The Art of Political Murder. Francisco Goldman
streets empty of traffic—by day they were usually impossibly jammed—it was a drive that the bishop could have made in five minutes, and probably in no more than eight.
So a few minutes before ten, Bishop Gerardi drove up Second Street and turned left into the driveway that runs between the San Sebastián complex and a tree-filled park. The complex includes, in a row, a Catholic school building, the parish house, the garage, and the church. The park is traversed by a paved walkway leading from Sixth Avenue to the raised plaza in front of the church doors. At night, the park is dark and quiet, and the neighborhood, which bustles by day, because it is so close to the downtown business area and government buildings, is mostly deserted. Shops were shuttered, offices and school buildings were empty, and the heavy wooden doors of faded residences were securely locked. San Sebastián is an old parish, dating nearly to the founding of the city in the late eighteenth century, but the church itself, which is of modest size, with two bell towers, one at each corner, was twice destroyed by earthquakes and twice rebuilt during the past century. A remnant of the colonial era, a statue of the Virgin of Sorrows of Manchén, her chest pierced by numerous swords, her pale polychrome face ethereally sad, lips parted to expel a gentle sigh of pain, stands in a side chapel.
A dead-end side street, Callejón del Manchén, extends two blocks, between Third and Fifth streets, from alongside the church of San Sebastián to the rear of the old National Palace. At the intersections of Callejón del Manchén and Fourth and Fifth streets, guarded security gates protect the presidential residence, which is situated between them. The very wealthy and patrician President Arzú, who is descended from Spanish colonial viceroys and archbishops, was the first Guatemalan president to choose to live in his own home instead of in the presidential residence, which was being used for business and formal ceremonies. Also inside those gates were the headquarters of the Guatemalan Army’s Presidential Guard and the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP), or Presidential Military Staff. In recent decades there was probably no city block in all of Central America more forbidding or generally feared than that one on Callejón del Manchén, where the EMP and its notorious military intelligence unit, formerly known as El Archivo, were situated. The EMP and the Presidential Guard, aside from overseeing the personal security of the president and his family, sheltered, among its approximately 500 members, an elite anti-kidnapping commando unit. During the war years, there were rarely any survivors of the EMP’s interrogation and torture sessions. (According to declassified U.S. documents, Guatemalan Military Intelligence—G-2—and the Archivo, though technically separate, worked hand in hand.) Looming on the other side of Fourth Street, just outside the gates and only about 200 feet from the church, is the modern white-concrete and black-glass multistory building of the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis (SAE), a government information-gathering agency that up until 1998, at least, was also integrated into the military’s intelligence structure.
So the church of San Sebastián is located in an interesting neighborhood, inside an Army security perimeter. The park itself, it would turn out later, when investigators and journalists subjected it to anthropological scrutiny, was its own complex and busy little world of sometimes clashing subcultures. Local office workers came to the park for lunch or snacks purchased from the food stands lining the sidewalks, or to sit on a park bench for a contemplative shoeshine. Young lovers snuggled on the shaded benches along the paved paths in the afternoons. During the day, lavacarros, car washers, plied their trade alongside the park, filling their plastic buckets with water from the fountain. Some of the car washers were alcoholic indigents, but most were not, and almost all belonged to a union that collected small dues at an office downtown where classes were offered on such subjects as how to negotiate prices with customers.
But the park was also a place where tribes of teenagers and small gangs of delinquents staked out and sometimes fought over territory—tough high school kids, heavy-metal rockeros, petty thieves, pushiteros who sold drugs, and even a gang of druggy alleged satanists who always wore black and who sometimes burst into the church to interrupt Masses, shouting obscenities. Young athletes came to play basketball and fútbol in the little basketball court near the Chapel of the Eternal Father, on the Third Street side of the church. Later Father Mario would tell police investigators that the smell of marijuana often pervaded the parish house because of the youths smoking outside, in front of the parish house door, and that sometimes they smoked crack. It was naturally assumed, given the character of the neighborhood, and its nearness to the seat of government and military security and intelligence installations, that some of the park’s denizens, the vendors, shoe-shine men, car washers, and petty criminals, must be orejas—ears, informers.
On any given night, as many as fourteen homeless men and a woman or two would take shelter in the covered walkway alongside the parish house garage, or on the plaza in front the church entrance, which was commonly referred to as the “atrium.” They slept in beds made from old cardboard and tattered blankets that they folded and stored by day between the beams of the concrete overhang or in other nooks of the church property. Like Guatemala’s narco traffickers, gang members, and sports heroes—or like the Turks in Don Quixote de la Mancha, “who have the custom of naming themselves according to the flaws or virtues that each possesses”—the indigents had nicknames: Carne Asada (Grilled Meat), Chalupa (Lollipop), El Gallo (Rooster), El Monstruo (Monster), El Árabe, El Canche (Blondie), Ronco (Hoarse One), El Loquito (Little Crazy Man), more than one El Chino (Chinaman), and so on. That was how they were known among themselves and to the police, though most others referred to them, and to such indigents generally, as pordioseros, after the beggars’ cry “For the sake of God,” and as bolitos, little drunks. “My bolitos,” Bishop Gerardi used to say, and they in turn called him jefe. (“Another of my bolitos died last night,” a neighbor recalled the bishop lamenting on the sidewalk one morning.) The indigents were also called charamileros, from the name for pharmaceutical alcohol mixed with water that most of them drank, a concoction also known as a quimicazo, which sped them toward oblivion and death. Pure alcohol mixed with dirty water from the basin of the park’s fountain was claimed by some to be a particularly potent quimicazo.
That Sunday evening, two of the park’s indigents—Rubén Chanax Sontay, better known as El Colocho (Curly), and El Chino Iván Aguilar—were in Don Mike’s, a small liquor-and-grocery store around the corner from the church. Unlike the owners of other, similar tiendas in the neighborhood, Don Mike didn’t conduct his business through lowered gates after dark. Customers could gather there, small as the store was, lean against the counter sipping beer or soft drinks, and watch the small portable television set that was mounted in a corner.
Rubén Chanax would later tell police investigators that he was originally from the altiplano town of Santa Cruz, Totonicapán, and that he’d been living in the park for about four years, since shortly after his discharge from the Army. He was a doe-eyed, Mayan-featured youth of twenty-four, small but muscular, with wavy-bristly black hair rather than the curls suggested by his nickname, and a quiet, self-contained manner. Alone among the indigents who slept in front of the church, he didn’t drink alcohol or take drugs. He said that when he first arrived at the park, four years earlier, he was a drinker, but that under Bishop Gerardi’s influence he’d stopped. (A somewhat dubious claim, I think, but who knows?) He earned his living as one of the park’s lavacarros, though because he wasn’t in the union, the other car washers wouldn’t allow him to fill his plastic buckets at the park’s fountain. Bishop Gerardi, who does seem to have taken some interest in him—buying him new sponges and cloths, for instance—used to let him come into the Chapel of the Eternal Father to fill his buckets from the tap in its little garden.
El Chino Iván, taller, skinny, lighter-skinned, and a far more truculent character than Rubén Chanax, was a petty thief, a cristalero—one of those who smash automobile windows to steal radios and such. He drank and used drugs, including crack and pills known as piedras, stones. He’d turned up in the park a year before the murder, after his parents expelled him from their home, and ever since he had been coming and going, disappearing for weeks, then returning. He had been sleeping in the park for the past month.
Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván had spent part of that Sunday in their own idle ways, the former going to see a movie in the afternoon and wandering the city, the latter mostly hanging