ONE EVENING IN THE SUMMER of 2004, I had met in a café in Zone 10 with Claudia Méndez, from elPeriódico, and the two Untouchables, Rodrigo Salvadó and Arturo Aguilar. All three had come of age during the years of their involvement in the Gerardi case, nearly a quarter of their lives so far. Claudia Méndez had gone from being a novice reporter to an award-winning, internationally respected professional journalist, while also pursuing a master’s degree in literature. Rodrigo Salvadó was finishing his university thesis for his master’s degree in anthropology, and Arturo Aguilar, no longer living at home with his parents, was soon to graduate from law school. Arturo was married and Rodrigo was soon to be.
That night I asked my young friends how they would feel if the convictions were invalidated and the Limas were set free. After having devoted so much of their lives to the case, would they feel that their work had been in vain? Would they think that they had wasted years in a futile battle? Not at all, they answered. They all agreed: even if the Limas went free, they would have no personal regrets. Working on the Gerardi case had been the great and transforming experience of their lives so far. Of course it was all worthwhile, no matter what the outcome.
ON MARCH 11, 2005, nearly seven years after the murder of Bishop Gerardi, attorneys for the defense, the prosecution, and ODHA, along with the imprisoned surviving defendants, finally convened in a courtroom for the decisive appeals hearing. During the transition from the Portillo government to the Berger government, there had been a reshuffling and restructuring of the courts. The Fourth Court of Appeals had simply been renamed the Second Court of Appeals, but Wilewaldo Contreras, whom ODHA had fought a four-year battle to recuse, was no longer one of its three judges. Three hundred spectators packed the courtroom that day. Outside and inside, people carried posters demanding justice for the bishop’s murder, or for the Limas to be freed. The crowd included a large and noisy contingent of military men, prominent figures of the Guatemalan right, and the U.S. ambassador, John Hamilton. (His predecessor, Prudence Bushnell, was now the dean of the State Department’s School of Foreign Service.)
The defense attorneys, as expected, made Rubén Chanax the center of their arguments: Chanax had lied. Later I was told—and saw for myself on videotape—that both Mario Domingo and Jorge García were nervous and hesitant. They were intimidated by the show of military force in the courtroom.
The Limas were allowed to speak. The blustery Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, who went first, said he couldn’t understand a word that the special prosecutor, Jorge García, had said. The courtroom exploded in derisive laughter and shouts, especially from the front row, which was lined with military men. When Jorge García rose and addressed the judges, he was livid, shaking with anger. He’d treated the defense attorneys and the defendants with respect, he said, and demanded the same.
The presiding judge, Thelma del Cid, warned against any more provocations from the defendants or the spectators. Colonel Lima continued, denying his involvement in the murder. Waving his finger in the air, the colonel thundered: “In the Army we don’t kill with rocks. In the Army we kill with bullets!”
Captain Lima spoke next. He accused Ambassador Hamilton of exerting pressure on the court. Again Judge del Cid interceded. Captain Lima indignantly responded, “What? After five years of prison, I don’t have the right to talk?” Jorge García had prepared false witnesses, he said. And Monseñor Efraín Hernández, “who claims to preach the word of God, is dying of cancer in the hospital while his daughter [Ana Lucía Escobar] travels to Spain. And with whose money? Alfonso Portillo’s money. Edgar Gutiérrez is the one who is responsible for everything! He and his second in command, Ronalth Ochaeta!”
Captain Lima continued, “God has forgiven me for what I had to do in prison to maintain my family,” and the courtroom erupted in emotional applause. He then turned his attention to ODHA. Nery Rodenas, warned the captain, was the one who would suffer God’s vengeance. “Not now, but when your sons are grown. The punishment comes in the fourth generation!”
Captain Lima also said, “Father Mario Orantes doesn’t know anything. I can assure you that if the Father knew something, he’d already be dead.”
Lima’s defense of Father Mario was interesting. It was, I think, a clumsy attempt to cover one of the most gaping holes in the thesis that Ana Lucía Escobar and the Valle del Sol gang had played a role in the murder. That scenario, as Captain Lima had reiterated, remained central to his defense. But in every hypothetical version the scenario depended on a connection between Father Mario and Ana Lucía. Blanca Lidia Contreras, who had come from Canada to give the testimony from which the Valle del Sol scenario emerged, had portrayed the two as linked in depravity and criminality since Ana Lucía’s childhood. (In their book, de la Grange and Rico even cited private telephone calls between Father Mario and Ana Lucía that they said had been intercepted by Military Intelligence. “Of the intercepted phone calls, one in particular had caught their attention: a morbid dialogue, with strange sexual insinuations, that the priest had with the girl tied to organized crime.”) Yet, for the duration of a long court trial and five years of prison, the Limas and their attorneys had never challenged or called attention to Father Mario’s incredible account of his nonparticipation in the crime, or pressured him to admit a connection to Ana Lucía and her gang. Why was that? Because there was little they dreaded more than Father Mario’s confessing what he really knew about the murder?
THE COURT ANNOUNCED its verdict eleven days later, on March 22, Holy Tuesday. Private planes flew over Guatemala City trailing banners that read, “Free the Limas,” and “Edgar Gutiérrez did it.” Outside the courthouse, dozens of children stood holding signs calling for the Limas to be freed. They turned out to be street children who’d been hired by Álvaro Arzú, the current mayor. ElPeriódico reported that they were each paid fifty quetzales (about six dollars), nearly double the legal minimum wage for a day’s work in Guatemala.
The appellate court ruled that day in a way nobody had expected. In a plea bargain of sorts with the defense, the charges against the Limas were downgraded from their being coauthors to accomplices, and their sentences were lowered from thirty to twenty years. (Father Mario’s status remained the same.) The prosecution’s and ODHA’s fundamental accusation—that Bishop Gerardi’s murder was a crime of state—was upheld. The degree of the Limas’ culpability had been called into question, but, still, ODHA felt vindicated. This was much better than what they had been steeling themselves for. Shortly afterward, when I returned to Guatemala, I could sense, viscerally, what a relief the ruling had been. Mario Domingo seemed physically transformed, more relaxed. His rosy-cheeked complexion had returned. Now, finally, all that was left was for the Supreme Court to affirm the appellate court’s ruling, and the case could finally, four years after the original trial, proceed to the potentially explosive next stage, in which more important and powerful men than the Limas could be charged with the murder.
THE PROSECUTORS AND ODHA were getting closer to an understanding of what had happened inside the EMP on the night of the murder: who had been on duty and who hadn’t, what divisions, what subdivisions, which officers and specialists, and so on. Penetrating the miasma of secrecy and deception had been a long and daunting struggle. But when Portillo had finally closed the EMP at the end of his term, many low-ranking EMP specialists found themselves without jobs. A few of them had begun to talk.
One was Osmel Olivares Alay. In September 1999, he’d been asked by his commanding officer to assert publicly that Jorge Aguilar Martínez, the EMP waiter who was a key witness about who came and went from the EMP the night of the murder, couldn’t have been at the security office then because he’d been with Olivares Alay in the National Palace on janitorial duty—just as Colonel Rudy Pozuelos, the head of the EMP, had insisted. But during a visit to ODHA five years later, after the closing of the EMP, Olivares Olay told Arturo Aguilar, the youngest Untouchable, that now he wanted to tell the truth, which was this: “Ninety percent
of what Aguilar Martínez said is true.” Olivares Alay was extremely nervous about having come to the ODHA office. What if Military Intelligence found out? Arturo Aguilar agreed to wait for Olivares Alay to contact him again, to arrange another time and place to speak. Months passed, and he wasn’t heard from.
It turned out that Olivares Alay had done what some 10 percent of Guatemala’s population of 14 million had done. He’d struck out for the United States, making the long illegal journey across Mexico. Olivares Alay was in Washington, D.C. Mario Domingo’s wife, Jessica, was from West Virginia and Mario took advantage of a family visit to contact Olivares Alay to arrange a meeting. Mario was instructed to go to a certain street corner and look for someone in jeans, a red T-shirt, and a baseball cap. Olivares Alay had found a job painting houses in the suburbs of Washington. They went to a nearby coffee shop and Olivares Alay told Mario that, on the night of the murder, he and Aguilar Martínez had indeed been scheduled for janitorial duty in the National Palace between eight PM and one AM. But Aguilar Martínez had left soon after arriving for his shift, and he didn’t return until precisely one, in an agitated and sweaty state. He then told Olivares Alay that Monseñor Gerardi had been murdered. Olivares Alay didn’t make much of that information, because he didn’t know who Gerardi was. He said he didn’t give it more thought until August 1999, when Aguilar Martínez, having given his testimony, left the country.
Colonel Rudy Pozuelos had held meetings with a few EMP specialists after Aguilar Martínez testified. “We felt like a privileged group,” Olivares Alay told Mario Domingo. The men agreed to allow their names to appear on a newly drawn-up ordenes de cuerpo, a list of men who supposedly were on duty in the EMP on the night of the murder. Olivares Alay was asked to sign a notarized document attesting that Aguilar Martínez had been with him throughout their shift in the National Palace. He gave Mario Domingo a photocopy of that document. So where was Aguilar Martínez between eight and one in the morning, hours during which the operation to murder Bishop Gerardi was taking place? Was he exactly where he’d said, in the Security Services office near the EMP Guard Command gate? Or, like Rubén Chanax, had even he, in his depositions implicating others, suppressed his own greater participation in the crime? At the trial the defense lawyers had never attempted to call Aguilar Martínez as a witness, as they had Chanax and Gómez Limón; nor had they drawn attention to the account of the crime in his deposition. They hadn’t even summoned Olivares Alay to repeat his story about both men being on duty in the National Palace.
JUST AS JORGE GARCIÁ AND ODHA seemed ready to push ahead, armed with new information against high-ranking figures, the Public Ministry suddenly disbanded the office of special prosecutor for the Gerardi case. Jorge García remained, technically, in charge, but he had to report to another prosecutor, a former military man, and his team of assistant prosecutors was broken up. President Berger’s government would not support prosecutors who wanted to go forward with the Gerardi case. Berger had been elected as head of a new party filled with old Arzú loyalists and backed by General Otto Pérez Molina. Berger’s vice president, Eduardo Stein, had been Arzú’s foreign minister and a member of the High Commission he appointed to oversee the Gerardi investigation.
BY 2005, EDGAR GUTIÉRREZ, who had been the coordinator of the REMHI report and then had served in President Portillo’s government, was running his own small political consulting firm, writing a newspaper column, and publishing an online political journal that mixed reprinted articles by renowned American and European intellectuals with articles by Central American writers. Gutiérrez was jokingly referred to by his friends as “Dr. Satan.” No one had been more demonized than he by the critics of the Portillo government. So far, a dozen members of that government had been imprisoned or were under indictment on a variety of corruption charges, including Portillo himself, yet Gutiérrez had not been targeted. It was hard to believe that he would have escaped the wave of criminal investigations and indictments if there were any evidence against him of any type of malfeasance. He was living like a man who had nothing to fear from the law, although he had the most tensely alert, jumpiest bodyguard I think I’ve ever met.
MINUGUA’s final report on Guatemala said that under Gutiérrez’s leadership the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis had been transformed into a civilian information-gathering and analysis agency that no longer engaged in covert operations. Indeed, Fernando Penados had been fired by Gutiérrez from the SAE for engaging in activity that transgressed the new mandates for behavior. In late 2000, when Captain Lima held a press conference in prison, Fernando had dispatched a pair of agents to impersonate reporters. Lima had quickly noticed the imposters—who were dressed preposterously, like the Blues Brothers, in black suits and dark glasses—and demanded to know what newspaper they were from. They responded by naming a newspaper that had gone out of business years before. The incident was widely reported. Amusing photographs were published of the unmasked fake reporters trying to cover their faces with their notepads as they retreated from the conference. Lima represented the incident as an ominous threat against him. Edgar Gutiérrez, who hadn’t authorized Fernando Penados to indulge in any such ploys, was furious.
In early 2003, when Gutiérrez was serving as foreign minister in the Portillo government, agreements were signed establishing a special commission under UN auspices to investigate criminal networks in Guatemala—the clandestine “parallel powers” alleged to have their roots in Military Intelligence. It was to be called the Commission for the Investigation of Illegal Bodies and Clandestine Security Apparatus and was generally referred to as the CICIACS (pronounced see-syaks). It would be another international truth commission, but one legally empowered to investigate and take on the issue of impunity for organized crime linked to the Guatemalan military, police, and government. As foreign minister, Edgar Gutiérrez was deeply involved in the project, and the government was unlikely to have agreed to it without his urging. But the Guatemalan Congress, which was led by General Ríos Montt, rejected CICIACS as a violation of national sovereignty. (It certainly loomed as a violation of the impunity from prosecution of many members of Congress who were complicit in clandestine crime mafias.) President Berger had resurrected the CICIACS initiative but couldn’t yet overcome the predictable resistance. Berger was perceived as a weak civilian leader even by Guatemalan standards.
Edgar Gutiérrez and I met for lunch in Mexico City during the Christmas holidays at the end of 2005. He reflected on the Limas’ obsession with him. “People like the Limas can conceive of using political power in only two ways,” he said. “For personal enrichment and vengeance against enemies. That’s how power has always worked in Guatemala. So when I was at the SAE they looked at me and said, This guy is so clever we can’t even see what he’s doing. They imagined I was everywhere.” They couldn’t comprehend that an individual might have a concept of political power—never mind convictions—different from theirs.
I FELT AS IF I WERE LEARNING as much about the Gerardi case as I had learned in all the preceding years combined. Sometimes important sources who were indignant about the credibility given to a campaign of propaganda and smears against ODHA and the prosecutors, and who otherwise would not have talked to a journalist, decided to speak. Some of the new information centered on the role of the fearsome Major Francisco Escobar Blas, who had been implicated in the murder by Aguilar Martínez. Escobar Blas had been one of the prime movers behind the efforts to promote the Valle del Sol scenario—that Ana Lucía and her cohort had murdered the bishop when he discovered they had been trafficking in items stolen from the church.
It turned out that Father Mario, who was known for his comforting bedside manner when visiting ill and elderly parishioners, used to regularly give communion to Major Escobar Blas’s ailing grandmother in her home. Leopoldo Zeissig was the first to tell me that, and it was corroborated by Rafael Guillamón. Escobar Blas’s mother and grandmother both lived within a few blocks of the church of San Sebastián, and h
e sometimes lived with one or the other of them. His mother told Rafael Guillamón that on the night Bishop Gerardi was murdered, people from the EMP were phoning the house deep into the early morning hours, looking for her son. Later, when it became impossible to deny that there had been at least two men from the EMP at the San Sebastián parish house and park that night, it was officially claimed that the photographer seen there was Specialist Darío Morales and that the tall thin man in a red baseball cap accompanying him was Major Escobar Blas—who was neither tall nor thin.
Major Escobar Blas had been a legendary figure in the war zones back when he was a pilot with elite airborne counterinsurgency units. A former combat veteran described him as the kind of soldier who liked to strut around with the head of a decapitated guerrilla dangling from each hand. A few months after Bishop Gerardi’s murder, he was sent to take an advanced military course in Chile. Escobar Blas told his mother that it was “a presidential order.” The mother told Rafael Guillamón that her son was receiving threatening phone calls before he left for Chile. On the very day he went away, she said, Captain Lima had come looking for him in person, but had just missed him.
Why was Captain Lima looking for, and possibly angry with, Escobar Blas? Maybe because Captain Lima’s role in Bishop Gerardi’s murder had been secondary to Major Escobar Blas’s, yet it was the captain who was in trouble, the captain who had been recalled from the prestigious UN mission to Cyprus, the captain whose name was in the newspapers. Meanwhile lawyers from the Oficinita were supplying Escobar Blas with an alibi and he was being sent off to Chile.
The Art of Political Murder Page 32
