The Art of Political Murder. Francisco Goldman
photographer that Nery Rodenas saw the night of Bishop Gerardi’s murder had turned up daily to focus his camera on the people from ODHA and others who had come to observe the unprecedented trial of a member of the president’s security force. He was also seen outside the courthouse photographing the license plates of automobiles. Suspecting that the photographer was not a journalist, Ronalth Ochaeta asked the judges at the trial to demand that he identify himself. The photographer’s identification card revealed that he was from the EMP. In the end, Obdulio Villanueva received a five-year sentence for the murder of the milkman. ODHA had asked for the maximum penalty under the circumstances, thirty years.
That night in the church of San Sebastián, Nery Rodenas sought out Ronalth Ochaeta and Fernando Penados and told them that there was a man from the EMP taking pictures inside the garage. When Jean Arnault, the head of MINUGUA, dispatched his investigators to look into the matter, the photographer identified himself as a member of the director of the National Police’s advance security. By then, Nery Rodenas and some of the others had noticed that the photographer wasn’t alone. A tall, thin man who wore a red baseball cap, with the bill pulled low over his face, accompanied him. Later the man was seen in the park, talking into a portable radio.
Ángel Conte Cojulún, the director of the National Police, arrived at San Sebastián at three in the morning. When he was informed that his advance security had been inside the parish house taking photographs, he responded that he didn’t have any advance security. Accompanied by the MINUGUA investigators, Conte Cojulún went to speak with the suspicious men, who insisted on talking with him alone. After a few minutes, the two men left the park, and Conte Cojulún spoke to Fernando Penados. “Listen, Fernando, they’re with the EMP,” he said. “Don’t make such a big deal out of it.”
AT SOME POINT during that long night, Helen Mack and the bishop’s protégés from ODHA, Ronalth Ochaeta, Edgar Gutiérrez, and Fernando Penados, huddled together on the ground in one of the inner patio gardens of the parish house and had a conversation, which, as the situation developed over the next few days, resulted in a decision that ODHA should form its own team to document the case. Experience had taught them that it would be naive to assume that an investigation conducted by the government would not be biased, or that it would go after the most obvious suspects, the people in the Army, or with ties to the Army, most threatened by the REMHI report.
The idea that ODHA should form its own team seems to have been Helen Mack’s. She also suggested that night that forensic anthropologists from ODHA should attend the autopsy of the bishop’s body. ODHA teams were participating in the exhumations of clandestine graves and massacre sites then being conducted throughout the country, and Ochaeta phoned two of the forensics specialists.
Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez agreed that they shouldn’t leave the parish house until the bishop’s body was taken to the morgue. “I just sat there,” Ochaeta recalled. “I’d get up, sit down, get up. Edgar too. Nobody said anything. I think an hour, an hour and a half went by. We just looked at each other without saying anything.”
Helen Mack, though, was in constant motion. She had gone to fetch her friend Dr. Mario Iraheta, a respected forensics specialist, and bring him to San Sebastián. Now she came to sit with the men from ODHA. “Chafas cerotes hijos de la gran puta,” she burst out. Chafas is slang for military officers; cerotes is a common Guatemalan vulgarism, something like little pieces of shit. “Chafas cerotes hijos de la gran puta!” she repeated several times. “Estos pisados fueron—those assholes did it.” Then she took out her cigarettes and sat smoking in silence.
In the parish house garage, Dr. Iraheta worked alongside Dr. Mario Guerra, head of forensics for the Judicial Morgue. They carefully washed the murdered bishop’s wounds, cleaning the blood from the face, which had received repeated blows with some hard object—apparently, the triangular chunk of concrete—delivered with almost inconceivable ferocity. The most obvious wounds were fractures in both cheeks and around and across the nose, bloody bruises over the right eye, and multiple bruises in the back of the skull. The left ear was a particularly excoriated mass. On the bishop’s neck there were bloody scratches that indicated a struggle—marks that might have been caused if the zipper of his jacket was pulled against his skin while he fought to free himself, or perhaps when a thin gold chain, affixed to a religious medal, was torn from around his neck.
Bishop Gerardi had apparently received the first blows as he emerged or was pulled from the car. Axel Romero discovered a lens from the bishop’s eyeglasses in the pocket on the inside of the door on the driver’s side. There was blood inside the car, and grains of concrete. The keys were missing, and the Public Ministry towed the car away that night. Later, when ODHA was told that they could take the car back, Nery Rodenas went to get it, bringing the spare set of keys left behind at the parish house. When the car’s ignition was turned on for the first time since the night of the bishop’s death, the air conditioner and radio came on simultaneously. The bishop hadn’t had the chance to turn either off. The assailants must have reached in, switched the ignition off, and yanked out the keys.
Sometime before dawn, when the firemen took Bishop Gerardi’s body to the morgue, Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez walked over to the ODHA offices. They had to prepare a statement. In a few hours, people would be awakening to the shocking news of Bishop Gerardi’s murder. Everyone—the press, the government, the diplomatic community, all of Guatemala—would be waiting for the reaction of the Catholic Church and of ODHA. They had to think about what they were going to say.
Father Mario said later that he approached a crime-scene specialist from the Public Ministry, asked for permission to clean up the garage, and was told to go ahead. Margarita López; the sacristan, Antonio Izaguirre; and Julio Trujillo, whose job it was to tend to the venerated statue of the Virgin of Sorrows of Manchén, set to work mopping up the bishop’s blood and cleaning the garage. Trujillo found more bloody footprints in the entrance of one of the little offices at the back of the garage, but he was told to keep mopping, and he did.
When the cleaning up of the garage—the destruction and washing away of evidence that might have still remained at the crime scene despite the earlier chaos and carelessness—became a scandal in the press, Father Mario repeatedly insisted that someone from the Public Ministry had told him that it was OK. The priest couldn’t identify that person by name but said he was a tall man with a beard. By then Father Mario had become the focus of much speculation and suspicion, public and private. So when no one from the Public Ministry stepped forward to take responsibility for the “error,” or to identify the “bearded man,” many assumed that the priest was lying, and that he had ordered the cleanup of the garage entirely on his own.
Edgar Gutiérrez told me later that while he realized that people say the opposite about Father Mario’s demeanor that night, he personally did see the priest quietly weeping. Others described feeling strangely chilled when, after Bishop Gerardi’s body was taken to the morgue and the garage and house had been mopped and cleaned, the priest emerged from the parish house, expressionless, immaculately dressed and groomed, to walk his German shepherd, Baloo, in the park.
Margarita López laid the bishop’s robes out on his bed, and later that morning Father Mario took the clothing to the funeral home. He oversaw the dressing of the bishop’s corpse and assisted the undertakers in reshaping the ruined face so that it would resemble the living one as much as possible.
At about six in the morning El Chino Iván, roused from his night of soporific-induced deep sleep, had told the police of his encounter with the shirtless man, and had handed them the quetzal bill that he said the stranger had paid him in exchange for two cigarettes. Then El Chino Iván slipped away, disappearing into the city. Two days later, he would turn up at MINUGUA’s office, claiming that he feared for his life, and soon after he joined Rubén Chanax in the subterranean life of a protected witness in the custody of the Guatemalan police.
Meanwhile in the early morning hours of April 27, in the Public Ministry, Rubén Chanax was giving the first of his many official statements. He wouldn’t get a chance to sleep until ten o’clock that night, twenty-fours after he had walked out of Don Mike’s. Along with the prosecutors, observers from MINUGUA, and the director of the police, three of the young men from ODHA