The Art of Political Murder (15 page)

Along with Dr. Reverte Coma's deductions about Baloo, the cast of the dog's teeth, and the photographs, Ardón had other circumstantial evidence that made it hard to dismiss out of hand his decision to arrest Father Mario. In one of the priest's declarations he had admitted that Baloo, as a young dog in Germany, had “received the normal training they give to any German shepherd that is going to compete in ‘shows' for the breed.” That included being trained to attack a forearm. A sheet of paper had been found in Father Mario's bedroom with commands in German, spelled out phonetically, and their translations, including, “
Fass!
” “Attack!” and “
Ous!
”—apparently a command to growl. But when asked if his dog had ever bitten anyone, the priest answered, “Never,” and said, “The most he's ever done is growl at people he doesn't know when they come close to me, because when I'm with him in the street or the park, he's defending me.” In two of his statements, Father Mario admitted that Baloo sometimes growled at people
in the parish house, especially the parish secretary, but never at Bishop Gerardi, and in another, his first statement, he claimed that “the dog never growls, even if he hears footsteps nearby”—this was why, he said, Baloo had kept silent while the murder was taking place.

The most damning testimony against Baloo was in an account of an interview given to prosecutors by a
bolito
, Arni Mendoza, alias El Pitti, on June 12. “Monseñor [Gerardi] was a very good person, totally the contrary of Father Mario Orantes,” the transcript of the interview said, “because on the twenty-fifth of April of this year Father Mario turned and ordered his dog to attack him [El Pitti] and it bit him and tore through his pants leg.” The
bolito
had also testified that on the night of the bishop's murder, at approximately nine o'clock, he had seen a white car, a Mercedes Benz, parked on Second Street. He saw the same car three days later. Getting out of it was “a priest whom he suspects of having been involved in the crime.”

Press accounts, which were usually based on fragmentary information and hearsay, about the “mystery witness”—the taxi driver—always described the car with plate number P-3201 as a white Mercedes. It was a closely held secret among the Untouchables and others at ODHA that the white car with the four-digit military plate had actually been a Toyota Corolla. There had been a white Mercedes Benz at the church the afternoon and the night of the murder, but that car, it was eventually discovered, belonged to an elderly, conservative Spanish priest named Amezaga, who had first come to San Sebastián that day on a routine matter.

El Pitti's declaration seemed designed to link Father Mario to the shirtless man whom the mystery witness had seen next to the white car, but his testimony wasn't credible, and not only because of its convenient timing. He had never mentioned being bitten by Baloo in his earlier declarations to police or during an extensive interview with MINUGUA. And this was the same
bolito
who had turned up outside the cathedral during Bishop Gerardi's funeral
ceremonies to shout that the murderer was El Chino Iván. Years later, Rafael Guillamón, the investigator from MINUGUA, told me that in his opinion El Pitti's declaration about the dog bite had been entirely cooked up by Ardón's assistant Gustavo Soria.

“W
HAT HAPPENED IS THAT
Monseñor saw something extraordinary in the parish house that night as he pulled his car into the garage. And that was precisely what led to his death, because what he saw was something that was supposed to be hidden. That started an argument between Monseñor and his assailant, and his assailant ordered Baloo to attack and then he assaulted Monseñor with some blunt instrument, maybe a crowbar…. This murder was committed by one person and a dog, because the corpse had a dog bite in the back of the skull.” Mario Menchú, the defense attorney, gave this succinct account of the situation four days after the the arrest of Father Mario and one day before his hapless client, the alcoholic and lame indigent Carlos Vielman, was finally released from jail.

Margarita López, the parish-house cook, was also soon given “provisional” liberty. Two years later, in October 2000, Carlos Vielman died of cirrhosis of the liver. El Pitti had died the year before, of AIDS.

F
ATHER
M
ARIO WAS
, at thirty-five, still a young priest for such a relatively quiet, genteel, centrally located parish as San Sebastián, the kind usually reserved, I was told, for bishops with overloaded schedules, like Bishop Gerardi, and old priests on the verge of retirement. Yet Father Mario had already been at San Sebastián for eight years. His duties were relatively light. He'd shared four daily Masses, six on Wednesdays, with Bishop Gerardi. His base monthly salary was 500 quetzales, about seventy-four dollars, plus fourteen quetzales for each Mass. He met and prayed with rosary groups, conducted the occasional group catechism class, heard confessions—the routine duties of a parish priest. The first Saturday of every month he made the rounds of the neighborhood to take confession from parishioners who were too old or infirm to come to church. He was said to have a sympathetic bedside manner with the gravely ill.

When I asked the sacristan, Antonio Izaguirre, whom Bishop Gerardi used to affectionately call Tonomono (Tono is short for Antonio, and
mono
means cute, or monkey)—he had the disheveled, sweet-natured, lonesome air of someone who would have had trouble handling a more demanding job—if Father Mario often left the church to do charity work, the sacristan could barely restrain a laugh. Father Mario, he said, rarely left his bedroom. He was “obsessed,” the sacristan told me, “with talking on
the phone.” But Father Mario was also known for the reticent brevity of his sermons. He struck some people as lazy, others as highly intelligent. Many found him unsociable, barely acknowledging Bishop Gerardi's friends when they visited; others recalled him as gregarious and said that when he did go out, he liked to attend the dinner parties of close friends, especially those of an extremely wealthy woman in late middle age, Martha Jane Melville Novella, whom he had chosen to be “godmother” at his ordination and who gave him a birthday party every year.

Father Mario's relationship with Bishop Gerardi was described by some as friendly enough, though perhaps a bit perfunctory, and by others, including by some of the bishop's relatives, as warmly affectionate. They added that Father Mario liked searching the Internet for obscure theological texts that he knew would delight his superior. Once, Fernando Penados told me, when he was working at the Public Ministry, he'd asked Bishop Gerardi for some Franciscan robes for an undercover operation he was organizing near the church of Candelaria, and it was Father Mario who had procured them.

Father Mario's bad health—he had migraines, asthma, colitis, and ulcers—was the usual explanation for his assignment to San Sebastián, along with his intimacy with Monseñor Efraín Hernández, the chancellor of the Curia. During their boyhood, Hernández had been like a second father to Mario and his older brother, Sergio, who was also a priest. Father Mario had studied at the Liceo Javier, a prestigious school run by Jesuits that was a breeding ground for young political activists and radicals in the 1970s and 1980s, but he became a seminarian in the conservative Salesian order. Later he was a simple diocesan priest. His family was connected to the most conservative wing of the Guatemalan Church. His mother was related to a well-known cleric—Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arrellano, an aggressive anti-communist who collaborated with the CIA in the lead-up to the coup of 1954. An old schoolmate recalled that Mario's brother,
Sergio, was nicknamed El Nazi because of his authoritarian personality and love of all things military.

Father Mario's schoolmates recalled also that he had wanted to be a priest since childhood. Yet something about him seemed poignantly unsuited for the austere demands of the priesthood, at least as most people conceive of that calling. There was the striking babyishness of his speech, including an overuse, even by Guatemalan standards, of diminutives. And though, as Father Mario, in his own defense, later pointed out, diocesan priests don't take a vow of poverty, the disconcerting number of possessions in his bedroom did not seem in keeping with spiritual transcendence of the seductions of the material world. Father Mario slept in a king-size bed imported from England, made up with luxurious sheets and bedding. Most of the furniture in the room was mahogany, including shelves holding some 600 books, mainly theological, and an entertainment unit that supported a JVC television with a thirty-six-inch screen, a VCR, and a Pioneer laser-disk player. When prosecutors and police searched the room on the day of the arrest, they found approximately ninety video-cassettes (
Jurassic Park, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Bordello of Blood
, boxed collections of
Lethal Weapon, Frankenstein
, James Bond thrillers, and comedies with the Three Stooges—the last, according to Mario's mother, his favorite performers). He had a Macintosh 6500/300 computer, an Epson Stylus 800 color printer, a collection of fifty CD-ROMS, a JVC stereo with four ambient speakers, and approximately 200 CDs of mainly classical music and soft Latin romantic pop in the style of Julio Iglesias. He had a reclining armchair and a computer chair upholstered in magenta leather. In his closet were sixty shirts, most either from Ermenegildo Zegna or custom-made in London; twelve leather jackets; twelve pairs of Italian shoes; twenty pairs of slacks and fifteen sweaters, all with designer labels; four Dunhill belts; at least six sets of pajamas; and four bottles of Dunhill cologne. He had three expensive watches, one a gold Cartier found
with a receipt for more than $3,500. Along with the Walther pistol in his drawer there were several cartons of bullets, which were described as a gift from his brother Sergio and which Father Mario said he had been intending to sell. There was a framed autographed photograph of a beautiful woman who turned out to be his ordination godmother, Miss Martha Jane Melville Novella. But many of the things found in the room reflected Father Mario's affection for Baloo. There was a stuffed felt dog on the striped bedspread, and the bedroom dresser displayed trophies that Baloo had won in dog shows, as well as a number of framed photographs of the dog. Also found in the room were photographs of Baloo with an erection, or, as Fernando Penados phrased it when describing it to an eminent Church figure, “in his maximum expression.” Fernando had then held his hands up, wide apart, and asked the prelate, “Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you?”

Otto Ardón confiscated many of Father Mario's belongings during twelve separate searches of his room conducted in the weeks after his arrest. Some of his clothes and a pair of Gucci shoes were sent by Ardón to Washington, D.C., for testing at the FBI crime lab, along with other pieces of potential evidence, including the cushion Baloo had slept on.

B
ALOO, WHO WAS BORN
in Germany and cost $2,500, was also a gift to Father Mario from his brother, Father Sergio. (Bishop Gerardi's nickname for the pricey thoroughbred was Pecado, “Sin.”) In 1992, Father Sergio had assumed the prestigious post of rector of the Colegio San José de los Infantes, which stood alongside the Metropolitan Cathedral. During his tenure, which lasted only four years, he ran up mostly unaccounted-for bills, on the school's bank account, of 4,008,000 quetzales (then nearly $650,000). Part of the money was spent on guns: high-caliber Colts, Tauruses, and Jerichos. The priest gave guns away, and he sold them. The guns were now a problem, because a number of
those bought and registered in the school's name were missing. Bills of sale for other missing weapons had been found as well, along with a cache of guns that were never registered at all. In the wake of Father Mario's arrest, the chief of police had personally come to the school and taken away all the documentation relating to the weapons.

One reason that Father Sergio had armed himself so heavily, at least initially, may have been a problem he was having with parents over the issue of school military marching bands. Known as “war bands,” they had been omnipresent in the streets of Guatemala City—every school seemed to have its own war band—for as long as any living person could remember, marching and rehearsing dreary martial music for the September 15 Independence Day parade and other patriotic events. Father Sergio's predecessor as rector of the Colegio San José de los Infantes had made the mistake of suspending the bands and was driven from his post by angry parents. In 1998, about 50 percent of the school's 1,100 students were the children of military officers. When Father Sergio took over in 1992, he had reinstated the war bands, and he even organized a trip to Miami for teachers and students to buy new uniforms and instruments; it was one of the first outlays that led to the enormous debt he left behind at the school. The rector who eventually succeeded Father Sergio, José Mariano Carrera, told me that the war bands, with their fervent militarism and patriotism, were a powerful symbol of the anticommunist, pro-military, pro-oligarchy Church of the 1950s, epitomized by the Orantes brothers' cold warrior great-uncle, Archbishop Rossell. The war bands were an expression of the peculiar character of certain sectors of Guatemalan society, and the battle over them was a parable of a clash of local values and beliefs, backward versus modern—easy to imagine as a comic provincial novel with sinister undertones.

The parents of the students at Colegio San José de los Infantes must have been happy with Father Sergio at first. But then President
Arzú and his education minister, as a gesture toward demilitarizing Guatemalan society, banned school war bands. The Colegio San José de los Infantes moved from its old quarters alongside the cathedral to a new modern complex on the outskirts of the city. Supposedly, Father Sergio began to receive threats from the parents of students angered by the long commute to the new campus, and by the end of the war bands.