Captain Lima would leave prison a fairly wealthy man, his honor intact. Powerful men would be indebted to him.

  IN THE PROSECUTORS’ OFFICE, as in ODHA, the pessimism and anxiety hanging over the case were palpable. Month after month went by, and no ruling had been issued on when the Fourth Court would hear the appeal for a second time, or who the judges would be. ODHA was still fighting to recuse Wilewaldo Contreras. Meanwhile, in the Sunday columns that she published in Prensa Libre, Maite Rico, the coauthor of the article and later the book defending the Limas, stayed on the attack. Many of the country’s other media figures, including the host of an influential political talk show on television—whose family owned the Pollo Campero fried-chicken empire—were also relentless in their accusations. Defense lawyers had been waging a campaign through the media since even before the appearance of de la Grange and Rico’s article in Letras Libres in 2001. Noé Gómez Limón, the brother of the prisoner who had testified that Obdulio Villanueva was not in the prison the day of the bishop’s murder and that Villanueva’s lawyer, Roberto Echeverría, had tried to bribe him, was murdered in December 2002. After Villanueva’s death in the Centro Preventivo riot two months later, Echeverría told the Guatemalan press, “It grabs your attention that first they murdered
the witness and now Villanueva. Let’s see if ODHA and President Portillo will turn the body over to his relatives.”

  Aggressive criticism in the media was daily fare at ODHA, engendering a state of perpetual strain. It seemed as if whenever I dropped in on Mario Domingo in his office I found him indignantly pounding away at his computer’s rattling keyboard, working on his ever-growing compilations and annotations of all the errors and falsehoods in de la Grange and Rico’s book. After Mario Vargas Llosa’s piece appeared, Mario Domingo wrote a six-page single-spaced letter to El País that the newspaper did not print, even in an abridged version. During a visit to the office of the new special prosecutor, Jorge García, in the Public Ministry, an assistant prosecutor said to me, “Vargas Llosa’s column has given the judges all the cover they need to let the Limas go free without any public controversy.” He spoke as if the outcome of the appeal was no longer in doubt.

  Nevertheless, the Untouchables and ODHA’s lawyers pressed forward with their investigation. They were saying that if they lost the appeal and had to build a new case from scratch, they would be ready. That may have been just bravado, since it was doubtful that the prosecutors would want to start over, especially if they were forced to forgo Rubén Chanax’s testimony.

  The fate of the Gerardi case seemed to rest more heavily than ever on whether or not Rubén Chanax had told the truth. Since the trial, the defense attorneys and their supporters had been portraying all of the prosecution witnesses as liars who had given fabricated testimony, but they focused their arguments on Chanax. He had been the prosecution’s star witness. But he was Leopoldo Zeissig’s witness, and now Zeissig was in exile. Before the trial, ODHA had no relationship with Chanax at all. After the trial, ODHA and the prosecutors devoted much of their energy to investigating Chanax’s story from the beginning.

  From his very first statement to the police on the morning after the murder, Chanax had claimed to have served in the Army. Much later he had told investigators of being selected for a training course to enter Military Intelligence, and of failing it. His military past explained why he’d been recruited to be an informer, practically an undercover intelligence operative, if he was to be believed. In November 2002, Mario Domingo and Jorge García had gone to Mexico City to interrogate Chanax more thoroughly. Chanax told them that when he was a ten-year-old boy in San Cristóbal Totonicapán, his mother, Rosa Sontay, had sold him to a childless couple—a woman and her much older husband—in Chiantla, Huehuetenango. Chanax would never forgive his mother for this. The wife had been especially cruel to him. Finally, Chanax had run away—this was his first taste of life on the streets, and he fell into petty crime. After a brief incarceration in a prison for juvenile offenders, he had gone to live for a while with his grandparents in San Cristóbal, and then with his father and stepmother. He learned some carpentry, his father’s trade. He was fond of his stepmother, Julia Gómez. It was while he was living in San Cristóbal, in 1990, that he was conscripted into the Army and driven in a pickup with other boys to the military base in Jalapa, in Military Zone 9. Later he was assigned to the Fourth Engineering Corps, in the capital.

  Told that he’d been selected for a course to enter the Military Police, young Rubén was taken with a few other soldiers to a secret subterranean detention center. Chanax recalled descending iron stairs into pungent darkness and seeing small cells crowded with six or seven prisoners, filthy and neglected, their hair grown wild and long, some of them obviously victims of torture. An officer explained, “This is what happens to traitors.” It turned out that the Military Police course was a ruse. Chanax and the others had been selected for a Military Intelligence course in “espionage,” which meant that they were to learn how to follow people and vehicles, how to infiltrate a subject’s home, and so on. Chanax’s first assignment was to spy on a judge, under the tutelage of his instructor, Major López Rico. (All the names of the military officers Chanax had provided later checked out.) After the course, Chanax said, he returned to the Fourth Engineering Corps, and he began to suffer from a chronic sinus problem. His face swelled up, and he had a long stay in a military hospital.

  Chanax had “failed” his course in the sense that he was not selected for a career in Military Intelligence, but he was being prepared for the life of a trained informer. When he returned from the hospital, General García González sent him to live in San Sebastián park and gave him 2,000 quetzales to spy on Bishop Gerardi. He was to report to the nearby EMP. That assignment lasted six months. In July 1994, at the age of nineteen, Chanax was discharged from the Army. He took a series of jobs, including one as a construction mason. His mother now lived in Guatemala City, and he tried to live with her and his little sister for a while, but the relationship with his mother was stormy. He began to live in the streets, and he discovered that he liked the freedom. He drifted back to the San Sebastián park, although in those days he slept in cheap “whore hotels” at night. Eventually he was contacted by a “colonel”—apparently not Lima Estrada—and offered his old job back, spying on the bishop. The colonel took him to a house in Zone 6 where he would sometimes give his information. That house would turn up in later revelations about the planning of Bishop Gerardi’s murder.

  People might argue for or against the truth of anything else Chanax had subsequently said, but if he’d lied about having been in the Army, nothing else about his story made much sense. Mario Domingo was able to locate Rubén Chanax’s mother, Doña Rosa Sontay, a decrepit-looking, angry woman with black teeth who lived in a shack in one of the most squalid areas of Guatemala City. She told Domingo that she used to go to the Jalapa base to collect the small monthly payments the Army issued to the families of conscripts. The first time she went, there was some confusion over her son’s name, and she discovered that Rubén was using his stepmother’s name, Goméz. After returning from the Army, his mother said, Rubén had a girlfriend named Angélica, with whom he’d fathered a child. Doña Rosa didn’t display much maternal affection or concern for her son. Rubén, she said, used to hit her.

  Mario Domingo managed to find at least one other former soldier who’d been in Jalapa, in the so-called Tiger Course, with Rubén Chanax. This soldier said that Chanax was good at firing a rifle, but bad at other things. The macabre trials the Guatemalan Army contrives to test recruits, especially in elite combat battalions and intelligence units, are notorious. Over the years the same horrific anecdotes have repeatedly emerged, including one about recruits’ being given a puppy to care for through basic training, then having to slash its throat. Some young soldiers vomit, or feel pity or sadness. But Chanax, said the former soldier, had coldly cut his puppy’s throat.

  Rubén Chanax, in Mexico City, had told Mario Domingo a much more disturbing story about his G-2 training course. At the end of the intelligence course, he said, as a kind of final exam, the trainees had to commit a murder. Considering that it was a course for the Guatemalan Army’s most murderous entity, this was not incredible. Chanax described an incident he said had occurred in May 1992 on the Incienso Bridge, spanning a deep ravine outside Guatemala City, resulting in the double homicide of a young couple selected at random. The weapon was a pistol, he said. “And then,” said Chanax, “we graduated, if you want to put it that way.” Later Mario Domingo found brief newspaper reports from May 10, 1992, of a couple found dead at the bottom of the ravine underneath the Incienso Bridge.

  AFTER THE PUBLICATION of the book about the case by Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico, in which they said that a thorough search of military records turned up no documentation whatsoever of Rubén Chanax’s military service, Rodrigo Salvadó and Arturo Aguilar went to San Cristóbal Totonicapán and found Chanax’s grandfather, who gave them photographs of a young Chanax in uniform. ODHA provided those photographs to the press. Jorge García had for months been petitioning the Ministry of Defense for documentary proof of Rubén Chanax’s military service. Inquiries for Rubén Chanax Sontay turned up nothing, but now, on the basis of the conversa
tions with Chanax and with his mother, Rosa Sontay, the prosecutor asked for records for Rubén Chanax Gómez. On May 3, 2004, he received a one-page signed and stamped document that read: “After searching the archives, we confirmed that there is only information about a señor Rubén Chanax Gómez, who was on active duty in the Army Corps of Engineers ‘Lieutenant Colonel of Engineers and Engineer Francisco Vela Arrango’ from 1 February 1992 to 31 July 1994, when discharged for having completed his required tour of duty.” The document also described his treatment for a chronic sinus condition in 1993. Rafael Guillamón told me later that once, during the first months after the bishop’s murder, he’d sat Chanax down in front of some disassembled weapons, including military assault rifles. Chanax had reassembled them with an easy, familiar confidence.

  Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico were no longer living in Guatemala, but Rico was quick to respond to the discovery of the new information supporting Chanax’s contention that he had Army experience. She published a column in Prensa Libre complaining that the photograph of Chanax in uniform, which had also been published in Prensa Libre, was hopelessly blurry (although ODHA had given the paper several legible photographs).

  Maite Rico also found the idea that Chanax would use his stepmother’s maternal surname ridiculous. But there was a greater problem. The document Jorge Garciá had successfully subpoenaed from the Ministry of Defense, she said, gave Chanax’s age when he left the Army as thirty-one: “The problem is that that is Chanax’s age now, not his age at the time of his military service. All these absurdities lead one to think that this document was introduced into the Defense information system after October 31, 2003, the date on which Chanax turned thirty-one. The objective: an attempt to give credibility to his testimony. Who did it? That is what has to be verified…. Rubén Chanax Sontay is a false witness, as we demonstrated in our book, Who Killed the Bishop?”