Rubén Chanax Sontay in uniform, circa 1993
That particular column by Maite Rico is a key document, I believe, for understanding the nature and context of the campaign waged against the verdicts in the Gerardi case, and against the witnesses, the prosecutors, and ODHA. Rico’s account of the military document she saw is especially provocative. It was not, in fact, the same document that the Ministry of Defense gave to Jorge García. That document, Report 2418, contains no mention of Chanax’s age. I have seen, and have in my possession, a photocopy of that document. (Chanax’s age at any time had never been an issue and, anyway, it made no sense to suggest, as Rico’s mystifying document did, that Chanax would have been conscripted at such an advanced age, nearly thirty.) So where did Rico get her document? Who sent it to her and why? I asked Mario Domingo about this and he replied, by e-mail, “That was what made us deduce that the authors of that book must get their information from Military Intelligence.”
SOME OF THE MOST WORRISOME ISSUES in Chanax’s testimony went back to the very first moments of the crime. Mario Domingo had long been troubled by the question of how El Chino Iván could have immediately returned to the park after retrieving his cigarettes from Don Mike’s and not seen the black Jeep Cherokee in which Captain Lima and Sergeant Major Villanueva arrived at the church of San Sebastián. In the first week of March 2003, Arturo Aguilar and Rodrigo Salvadó were sent to Costa Rica to talk to El Chino Iván. All they had to go on was an unspecific address in the outskirts of San José, “near a red bridge.” They walked the streets, knocking on doors; finally Rodrigo and Arturo called at a door answered by a man who said that El Chino Iván did live there, but that he wasn’t in. The house was near a reeking sewage canal. After several more visits and phone calls, it became obvious that El Chino Iván was avoiding them. Several unrelated people seemed to be living at the address, and one finally directed Arturo and Rodrigo to a young woman named Wendy Cascante, who had met El Chino Iván in a computer class soon after he’d arrived in Costa Rica. She had become pregnant with his child, and they had tried living together in her mother’s house, but that domestic arrangement hadn’t lasted very long. Since leaving her, El Chino Iván came to visit only sporadically, sometimes bringing money for their little daughter’s support. Cascante didn’t know where he lived now or how he supported himself, but she suspected that he’d returned to a life of street crime. She recalled that El Chino Iván had been especially nervous during the months just after the trial in 2001, repeatedly saying that he was going to be killed. Once she’d answered the telephone and a male voice said, “Tell the Guatemalan that we’re going to kill him.”
Arturo and Rodrigo finally found El Chino Iván. They met with him twice, and he told them a new story about what happened after the shirtless man stepped out of the garage at the parish house. Chanax had testified that he’d rung the parish-house doorbell to inform Father Mario that the little garage door—from which the shirtless man had emerged minutes before—had been left open. But El Chino Iván said that he, not Chanax, rang the bell that night, and that no one had answered. He said that he—not Father Mario, as Chanax claimed—had then closed the little door of the garage.
For the most part, El Chino Iván stuck to his original narrative about the night of Bishop Gerardi’s murder, but he now said that he had seen some men gathered in Don Mike’s store that night. He didn’t know who they were. And he admitted that he’d seen Rubén Chanax speaking with Obdulio Villanueva in the park on the Sunday morning of the murder. He also said he suspected that Bishop Gerardi hadn’t been murdered by “Hugo.” He didn’t even believe that Hugo existed. El Chino Iván said that he thought Villanueva and Captain Lima were the murderers, and that they had been helped by Rubén Chanax.
When the Untouchables asked why he’d revealed none of this at the trial, El Chino Iván said that it was because before the trial he’d received a telephone call from Ardón’s former assistant, Gustavo Soria (who Rafael Guillamón, MINUGUA’s chief investigator, emphatically insisted worked for Military Intelligence). Soria, El Chino Iván said, had wanted him to alter his original story at the trial, and had offered money. El Chino Iván claimed that he’d refused the offer and had instead stuck to the original story. This would explain his fear and the death threat that Wendy Cascante said he’d subsequently received.
In May, Mario Domingo and Jorge García returned for a second time to Mexico to talk to Chanax, who said that somebody from the Guatemalan military had visited him recently and offered him $10,000 if he would return to Guatemala and retract his testimony. “Look, I’ve already told you plenty,” Chanax said, “and I know you want to implicate me, but I promise you this: I’m never going to prison and nobody is going to kill me on account of this case.” The military visitor had apparently told Chanax that El Chino Iván was living in luxury in Costa Rica and that the Public Ministry was preparing to betray Chanax. Jorge Garciá, upset to learn that Chanax’s whereabouts had been discovered, reassured him that none of this was true.
Rubén Chanax clarified one of the puzzling elements in the witnesses’ testimony. In their separate statements to the police on the night of the bishop’s murder, Chanax and El Chino Iván had contradicted each other about what had happened after the shirtless man had left the park. In Chanax’s version, the man had returned, walking down the avenue, buttoning on a white shirt; in El Chino Iván’s version, it was a beige shirt and he walked directly into the park. El Chino Iván even claimed to have sold the stranger cigarettes. In his conversations in Mexico, Rubén Chanax revealed that the shirtless man had never returned at all; he said that both versions were untrue. “I made that part up,” Chanax confessed. “El Chino and I had the mission of confusing the investigation.”
ONE WAY of possibly resolving the contradictory accounts about the crucial minutes following Bishop Gerardi’s murder was to bring Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván face to face. In November 2003, Mario Domingo, Jorge Garciá—who had recently become the special prosecutor in the case—and two observers from MINUGUA went to Mexico City. They told Chanax to meet them near the Zócalo, the city’s enormous central plaza. The lawyers arrived with El Chino Iván, who’d been brought from Costa Rica for the surprise reunion. While El Chino Iván behaved as if he were overjoyed to be reunited with his old friend, Chanax clearly felt betrayed and fell into a sulk.
The lawyers took the witnesses to a hotel suite they had rented nearby. There, El Chino Iván recited his original story. He’d left Don Mike’s minutes after Rubén Chanax had. When he reached the park, he’d glimpsed Chanax speaking with the shirtless man in front of the garage door. Realizing that he’d left his cigarettes behind in the store, he’d turned back, retrieved them, and then returned to the park. El Chino Iván said that he was away from the park only two or three minutes. That, he claimed, was when he had his encounter with the shirtless man. (Now, faced with lawyers and UN representatives instead of scruffy young Untouchables, El Chino Iván didn’t repeat the suspicion he’d voiced in Costa Rica, that Hugo didn’t exist.)
Rubén Chanax said that the shirtless man was barely exiting the park, on the Third Street side, when the black Jeep Cherokee entered the drive on the Second Street side. According to Chanax, it had all happened—the shirtless man exiting the garage, Lima and Villanueva arriving—within a few minutes. So if El Chino Iván was away only two or three minutes, as he insisted, how could it be that he hadn’t seen Captain Lima and Obdulio Villanueva arrive to alter the crime scene? Because, insisted Rubén Chanax, El Chino Iván was away from the park much longer than two or three minutes.
Mario Domingo was convinced that Chanax’s version was the true one, or at least the truer one, and he had a private conversation with El Chino Iván in which the bolito finally admitted that he might, actually, have been away from the park longer than he originally stated. He said he didn’t remember. “Maybe I was away longer,” he stammered. “Maybe ten minutes.” El Chino Iván had probably never seen the shirtless man. His
claim that he’d seen the man now known as Hugo may have been premeditated disinformation, or simply a lie.
Rubén Chanax said that the original plan had been for Hugo and El Chino Iván to fake a robbery in the church, but El Chino Iván panicked and ran away. He returned to the garage at the San Sebastián parish house, but only after Captain Lima and Obdulio Villanueva had come and gone. The plan was that he and Chanax would say nothing, but when the police arrived, El Chino Iván told them that Chanax had seen everything, and the police took Chanax away. During those first interrogations, Chanax had revealed little more than his encounter with the shirtless man. Then El Chino Iván, once he was in custody too, had invented his own contradictory version.
El Chino Iván now repeated the story about how he, not Father Mario, had closed the door of the garage. Chanax, he said, had warned him, “You don’t know what just happened there inside the garage. And now you’ve left fingerprints and your DNA on the door.” Worried, El Chino Iván had spat on a piece of cardboard to wipe the door clean. His tone grew nearly hysterical as he insisted on his version. Chanax diffidently shrugged and agreed: “Así fue.” That’s how it was. But later he said, “If you want to believe him, believe him. If you want to believe me, believe me.”
Of course it was maddening, for the story made little sense. That El Chino Iván had tried to wipe away his “DNA” with his own spit seemed plausible. But it was harder to believe that he hadn’t at least peeked through the open door, into the illuminated garage, to see what had happened there. On the other hand, might Rubén Chanax have lied after all when he said that he’d rung the doorbell, and that Father Mario had come to the little garage door in his long black leather coat and closed the door? Was that story completely credible? What was Father Mario, in his black leather coat, doing in the garage, alone with the bishop’s corpse?
What if both El Chino Iván and Rubén Chanax were lying about that particular moment and incident? Rafael Guillamón later told me what he thought had occurred immediately after the murder, after Hugo (if indeed Hugo existed), Captain Lima, and Villanueva (and whoever else) had come to and gone from the scene of the crime. Rubén Chanax, he believed, had then entered the parish house from the garage and walked down the corridor to Father Mario’s bedroom door. He had knocked at the door to let the priest know that the gruesome deed had been accomplished. That would explain, Guillamón surmised, the traces of blood found later outside Father Mario’s door. Of course if that was what had happened, it was not something Chanax was going to admit. Chanax would have found another way to reveal the priest’s involvement, while suppressing his own. It wasn’t as if Father Mario would then counter that “lie” with the true, equally incriminating version.
Chanax did not lack imagination. A good, even trained, observer, he noticed people, how they spoke, how they moved, what they wore. He knew how to shape his information (factual or not) into a narrative. He withheld information to protect himself, but also others. One key to deciphering Chanax was to decipher his secret loyalties, some emotional and others tactical. Whatever else it was, Chanax’s saga was also about staying alive. Any number of missteps might have cost him his life. By the spring of 2003, nearly two years after the trial, it seemed that Guatemalan Military Intelligence knew exactly where to find him. Yet Rubén Chanax was still alive.
Chanax had told the interrogators from MINUGUA that El Chino Iván was in “G-2 counterintelligence.” Those who believed that El Chino Iván was working for G-2 also believed that his and Rubén Chanax’s roles were complementary. Chanax’s job had been to watch and inform on Bishop Gerardi. El Chino Iván’s job had been to watch and inform on Chanax. If Chanax told the Public Ministry or police interrogators one thing, it was El Chino Iván’s role to tell them another.
As witnesses they were, indeed, “less than ideal.” It was all enough to drive an earnest, dogged lawyer like Mario Domingo crazy. Often, when talking about the two witnesses, he grew outraged, and his squinty expression became contorted. “They’re both hijos de puta,” he’d exclaim, “and they were both in on the plan. But one kept quiet and stayed in his role. The one who talked because he finally got bored and fed up was Rubén Chanax!”
IN APRIL 2004 Helen Mack won her case against the Guatemalan state. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights—the Hague of the Americas—ruled unanimously that the murder of Myrna Mack had been planned and carried out by a clandestine intelligence unit within the EMP. In a landmark decision, the judges outlined the modus operandi by which the Army and government had employed state institutions and even civilian entities to stall and misdirect criminal investigations and prosecutions. They addressed the manner in which courts were incorporated into the military’s strategies and examined the role of judges who knowingly abused the appeals process and who applied specious arguments in their rulings. The decision identified courts and judges that had acted in concert with the military throughout the long history of the Mack case, including Wilewaldo Contreras’s Fourth Court of Appeals.
The judges of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights described the various stages of a politically motivated homicide as typically carried out by the Guatemalan Army, especially by Military Intelligence. First came the preparation and planning, followed by the second stage, the actual execution of the victim. But there was a third stage, which the judges described as a continuation of the murder itself, as much a part of the crime as the prior stages. That third stage included the methods used by Military Intelligence to subvert the courts and the role of complicit judges in preventing justice from being done; and also the crucial role of misinformation, especially disseminated through the media, used to discredit opponents and create confusion.
It was in the long post-execution stage that the murder of Bishop Gerardi was especially masterful. I do not know whether particular journalists consciously spread misinformation or actually believed in the integrity of their Military Intelligence and government sources. It is reasonable to assume that when Mario Vargas Llosa wrote his essay on the Gerardi case and on the book Who Killed the Bishop? for El País, he was convinced of the truth of what he was writing. It may have been overly eager, unguarded ideological sympathy or prejudice; or the vanity of a Great Man of Letters, seduced, after many decades of adulation, into a sense of his own infallibility; or a case of what Borges had in mind when he wrote that no man, outside his own specialty, is not gullible; or some combination of these that led the distinguished novelist to accept at face value an extraordinarily controversial book’s most far-fetched assertions as facts not requiring independent verification, and then to join his voice to the book’s smears and accusations.
3
“BUENO, ITS NOW ALMOST ELEVEN in the morning on monday who knows why i’m writing this because if i don’t get out of this i hope that this gets to the press so that they will know who i was in truth and that i’m not how they say … if i end up dead or far from here because now i only have two roads in all this but like i said that’s life but i’m not afraid because there’s no reason i should be. but if they capture that rat i hope he suffers because what he did has no pardon because someone like el padre didn’t deserve that kind of death. the way they gave it to him.”
That, with no attempt to faithfully translate misspellings—although the writer’s forgoing of most capital letters has been retained—is from a twenty-six-page diary kept by Rubén Chanax from July to August 1998, when he and El Chino Iván had been in police custody for three months. Across its first page was scrawled the title: “Thoughts and memories from the Hotel Monterrey.” In those pages, Chanax more than once asked himself if he’d done the right thing by becoming a witness, wondered what the future held for him, and acknowledged the risks he was taking. “i get out of this, or they’ll kill me.” Repeatedly, he wrote about being depressed and bored by his confinement. “You don’t even notice if there’s any sun … one day they took us to the police station and there was sun but when we came out everything was black with ashes f
rom the volcano and like i said one of these days it will rain fire and i won’t even notice.”
Sometimes Chanax wrote about how much he missed his friends in the San Sebastián park, whom he considered his “true family.” He wrote, “Tried to find my mother with the police with mimigua [MINUGUA] but they came and told me she didn’t want to know anything about me. that i’m a thief but that’s a lie because none of the people in the park who know me would make those kinds of comments about me … i’m too deep into all this and how am i going to get out of this i have no one unlike the other [El Chino Iván] he has family they visit … a while ago they celebrated his birthday he said come with me and my family and i didn’t accept for one reason because with me from the day i was born nobody ever celebrated mine nor do I think they ever will. Bueno, i’ll go on tomorrow.”
New entry: “Bueno Here i am again and i’m too angry and sad … it’s now three months that i’ve been shut in and i’m too bored what i need is simple some T-shirts, some pants some shoes and to go to the movies three times a week … before I write more I want to make clear i am not doing this out of any interest and as for being a false witness, i am not that. and anyway, i don’t care who ends up guilty whoever it is i don’t care. bueno, this is what i saw that night, at around 6 i got to san Sebastián park.”
The Art of Political Murder Page 30
