The Art of Political Murder. Francisco Goldman
repressive operation against university students after the coup in 1954, was assassinated by left-wing guerrillas in the 1960s. Lima Estrada was a graduate of Guatemala’s Escuela Politécnica, the training academy for Army officers. He had studied at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, and also took an elite U.S. military course in counterespionage and “special operations” in Panama.
During the 1970s, Lima Estrada was an officer in the Regional Telecommunications Center, a special political-intelligence unit inside the presidential palace, described in the National Security Archive as a predecessor of the EMP’s “notorious ‘Archivo.’” By 1981 he’d been promoted to the rank of colonel. According to one declassified U.S. intelligence report, in the early 1980s Colonel Lima Estrada “was extremely successful as commander of the most important Mil Zone (20 Quiché).” Apparently he’d assumed his command in El Quiché just after Bishop Gerardi had closed the diocese there. At least five massacres of Mayan peasants by the Guatemalan Army occurred under Colonel Lima Estrada’s command in El Quiché. In an interview given to the Wall Street Journal in 1981, the colonel named Napoleon and Hitler among his heroes. Later he commanded an airborne special forces unit that played a central role in counterinsurgency campaigns and also, according to the National Security Archive, “founded an elite ‘Kamikaze’ Counterinsurgency Tactical Unit to carry out political executions and other hits, directed by the president and his key intelligence advisers.” Those advisers met in secret to decide the life and death of Guatemalans under the auspices of a group known as CRIO (Centro de Reunión de Información y Operaciones) that was later revived, according to the National Security Archive, under the government of General Mejía Víctores, which took power after a coup against General Ríos Montt in 1983.
During that era of massacres in the countryside, the Guatemalan Army received fulsome public support from President Ronald Reagan, who famously declared General Ríos Montt the victim of “a bum rap.” In 1983, three Guatemalan U.S. Aid workers were killed, and even the U.S. ambassador said that they had been murdered “by the presidential intelligence unit, the ‘Archivo,’ in reprisal for recent U.S. pressure on human rights in Guatemala.” From 1983 to 1985, in the government of General Mejía Víctores, Colonel Lima Estrada was the director of Military Intelligence, G-2. In 1999, less than a year after the murder of Bishop Gerardi, the National Security Archive procured and published an extraordinary dossier, a “logbook” kept by G-2 of death-squad operations in the years when Colonel Lima Estrada was at the agency’s head, documenting the cases of 183 murdered civilians, with individual photographs, from August 1983 to March 1985. That example of G-2’s zeal for record keeping might seem puzzlingly self-incriminating, though it is hardly the first instance in world history of criminally repressive and even murderous government entities displaying an earnest faith in the self-absolving guarantees of bureaucratic procedure and order.
Soon after Guatemala’s first democratically elected civilian president in decades, Vinicio Cerezo, came to power, in 1986, Colonel Lima Estrada found himself languishing in the military backwater of the Chiquimula base, in the dry eastern lowlands. He seemed to be out of the game, far from the remaining war zones or the internecine machinations of the capital, where Defense Minister General Héctor Gramajo was consolidating his own position and pushing aside hard-line officers whom he considered excessively hostile to Guatemala’s democratic opening. From Chiquimula, Colonel Lima Estrada soon emerged as one of the leaders of a failed coup against President Cerezo’s government. His punishment was to be sent to the country’s embassy in Peru as military attaché, where he continued to be involved in coup plotting from afar, and then to Nicaragua. The declassified reports also reveal that charges of corruption were leveled against Colonel Lima Estrada only two weeks before the attempted coup. It was alleged that in the mid-1980s he had participated with two other officers in defrauding the Army of 1.5 million quetzales, and this at a time when the national currency still had a strong value against the dollar.
Colonel Lima Estrada, by his institution’s standards, had had a spectacular career, yet he had never been promoted to the rank of brigadier general. The reason, according to declassified reports, was political. “Lima is very strong-willed and highly outspoken,” wrote the author of a U.S. intelligence report. “That coupled with his very conservative philosophy and ideology makes him a bit dangerous in a budding democracy.” He belonged to a group of influential active and retired Military Intelligence officers known informally as the Cofradía (as the secretive religious brotherhoods in Mayan villages and towns are also called), and to the larger, and official, group of retired officers and war veterans known as AVEMILGUA (Association of Military Veterans of Guatemala). It was on behalf of the latter organization that the colonel had turned up to testify to the truth commission after the Peace Accords in 1996. That had been a defiant performance. When the commission members turned on their tape recorders at the beginning of the session, the colonel opened his jacket and showed them an electronic device he was carrying. “I’m recording also,” he said. He denied, during that brief, blustery session, that during the war the Guatemalan Army had been guilty of any illegal transgressions against the lives or physical integrity of anyone whatsoever. The retired officers met regularly with General Marco Tulio Espinosa, the head of the Army High Command, to discuss their concerns about how the Peace Accords might affect the Army and the officers who had fought and won the war, especially given the increasingly vehement, amnesty-defying calls for a reckoning and prosecution of past human rights violations.
Another tip, two tips really, linking Colonel Lima Estrada to the Gerardi murder would filter down to both OHDA and MINUGUA from, I learned later, his sister-in-law, in whom his wife had confided. The wife was distraught because she had overheard a conversation between her husband and other retired officers in the little store in Colonel Lima’s garage. She heard the officers say to her husband, shortly before the murder, “No te rajes, Lima,” or, “Don’t get cold feet on us.” And she’d heard her husband reply, “We had to do much worse things during the war.” The day after the murder he got very drunk. When the wife realized the significance of what she had heard, she went to her sister, Meche, who told the story to her doctor, Carlos Pérez Avendaño, who in turn told two friends. One of those friends phoned ODHA. The other, an architect named Sergio Búcaro, brought the information directly to President Arzú, who was his friend and neighbor. Arzú told Búcaro to go to the EMP. A few months later, Búcaro was named Guatemala’s ambassador to the Vatican. Rafael Guillamón at MINUGUA believed that Búcaro had been rewarded for keeping silent about what he knew.
There was not nearly as much information available about the colonel’s son, Captain Byron Lima Oliva. He was one of the young officers in charge of President Arzú’s security detail. About thirty, tall, dark, athletic, handsome, possessed of a striking intensity and verbal facility, he was said to be well regarded by most of his fellow officers, but he was also dogged by rumors of a dangerous emotional volatility. He was a former Kaibil special-forces soldier who had first seen combat at the age of seventeen in some of the campaigns of the 1980s. The Kaibiles are an elite commando force known for their cruelty. Their motto is, “If I go forward, follow me. If I stop, urge me on. If I turn back, kill me.” Their involvement in massacres of civilians is well documented, and REMHI’s report recommended that they be disbanded.
Captain Lima had belonged to the controversial anti-kidnapping commando unit of the EMP to which his father, the retired colonel, reportedly served as an adviser. Given the inability of the police and the Public Ministry to confront Guatemala’s skilled, ruthless kidnapping rings, the EMP had been called on to perform much of the police work in high-profile or especially delicate cases. Alhough many kidnapping rings were known to involve military men and police, the unit had some successes, but it had also been implicated in disappearances and was accused of making off with ransom payments.
The Untouchables discovered that on April 26, the Sunday that Bishop Gerardi was murdered, Captain Lima had flown into Guatemala City on American Airlines flight 927 from Argentina via Miami, landing at one in the afternoon. (He had been in Argentina arranging advance security for a presidential visit.) Captain Lima claimed, in a statement to prosecutors, that he had been with a friend, Erick Urízar, in a bar called the Sports Grill until eleven-thirty that night, and had gone directly from the bar to his barracks in the EMP headquarters, arriving around midnight. But ODHA had conducted a check of credit-card receipts and discovered