The Art of Political Murder. Francisco Goldman
She belonged to the ultraconservative Roman Catholic order Opus Dei, no less. Helen Mack was still working in real estate and finance, but she was also the founding director of the Myrna Mack Foundation. Her long and still ongoing pursuit of justice for her sister’s murder had made her Guatemala’s most formidable and admired human rights activist. Intelligent and seemingly fearless, Mack projected a focused and even cold implacability along with the most disarming emotional vulnerability, often breaking into heartrending tears when discussing her sister’s murder or having to address the press after yet another discouraging reversal in the courts. Eloquent in public, in private she was usually considerate and kind but also straightforward, blunt, and often astonishingly salty. In that way she resembled Bishop Gerardi, with whom she’d worked closely over the years. Fernando Penados liked to say that it was his dream to one day be head of the Presidential Guard, but only when Helen Mack became president.
Jean Arnault, the French head of the United Nations Peace Verfication Mission, which was assigned to monitor Guatemala’s compliance with the Peace Accords, also arrived on the scene. The multinational mission, which was referred to by its Spanish acronym, MINUGUA (min-U-gwa), was a ubiquitous presence in Guatemala. Arnault was accompanied that night at San Sebastián by Cecilia Olmos, a Chilean working at MINUGUA’s headquarters in Guatemala City, and Rafael Guillamón, a veteran investigator from Spain with years of expertise in Arab counterterrorism. Guillamón, who was in his early forties, was broad-shouldered and compact, with a scruffy reddish beard. He was MINUGUA’s chief police investigator, and he and his small team of two other agents reported solely to Jean Arnault.
The prosecutors of the Public Ministry were assigned cases according to a numeric rotation system, and that weekend Prosecution Unit 6, which was led by Otto Ardón Medina, was on duty. Gustavo Soria, one of the assistant prosecutors from Unit 6, had arrived at San Sebastián shortly before his boss that night. Ardón, a lugubrious, retiring man, mostly hung back and watched the younger, comparatively sleek and self-confident Soria direct the police.
Outside the garage, the groggy indigents told the police that Rubén Chanax had information. He was the only one among them who didn’t drink, they said, and so he’d “seen everything.” Chanax told the prosecutors and the police about the shirtless man who’d stepped out of the garage. He was whisked away to a police station, and his long journey as a protected witness, in the custody of the National Police and the Public Ministry, began.
Back inside the house, Ronalth Ochaeta was struck by Father Mario’s seemingly preternatural serenity, and by how neatly dressed he was, all in black, in a black leather jacket, his hair looking recently washed and combed. He abruptly asked the priest what had happened, and Father Mario again launched into his story. Later, when Ochaeta asked if he could use the bathroom in the priest’s bedroom, Father Mario said no, and directed him to another bathroom in the house. Ochaeta watched Father Mario going into his bedroom and thought it was odd, the way he opened the door just enough to be able to slide in sideways.
The attorney general, the head of the Public Ministry (a presidential appointee), arrived and embraced Ochaeta. “Hijos de puta, this has all the marks of los de allí enfrente,” he said—“of those from just over there.” He obviously meant the EMP’s military intelligence unit. He telephoned another prosecutor from his office, Fernando Mendizábal de la Riva, who came to the church and, soon after arriving, remarked to Rafael Guillamón, MINUGUA’s chief investigator, “This looks like the work of esa gente—those people.” In Guatemala such euphemisms are easily understood. But Mendizábal de la Riva was known to be a friend of General Marco Tulio Espinosa, who until his recent promotion to head the Army High Command had been the head of the EMP, and was now seen as the most powerful figure in the Guatemalan Army. So even people with powerful political appointments, like the attorney general, and a friend of the Army’s most powerful general, were capable of spontaneous observations that later they would most likely deny having made. Even politically compromised and complicit people do not always behave predictably, just as, of course, the most disciplined and intricately plotted crime does not always turn out exactly according to design.
Nery Rodenas, the coordinator of ODHA’s legal team, lived well outside the city with his wife and small children, and he didn’t have a telephone, so someone from ODHA drove to his house and brought him back to San Sebastián. Rodenas had studied law at the public university, San Carlos, at the same time as Ronalth Ochaeta. But while Ochaeta made his name in political circles as a member of the University Students’ Association, Rodenas was the leader of a Catholic students’ group. He had converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism as a teenager. Tersely soft-spoken, Nery Rodenas had the melancholy eyes, rosebud mouth, plump cheeks, and somewhat stiff but gentle air of a clerk in a Botero painting. Of all his colleagues at ODHA—at least the ones I was to get to know—Rodenas was the only devout, practicing Catholic.
Nery Rodenas reached the church of San Sebastián sometime between two and two-thirty in the morning and pushed his way through the crowd gathered in front of the garage door. All around him people were weeping, or conversing in hushed tones, or taking notes and snapshots as Gustavo Soria and the police worked inside the now re-expanded security cordon. Rodenas turned around and saw a man—short, brown-complexioned, with a mustache—taking photographs with a flash, and he realized that he had seen him before. The man wasn’t a photojournalist. Rodenas had seen him in the old colonial city of Antigua, at the trial of the accused murderer of a twenty-year-old milkman named Haroldo Sas Rompich.
THE PRESENCE of the short man who was taking photographs was one of hundreds of threads of evidence that would eventually be woven into the investigation and prosecution of the murder of Bishop Gerardi, Guatemala’s “crime of the century”—the most important, and certainly the most bizarrely spectacular, passionately contested, and convoluted legal case in the country’s history. Years later Rodenas and others would still be pulling on that particular thread, investigating and debating its significance.
One day in February 1996, President Álvaro Arzú, not even a month into his term as president, and his wife had been horseback riding through the countryside near Antigua, accompanied by their EMP bodyguards in a caravan of vehicles and horses, when the milkman Sas Rompich drove into their path in the 1984 Isuzu pickup in which he made his daily rounds. It is possible that Sas Rompich was at least a little drunk. Earlier, he’d stopped at a small country store to drink a few beers to help lighten a hangover, and now he was on his way to the farm where he picked up his milk. Captain Byron Lima, of the EMP Presidential Guard, alertly rode his horse into the path of the oncoming pickup, holding out his hand for the driver to stop, but the pickup kept on coming forward, and the horse reared, throwing its rider, who broke his arm. The pickup then crashed into a parked car by the side of the road. Apparently confused and panicked, the milkman accelerated, then rocked into reverse, and another officer jumped onto the pickup’s running board and reached in for the ignition, trying to bring the vehicle under control. Someone else shot out the rear tires. A guardsman drove his car against the front of the pickup, blocking it, and someone went right up to the pickup with a nine-millimeter pistol in his hand, reached in through the window, and fired three bullets into the milkman, including one into his ear, killing him instantly.
The government subsequently announced that the president’s bodyguards had heroically prevented an attempted double assassination of President Arzú and his wife. No one could deny that the milkman had given the first couple a scare. The first lady had turned and galloped her horse into a nearby field, leaping a fence. In the past, the declaration of a threat to the president would have been enough to put an end to the matter. The legal system, the press, and all relevant actors would have asked no more questions. But in the new climate established by the Peace Accords people were willing to entertain the idea that the president’s security guards might have displayed a reckless disregard for human life, perhaps even committed murder.
ODHA lawyers represented the victim’s family at the trial of the guardsman, Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva, who was accused of having murdered the milkman. Mario Domingo’s account of the incident, which was also the prosecution’s, as narrated above, was based on the testimony of the sole civilian witness: a youth who was out riding his bicycle when, as he was about to overtake the slow-moving presidential caravan, he was ordered to dismount and walk alongside.