The Art of Political Murder

by Francisco Goldman

  Juan Luis Font, elPeriódico’s managing editor, was one of those who received a visit from Escobar Blas. Font is a journalist in his thirties, conscientious and devoted to his profession. He told me that Escobar Blas frequently contacted him, and that Captain Lima occasionally phoned from prison as well. They perceived Font as sympathetic to their cause because he had been an early advocate—to his subsequent regret—of de la Grange and Rico’s theories about the Gerardi case. Font admitted that his own knowledge of the complex case was superficial, especially compared with that of his main reporter on the story, Claudia Méndez. That was why, when Escobar Blas turned up at the newspaper’s office bearing his video, Font summoned Claudia, even though he knew that doing so would irritate his visitor.

  Escobar Blas sat facing Font’s desk, and Claudia took a seat in a rear corner of the small office. “Throughout the meeting,” Font told me, “Claudia peppered him with questions.” Escobar Blas had to keep turning in his chair to deliver his menacing stare and curtly evasive answers. But Claudia wasn’t intimidated. At the trial, she said to Escobar Blas, the prosecutors had proved their case and anyone who closely followed the record could see that. Escobar Blas had perjured himself when he’d testified that he was the tall thin man in a red baseball cap who had shown up with the EMP photographer at the San Sebastián parish house on the night of the murder. Really, Claudia said to Escobar Blas, it was EMP specialist Julio Meléndez Crispín who’d been there. Wasn’t that true?

  Escobar Blas, Juan Luis Font told me, lost his composure. Glaring at Claudia, he snarled, “Meléndez Crispín is weak! He’s weak! He wasn’t going to be able to hold up!”

  Moments later, infuriated and flustered, Escobar Blas stalked out of the office.

  THE CONSTITUIONAL COURT scheduled a public hearing of the defense’s amparo for May 16. That morning the spectators’ seats in the courtroom were nearly filled, mainly with supporters of the prosecution and the Church. When ODHA’s lawyers arrived, there was a surprise. Mario Domingo was there. Instead of going back to West Virginia, he had decided to resume his duties as head of ODHA’s legal team. But the defense lawyers didn’t show up. They had apparently realized, or found out beforehand, that with such weak arguments—obvious patadas de abogado—their efforts would be futile. The court’s five judges remained out of sight while everybody waited, and finally the courtroom emptied. The judges now had three days to sign their ruling. It seemed that the case, or at least its nearly eight-year first stage, was finally over.

  But the ruling didn’t come down. Four months later, on September 22, 2006, Prensa Libre reported that the court had upheld the verdicts, and anecdotal evidence—conversations with some of the judges—indicated that this was true. The five-member court decides its cases by majority, and four judges had signed the decision against the defense, which now awaited only the signature of the fifth judge—the court’s president—to become official. The president was a rightist, however, and he had the power to stall for time. How long he might be able to stall—if, indeed, that was what he was doing—was a matter of opinion, but Jorge García said that he feared the Gerardi case might devolve into one of those blizzards of legal challenges that were slowly resolved, one at a time, over years and years. Others insisted that the Gerardi case had already progressed too far for anyone to be able to permanently thwart it in that manner.

  The most pragmatic opinion was that the character of the next Guatemalan president and government would determine whether or not the Gerardi case would be given a chance to go forward. The new government would—or would not—foster an environment in which prosecutors felt institutionally supported in continuing the fight. There was no political will in President Berger’s government to support the prosecution of the case, even though Berger was said to have acrimoniously split with Arzú. Under Berger’s rule, the military was reconsolidating its position in the centers of power. The EMP no longer formally existed, but its reincarnation was said to be functioning out of the installations of the so-called Equestrian Unit of the Campo Marte military base in Guatemala City. The main intelligence group of the Guatemalan Army’s High Command (G-2) had never gone anywhere.

  President Berger’s term would end with the dawning of 2008. Rigoberta Menchú had announced that she was a candidate for president, and the Guatemalan press was already tracking the alliances between politicians and behind-the-scenes power brokers. Most potential candidates for president were making pilgrimages to the Miami-based Mexican television magnate Ángel González, owner of almost all of Guatemala’s television stations. Dionisio Gutiérrez, of the Pollo Campero fried-chicken family and host of the country’s singularly influential political talk show on television, was reported to be allied with General Otto Pérez Molina, the former head of the EMP whom Rubén Chanax had identified as having been in Don Mike’s store on the night of Bishop Gerardi’s murder, along with Colonel Lima and the EMP’s Colonel Reyes Palencia. But this information was not public knowledge. Billboards loomed over Guatemala City’s traffic arteries, advertising the candidacy of General Pérez Molina. They featured the general in what looked like a prizefighter’s pose, clenched fist raised, with a killer stare. His opponents were sinister mara thugs with tattooed faces. A slogan promised mano dura, a “hard fist,” against street gangs.

  RUBÉN CHANAX HAD MENTIONED General Otto Pérez Molina’s role in the murder of Bishop Gerardi confidentially, to MINUGUA’s Rafael Guillamón, among others. And Captain Lima, during the interview with Claudia Méndez in which he sent his “subliminal warnings,” had praised Pérez Molina as an officer who “stands by his men.” Lima alluded to other “higher-ups,” who might logically include, for example, General Marco Tulio Espinosa, but he didn’t identify them. Neither Chanax nor Lima ever mentioned General Pérez Molina in any of their official legal statements. Was their silence a tactic employed to guarantee their own protection? Lima probably employed several such strategies simultaneously. Did he really know the location, for example, of the videotape of the murder scene, with which he’d threatened Chanax? And if he did, who else might be threatened by what was on that tape? What other pieces of compromising evidence and information might Lima have?

  “In all the prisons where he has been confined, Lima has been one of the principal leaders,” Prensa Libre had reported on September 30, 2006, during a week when Lima suddenly lost his aura of Machiavellian invincibility. Guatemalan journalists who’d been to the Pavoncito prison, where Captain Lima and his father were inmates, said—but didn’t dare write—that the captain lived apart from the general inmate population, in private quarters, with two golden retrievers; that his control of prison businesses was so complete that he even charged for the use of the plastic chairs visitors sat in. All of this began to change on September 25, when 3,000 Guatemalan soldiers and police conducted a dawn raid at another prison, the Pavón Penal Rehabilitation Farm. In news reports all over the world, the raid was characterized as a successful attempt by the beleaguered Guatemalan government—and by its intrepid new director of prisons, Alejandro Giammattei—to wrest control from the inmates and put a stop to a corrupt system. Newspapers were filled with descriptions of incarcerated crime bosses living in relative luxury while running their enterprises and rackets, and of criminals on the outside using the prison—which was said to have its own brothels and even a disco—as a hideout.

  During the raid, seven prisoners, described as heavily armed inmate leaders, were killed. Among the dead was a Colombian drug trafficker, Jorge Batres, who had nearly completed his sentence and was soon to have been released. Captain Lima’s old nemesis, Carlos Barrientos, the man who had fought with Lima in the Centro Preventivo and stolen his agenda notebook, was also killed. The raid was such a public-relations success that Alejandro Giammattei resigned as director of prisons and announced that he was running for president on the ticket of President Berger’s party.

  After the raid, most of the surviving prisoners from the Pavón Penal Rehabilitation Farm were
transferred to the Pavoncito prison—Little Pavón. On the day of the transfer, several reporters saw Alejandro Giammattei engage Captain Lima in a brief, seemingly amicable conversation. The story in Prensa Libre on September 30 asserted that, although Captain Lima had been a prison leader throughout his seven years of incarceration, “on this occasion, the military man has failed to win the support of the 1,650 prisoners transferred from the Pavón Rehabilitation Farm, who accuse him of being an extortionist.” Inmates were said to be upset that Lima wanted to charge them for bringing cell phones or even food into the prison. Thus Captain Lima and his father were to be isolated from the prison population for their own safety and to prevent the captain from “fomenting instability.”

  By then, stories were circulating that the seven prisoners slain in the Pavón raid had been murdered by a police death squad. Reporters as well as inmates with cell-phone cameras had photographed a group of heavily armed men in police commando uniforms, wearing ski masks, who were said to have picked out several prisoners who were lined up with others, their hands tied behind their backs. Most of the men later found dead were among those who had been pulled out of line by the masked commandos. They were apparently executed at close range.

  Claudia Méndez of elPeriódico broke the story about the executions of the seven prisoners. The office of the Guatemalan Human Rights Procurator—who is appointed by the government—investigated and confirmed that there had been extrajudicial executions at Pavón. Throughout the spring of 2007, elPeriódico and other papers ran stories about the police death squads that were carrying out the “social cleansing” campaign supposedly aimed primarily at mara youth gangs. Members of these death squads also often worked as assassins for organized crime bosses, and it was in this role—one gang of narco-traffickers attacking another—that they carried out the executions in Pavón. ElPeriódico identified two members of the police death squad that participated in the prison raid: the Benitez Barrios brothers, wealthy young men who had been invited by Erwin Sperisen, the director of the National Police, to work as unpaid advisers. After the publication of the stories, elPeriódico and its director, José Rubén Zamora, once again became the target of an array of virulent threats, specious legal motions, and the usual Guatemalan agitprop.

  Alejandro Giammattei, now the governing party’s presidential candidate, was furious about the reports. The negative stories included comments from Captain Lima, who wrote a regular column from prison for a small Mixco newspaper, El Metropolitano, in which he often attacked his foes in the Gerardi case. Lima wrote that the slain Colombian drug dealer had been taken secretly from Pavoncito to Pavón the day before the raid, implying that there was a plan to kill him. On December 22, four men in civilian clothes and ski masks had visited Captain Lima at Pavoncito. Lima claimed in his El Metropolitano column to have recognized at least three of his visitors. They were military men, including a lieutenant colonel named Carlos Santisteban Zárate, who had threatened him before. Lima wrote that his hands and feet were tied and that he was taken to a garbage dump in back of the prison. “They stripped me naked and beat me all over my body with sticks,” he wrote, “introducing one of these up my anus, causing me wounds and lacerations.” While he was being tortured, Lima said, his assailants asked if General Otto Pérez Molina had paid him to discredit the prison system (and by extension Alejandro Giammattei, who was then Pérez Molina’s rival as a presidential candidate, although there is no evidence that Giammattei had prior knowledge of the Pavón assassinations). The masked men also demanded to know if Lima had provided Claudia Méndez with information for her articles in elPeriódico about the prison raid. Lima said he wasn’t the source. (Méndez says that she relied on other sources for her reports.)

  Lima wrote that he was thrown into a filthy isolation cell infested with rats and without light, sanitation facilities, or running water. Then he was transferred to Infiernito—Little Hell—the most notorious prison in Guatemala, where he was again isolated. A former military man who had worked as a security adviser to MINUGUA and to the United States embassy contacted ODHA and Claudia Méndez and told them that mara gang members—including a man known as Bam Bam, who had participated in the decapitation of Obdulio Villanueva—had been moved into a cell adjoining Lima’s. ElPeriódico published an article calling attention to Lima’s plight. Leopoldo Zeissig, who was still working with the office of the Human Rights Procurator, declared that the office was monitoring Lima’s situation. The consensus was that Captain Lima’s powerful protectors had decided it was time to abandon him, especially if his elimination would seem unrelated to the Gerardi case.

  In November 2006, elPeriódico had published an investigative piece reporting that thirty military officers, many of them veterans of the war and of Military Intelligence, held command posts in the National Police, in clear violation of the Peace Accords. Some of the officers had served in the EMP. One colonel was linked by the paper to the Oficinita; another was described as having worked until recently in Mayor Arzú’s office. General Marco Tulio Espinosa, head of the EMP and minister of defense when Arzú was president, was reported to be running a clandestine unit that included telephone espionage from the basement of Arzú’s mayoral office. One of Espinosa’s main tasks, according to a well-connected source, was monitoring the Gerardi case.

  Who was directing the police in the “social cleansing” being waged against presumed urban delinquents? These activities resembled the clandestine military terror of the war years, and it was easy to see how such an operation could be used for political assassinations. “Social cleansing or extrajudicial execution,” said Mario Domingo. “The line between crime and politics here can be so fine as to not even exist.”

  RODRIGO SALVADÓ, one of the last two Untouchables, was leading ODHA’s new exhumation team. He was an anthropologist, and that kind of work was closer to what he’d trained for. His college thesis had been an exploration of how the war had affected the observation of traditional religious customs in Maya communities. Rodrigo would sometimes spend weeks at a time in remote mountain areas, but he said that if the Gerardi case ever went forward, he was willing to resume his job as an investigator. “Maybe it’s some suicidal urge on my part,” he joked softly.

  Rodrigo told me about a witness who had been pretty much overlooked—one of the car washers who had been in San Sebastián park on the night of Bishop Gerardi’s murder. Rodrigo wasn’t sure he could find the witness but was willing to try. Once more we set out on the short walk from the cathedral complex to the church of San Sebastián. Rodrigo said he hadn’t talked to the car washer in a while, and that if we found him it was uncertain what condition he’d be in. He wasn’t always lucid. We found him bent over a bucket of sloshing water, sponge in hand, busily washing a parked car. He was a tall, dark, middle-aged man with the stark thinness of a terminally ill person. His hollow-cheeked face was wrinkled and scrunched-looking, like a lost leather glove, and his few remaining teeth were crooked brown shards. Yet from under a soiled New York Yankees cap, black hair fell boyishly over his forehead, and he had attentive, glittery eyes. Rodrigo introduced us and then left us alone. The car washer’s name was Víctor. He said that after he finished washing the car, he would meet me in the park. I waited. It wasn’t long before I saw him approaching, with a lurching gait. Víctor seemed to be lame in one leg.

  His full name was Víctor Hugo Godoy Cojulún, and he was forty-two years old. He’d been born in the Guatemalan city of Antigua and had been working as a car washer and living in and around San Sebastián park since he was twenty-three. In 1998, when Bishop Gerardi was murdered, Víctor slept at night in a little storage room—it looked like a concrete bunker—that belonged to the municipality; it was at the corner of the park and the driveway on the Second Street side. We walked over to it so that he could show me. A steel door to the storage space was now kept locked, but back then, in 1998, it had had a wood door behind a barred gate. Since then the storage room had been divided, one half converted into p
ublic restrooms.

  On the night of Bishop Gerardi’s murder, Víctor said, he and a man who shared the storage room with him, Isaías, had been joined there by a third person, Pablo. They’d made a few trips from the storage room to a nearby store to buy liquor, and at around ten o’clock they were inside, drinking. The door was open to the street. Then Víctor heard a sound from outside that he still vividly recalled, a kind of hyperventilated snorting, and when he looked up he saw a man passing, shirtless, muscular, with a military haircut, his body tensed, bent arms moving forward and back in short, abrupt thrusts, and all the while making that noise, as if, Víctor said, the man “was trying to expel his euphoria”—the adrenaline-charged exhalations, perhaps, of someone who’d just beaten somebody to death. Víctor was frightened. “That person gives me an ugly feeling,” he told his friends when the shirtless man abruptly reeled around and went past the door again. “Shut the door,” he told them, and they did.