The Art of Political Murder (12 page)

During the initial interrogation of Vielman, Otto Ardón had bellowed at him: “Confess that in the moment in which Monseñor Juan José Gerardi Conedera was entering the parish house … at about ten at night, you attacked him with a piece of concrete with which you gave him several blows until you caused his death!” Vielman, apparently utterly bewildered, responded with the same words throughout the interrogation: “I don't know what you're talking about!”

It was almost inconceivable that Vielman, who was lame in one arm, could have wielded the heavy chunk of concrete. The church of San Sebastián was far from his usual stomping grounds by the bus terminal. And what reason could he have had for murdering Bishop Gerardi? Robbery didn't seem a plausible motive. The bishop's gold ring and his wallet with fifty dollars inside it had been left on his person. The only things that were missing were the keys to the parish house and to the bishop's car, the chain from around his neck, and his cheap plastic Casio watch.

ODHA checked out Vielman's alibi, which seemed solid. After sweeping up, as he often did, in La Huehueteca, a little cantina near the bus terminal, he'd been paid with a bottle of cheap cane liquor, which he shared with other indigent friends, and then he had slept there. Nevertheless, Otto Ardón continued to insist that Vielman was the perpetrator. Ardón may simply have been eager to arrest anyone and perhaps hoped that Carlos Vielman would provide an adequate scapegoat. Or perhaps he really was as incompetent as Edgar Gutiérrez said he was. Gutiérrez had been educated in Mexico as an economist and was responsible for much of the REMHI report's shape and content. His gentle, soft-spoken demeanor belied an intensely cerebral and complex personality. Gutiérrez's public calls for Ardón's removal poisoned relations between ODHA and the prosecutors, although it is hard to imagine that a spirit of collaboration could ever have flowered between them.

The lethargic, seemingly diffident Ardón—the prosecutor bore a remarkable resemblance to an unsmiling Alfred E. Neuman, the cartoon character who is the face of
Mad
magazine—had been bemoaning to everyone his unlucky fate in drawing such a high-profile, implicitly dangerous case. He let it be known that he had nothing to gain from prosecuting it, that it would be bad for his career. Sometimes, in a tone of weary bravado, he said the pressures and complications of the case didn't allow him to sleep at night.

V
ERY QUIETLY, HARDLY NOTICED
, FBI agents had slipped into the country a few days after the murder and were aiding Ardón and the prosecutors. Rubén Chanax had passed a polygraph test the FBI administered in which the only question he was asked was if he had seen a shirtless man step out of the garage. El Chino Iván refused to take the test.

In late May, Ardón sent pieces of evidence to the FBI laboratories in Washington, D.C., to find out if the blood or hairs found in the blue sweatshirt corresponded to Vielman's, or if any traces of Vielman's body fluids or DNA were on the bishop's clothes. The results of all those tests would be negative. It was to be an ongoing routine in the investigation. Guatemalan prosecutors would send evidence and samples to Washington and then wait with bated breath for the results, which on every occasion disappointed them. One reason was that the prosecutors were often requesting the wrong kind of information. There was a great deal of Bishop Gerardi's blood in the garage, tracked all over the house, and left in traces on the walls, but there was not much in the way of incriminating evidence waiting to be discovered in it. And a great deal of potentially crucial evidence had been lost. The single, rather small, bloody footprint found by the bishop's body, the first and seemingly most promising piece of evidence, was never matched, at least not publicly or officially, to the foot-wear of any named suspect or witness.

President Arzú responded to the crime by appointing a High Commission of notables, including Rodolfo Mendoza, the minister of the interior, to whom Ronalth Ochaeta had passed the license-plate number. The Church declined to participate, arguing that the work of investigating the crime should be left to those who were presumably better qualified: the police and prosecutors. The Church feared being trapped into sanctioning an official whitewash. It did not go unnoticed that military regimes of the past had typically responded to crises by appointing a political commission.

President Arzú, who was notoriously thin-skinned to begin with, was on the defensive. In his first public interview about the case, published in
Prensa Libre
, the country's largest newspaper, Arzú pointed out that just days before in New York City a priest who had done social work in the Bronx had been murdered. “Why should the image of our country be stained,” he said, “and not that of the United States, when these two acts are equally reprehensible and painful?” Throughout the 1980s, when Guatemala was frequently sanctioned for its human rights record, Army and government spokespersons had customarily responded by pointing to the crime rate in New York City and indignantly asking why the UN, American liberals, and human rights organizations weren't asking for sanctions against the United States as well.

D
URING THOSE FIRST DAYS
and weeks after the murder, the small team of UN investigators led by Rafael Guillamón, who reported directly to MINUGUA's chief, Jean Arnault, quietly tried to identify and track down some of the indigents who had slept outside the San Sebastián parish house on the night of the murder. The exact number will probably never be known, but it seems that perhaps eight, though more likely ten or twelve,
bolitos
were sleeping in the open plaza in front of the church and by the garage that night.

Four nights after the murder, on April 30, three of the
bolitos
—El Chalupa, El Cachimba, and El Árabe—on their way out of the
park to buy a bottle of alcohol, had reportedly been accosted by a group of men who had roughly interrogated and beaten them and even attempted to pull them into a white Mercedes Benz. On another night, shots were said to have been fired into the park.

Some of the
bolitos
had surprising backgrounds. Two of them, Marco Tulio Rivera and his brother Héctor, were the sons of a former director of the National Police. Marco Tulio had been thrown out of military school as a youth for drunkenness, but Héctor was a civil engineer who had graduated from the military officers' training academy. Héctor would stay drunk for two months or so, living in the park, then would turn up sober on a highway building crew in the mountains, and then would repeat his odd cycle. He was one of those who said he'd slept through everything the night of the murder. Vilma's “husband,” the
bolito
known as Ronco, was also an ex-soldier and claimed to be on the run from a mysterious pursuer.

The
bolitos
were hardly reliable interview subjects, fogged by drugs and drink and, on the night of April 26 specifically, by whatever soporific they had unwittingly ingested in their unlikely gift basket of cheese sandwiches and beer. Some may have pretended to remember less than they knew, some more. But Rafael Guillamón culled a number of interesting details from the
bolitos
. Years later, when the case finally went to trial, some of what he learned would seem hauntingly pertinent. Several of the
bolitos
might have been able to provide important corroborating testimony, had they still been alive. El Canche, Marco Tulio, and El Pitti, whose real name was Arni Mendoza Jeréz, claimed to have at least glimpsed the shirtless man who had stepped out of the garage. El Canache said that he was muscular, a common soldier type. Most notably, in light of evidence that would eventually emerge, Marco Tulio and El Canache both mentioned seeing a large black vehicle, which one of them identified as a Jeep Cherokee.

El Canache, who disappeared soon after his conversation with MINUGUA, said that he ran into El Chino Iván at a Burger King in downtown Guatemala City the day after the murder, and that El Chino Iván was clearly distressed. He told El Canache that he'd been hungry the previous night, and that finding the little door to the garage left open had entered through it and walked all the way to the parish-house kitchen, where he'd eaten from the refrigerator. Guillamón believed that was the likeliest explanation for the half-empty pitcher of orange juice in the kitchen and the piece of hot dog in the potted plant next to the bishop's body.

The day after the encounter in the Burger King, El Chino Iván's father phoned MINUGUA's investigators to say that his son had information about the Gerardi case and that he was frightened. El Chino Iván—who was tall, fair-skinned, and well spoken—soon turned up at MINUGUA headquarters and told Rafael Guillamón that Rubén Chanax had told him that he was with G-2, Military Intelligence. He said that Chanax often boasted about his knowledge of weaponry and that he had said that in ninety days a
limpieza social
, or social cleansing, of the park—an operation, usually carried out by police, in which undesirables were “eliminated”—was going to begin. El Chino Iván asked for protection. His father wanted him to go to the United States, but it was his immediate fate to pass into the custody of the police as a protected witness alongside Rubén Chanax.

When Guillamón interviewed Chanax, he asked about El Chino Iván's assertion that he worked for G-2. Chanax admitted telling him that, but said that he'd been lying. He only wanted to frighten his friend, to keep him from robbing and breaking into cars near the park. Chanax said that he had been shanghaied into the Army when he was sixteen, like so many other poor Guatemalan boys. He remembered the names of his commanding officers and squad leaders. There was really no reason to doubt that he had a military past, and that, like some of the others who lived in the park, he had drifted into the life of the homeless after being discharged.
Later Chanax told someone else in MINUGUA that El Chino Iván worked for military counterintelligence.

Were these claims simply fantasies and boasts? Apparently Chanax did not repeat them to Otto Ardón and his prosecutors or to the police.

T
HE FIRST PIECE OF EVIDENCE
that pointed, however circumstantially, to a military connection to the crime was the license-plate number that the taxi driver had given to Father Quiróz. The minister of the interior had asked Ronalth Ochaeta for the name of the witness who had taken down the plate number, claiming that without this information he couldn't attempt to identify its owner. But Arturo Aguilar and Rodrigo Salvadó had already hired, with Ochaeta's permission, a
tramitador
, someone whose job it is to undertake bureaucratic procedures—guiding paperwork through red tape, knowing when to grease a palm—on behalf of others, an occupation that is a Latin American institution. The
tramitador
took care of the necessary business at the registry of motor vehicles and discovered that the license-plate number had once been attached to the Chiquimula military base.

The Chiquimula base had been shut down the year before, and the vehicle that bore license-plate number P-3201, a pickup truck, was now registered to the Army High Command in Guatemala City. ODHA passed this information to the commission appointed by President Arzú, and from one day to the next, according to Ronalth Ochaeta, all records of the plate vanished except for the documents ODHA had in its possession. When Ochaeta complained that the Arzú commission was not cooperating in regard to the information, the Defense Ministry issued a statement explaining that the pickup had been sold, but then was forced to acknowledge that the pickup had been sold
without
the license plates. Finally it was acknowledged that one of the two plates numbered P-3201, which should still have been in the possession of the Army High Command, was missing.

On April 28, the same day Mynor Melgar learned of Father Quiróz's encounter with the taxi driver, an anonymous telephone call had been received by a receptionist at the archbishop's office. A woman said to tell Archbishop Penados to investigate “Colonel Lima Oliva,” and then she said, “Investigate the Limas.” She described herself as a friend of the archbishop and of Monseñor Quezada, a prominent bishop with a conservative reputation, but she would not give her name. This was just one of countless anonymous tips that reached ODHA. The legal team and the Untouchables had quickly learned that information arriving in this manner was often intended to mislead, and so far almost none of it had proved useful.

There was no Colonel Lima Oliva in ODHA's database. But there was a Captain Byron Lima Oliva in the EMP's Presidential Guard. Indeed, he was the officer who had been thrown from his horse and broken his arm during the incident in 1996 that cost the milkman Sas Rompich his life. And there was a recently retired Colonel named Byron Disrael Lima Estrada, who turned out to be the father of the young Lima in the EMP. Colonel Lima Estrada lived in the Colonia Lourdes, a comfortable neighborhood where military officers make their homes. The retired colonel was said to run a little grocery store out of his garage.

Colonel Lima Estrada was a most unlikely shopkeeper. In 1988, he had commanded the Chiquimula military base—the same base to which plate number P-3201 had formerly been assigned. That immediately caught ODHA's eye. The colonel had had an exemplary military career during the cold war period. A number of files on him held by the U.S. Defense Department and the CIA had been declassified, and the records were posted on the National Security Archive Web site maintained by George Washington University. Colonel Lima Estrada was an anticommunists' anticommunist and a legendary counterinsurgency officer. The colonel's visceral hatred of communists was explained by his painful personal history: his father, a military officer who had led
a lethally 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.