The Art of Political Murder (39 page)

“When he finally said, I was an informer, not a beggar,” Zeissig explained, “he was testifying against his own people. He was risking his life. He was taking the risk that they would find him and kill him.”

As Rubén Chanax would later reveal at the trial, one of his calls to Zeissig from Mexico City had been intercepted and he heard a voice that he identified as Hugo, warning him against coming to Guatemala to testify. There were other signs that Chanax's whereabouts and routine had been pinpointed. Chanax was forced to leave his job at the taco stand for more boring work as a janitor in an apartment building.

Rubén Chanax had been flown back to Guatemala City, accompanied by Jorge García, on Thursday, April 27, 2001. That night he slept on a couch in the prosecutors' office. Four security policemen from the Public Ministry, machine guns ready, guarded him, sleeping in shifts of two. When Zeissig arrived at seven in the morning he found his witness bathed and dressed in a suit and tie, apparently ready to go. But Chanax seemed extremely nervous. At breakfast his hands shook so much he could barely hold his fork. Zeissig decided that Chanax shouldn't be
sent to the witness stand until Monday. “I wanted him to be serene. I knew it was going to be a brutal cross-examination. ‘They are going to attack you,' I told him. ‘You're going to have to be very alert. We'll be trying to protect you. But the judges will let them ask their questions. You have to go forward with the truth.'”

They spent that weekend holed up in the office. They rented movies, sent out for food. Zeissig and his staff began working on their closing arguments. Monday morning they went to court. Zeissig left in his three-vehicle security caravan. He had sent Chanax ahead ten minutes earlier in a car the prosecutors had never used before, accompanied by three armed guards. When the court convened that morning, Zeissig rose and announced that the witness Rubén Chanax Sontay was in the building. Not even ODHA knew he was coming. Mynor Melgar's mouth, recalled Zeissig, dropped open in astonishment.

“I
HAD A JOB
,” was how Leopoldo Zeissig summed up his experience as special prosecutor of the Gerardi case. “And if I believe in what I'm doing, I should do it right.” An unwanted exile seemed a high price to pay for having done that job. Zeissig missed his parents, relatives, and friends, his house, the camaraderie of the Public Ministry. He missed Guatemala.

Captain Byron Lima, Zeissig told me, had a signature manner of announcing himself over the telephone in anonymous telephone calls: birdcalls. In the Kaibil commando unit that Lima had belonged to, soldiers became adept at mimicking jungle birdcalls. On the first Christmas Eve of his exile, when Zeissig picked up the receiver to answer the telephone, he heard a voice making eerie, high-pitched sounds. He felt certain that it was the captain phoning from prison in Guatemala City, just to let Zeissig know that he knew where to find him.

“Merry Christmas, Byron,” Zeissig said into the phone, and hung up.

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
25, 2002, a few months after I visited Leopoldo Zeissig in exile and we spoke in the hotel lobby in that arid South American city, the Fourth Court of Appeals overturned the verdicts in the Gerardi case. A new trial was ordered. The appellate court ruled that the three judges in the original trial had “overly relied” on Rubén Chanax's courtroom testimony. It accepted the arguments of the defense about Chanax's changing his pretrial testimony rather than expanding on it. (ODHA had lost the battle to recuse the most notoriously partisan and pro-military of the appellate judges, Wilewaldo Contreras.)

Because a new trial had been ordered, the defendants had to stay in prison. Father Mario remained in custody in a private hospital. In a triumphant statement from the Centro Preventivo, Captain Lima proclaimed, “Organized crime killed Gerardi, and now it will be proved…. It should also be noted that the Public Ministry is contemplating criminal charges against the prosecutors Mario Leal and Leopoldo Zeissig for manufacturing false witnesses.” Lima called ODHA “a group of communists who don't understand that the war has ended.”

That night in New York, when I checked the messages on my answering machine, I heard a voice making strange noises, whooping and celebratory, somewhat like New Year's Eve noisemakers—
wooo-eeeeeee! wooo-eeeee—
and drawn-out enough to sound
mocking too. A jungle birdcall, possibly. Whoever made the call, without saying a word, hung up.

It turned out that the ruling by the Fourth Court of Appeals was deeply flawed. For one thing, the appellate court was not supposed to rule on the quality of the proof that led to the verdicts but solely on whether the defendants' right to a fair trial had been violated. This legal point aside, it was also soon shown that the appellate judges had not actually examined the testimony they deemed contradictory. Tipped off by MINUGUA, the prosecution lawyers discovered that the records of Rubén Chanax's testimony had never even been requested by the appellate judges. They were still in the files. The judges had ruled on the substance of proofs they had never seen. Judge Wilewaldo Contreras's court had issued a precooked ruling.

On October 3, another Guatemalan court—Yassmín Barrios was one of the judges—found the former head of the EMP Archivo, Colonel Juan Valencia Osorio, guilty of having ordered the murder of Myrna Mack in 1991. (The man who stabbed her to death, Sergeant Noél Beteta, had been convicted in 1993.) But two other officers—another colonel and a general—were acquitted at the trial. Mynor Melgar was the prosecutor in the case. Helen Mack, after an eleven-year struggle, had at last won an unprecedented conviction against an active-duty colonel for being the “intellectual author” of a politically motivated crime of state, however diluted the victory was by the acquittals. Mack's murder did not fall under the Army's self-granted amnesty from prosecution for wartime crimes against human rights because it was a civilian homicide that had occurred outside any military context.

Four months later, in February 2003, the Supreme Court reinstated the verdicts in the Gerardi case. The Fourth Court of Appeals was ordered to hear the appeal again, and this time to conduct the proceeding properly. ODHA initiated a new battle to recuse Judge Wilewaldo Contreras, who'd publicly referred to ODHA's lawyers as his “enemies.”

Judge Wilewaldo Contreras and the appellate court struck again in May, when they overturned the verdict in the Myrna Mack case, freeing Colonel Valencia Osorio. Later the Supreme Court reinstated that verdict too, but the damage was done. A truckload of soldiers arrived at the colonel's house just before the prosecutors, including Mynor Melgar, got there to rearrest him. The colonel was smuggled aboard the truck, which drove off to an unknown destination.

T
HE SAME DAY
, February 12, 2003, that the Supreme Court upheld the verdicts in the Gerardi case, a riot broke out in the Centro Preventivo prison. Inmates in Sectors 1 and 2, members—
cholos
—of the infamous Central American youth gangs known as
maras
, attacked Sector 7. The
cholos
were armed with machetes, knives, and guns. Their target was Sector 7's leader, Captain Byron Lima. By the end of the rampage, six prisoners were slain, three by decapitation, including the former EMP specialist Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva.

The Limas' supporters had portrayed them in the press as having cleaned up the prison and imposed a wholesome but tough military discipline on their fellow inmates. It was true that Captain Lima had been elected head of all the prison sectors, that he'd put up signs barring spitting, and that he insisted that prisoners follow new rules regulating at what hours they could play their stereos and radios. In the mornings he made inmates assemble and shout out, “Good morning, Guatemala.” The lethal riot could be seen, then, as a rebellion by depraved criminals against spit-and-polish military discipline.

But there were other versions, other explanations, about what set off the riot in the Centro Preventivo that day. A full year before the incident, in January 2002, while the Gerardi case was in its first appeal stage, the president of the Penitentiary System Consulting Commission had received a letter from guards at the Centro Preventivo. The guards, who withheld their names, explained that
they felt “obligated to denounce to you the corruption of our superiors and also we don't want to be blamed for what could happen.” They accused the subdirector of the prison system, Colonel Barahona, of granting the Limas special privileges. “The Limas, being the military men they are,” the guards wrote, “have an ally in Colonel Barahona, who allows them to bring in prohibited items for the business they run in their sector. They gave an order allowing them to bring in as many such things as cigarettes as they want, but what the colonel doesn't know is that inside those cigarettes they bring in drugs.”

Two hundred
cholos
had recently been transferred to the Centro Preventivo following an outbreak of intergang warfare in another prison. In Guatemala, as elsewhere, narco capos go on directing their criminal enterprises from inside prisons, as do the heads of kidnapping, extortion, and car-theft rings. In the past, inside and outside the prisons, the
maras
worked for these often military-run mafias, providing foot soldiers, assassins, and such; in recent years, they had been asserting a new autonomy. The
cholos
in the Centro Preventivo wanted control over the prison crime rackets. They wanted those lucrative rackets for
themselves
. They didn't want to submit to the Limas' brutal reign. They wanted the Limas to submit to
their
brutal reign. Some had seen it coming:
elPeriódico
, citing prison authorities who refused to be identified by name, had earlier described the tension created by Captain Lima in the Centro Preventivo as a “time bomb” that had long been waiting to go off.

The
maras
are usually described as having their origins in the gang culture of Los Angeles. Young combat veterans, deserters, orphans, the children of parents fleeing the Central American civil wars, especially El Salvador's, formed gangs in Los Angeles to protect themselves and forge an identity of their own. After serving prison terms in the United States, many of them were deported back to their countries of origin. But
maras
have been a presence in Guatemala City since at least the 1970s, when the
city's poorest squatter slums began to be filled with people fleeing war and poverty in the mountains.

Central America was flooded with weapons from the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies during the cold war. Thirteen-year-old boys hold up convenience stores with grenades, and adolescent carjackers and kidnappers go around armed with M-15s, Gallils, and AK-47 assault rifles—“logistical support” often supplied by their partners and crime bosses in the police and the military. In 2005 there were some 100,000 Central American gang members operating across five countries, including Canada and the United States, with at least half of them based in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. On both the Guatemalan-Mexican and Mexican-U.S. borders,
maras
have established dominion over the lucrative and treacherous business of transporting illegal migrants, while simultaneously preying on them.
Maras
are also employed by the Mexican and Guatemalan cartels on the narco routes through the same territories. They have a reputation for favoring weapons of stealth and silence over guns: machetes, daggers, lead pipes, even Asian martial arts weapons.

The gang members rarely seem to splurge or launder money by purchasing ostentatious vehicles, houses, or other luxury goods. Instead, they reinvest their money in their businesses and the subsistence of their gangs. In Guatemala City there were said to be approximately 350 separate
mara
cells, embedded like spider nests in individual neighborhoods. There are gang members who tattoo their entire faces with Goth lettering and symbols. Other cells forbid tattoos that can't be covered by clothing. The newspapers are full of stories about teenagers murdered by
maras
, who kill, it is often said, just for fun. Initiation rites often seem to require murdering a female victim, usually an adolescent girl. That was one reason that 665 women were violently murdered in Guatemala, mostly in the capital, in 2005. On the other hand, some
maras
, or at least some cells, claim to forbid violence against women.

A twenty-one-year-old
cholo
known as El Bocón (“Big Mouth”) told police investigators that the riot in the Centro Preventivo had been planned for two months. El Bocón described how the
cholos
made their way from Sectors 1 and 2, smashing open holes in the fortified doors. “Then the
cholos
got into Sector 8 and they opened a hole to get into 7 and that's where Villanueva and another
maje
made their stand, fighting with the
cholos
, while the rest of us got out of there. And when I was out I realized that Psycho and Chopper from the Salvatrucha gang were decapitating Villanueva. When he tried to crawl out through the hole, he couldn't because he was too fat and he got stuck, and then they grabbed his hair and cut off his head.”

Colonel Valencia Osorio, who had been convicted of ordering Myrna Mack's killing (this was three months before that verdict was overturned), crawled to safety through a hole smashed in a wall. But where were the Limas? The
cholos
were chanting, “We want Lima! We want Lima!” They hacked off the top of Villanueva's skull with a machete. Psycho scooped up Villanueva's brain matter with his hands and flung it into the faces of the cornered Sector 7 prisoners, screaming, “Bring us Lima!” But Lima was nowhere to be found. They seized on a felt soldier doll that Lima kept by his bunk. The
cholos
decapitated the doll and shoved its head inside Villanueva's decapitated head, in through the neck and up, so that the doll's face showed through the brain matter.