The Art of Political Murder (46 page)

F
OR ALL THE EFFORT
deployed to keep them silent, people—some people—talk anyway. Not long before the murder trial got under way in the spring of 2001, a woman named Elida Mancilla Meléndez held a barbecue to celebrate the inauguration of her new house in San Lucas Sacatepéquez, near the city of Antigua. Among the guests were Archbishop Próspero Penados, two priests who'd graduated from the Adolfo Hall military academy in Cobán, and a nun, the sister of the hostess. The sisters' nephew, an EMP specialist
named Julio Meléndez Crispín, was also a guest. He was tall, thin, hook-nosed, sad-eyed, and glum.

Julio Meléndez Crispín turned out to be the real reason for the barbecue. His aunts wanted their nephew to have a conversation with the archbishop. Julio Meléndez Crispín was worried about the potential repercussions of his role in the Gerardi case, and his aunts had urged him to tell Archbishop Penados “what happened that famous night.” So Meléndez Crispín, as they say in Guatemala, turned over his bowl of soup. He told the archbishop that all the officers in the EMP knew what was going to happen. That many people had been contracted to monitor what went on around the park: indigents, taxi drivers, shoeshine boys, newspaper vendors, and so on. That there had long been an intelligence operation in effect against the Catholic Church and ODHA. That the murder plan was channeled through the EMP. That during the operation all the on-duty members of the EMP were confined to quarters before, during, and immediately after the murder (as the waiter specialist Aguilar Martínez had reported). And that he, Julio Meléndez Crispín, not Major Escobar Blas, was the tall man in the baseball cap who accompanied the photographer, Darío Morales, to the parish house to observe the murder scene.

Julio Meléndez Crispín said that in Captain Lima's operational group on the famous night there were only fellow veterans of the Kaibil special forces. Lima's job was to monitor the crime. Meléndez Crispín said that Father Mario had long been an informer and that both Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván were informers too. He said that he had informed on the archbishop's nephew, Fernando Penados, with whom he had first made contact through a family friend. He said that Colonel Lima Estrada and other prominent retired combat officers had been advisers to the EMP's anti-kidnapping commando unit. He identified the person—Danilo De León Girón—in charge of deleting and burning the files on the Gerardi case in the SAE after Alfonso Portillo became president and before Edgar Gutiérrez took control of the agency.

And then Meléndez Crispín revealed to Archbishop Penados the identity of the shirtless man: Obdulio Villanueva. That too made sense. Many thought it doubtful that the planners of the crime had contrived to bring the burly Villanueva from the Antigua prison only to make a video and drag Bishop Gerardi's corpse farther into the garage.

Details of the confidential conversation between the archbishop and Meléndez Crispín reached Rafael Guillamón at MINUGUA through another guest at the barbecue, but the UN did not have a mandate to interfere in the criminal investigation. It is not known what the archbishop did with the information. Apparently nothing. Investigators at ODHA heard only a very vague description, from a nun who also attended the barbecue, of what was said.

M
ONSEÑOR
H
ERNÁNDEZ
, the former chancellor of the Curia, died in the spring of 2005. Archbishop Penados, who had been declining in spirit and health since the murder of Bishop Gerardi, died soon after. That same spring, during a meeting of presidents from Central America and the Dominican Republic, George W. Bush declared that he was “preoccupied by the proliferation of pressure groups in Central America, predominately aligned with the left, who are putting the stability of democracy at risk.” So the primary danger to democracy didn't come from narco-militaries or government corruption or institutionalized lawlessness or the violence perpetrated by the
maras
. It came from leftist “pressure groups,” by which Bush could mean only nonviolent labor union and peasant organizations, human rights organizations, elements of the Catholic Church, and so on. He didn't specify how such groups were threatening regional democracy.

The
New York Times
and other publications reported that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimated that 75 percent of the cocaine reaching the United States was being transshipped through Guatemala and that “high-level military and national police were linked to the trade.” The FBI reported that thirty former Guatemalan Army Kaibiles had been hired by the Mexican “Zeta”
drug cartel as assassins and instructors. In the summer of 2006, Mexicans were scandalized by a series of gruesome murders carried out against that cartel's rivals and enemies. Reporters attributed the murders to the hired Kaibil assassins. Beheadings, the reports said, were carried out in a special manner associated with the Kaibiles, using razor-sharp bayonets.

In the fall of 2005, an enormous secret-police archive of data going back for more than a century, and especially rich in information about the disappearances and political assassinations carried out during Guatemala's thirty-six-year internal war, had been found in a bat-infested, musty old munitions depot in Guatemala City. A government ombudsman, the Human Rights Procurator, took control of the mildewed archive, which promised to provide countless clues and evidence of Guatemalan atrocities. Leopoldo Zeissig had quietly returned to Guatemala that spring and was working with the ombudsman's office as a legal adviser. He was part of the team dealing with the formerly secret archive, which was said to hold sufficient files, if laid end to end, to span the length of 130 football fields.

I met with Zeissig one evening in the Austrian pastry café at the Hotel Camino Real. It was the first time we'd seen each other since I'd flown down to South America to see him when he was in exile there. We reminisced about the investigation into Bishop Gerardi's murder. “I loved the prosecutor's office and thought it was important to do a good job,” he said. “I was still a dreamer about justice.” But, in the end, Zeissig's motives had been called into question. The backlash against the case had been political, he said, “because of all that Monseñor Gerardi represented, and because of the forces moving around back there who wanted to kill him.” Zeissig denied that he and his prosecutors had a political agenda. “Our work was strictly juridical, by the letter of the law,” he said. “What personal gain have I gotten out of any of this?” Tears welled up in Zeissig's eyes. “It's idealistic maybe, but I want this country to improve. Is that like Quixote attacking windmills?”

It was hard to predict what, finally, the Geradi case would
mean for Guatemala: historic breakthrough or anomaly, precedent or fiasco? The Army and its accomplices had fought hard, ceaselessly—if not exactly courageously—to cover up their role in the murder, to spread smoky layers of confusion over every aspect of the crime, and to turn the tables on their accusers. “I have no doubts that the military did it,” Fernando Penados said to me. “The problem is, go ask the people about the Bishop Gerardi case now, and they have no fucking idea what happened there.”

I
N THE SUMMER OF
2005, I had visited Rubén Chanax in Mexico again. I'd been warned that he was still in touch with Military Intelligence and I was nervous about being alone with him and his warty strangler's hands in the dark little apartment. So when I called up at his window and he came down—again with bloodshot eyes, and wearing basketball shorts and a big dirty T-shirt—I suggested rather strongly that we go to a restaurant. He hesitated, looking warily up and down the street, and I saw that he was as frightened of me as I was of him, although his caution was nearly instinctual. He couldn't allow himself to trust anybody.

We stepped onto the sidewalk. As before, a vigilant neighbor immediately appeared. I sensed something more than routine about the neighbor's concern this time, and in the brief, whispered conversation between them. As we walked down the sidewalk, Chanax said that he had been trying to get transferred to another country. Maybe Argentina would take him. He wanted to be someplace else, he said, far away.

I had something on my mind that I wanted to ask him, and I decided to try to catch him off guard. “Rubén,” I said, as we walked along, “people are saying that Obdulio Villanueva was the shirtless man, that he was Hugo. Is that true?” Chanax's reaction was instantaneous and spontaneous. He laughed, and said, “No, it was Hugo.” He held his hands wide apart and asserted, as he had before, that Hugo had a “big, fat, dark Indio face.”

Later, when I spoke to Mario Domingo at ODHA—he harbored
his own suspicion that the shirtless man might have been Villanueva—he was unsurprised by Rubén Chanax's denial. Chanax, he said, couldn't change his story now. Doing so would only raise questions about how much more he knew and had withheld and further implicate him in the crime. Mario was convinced that Rubén Chanax was in the garage and saw Bishop Gerardi beaten to death, whether by Hugo or by Villanueva, or by both of them, assuming they were not the same person. Investigators—including Jack Palladino, the private eye from San Francisco—had always maintained that there had been at least two people inside the garage, probably more. One or more men could have been inside the parish house before Bishop Gerardi arrived home that Sunday night in his VW Golf. Another man might have been outside, hiding among the
bolitos
, and followed the car inside. Then someone would have had to swing the cumbersome garage door shut. That person might even have been Rubén Chanax. Aguilar Martínez had described seeing at least three other operatives, dressed in black, getting out of the black Jeep Cherokee, along with Lima and Villanueva, when it returned to the EMP. Julio Meléndez Crispín had told the archbishop that those operatives were Lima's former fellow Kaibiles.

Rubén Chanax and I sat down in the restaurant. He ordered soup, some tacos, a Coke, but barely touched his food. We went on talking, and he began to relax. Matter-of-factly, Chanax said that he'd known Bishop Gerardi was going to be murdered months before it happened. I asked him why he hadn't mentioned that when he'd testified.

“Prosecutor Zeissig knew about it,” Chanax said. But, of course, he couldn't admit that in his testimony. Hadn't I seen, he asked, how the defense attorneys had clamored for him to be arrested only on the basis of what he'd revealed in court?

“Look,” said Rubén Chanax. “I'm going to tell you how it happened.” Hugo, he said, had gone into the church just after the evening Mass and hidden, probably inside a confessional, waiting
for the sacristan to lock up. Later, El Chino Iván was supposed to go in and steal something, or else receive stolen artifacts from Hugo, and then those artifacts from the church of San Sebastián would turn up for sale a few days later in the Zone 4 stolen goods market. “And there it would all end, and they'd be able to say it had been a robbery.” But El Chino Iván had become frightened, and run away, and the robbery had never come off.

Father Mario's job, Chanax told me, had been to unlock the door connecting the church to the parish house so that Hugo could easily come into the garage.

Well, that was what many people had always suspected.

Rubén Chanax said that the day before the murder, he and Colonel Lima met briefly with Father Mario, as Mario was walking his dog in the park, to coordinate arrangements one final time. Now, I had the feeling that Chanax was fabricating a scene. It could have been someone other than the colonel, I thought, someone he doesn't want to mention. Or it might never have happened at all.

Where, at least up until 1998, one could always find Hugo, Chanax said, was at the barracks of the Fourth Corps of Engineers in Guatemala City. “He comes out for a sandwich at the stand in front every day,” said Chanax. “He comes out, with that big black Indio face of his.”

Chanax's tone had become easy, familiar. There was an animated light in his eyes. He was like some old, nearly forgotten actor, I thought, sought out by an admirer, the attention restoring his old glory. He even boasted a little. It had always been easy for him to win people's confidence, Chanax told me, and to make people like him. That had been his great talent as an intelligence agent. Later, as we were walking back to his building, I sprinted ahead a bit to avoid some traffic, and Chanax laughed and said, “Only Indios run in the street.” He caught up and fell into step beside me, as if we were buddies, as if we were just going to see a movie together.

VICTORY AND DEATH

And courage is a rarer thing than evil, after all.

—Salman Rushdie,
Shame

“W
E WON, WE WON
!” That was all Arturo Aguilar wrote in his e-mail message to me in New York on January 12, 2006. A few minutes later another e-mail arrived from Claudia Méndez. “
Confirmaron
”—They confirmed it. The Supreme Court had upheld the convictions and the twenty-year sentences for the Limas. Brief messages for such a big victory, and after such a long wait, but I thought I could feel their astonished joy and relief.

The court had stalled for months, and there had been much speculation that the charges against the Limas would be reduced again, this time to covering up evidence, which carried a maximum three-year sentence. They would then have been freed and the legal basis for proceeding with a criminal investigation against higher-ranking EMP officers would have been erased. But now the case could finally move ahead, with investigations against Colonel Rudy Pozuelos, Major Andrés Villagrán, and Major Francisco Escobar Blas, among others. Everyone I spoke to assured me that there were no more realistic legal loopholes for the Limas to exploit, though one should expect, I was told, a few last
patadas de abogado
, lawyers' kicks (like the thrashing of a drowning man,
un ahogado
), from the defense attorneys.