The Art of Political Murder. Francisco Goldman
and clearly wasn’t muddled by alcohol or drugs. Once again, Chanax described the shirtless man. He had brown skin, big eyes, a big round face, a wide mouth, a small mustache, a light beard, and curly hair, cut short, “military-style.” When challenged by his interrogator about the haircut, Chanax insisted that he had spent thirty months in the Army and could recognize a military haircut when he saw one. According to El Chino Iván’s later testimony, the shirtless man’s hair was not curly, and he didn’t have a beard.
Rubén Chanax told his interrogators that about ten nights earlier a man known to the indigents as El Chino Guayo had turned up at the church to sleep, and that he’d asked what time Bishop Gerardi usually returned to the parish house at night. Chanax claimed to have answered that he didn’t know. El Chino Guayo was described by some of the other indigents as a crackhead with a violent temper who sometimes started loud fights outside the parish house. The police went to El Chino Guayo’s house at six in the morning, and though the youth, the son of an Army man, was in some ways an interesting character, he turned out to be the first of many apparently false leads.
WHEN THE PARISH HOUSE was finally calm and empty of people, Otto Ardón, his assistants, and some police specialists were able to conduct a more relaxed and relatively thorough inspection. They found blood drops in a little room by the garage where ironing was done, and more on the wall outside it. They found specks and small stains of blood on other walls; there were still more traces of blood that they missed and that ODHA would find later.
The evidence recovered from the garage that morning included the discarded sweatshirt, which would turn out to have some bloodstains and a few human hairs; the concrete chunk, also bloodstained; some sheets of rumpled newspaper; and a few fingerprints and handprints that might be related to the crime.
As they were leaving San Sebastián for the morgue that morning, the MINUGUA investigators were startled to hear one of the few female indigents, a woman known as Vilma, chanting in a slurred way that the bishop had been murdered by huecos—homosexuals.
THE AUTOPSY got under way at about nine in the morning. Dr. Mario Guerra, head of forensics for the morgue, and the other doctors who performed and observed it were hardly facing a deep forensic mystery. “Fourth-degree facial cranial trauma” was listed as the official cause of death. A fracture and cuts on one thumb, plus the marks on his neck, seemed to indicate that Bishop Gerardi had put up a brief, furious struggle.
On the back of the bishop’s head were four distinct punctures, in the shape of an arc. Rafael Guillamón, who monitored the autopsy for MINUGUA, thought they looked like marks left by a blow delivered with “brass knuckles.”
The assistant prosecutor, Gustavo Soria, came into the autopsy room and said that an anal swab—to check for signs of recent homosexual penetration—was to be performed on the bishop’s body. “Orders from above!” said Soria. When Guillamón recounted this story to me many years later, he snorted sardonically that the orders, coming from Military Intelligence, of course, were from General Espinosa, the former commander of the EMP who had recently been promoted to head of the Army High Command. “Soria worked with Military Intelligence,” Guillamón said.
Was Guillamón correct? People had turned up that night, at the church and elsewhere, he said, like actors walking onto a stage to perform their roles. Some knew their roles in advance. Maybe others had arrived at the church, assessed the situation, and quickly understood what their roles should be. But were some of the people whose actions later seemed suspicious merely grossly incompetent? Were some fated to be suspected because of their intrinsic oddness, or because they had other secrets and vulnerabilities? Who were the actors in the crowd outside and inside the church of San Sebastián that night? Were any of the indigents and bolitos actors in the sense that Guillamón meant? Was Vilma, the female indigent chanting that the bishop had been murdered by “fags,” an actress? The chancellor of the Curia or La China—Ana Lucía Escobar? The parish-house cook? Even someone from ODHA? And who had the important “offstage” roles? General Marco Tulio Espinosa (“the most powerful man in the Army”)? Or even President Arzú? All would eventually be targets of suspicion.
It was obvious, at least if the accounts of both Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván were true, that the man without a shirt had meant to be seen, or did not mind being seen, by at least two of the park’s indigents when he stepped out of the garage that night. He left a sweatshirt behind on the floor. Was that to make it seem as if the terrible act of violence had somehow involved an act of love or lust? So that later, when witnesses spoke up, it would suggestively connect the shirtless man, the sweatshirt on the floor, the murdered bishop? But why, if it really was the same man, did he come back minutes later wearing a shirt? And where did the stranger go?
Those were some of the questions, based on the most obvious early information available, that were contemplated in the first hours and days after the murder, which made headlines across the world. Denunciations of the crime and calls for justice poured in from political and religious leaders, including Pope John Paul II. It was widely assumed, of course, that the bishop was killed in retaliation for the REMHI report, though it was hard to believe that his enemies could respond with such reckless brutality, no matter how threatened or angered they were.
How realistic was it to expect that the murderers would ever be brought to justice? Guatemalans had only to look at the region’s recent history of “unimaginable” homicides to feel discouraged. Though a UN truth commission in neighboring El Salvador had confirmed what had been widely alleged since the crime occurred, that Archbishop Romero had been murdered by government assassins, no charges had ever been brought in that case, nor had any serious criminal investigation been sustained. To the north, in Mexico, the murder of Cardinal Posadas in 1994 remained unsolved, as did the assassination of the reformist presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, in 1988. The more shocking the crime, it seemed, the more powerful or powerfully connected the criminals, and in Latin America powerful people almost never end up in prison.
Nevertheless, as Ronalth Ochaeta said in the statement given to reporters that first morning, it was inconceivable that a crime of such magnitude could occur only hundreds of feet from some of the government’s most sophisticated security units and surveillance apparatus and remain unsolved for long.
THE UNTOUCHABLES ANDTHE DOG-AND-PRIEST SHOW
Peace would then be a form of war, and the State a means of waging it.
—Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power”
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THE CHURCH OF SAN SEBASTIÁN was my mother’s church when she was young. During her adolescence she gave handwriting lessons in its school for boys. When I was an infant, my grandparents and my mother brought me to the church of San Sebastián to be baptized. My mother married an American from a Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant family, and though I spent my early childhood bouncing between Guatemala and the United States (and between religions) I grew up mostly in Massachusetts. In the 1980s, when my grandparents were no longer alive, I returned to Guatemala frequently and lived in their house, once for an unbroken stretch of about two years, in an upstairs apartment that had belonged to my unmarried great-aunt. I was in New York in the spring of 1998 and followed the story of Bishop Gerardi’s murder and its repercussions from there. By late summer the case had taken several astonishing turns, culminating with the controversial arrest, on July 17, of Father Mario, whose behavior the night of the murder had immediately aroused suspicion. Margarita López, the cook, was also arrested, and Father Mario’s aged German shepherd, Baloo, was taken into police custody. A renowned Spanish forensics expert claimed to have discovered evidence of dog bites on Bishop Gerardi’s skull.
The murder, which had at first seemed like a clear-cut political crime—a consequence of the REMHI report—had become a baroque story of perhaps perverse human passions. The mysterious