The Art of Political Murder (23 page)

But the most important source of the allegations against Monseñor Efraín Hernández and Ana Lucía, although this was not yet widely known at the time, was a Guatemalan woman who lived in Canada and who went by several names, including Blanca Lidia Contreras, and who had once been married to Monseñor Hernández's brother. In August she had traveled from her home in Canada to testify before Otto Ardón. Her trip had been arranged by a man named Luis Mendizábal, an unofficial adviser to President Arzú.

Blanca Lidia Contreras thought she knew—or so she said—why Bishop Gerardi had been murdered. It was because of two letters that she had written to the bishop and sent from Canada to Guatemala with a friend to be hand-delivered. Blanca Lidia claimed that when she heard of Bishop Gerardi's murder, she'd connected the dots, and realized that her well-intentioned letters could be the source of the crime. After calling the Guatemalan embassy in Ottawa and not receiving the response she'd hoped for, she phoned President Arzú and the first lady directly. That, she claimed, was how she had found herself in contact with the presidential adviser Luis Mendizábal.

Blanca Lidia Contreras said that Ana Lucía's mother, Imelda Escobar, had come to work as a housekeeper for Monseñor Hernández in the early 1970s, when he was parish priest of a church called Esquipulitas. Imelda Escobar was a poor but handsome woman with five children. Blanca Lidia Contreras, by virtue of her position as Monseñor Hernández's sister-in-law, was close to the workings of the parish house, and she noticed that the new housekeeper soon began showing signs of wealth, dressing her children in expensive clothes and enrolling them in expensive schools. Then, in 1974, Imelda Escobar became pregnant with
Ana Lucía, and she implied, Blanca Lidia said, that Monseñor Hernández was the father of the child. What Imelda Escobar actually, allegedly, said to her was: “Congratulations, you're going to be an aunt!”

Blanca Lidia's testimony was rife with tales of lurid happenings years earlier, when Monseñor Hernández was the Esquipulitas parish priest and the Orantes boys were among his parishioners. She described young Mario and Ana Lucía and her friends romping naked on a church altar—an entertaining image, though perhaps not an entirely credible one, considering the eleven-year age difference between Father Mario and the girl. Blanca Lida described young Mario riding around with Imelda Escobar's gangster children in cars full of guns. She said that Mario used to bring Imelda Escobar porno films. She said that Imelda Escobar would let the adolescent Mario and his brother Sergio drink alcohol in the parish house with her sons, and that she allowed “grown women” to lock themselves in rooms with the boys to entertain them. She said that Imelda Escobar practiced witchcraft. That Imelda had placed relatives in housekeeping positions in parishes throughout the country and through that web operated her ring of stolen Church valuables. That Imelda and Ana Lucía traveled to Houston and Egypt, where they had bank accounts and did business. She also said that El Calvario, the church where the Escobars and Monseñor Hernández lived now, was a center of drug trafficking, child prostitution, and gambling, and a criminal lair for Ana Lucía's gangster friends.

Throughout her testimony—apparently culled from decades of family gossip, some of it, I would guess, true, but much probably exaggerated or invented—Blanca Lidia Contreras painted a picture of the chancellor of the Curia, Monseñor Hernández, trapped in an earthly hell, constantly threatened with exposure by his criminal housekeeper and their daughter, and sometimes drugged. Ana Lucía was said to have threatened to identify Monseñor Hernández as her father if he didn't use his influence to help her and her friends. Indeed, people at ODHA had witnessed
some of the titanic tantrums the tempermental vixen had thrown when she demanded his help in getting her out of some scrape. They had seen her nearly carried out of his office after having been given tranquilizers.

Blanca Lidia Contreras told the prosecutor that the letters she wrote Bishop Gerardi asked for his help in disentangling her former brother-in-law (she was by then divorced), Monseñor Hernández, from his criminal housekeeper and her gangster daughter. She said she believed that Bishop Gerardi had been murdered because those letters had fallen into the wrong hands. She refused to identify the friend who, supposedly, had delivered the letters, saying that she feared for the friend's safety.

Several people told me that they had heard the stories about Ana Lucía being Monseñor Hernández's daughter. There is a saying in Guatemala, “
Hijo negado, pinto y parado,”
meaning that if you deny that someone is your child, the child will grow up looking just like you. Ana Lucía was small of stature and pretty, and she shared Monseñor Hernández's dark complexion, soft round face, and vivid, nearly Asian eyes.

Ana Lucía Escobar

Fernando Penados's assessment of the church of El Calvario, home of the chancellor of the Curia and his housekeeper's brood, was that “there are several of dubious genetic origin living there.” Fernando said that Ana Lucía's identification papers had always listed her father as unknown, but that in the fall of 1998, when stories of her suspected involvement in the Gerardi case got around, a man came forward to say that he was the father. Fernando didn't believe that Ana Lucía had had a direct role in Bishop Gerardi's murder. He remarked that she was guilty of just about every crime but that one.

I talked to Ana Lucía Escobar on the telephone a few times. Her voice was sweetly girlish and lilting. She denied all the accusations against her and said that she had broken up with her boyfriend of several years, a member of the Valle del Sol gang named Luis Carlos García Pontaza who had a history of arrests for such crimes as bank robbery and possession of drugs and unregistered weapons. The only time she seemed surprised was when I mentioned Blanca Lidia Contreras. I realized that Ana Lucía had no idea that Blanca Lidia had come from Canada to testify against her.

Most of the suspicion that fell on Ana Lucía for her role in the Gerardi case centered on her presence at the parish house on the night of the murder. She and her cousin Dagoberto had turned up with Monseñor Hernández, the first person Father Mario had telephoned. Her account of that night—that her mother woke her at about midnight, that she drove Monseñor Hernández and her cousin from El Calvario to San Sebastián, arriving minutes before the firemen—hadn't been credibly contradicted by anybody.

Juan Carlos Solís Oliva, the former judge and stepson of Colonel Lima, continued to write about his independent investigation into Gerardi's murder. But he would soon fall out with his military and government contacts and give a statement to prosecutors explaining how he had sold the theory about Valle del Sol to Otto Ardón, who was an old friend from law school. In September 1998, as the dog-bite scenario was falling apart, a distraught Ardón had
met with Solís Oliva in a Burger King. “He had big circles under his eyes, and physically he'd deteriorated tremendously,” Solís Oliva would recount of that meeting with the special prosecutor. “He told me that he couldn't sleep, that he was under pressure, and he wept, right in front of me he started weeping, and he said, ‘Look, Juan Carlos, you've always been a strategist, I've always admired you,'” and he asked for help. Solís Oliva offered the Valle del Sol scenario.

By May, when he gave his statement to prosecutors, Solís Oliva was claiming that his former collaborators in the EMP, particularly Major Escobar Blas, had threatened to kill him, and he had gone on the run, changing houses every night. Solís Oliva called Escobar Blas “a pathological killer,” although he also declared that he remained convinced of the innocence of his stepfather, Colonel Lima, and his half brother, Captain Lima. He identified Escobar Blas as a member of the Cofradía, the elite brotherhood of present and former Military Intelligence officers in which his stepfather was a leader. Solís Oliva testified that his informants at Military Intelligence had shown him the
very letters
that Blanca Lidia Contreras had meant to be delivered to Bishop Gerardi. He said the EMP had intercepted those letters.

That was a curious claim. How had the EMP come into possession of the letters? Had Father Mario found them, and then passed them on to the EMP? But why would the priest do that, if the letters incriminated him? Did the EMP send somebody into the parish house to steal the letters, either shortly before or immediately after the murder? Was it possible that the letters shown to Solís Oliva were forgeries?

Years later, in the spring of 2005, shortly after Monseñor Efraín Hernández's death from cancer, I received a phone call from a woman speaking in French who turned out to be Blanca Lidia Contreras. She had somehow gotten hold of my number, but it was
the wrong number
. She was mistaking me for a French reporter who had by then emerged as one of the military's strongest defenders in the Gerardi case. Blanca Lidia Contreras was
highly entertaining to speak to on the telephone, but she did seem to nurture an obsessive desire for vengeance against Imelda Escobar. She said that after the Guatemalan earthquake of 1976, Imelda Escobar had really begun enriching herself, stealing foreign aid for earthquake victims donated through the Church. Ana Lucía, she said, was the sort of little girl who ripped up flower beds and tore the heads off baby ducks.

Blanca Lidia had phoned me (thinking I was the friendly French reporter) because she wanted to draw attention to Imelda Escobar's alleged financial misdeeds in the aftermath of Monseñor Hernández's death. I put her in touch with a newspaper reporter in Guatemala City. Blanca Lidia and the reporter had a number of friendly and animated conversations—it's hard to imagine a dull conversation with Blanca Lidia—but when the reporter tried to press her about the identity of whoever had supposedly delivered the letters to Bishop Gerardi, Blanca Lidia withdrew, and cut off all communication.

Luis Mendizábal, the presidential adviser who arranged Blanca Lidia's trip to Guatemala to testify to prosecutors in the late summer of 1998, was later linked, in a long investigative report published in a newspaper in El Salvador, to the Salvadoran ARENA party leaders who ran death squads and engineered the assassination of Archbishop Romero in 1980. Mendizábal was the liaison in Guatemala for the founders of ARENA; he introduced the Salvadoran Roberto D'Aubuisson to the leader of Guatemala's ultra-right MLN (“the party of organized violence”), Mario Sandoval, who became D'Aubuisson's mentor. ARENA, actually constituted in Guatemala in 1980, was closely modeled on the MLN. In Guatemala, Mendizábal owned a clothing boutique whose back rooms were rumored to have been a meeting place for MLN death squads in the war years. In 2000, the Guatemalan newspaper
elPeriódico
would report that Mendizábal was a member of a clandestine group known the Oficinita, which acted as a liaison between the Army, the government, and powerful
hard-line conservatives in the private sector. Allegedly formed by General Espinosa in the late 1990s, the Oficinita was intended primarily to subvert, from inside the legal system, prosecutions that threatened the military and its supporters.

Were the letters that Blanca Lidia Contreras supposedly wrote to Bishop Gerardi actually a ruse in which she collaborated in exchange for being invited by Luis Mendizábal to come to Guatemala and, on the record, wage her vendetta against Imelda Escobar? Solís Oliva
saw
the letters, and he described their handwriting and salutations, although that is not the same as having them examined by a handwriting expert. But suppose Blanca Lidia really did write the letters? Those letters provided powerful supporting evidence for the Valle del Sol scenario, and many people were desperate to discover just that sort of evidence. Why weren't the letters passed to the special prosecutor, Otto Ardón, during the time he was thrashing around for any such evidence? Why did the letters never turn up again in the Gerardi case?

The theory that Ana Lucía Escobar and the Valle del Sol gang murdered, or participated in the murder of, Bishop Juan Gerardi would prove to be the Frankenstein monster in this case. It was a good story, a seductive story, too
good
a story to dismiss, even too good not to wish, as a tabloid editor might, for it to be true. But like ODHA's legal team, some later prosecutors on the case, and others, I eventually—years later—came to believe that the scenario might have been entirely fabricated. Perhaps the sinister Valle del Sol gang was only a group of young delinquents, including Ana Lucía, and not a true organized crime gang at all. The old family ties and perhaps the friendship between Father Mario and Ana Lucía were just another circumstance that would have made the murderers feel they had won the lottery. Solís Oliva's confession that his ludicrous investigation was essentially phony should have been revealed immediately. But it wasn't. He had confided to a judge and lawyers, not the public. The propaganda machine ground on, until
the Valle del Sol scenario became the most popular explanation of who killed the bishop.