The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  Here Rubén Chanax dutifully scrawled the familiar story: his instant soup, Don Mike’s, going back to the parish house, the shirtless man stepping from the garage. “i didn’t know that person so I didn’t give it much importance … characteristics of that person height about one meter seventy [five feet eight inches] color of skin brown a round face hair cut in a military style large eyes normal nose and beard in the goatee style. he was wearing black caterpillar boots blue pants discolored old without a shirt. he came back with a shirt. then the other one came and everything ended i didn’t sleep that was about ten thirty p.m.”

  His writing changes when he gives his description of the shirtless man (to whom he didn’t give “much importance”), suggesting a practiced method of remembering and writing down people’s physical characteristics and attire. Of course he knew that prosecutors or investigators were likely to read his little diary; he had to be careful what he wrote there. But who, after all, was “Hugo”? Why couldn’t, or wouldn’t, Chanax tell prosecutors who he was, or where to find him? They were little closer to identifying him than when he’d been known only as the “shirtless man.” He was believed to be an assassin from Military Intelligence, his identity closely guarded, protected by several aliases.

  One of the most convincing suggestions about Hugo’s true identity was produced by none other than Fernando Penados, when he was working as an investigator for Edgar Gutiérrez, the first civilian head of the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis. Fernando wrote a report on one “Roberto Rodríguez García, alias ‘Hugo’ el Karateca. Identity card number e-05 47015,” born in 1966 in Santa Lucía Cotzumalguapa, Escuintla, in the hot southern lowlands. He was a former Kaibil counterinsurgency soldier, a parachutist, and, reported Fernando, “a member of the EMP under Arzú and for a while under Portillo, until he began to feel ‘localizado,’” or close to being identified. “But they tell me he’s still on active duty in Military Intelligence.”

  No photograph of Hugo el Karateca was found, but a tiny photo taken for Roberto Rodríguez García’s identity card when he was eighteen was located. Leopoldo Zeissig blew it up on his computer screen and called Rubén Chanax into his office. An assistant prosecutor later told Mario Domingo that Chanax went stiff with fright at the sight of the image. But Zeissig told me that he hadn’t noticed any reaction in Chanax at all. At any rate, when Zeissig asked, Chanax said he didn’t recognize the person. The photo, however, depicted a “Hugo”—if he was the same man—at about half the age he’d been on the night of the murder.

  RUBÉN CHANAX WAS LIVING in a notoriously seedy barrio in Mexico City, a city of more than 23 million inhabitants. To say that he was working again as a taquero is not to give much away. The number of taco stands in that city could be a metaphor for infinity; a lifetime might not be long enough to visit every one. I first met Chanax in February 2005. I was just passing through and had to be back in New York the next day. A friend from Guatemala, someone Chanax trusted, was there for the weekend. We went to the taco stand and found Chanax at work.

  Rubén Chanax was smaller of stature than I’d imagined, but also brawnier. The backs of his strong, knotty hands had several large warts. He had classic Mayan features—the sloping nose and forehead—and a melancholy air. His large, black, deerlike eyes gave him a boyish aspect. That day we spoke only briefly. He had to return to work. I told Chanax that I would be back in a few weeks, and that I hoped we’d be able to talk. Chanax said it was best to look for him before he started work in the afternoon. He lived in a shabby little apartment building directly across the street from the taco stand.

  I didn’t have a chance to return until three months later, in May. Because Chanax’s apartment had no doorbell, he’d told me that I should stand on the sidewalk and call up to his window. The pane was broken, covered by black plastic garbage bags. I was worried that he wouldn’t remember me. From the sidewalk, I shouted his name, and after a while the black plastic was tugged back and Rubén Chanax’s face appeared. He called down that I should go around to the front. He came to the door in floppy shorts and a baggy T-shirt. It was eleven in the morning, but he seemed sleepy, and his eyes were bloodshot. He glanced nervously up and down the street. I suggested we go somewhere nearby to talk and invited him to breakfast, but he seemed hesitant to accept the offer. As we stood in the door talking, two men appeared, one middle-aged, the other young, and took him aside and spoke with him out of my earshot. They were neighbors. They knew something about his situation, apparently, and looked out for him. I remembered that these same men, or at least the younger one, had appeared during that first visit three months before.

  So I followed Chanax inside and climbed the stairs to his apartment—two small rooms, dark and sparely furnished. Empty beer bottles on a plastic table. An old, small couch and plastic chairs. Posters of Thalia and other bikini-clad nearly preadolescent-looking Mexican female pop stars were hung on the walls overlooking his tiny, almost criblike bed. On this visit and subsequent visits I noticed that the lights—if indeed he had working electricity—were never on. We sat in facing chairs in the dark front room. At first, we mainly went over the known, familiar story.

  But some of what he talked about that day, if not new information to the prosecutors or to ODHA, was new to me. The information fit with what I was learning elsewhere during that spring and summer of 2005, when, in some ways, the Gerardi case finally seemed to be cracking open, as if pressured from inside by fermenting gases kept too long in airless dark.

  The night of April 26, 1998, in Don Mike’s store, Chanax told me, he’d thought it was just a coincidence when the three military men came in: Colonel Lima; a powerful general and former head of the EMP, Otto Pérez Molina; and another man. “Later I learned that he was Colonel Reyes Palencia,” said Chanax. Reyes Palencia was head of the Presidential Guard, third in the EMP’s chain of command. A few months after my first encounter with Chanax, when I met in Europe with Rafael Guillamón, he confirmed that Chanax hadn’t known who Reyes Palencia was that night. Later Guillamón had shown Chanax photographs of military officers, asking him to pick out the men he’d seen in Don Mike’s. Chanax was able to name Colonel Lima and General Pérez Molina, but when he identified Colonel Reyes Palencia by his photograph, he didn’t know he’d picked out one of the EMP’s highest-ranking officers.

  General Pérez Molina had been head of the EMP during the presidency of Ramiro de León Carpio, from 1993 to 1996, coinciding with Rubén Chanax’s military service. Chanax was discharged in July 1994. Rafael Guillamón believed it was not Colonel Lima but Pérez Molina, or EMP operatives under Pérez Molina’s command, who had originally recruited Chanax as an informer. If Chanax felt loyalty to General Pérez Molina, it would explain why he’d suppressed the name from his official testimony. (Captain Lima had pointedly included General Pérez Molina among those he was sending “subliminal messages” to during his interview with Claudia Méndez in March 2001.) Rubén Chanax didn’t tell me that General Pérez Molina had recruited him. He spoke about meeting the general when he was in the Army Corps of Engineers, “and what an honor it was to meet a man like that.” Ever since he was a little boy, living in Huehuetenango with the family that had bought him from his mother, Chanax told me, he’d looked up to soldiers and liked being around them.

  General Otto Pérez Molina represented the military during the Peace Accords negotiations. He was one of the principal architects of the amnesty. In 1996, the year the accords were signed, the New York Times reported that in the early 1990s, when then-Colonel Pérez Molina was the head of Military Intelligence, he’d ordered the murder of the captured guerrilla Efraín Bámaca. He issued the orders after Bámaca’s wife, the American lawyer Jennifer Harbury, had begun a highly publicized campaign to pressure the United States and Guatemalan governments to reveal her husband’s whereabouts. Nevertheless, in 1998, during Arzú’s presidency, Pérez Molina was appointed the Guatemalan delegate to the Inter-American Defense Board in Washington, DC. A few nights after Bis
hop Gerardi’s murder, Pérez Molina had dinner in Guatemala City with Jean Arnault, the UN Mission chief. Arnault told Rafael Guillamón that he was struck by the general’s stony reticence when the subject of the murder was raised.

  Rubén Chanax told me that on the day Bishop Gerardi was murdered, he’d met Villanueva and Quesén in the park in the morning and they’d instructed him to return at ten that night. They were going to give him some things that were to be stolen from inside the church. (Later that summer Guillamón told me that Quesén had belonged to the EMP’s anti-kidnapping commando unit.) “Una carota de Indio,” a big fat Indian face—that was how Chanax described Hugo to me, holding his hands wide apart as if to emphasize what, he reiterated, “a big black ugly Indio face” it really was. “Bien mamado, con brazototes”—super well-built, with great big arms. We went through that whole story again. Mere minutes after the shirtless Hugo stepped out of the garage, the black Jeep Cherokee had driven up, and Captain Lima and Obdulio Villanueva had both gotten out of the backseat. Chanax didn’t see the driver. “Come here, hijoeputa,” said Lima, “you’re going to help us.” Lima gave him rubber medical gloves. So much blood! They turned the bishop’s body over on his back, and pulled the body farther in…. Captain Lima, said Chanax, picked a lens from Bishop Gerardi’s eyeglasses off the garage floor and put it in the leather pocket inside the VW’s front door. When they were done, Lima collected Chanax’s rubber gloves, put them into a little bag with the others, and said, “If you talk, there’s this”—and Rubén Chanax mimed Lima wagging the little bag of gloves.

  I asked him about his job as an informer in Operation Bird, spying on Bishop Gerardi. He was paid every fifteen days, he told me, sometimes 1,000 quetzales, sometimes less—the amount varied. Sometimes he went over to the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis on Callejón del Manchén and was paid by a secretary named Alejandra (supposedly the same woman who’d borne Captain Lima’s child, to whom he’d written a letter explaining that he couldn’t send child support because he was spending all his money paying for witnesses). He wrote reports and took them to the secretary; sometimes he phoned them in. “The bird has flown,” he was supposed to say, when Bishop Gerardi had left the parish house. Sometimes, said Chanax, he went out to the house in Zone 6 to give his reports and collect his pay.

  Chanax described his education as an informer for Military Intelligence, back when he’d been in the Army Corps of Engineers and had been selected for the course. “First, came the theoretical,” he told me, sounding like a diligent student. The theoretical included learning how to befriend people one was to spy on. “You have to reach them slowly. First, you find a way to help them in something.” Or, he said, you might come by their house looking for work. What if, theoretically speaking, the spy wants a job as a gardener in order to infiltrate the house, but the subject already has a gardener? “Then I pay that person to leave,” said Chanax. But what if the gardener doesn’t want to leave? “I tell someone else, and that person disappears,” said Chanax. “Then I come by and ask for work.”

  After Rubén Chanax had graduated from the theoretical, he was taught to murder in the stealthy manner of an intelligence agent. He described how you tie two knots into a length of rope, about two inches apart, so that, once you’ve mastered the technique, you can wrap the rope around a victim’s neck and break his windpipe in five seconds. Fishing line, tied between two pieces of wood, was also effective for a fast, silent kill. As I watched Chanax illustrate how to strangle by that method, with his strong, warty hands, my mood changed. I felt frightened of being alone with him in the dark little apartment. When he got up to go to the bathroom, I waited, tense with irrational fear.

  We spoke also about the incident at the Incienso Bridge, the “final exam” he’d told Mario Domingo about, in which he and his fellow trainees had been ordered to murder a couple. Their instructors, said Chanax, drove him and two classmates to the bridge in the jeep that night. Chanax told me that he’d turned back and let the other two murder the couple. As punishment for his cowardice, he was punched and beaten all over his body, right there in the jeep.

  According to Chanax, one of his former instructors, an officer named Eric Lainfiesta Cáceres, had recently tracked him to the little street where he now lived. At the corner newsstand, Lainfiesta Cáceres had told the old woman vendor that his friend Rubén Chanax had been arrested, and that he needed to know where he lived so that he could fetch his identification papers and get him out of jail. But the news vendor refused to help the inquisitive stranger. Lainfiesta Cáceres, said Chanax, cornered him soon after outside a nearby movie theater. Chanax said that he offered him money to change and retract his testimony. He only had to say that he’d been pressured into giving false testimony at the trial. Lainfiesta Cáceres acknowledged that Chanax would probably have to spend about two years in jail as punishment for giving false testimony, but promised, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” When Chanax got out of prison, he would be well set up financially. Chanax knew who to contact when he decided; they would help him cross back into Guatemala from Chiapas. It would look as if he’d acted of his own volition.

  Rubén Chanax said that he’d told his former officer, “I’ll think about it. Give me two days.” Then Chanax didn’t show up for their next meeting.

  “If I went to prison,” Chanax flatly asserted, “they’d kill me there.”

  A subsequent check of Lainfiesta Cáceres’s immigration records revealed that he did frequently travel to Mexico and as of 2005 was still doing so. Later I was able to confirm that in President Arzú’s government, Lainfiesta Cáceres had belonged to the SAE. He was second in command under Colonel Otto Spiegler in a unit of intelligence operatives.

  In response to my perhaps unavoidably leading question of whether he felt any guilt about Bishop Gerardi’s death, Chanax softly answered, “Parece que sí—it seems that way. I owed something to Monseñor. He was always good to me…. It was so cruel the way they did it. He’d never harmed anyone. He was just trying to write his book.” Chanax possessed a somewhat crude understanding of what the Recuperation of Historical Memory project and report had been about. “They say Colonel Lima killed 400 people inside a church. And that was going to come out, and he didn’t want it to.”

  Chanax was aching to return to Guatemala. He had no family he could rely on, yet said he missed his family. He beseeched me to ask Jorge García, when I was next in Guatemala, to get in touch with his mother and let her know that he was OK. But he admitted that he was too frightened to go back.

  “Be careful with him,” Mario Domingo had warned about Chanax. “He’s very crafty and able. He’s always playing misinformation off against the truth.” I suspected that some of what Chanax had told me wasn’t true. (I didn’t believe his self-exculpatory account of what had happened at the Incienso Bridge.) But I didn’t doubt that if Chanax were willing to further implicate himself in the murder of Bishop Gerardi, he could also implicate others. Chanax was full of secrets. His secret information, in his lonely world, must, by then, have been entwined with his most intimate sense of self, providing him with a sense of power and control, even of movie-like glamour and drama.

  Rubén Chanax said that he sometimes had nightmares about what he’d seen in the parish house garage on the night of the murder, that he woke up sleepwalking in the little apartment, trying to escape, to run away. He recalled how frightened he’d been that first night when he’d returned to Guatemala City to testify in the trial. He’d slept on a couch in the prosecutors’ office. There were trees in back of the office, and all night he could hear the rustling of wind in the leaves, and he’d felt frightened.

  MUCH HAD CHANGED IN GUATEMALA, and much had remained the same. The former PAN Party Mayor of Guatemala City, Oscar Berger, had been elected president in December 2003. He’d switched places with his former mentor, President Álvaro Arzú, who was now mayor. Berger’s predecessor as president, Alfonso Portillo, was in Mexico. The Guatemalan courts were seekin
g to have Portillo extradited to face corruption charges. Before leaving office, Portillo, pressured by his foreign minister, Edgar Gutiérrez—as well as by MINUGUA and the U.S. embassy—had at last come through on his promise to shut down the Presidential Military Staff, the EMP. It was replaced by a new entity, called the Secretariat for Administrative and Security Matters, which was under the command of a former guerrilla. Conceived as a highly professional and apolitical security service, the new unit had received training from Spain, the United States, Israel, and other countries.

  Why had Portillo waited until the end of his term to close down the EMP? Because it served as a source of secret funds for him, and was also the operational center of his own covert political operations. Now there was no longer an EMP, with its clandestine presidential intelligence unit. But Military Intelligence and the Cofradía, current and former high-ranking officers from the G-2 (or whatever it was calling itself at that moment), remained entrenched at the heart of power and organized crime.

  Most significantly for Guatemala, MINUGUA’s mandate had expired at the end of 2004. Though few of the terms of the Peace Accords had been implemented, the UN mission had closed its doors. MINUGUA’s aggressive monitoring in the Gerardi case had protected witnesses, judges, prosecutors, and others. MINUGUA had helped Guatemala’s fledgling apparatus of justice, however wobbly, to go forward. The justice system’s few successes, such as the convictions in the Gerardi case, could be seen as a validation of the multilateral “democratic institutions building” in which the UN mission, along with the United States and European Union donor nations, had been engaged. But the overall weakness of the Guatemalan justice system and its other institutions; the seemingly ineradicable culture of impunity, corruption, and abuse of power; the ever-worsening violence engulfing the country; and the mostly stagnant reform process underlined the limits of such efforts. Real change had to come from Guatemalans themselves, from those who were willing to fight for it, risking everything. As the Gerardi case had shown, sometimes individuals and groups were up to that nearly impossible and dangerous task.