The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  Major Escobar Blas found out that his mother had been talking to MINUGUA. He phoned her and told her to stop talking babosadas, foolishness.

  Escobar Blas was summoned back from Chile when the court-ordered evidentiary hearings were held at the church of San Sebastián and witnesses and some suspects were asked to reenact their movements and tell what they had seen on the night of the murder. Escobar Blas was reluctant to return to Guatemala, and a message, of sorts, was conveyed to him. (MINUGUA knew the details of this incident, as did the prosecutors.) His mother came home late one night and saw a young couple embracing in the dark shadows near her front door. They pushed themselves into her house behind her. She was very brutally assaulted. As they left, one of her assailants said, “A message from Valle del Sol.” If his mother couldn’t recognize the message behind those words, her son, one of the creators of the Valle del Sol fiction, certainly would.

  So Major Escobar Blas flew back to Guatemala and turned up at the San Sebastián church and gave his weird performance at the evidentiary proceeding as the tall, thin soldier in a red baseball cap seen by witnesses. But what was Major Escobar Blas really doing that night? Chepito Morales, a military defense lawyer, once confided, or boasted, to Rafael Guillamón, “We had to put Escobar Blas somewhere that night.” He needed an alibi, and the Oficinita provided one, placing him at the crime scene. It was not illegal, after all, for the EMP to have sent agents to look in on an occurrence within its security perimeter.

  “HOMOSEXUALITY WAS DEFINITELY THE KEY that opened the San Sebastián parish house to the killers,” Rodrigo Salvadó said to me one rainy afternoon as we sat in the corridor by ODHA’s courtyard going over details in the crime one more time. But how? To understand how the killers got into the parish house, one had to go back perhaps twenty years. Another story, as if long hidden inside one of the smaller boxes in a Chinese box—a box of fear inside a box of prudence inside a box of patient time-biding—had emerged.

  In 1984, Military Intelligence had become aware of a house in Zone 4 where homosexual officers and civilians mixed at secret parties. It was known as Club Rosa. Few national armies openly tolerate homosexuality among troops, and it isn’t hard to imagine how difficult it must be for a gay officer to accommodate his nature to the Guatemalan Army. The swaggering Colonel Lima, who could be described as a personification of the Army’s culture of strident machismo, must not have been pleased to learn that promising young officers and cadets from the Escuela Politécnica were partying, even cross-dressing, at Club Rosa. But how to stop this activity without bringing scandal and embarrassment down on the Army at a time when it was at war and when foreign governments and the international press were keeping such a close eye on the country? This was how: a member of Club Rosa, surnamed Muñoz Martínez, was murdered, and in a particularly gruesome manner. The message was understood. Two young officers deserted and fled the country, reportedly to California, where they still reside, one operating a karate dojo there. The rest were quietly transferred to other commands and units. Some served their time in the military and eventually fell by the wayside. But others, managing to hide or master their vulnerability, marrying, producing children, went on to successful military careers. One or two turned up in the nucleus of President Arzú’s EMP. (Two EMP officers mentioned in this chronicle of the Gerardi case are known to have been lovers, and were even discovered in bed together by the wife of one of the men. She then, as one former soldier told me, “shouted it from her rooftop in Colonia Lourdes.”)

  Twelve years later the war was over, and in those new times homosexuality was tolerated a little bit more in some sectors of Guatemalan society, if not actually in the military or among those associated with the conservative wing of the Catholic Church. And a new incarnation, in a sense, of Club Rosa came into being. Closeted homosexuals were meeting in an elegant home in Zone 2, a neighborhood of belle epoque mansions only a few blocks from the home of Major Escobar Blas’s mother. When Captain Lima was interviewed by Claudia Méndez, after his arrest, he told her about “a tryst house near the Morazán Park” in Zone 2. “They say Monseñor Hernández used to go there with Father [Mario] Orantes, along with some very wealthy lesbians.” Father Mario’s close friend and ordination godmother, Martha Jane Melville Novella, was said to be the owner of the house. At least one other EMP officer, a veteran of the first Club Rosa, occasionally attended the gatherings. Diego Arzú, the son of former president Arzú, was also said to be a member of the group. Diego, who was in his early twenties, had dated a niece of Martha Jane Melville Novella, which was how he was introduced into her aunt’s circle.

  A leaflet was circulated in Colonia Lourdes, the military officers’ residential neighborhood, only days after Bishop Gerardi was killed. It claimed that on the night of the murder Captain Lima had been sent to the San Sebastián parish house to extricate Diego Arzú. In his interview with Claudia Méndez, Captain Lima denied that accusation, but he also introduced into the conversation the allegation—without refuting it—that Diego Arzú belonged to the circle that met in what he referred to as the Zone 2 casa de citas, which can mean a bordello, or a place of illicit trysts.

  “There was definitely something going on between Diego Arzú and Father Mario Orantes,” said Rafael Guillamón. Several of the park vagrants, including Rubén Chanax, had mentioned Diego Arzú’s visits to the San Sebastián parish house. And a diplomat, a great admirer of President Arzú, told a former member of ODHA that Diego’s “double life” was “a strong rumor among the cabinet and in the corridors of the palace.” But what could the relationship have been between the priest and the aristocratic president’s young son? Father Mario had worldly enthusiasms but also a spiritual side. Perhaps the priest understood the youth’s travails and gave him support and counsel. Leopoldo Zeissig said that he believed, but hadn’t been able to corroborate, that Bishop Gerardi’s murderers had somehow exploited the link between Father Mario and Diego Arzú, especially afterward, during the cover-up.

  In a press conference from prison, Captain Lima had revealed that he had in his possession receipts for the delivery order from Pollo Campero to Father Mario on the night of the murder. Father Mario had told prosecutors that he had ordered a meal from Pollo Campero; so why would Lima use the receipts in order to issue, presumably, one of his subliminal warnings? Axel Romero, Bishop Gerardi’s nephew, was shown those receipts not long after the murder. The order was for two large combos—sixteen pieces of fried chicken and eight orders of fries. Who might have eaten all that fried chicken with Father Mario in the hours before the murder? A lover? More than one of the murderers? Did his guests surprise Father Mario? Or did they arrive at the parish house according to plan?

  There are two terms that one repeatedly hears in Guatemala, especially in discussing the blend of paranoia, stealth, ruthlessness, betrayal, corruption, violence, and cunning that characterize the exercise of real and secret power. One term is machucar la cola—to snag the tail, step on the tail, grab hold of the tail. (General Espinosa, who collected elephant figurines, especially admired elephants because, among other reasons, they have “a very short tail that nobody can machucar.”) Finding ways to machucar a rival’s, a superior’s, a colleague’s, or a subordinate’s tail is a key to getting ahead, and to survival. The second term is chantajear—blackmail. It’s what you can do to people when you have them by the tail.

  Protecting his son Diego was hardly President Arzú’s only problem. The reputation and even legitimacy of his presidency were threatened by the murder of Bishop Gerardi. And there were other things that the president would not wish to see disclosed or publicly exploited by his rivals. A few of these involved his son Roberto, who had become ensnared, according to Rafael Guillamón, in the goings-on at a disco nightclub owned by EMP officers in Zone 14, where narcotics were trafficked and heavily consumed. Someone who possessed information about all this, and who was himself in a powerful position—a general, for example—would be able to bend a number of people to his
will, including the president.

  When Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico’s book Who Killed the Bishop? was kicking up a storm in Guatemala, President Portillo asked his intelligence officers to find out what they could about who had been helping the authors. (Rico had told an admiring Guatemalan television interviewer that during the two years she and her partner spent investigating and writing the book they had lived off their savings.) Portillo was told that President Arzú had helped to fund the journalists’ endeavors. The source of that information being Military Intelligence, I repeat it with natural skepticism. But it does seem worth considering in light of the strikingly proprietary manner with which Arzú displayed his enthusiasm for the book, copies of which he handed out in great numbers. Soon after the new U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, James Derham, assumed his post in 2006, he had a private meeting with Arzú, who was then the mayor of Guatemala City. The ambassador was given a copy of Who Killed the Bishop?

  FOR ALL THE EFFORT deployed to keep them silent, people—some people—talk anyway. Not long before the murder trial got under way in the spring of 2001, a woman named Elida Mancilla Meléndez held a barbecue to celebrate the inauguration of her new house in San Lucas Sacatepéquez, near the city of Antigua. Among the guests were Archbishop Próspero Penados, two priests who’d graduated from the Adolfo Hall military academy in Cobán, and a nun, the sister of the hostess. The sisters’ nephew, an EMP specialist named Julio Meléndez Crispín, was also a guest. He was tall, thin, hook-nosed, sad-eyed, and glum.

  Julio Meléndez Crispín turned out to be the real reason for the barbecue. His aunts wanted their nephew to have a conversation with the archbishop. Julio Meléndez Crispín was worried about the potential repercussions of his role in the Gerardi case, and his aunts had urged him to tell Archbishop Penados “what happened that famous night.” So Meléndez Crispín, as they say in Guatemala, turned over his bowl of soup. He told the archbishop that all the officers in the EMP knew what was going to happen. That many people had been contracted to monitor what went on around the park: indigents, taxi drivers, shoeshine boys, newspaper vendors, and so on. That there had long been an intelligence operation in effect against the Catholic Church and ODHA. That the murder plan was channeled through the EMP. That during the operation all the on-duty members of the EMP were confined to quarters before, during, and immediately after the murder (as the waiter specialist Aguilar Martínez had reported). And that he, Julio Meléndez Crispín, not Major Escobar Blas, was the tall man in the baseball cap who accompanied the photographer, Darío Morales, to the parish house to observe the murder scene.

  Julio Meléndez Crispín said that in Captain Lima’s operational group on the famous night there were only fellow veterans of the Kaibil special forces. Lima’s job was to monitor the crime. Meléndez Crispín said that Father Mario had long been an informer and that both Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván were informers too. He said that he had informed on the archbishop’s nephew, Fernando Penados, with whom he had first made contact through a family friend. He said that Colonel Lima Estrada and other prominent retired combat officers had been advisers to the EMP’s anti-kidnapping commando unit. He identified the person—Danilo De León Girón—in charge of deleting and burning the files on the Gerardi case in the SAE after Alfonso Portillo became president and before Edgar Gutiérrez took control of the agency.

  And then Meléndez Crispín revealed to Archbishop Penados the identity of the shirtless man: Obdulio Villanueva. That too made sense. Many thought it doubtful that the planners of the crime had contrived to bring the burly Villanueva from the Antigua prison only to make a video and drag Bishop Gerardi’s corpse farther into the garage.

  Details of the confidential conversation between the archbishop and Meléndez Crispín reached Rafael Guillamón at MINUGUA through another guest at the barbecue, but the UN did not have a mandate to interfere in the criminal investigation. It is not known what the archbishop did with the information. Apparently nothing. Investigators at ODHA heard only a very vague description, from a nun who also attended the barbecue, of what was said.

  MONSEÑOR HERNÁNDEZ, the former chancellor of the Curia, died in the spring of 2005. Archbishop Penados, who had been declining in spirit and health since the murder of Bishop Gerardi, died soon after. That same spring, during a meeting of presidents from Central America and the Dominican Republic, George W. Bush declared that he was “preoccupied by the proliferation of pressure groups in Central America, predominately aligned with the left, who are putting the stability of democracy at risk.” So the primary danger to democracy didn’t come from narco-militaries or government corruption or institutionalized lawlessness or the violence perpetrated by the maras. It came from leftist “pressure groups,” by which Bush could mean only nonviolent labor union and peasant organizations, human rights organizations, elements of the Catholic Church, and so on. He didn’t specify how such groups were threatening regional democracy.

  The New York Times and other publications reported that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimated that 75 percent of the cocaine reaching the United States was being transshipped through Guatemala and that “high-level military and national police were linked to the trade.” The FBI reported that thirty former Guatemalan Army Kaibiles had been hired by the Mexican “Zeta” drug cartel as assassins and instructors. In the summer of 2006, Mexicans were scandalized by a series of gruesome murders carried out against that cartel’s rivals and enemies. Reporters attributed the murders to the hired Kaibil assassins. Beheadings, the reports said, were carried out in a special manner associated with the Kaibiles, using razor-sharp bayonets.

  In the fall of 2005, an enormous secret-police archive of data going back for more than a century, and especially rich in information about the disappearances and political assassinations carried out during Guatemala’s thirty-six-year internal war, had been found in a bat-infested, musty old munitions depot in Guatemala City. A government ombudsman, the Human Rights Procurator, took control of the mildewed archive, which promised to provide countless clues and evidence of Guatemalan atrocities. Leopoldo Zeissig had quietly returned to Guatemala that spring and was working with the ombudsman’s office as a legal adviser. He was part of the team dealing with the formerly secret archive, which was said to hold sufficient files, if laid end to end, to span the length of 130 football fields.

  I met with Zeissig one evening in the Austrian pastry café at the Hotel Camino Real. It was the first time we’d seen each other since I’d flown down to South America to see him when he was in exile there. We reminisced about the investigation into Bishop Gerardi’s murder. “I loved the prosecutor’s office and thought it was important to do a good job,” he said. “I was still a dreamer about justice.” But, in the end, Zeissig’s motives had been called into question. The backlash against the case had been political, he said, “because of all that Monseñor Gerardi represented, and because of the forces moving around back there who wanted to kill him.” Zeissig denied that he and his prosecutors had a political agenda. “Our work was strictly juridical, by the letter of the law,” he said. “What personal gain have I gotten out of any of this?” Tears welled up in Zeissig’s eyes. “It’s idealistic maybe, but I want this country to improve. Is that like Quixote attacking windmills?”

  It was hard to predict what, finally, the Geradi case would mean for Guatemala: historic breakthrough or anomaly, precedent or fiasco? The Army and its accomplices had fought hard, ceaselessly—if not exactly courageously—to cover up their role in the murder, to spread smoky layers of confusion over every aspect of the crime, and to turn the tables on their accusers. “I have no doubts that the military did it,” Fernando Penados said to me. “The problem is, go ask the people about the Bishop Gerardi case now, and they have no fucking idea what happened there.”

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2005, I had visited Rubén Chanax in Mexico again. I’d been warned that he was still in touch with Military Intelligence and I was nervous about being alone with hi
m and his warty strangler’s hands in the dark little apartment. So when I called up at his window and he came down—again with bloodshot eyes, and wearing basketball shorts and a big dirty T-shirt—I suggested rather strongly that we go to a restaurant. He hesitated, looking warily up and down the street, and I saw that he was as frightened of me as I was of him, although his caution was nearly instinctual. He couldn’t allow himself to trust anybody.

  We stepped onto the sidewalk. As before, a vigilant neighbor immediately appeared. I sensed something more than routine about the neighbor’s concern this time, and in the brief, whispered conversation between them. As we walked down the sidewalk, Chanax said that he had been trying to get transferred to another country. Maybe Argentina would take him. He wanted to be someplace else, he said, far away.

  I had something on my mind that I wanted to ask him, and I decided to try to catch him off guard. “Rubén,” I said, as we walked along, “people are saying that Obdulio Villanueva was the shirtless man, that he was Hugo. Is that true?” Chanax’s reaction was instantaneous and spontaneous. He laughed, and said, “No, it was Hugo.” He held his hands wide apart and asserted, as he had before, that Hugo had a “big, fat, dark Indio face.”

  Later, when I spoke to Mario Domingo at ODHA—he harbored his own suspicion that the shirtless man might have been Villanueva—he was unsurprised by Rubén Chanax’s denial. Chanax, he said, couldn’t change his story now. Doing so would only raise questions about how much more he knew and had withheld and further implicate him in the crime. Mario was convinced that Rubén Chanax was in the garage and saw Bishop Gerardi beaten to death, whether by Hugo or by Villanueva, or by both of them, assuming they were not the same person. Investigators—including Jack Palladino, the private eye from San Francisco—had always maintained that there had been at least two people inside the garage, probably more. One or more men could have been inside the parish house before Bishop Gerardi arrived home that Sunday night in his VW Golf. Another man might have been outside, hiding among the bolitos, and followed the car inside. Then someone would have had to swing the cumbersome garage door shut. That person might even have been Rubén Chanax. Aguilar Martínez had described seeing at least three other operatives, dressed in black, getting out of the black Jeep Cherokee, along with Lima and Villanueva, when it returned to the EMP. Julio Meléndez Crispín had told the archbishop that those operatives were Lima’s former fellow Kaibiles.