The Art of Political Murder. Francisco Goldman
around midnight, had answered the phone when Father Mario called about the bishop’s murder. Monseñor Hernández had been asleep since around ten. When he came to the phone, he asked Father Mario, whom he had known since Mario was a child, if he had called the police and firemen. When Father Mario answered that he hadn’t, Hernández told him to do so immediately.
Ana Lucía Escobar, La China, said later that she was awoken by her mother, and that she dressed as quickly as she could, and that she then drove Monseñor Hernández, along with her cousin Dagoberto, to the church of San Sebastián. She said that she remembered glancing at the digital clock in the car and noting that it was a little past midnight, and that they made the drive quickly.
After telephoning Monseñor Hernández, Father Mario made other calls, to his parents and to friends in Houston, Texas, where he often went for medical treatment. He phoned the distraught Juana Sanabria at ten minutes past midnight. When Father Mario told her that the bishop had been killed, and that he was in the garage, she suggested that maybe he was only badly wounded, but the priest repeated that Monseñor was in the garage, and said that she should come immediately and to bring her parish house keys. “I fell apart and couldn’t utter a word,” she would recount later, “and my legs went weak, and my body wouldn’t respond, the news had such a horrible impact, and then I said, Father, I don’t feel well.” So he told her to stay where she was. She turned on the radio and sat listening to the live coverage from San Sebastián that soon commenced. But first she had her daughter phone the bishop’s nephew, Axel Romero, a lawyer, who remembered receiving the call at precisely twelve-fifteen. Romero phoned Father Mario at the parish house to verify the terrible news, and the priest asked him to come right over.
When Monseñor Hernández arrived at San Sebastián, Father Mario led him into the garage. Hernández asked the priest if he’d given the bishop the last rites, and when he answered that he had not, Hernández performed the holy sacrament.
Ana Lucía Escobar told me later, over the telephone, in her small, softly melodic voice, that Monseñor Hernández then came to get her in the parish office. “He took me by the arm and walked me down the corridor, and he said, ‘Monseñor is dead, do you want to see him?’ At first I said yes, but when we got there, and I saw the blood, I said no, and went back.” Ana Lucía was put to work making telephone calls to inform church authorities and others of the bishop’s death. First she phoned Archbishop Penados. Ronalth Ochaeta’s cell phone was turned off. Then she phoned Dr. Julio Penados. Using a church directory that was in the office, she phoned bishops, members of the Episcopalian Conference, and other parish priests. The people who received those calls telephoned others in turn and the news of Bishop Gerardi’s murder, invariably met with exclamations of incredulity and shock, was quickly relayed throughout the city, the country, and beyond. Telephone records would reveal that one of the calls from the parish house was made to a pay phone outside a military academy in San Marcos. The likeliest explanation was that it was a wrong number: the pay phone’s number was only one digit off from the telephone number of the Bishop of San Marcos, Álvaro Ramazzini. Still, the day after news of the mysterious call appeared in a newspaper, the phone itself vanished, torn from its post.
Monseñor Hernández sent Ana Lucía to pick up Father Maco, Marco Aurelio González—“the priest with the two Saint Bernard dogs,” as Ana Lucía described him—at the church of La Candelaria, because the priest didn’t drive.
At twelve-forty AM, the firemen of Substation 2 had received a telephone call from Father Mario, who didn’t identify himself, informing them of a dead body in the San Sebastián parish house. Five minutes later, a detachment of firemen left in an ambulance.
At twelve-forty-eight, Father Mario finally phoned the police. He and one of the bolitos, El Monstruo Jorge, waited outside the church, and when they saw a police car passing in front of the park—it was now ten past one—they shouted and waved their arms, but the car kept on going. Five minutes later the firemen arrived and went into the garage, where they found Monseñor Hernández praying beside the bishop’s body. One of the firemen also knelt to pray.
The police arrived fifteen minutes later. A video taken by firemen provides a relatively composed look at what would, within half an hour, be a chaotic and overrun crime scene. The camera moves as slowly as a deep-sea diver’s cinematography around the garage, which is illuminated by fluorescent lights. The white VW Golf is parked on the right side of the garage, behind the beige Toyota. The bishop is lying on his back in the narrow space between a potted palm by the garage wall and the front tire of the Toyota. There is a large pool of blood around his head. His body is partially covered by a rumpled white sheet, and the cuffs of his jeans and his big shoes, the left foot crossed oddly over the right, protrude from underneath. There is a smaller pool of blood on the floor near the VW’s front door, which is slightly ajar. The triangular concrete chunk lies beside it on the polished, speckled stone floor, close to an upright, empty Pepsi bottle. Crumpled pages of newspaper are strewn about. Two vivid, parallel streaks of blood on the floor lead away from the VW to where the body lies, ending at the bishop’s shoes. The blue sweatshirt is on the floor. And a few feet from the body, near the bishop’s head, planted as if it were the last step of someone lifting off into flight, there is a bloody footprint.
In the kitchen, the refrigerator had been left open, and it appeared that at least one of the intruders had drunk from a half-filled pitcher of orange juice that had been full when Margarita López had gone to bed that night. A half-eaten raw hot dog was found in the dirt of one of the potted palms in the garage. An assistant prosecutor assigned to the case would deduce later that night that the piece of hot dog might have been left there by a stray cat that was frequently seen about the house.
DURING HIS YEARS as executive director of ODHA, Ronalth Ochaeta often displayed a temperamental and pugnacious personality that struck some as supercilious. He made enemies and, sometimes, mistakes. But he also, as the coming months would show, often made headway where a more restrained or passive personality might not have. When Ochaeta stepped into the kitchen of the parish house, Monseñor Hernández, a small, plump figure with a rabbit-like face and slanted, almond-shaped eyes, said to him, “This is what happens for trying to investigate the past.” And Father Maco, the priest whom Ana Lucía had gone to pick up at La Candelaria, said, “Yes, I was never in agreement with that.” Ochaeta snapped, “You were never in agreement with anything that Monseñor did, so don’t give me stories.” Monseñor Hernández broke in, “Well, what are you going to do now?” And Ochaeta answered, incredulously, “What am I going to do? You mean what are we going to do!” A third priest, a Spaniard whose surname was Amezaga, a Church conservative, stared at Ochaeta and then said, “But you in ODHA have the experience and should know what to do.”
Then a furious Fernando Penados stormed into the kitchen and said, “Ronalth, come out here! These people are already altering the crime scene! They’re shit! I asked them to widen the area inside the security cordon and they don’t want to!”
The first policemen to arrive had hung yellow tape around an area enclosing the body and the two cars. Even the bloody footprint had been left outside the perimeter of that first cordon, as well as other footprints at the back of the garage. Various crime-scene specialists had arrived soon after, as had the lawyer Axel Romero, the bishop’s nephew, among many others. People were walking around the body, and into and out of the garage and parish house. Some were even ignoring the yellow tape, stepping over it, and eventually it was knocked down. The tape itself became stained with blood. People tracked blood throughout the house.
Fernando Penados shouted at the police, ordering that the cordon be made wider. They obeyed, but then moved it back again. “Of course, later they made it much bigger,” Penados recalled later, “but by then the crime scene was totally contaminated.” Penados went outside and began shouting and kicking at the somnolent bolitos to wake them up, because surely they had seen or heard something.
THE CROWD GREW. Edgar Gutiérrez, from ODHA, was there, as was Helen Mack. Years before, Gutiérrez, who was an economist, had worked for a foundation with Helen’s sister Myrna, the young anthropologist murdered by the EMP’s Archivo. Before her sister’s death, Helen Mack, whose physical resemblance to the character Peppermint Patty in “Peanuts” was often