The Art of Political Murder (49 page)

Who was directing the police in the “social cleansing” being waged against presumed urban delinquents? These activities resembled the clandestine military terror of the war years, and it was easy to see how such an operation could be used for political assassinations. “Social cleansing or extrajudicial execution,” said Mario Domingo. “The line between crime and politics here can be so fine as to not even exist.”

R
ODRIGO
S
ALVAD
Ó, one of the last two Untouchables, was leading ODHA's new exhumation team. He was an anthropologist, and that kind of work was closer to what he'd trained for. His college thesis had been an exploration of how the war had affected the observation of traditional religious customs in Maya communities. Rodrigo would sometimes spend weeks at a time in remote mountain areas, but he said that if the Gerardi case ever
went forward, he was willing to resume his job as an investigator. “Maybe it's some suicidal urge on my part,” he joked softly.

Rodrigo told me about a witness who had been pretty much overlooked—one of the car washers who had been in San Sebastián park on the night of Bishop Gerardi's murder. Rodrigo wasn't sure he could find the witness but was willing to try. Once more we set out on the short walk from the cathedral complex to the church of San Sebastián. Rodrigo said he hadn't talked to the car washer in a while, and that if we found him it was uncertain what condition he'd be in. He wasn't always lucid. We found him bent over a bucket of sloshing water, sponge in hand, busily washing a parked car. He was a tall, dark, middle-aged man with the stark thinness of a terminally ill person. His hollow-cheeked face was wrinkled and scrunched-looking, like a lost leather glove, and his few remaining teeth were crooked brown shards. Yet from under a soiled New York Yankees cap, black hair fell boyishly over his forehead, and he had attentive, glittery eyes. Rodrigo introduced us and then left us alone. The car washer's name was Víctor. He said that after he finished washing the car, he would meet me in the park. I waited. It wasn't long before I saw him approaching, with a lurching gait. Víctor seemed to be lame in one leg.

His full name was Víctor Hugo Godoy Cojulún, and he was forty-two years old. He'd been born in the Guatemalan city of Antigua and had been working as a car washer and living in and around San Sebastián park since he was twenty-three. In 1998, when Bishop Gerardi was murdered, Víctor slept at night in a little storage room—it looked like a concrete bunker—that belonged to the municipality; it was at the corner of the park and the driveway on the Second Street side. We walked over to it so that he could show me. A steel door to the storage space was now kept locked, but back then, in 1998, it had had a wood door behind a barred gate. Since then the storage room had been divided, one half converted into public restrooms.

On the night of Bishop Gerardi's murder, Víctor said, he and a man who shared the storage room with him, Isaías, had been joined there by a third person, Pablo. They'd made a few trips from the storage room to a nearby store to buy liquor, and at around ten o'clock they were inside, drinking. The door was open to the street. Then Víctor heard a sound from outside that he still vividly recalled, a kind of hyperventilated snorting, and when he looked up he saw a man passing, shirtless, muscular, with a military haircut, his body tensed, bent arms moving forward and back in short, abrupt thrusts, and all the while making that noise, as if, Víctor said, the man “was trying to expel his euphoria”—the adrenaline-charged exhalations, perhaps, of someone who'd just beaten somebody to death. Víctor was frightened. “That person gives me an ugly feeling,” he told his friends when the shirtless man abruptly reeled around and went past the door again. “Shut the door,” he told them, and they did.

But that wasn't all Víctor had witnessed that night in the park, which had been his domain for two decades. Early on, he'd seen a man giving beer and food to the
bolitos
who slept in front of the garage at the parish house; and then, a little later, when he and his two friends went out to buy their liquor, crossing the park, he'd seen Captain Byron Lima and two other men on a bench. The other men were sitting and the captain was standing with one foot up on the bench, his hands resting on his thigh—authoritative, alert. That demeanor seemed, in retrospect, in keeping with the captain's persona. Víctor said that Captain Lima was wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.

Captain Lima, like other soldiers from the nearby headquarters of the EMP, was a familiar figure to the denizens of the park. It wasn't until much later, when allegations about the captain's participation in the crime appeared in the newspapers, that Víctor realized the significance of what he'd seen.

Rodrigo had suggested to me that Víctor had seen the father, Colonel Byron Lima, in the park that evening as well, but Víctor
said no. Another of the park's vagrants, Héctor Rivera, had seen the colonel. Héctor and his brother, Marco Tulio, the wayward alcoholic sons of a former director of the National Police, had lived in the park. Víctor said that he hadn't seen Héctor in a while.

About ten minutes before he saw the shirtless man, Víctor had seen El Chino Iván, who said hello when he walked past the open door to the storage room, on his way out of the park.

By now we'd left the park and were in a small café across the street. So why, I asked Víctor, hadn't he and the others in the park ever told what they'd seen?

The people in the park didn't talk, Víctor said, because they were afraid of the
militares
. Didn't I know about “the incident” in the park soon after the murder? He told me about someone who'd pulled up in a white van and stood outside it on Third Street with a wad of bills in his hand, offering money to anyone who had information about Gerardi's murder. “Nobody said anything,” Víctor said, “because we knew he worked in the G-2.” The visit was understood, in the language of the park denizens, as a serious warning to keep quiet. Nobody had been foolish enough to come forward.

Víctor, like the Rivera brothers, was related to a police chief. Ángel Conte Cojulún, chief of the National Police at the time of Bishop Gerardi's murder, was his cousin. Could that be just a coincidence? Or were the
bolitos
and car washers of San Sebastián, infested with informers, a peculiar extension of the state's security apparatus, the lowest of the low but with roles and rules that they understood?

Víctor had told Otto Ardón and his prosecutors, when they'd held the first evidentiary proceeding at San Sebastián, on May 17, 1998, a few weeks after the murder, that he'd seen the frightening stranger go past his door, and El Chino Iván leaving the park—essentially corroborating Rubén Chanax's first statements—while maintaining that he'd seen nothing else. Later I looked at a photocopy of the record
of the proceeding. The sole entry about Víctor in the official record of the Gerardi case took up just a few lines. Ardón and his prosecutors had never questioned Víctor again.

But now years had passed, and Víctor was giving out more information than he had offered before. Maybe he felt he no longer had anything to fear. Maybe he felt the end of his life approaching, and the twisted story of the Gerardi case provided him with a sense of meaning. He was surprisingly well informed about the case and had his own opinions about various aspects of it. He believed in the innocence of Father Mario. And he expressed his indignation that the appeals court had shortened the Limas' prison sentences by ten years.

Víctor told me that he'd once seen Obdulio Villanueva out on the streets when he was supposed to have been in the Antigua prison—at about four in the morning, months before the murder, just down Sixth Avenue, at the beginning of Zone 2, across the street from the Supreme Electoral Tribune building, near the house of Major Escobar Blas's mother. There were three Chevy Suburban SUVs parked in a row, and Obdulio Villanueva was looking at his image reflected in the black tinted windows of one, adjusting his necktie. Víctor walked past with some friends from the park and said hello, and Obdulio Villanueva looked at them. He raised his fingers to his lips, and said, “
Ustedes se callan
.” You all keep quiet.

Later, back at ODHA, I asked Rodrigo Salvadó if the prosecutors who'd come after Otto Ardón—Celvin Galindo and Leopoldo Zeissig—had interviewed Víctor, and he said that he guessed they had. Then why hadn't they called Víctor as a witness at the trial? Rodrigo said that probably Zeissig had decided that with Rubén Chanax he had all he needed, and that Víctor would make an unreliable witness, easy for the defense to discredit, with his obvious drug and drinking problems, and so forth.

M
ARIO AND
I
HAD GONE
, one afternoon not long after the murder of his young brother, to visit the headquarters of the police detective
units, downtown, at the edge of Zone 1. Earlier in the day we had dropped in at the Constitutional Court to see if there was any news about its ruling, and then we'd gone to lunch in the market. I wanted to interview some homicide detectives, and Mario agreed to come with me. We walked down long corridors of modular offices with hand-drawn signs on the doors—Extortion, Kidnapping, Fraud, etc.—until we came to Homicide, located in two adjoining, bleakly austere rooms, with metal desks in rows and cheap computers that didn't seem to get much use. There were only four detectives present, in street clothes, pistols shoved into their pants. They were startlingly young, the beneficiaries, apparently, of recent reforms requiring that detectives have more rigorous training and at least a high school diploma. Mario said he would take advantage of the visit to check up on his brother's case, and he went to speak with an officer in the next room.

The young detectives were a demoralized bunch, understaffed and underfunded, despite the ballyhooed reforms. There were only seventy detectives in their section, they told me, for a city currently experiencing seventeen homicides a day. And look at the grim, shabby condition of their office, one said. How was that supposed to affect their morale? As in decades past, there was such a dearth of patrol cars that they often had to ride public buses to crime scenes.

When I came out of the room I found Mario Domingo staring down at a thick folder of papers he held open in his hands. A detective was sitting on the corner of a desk opposite him. Mario's face was somber, and there were tears in his eyes. We left and were well down the corridor when Mario said, huskily, “They are saying that Darinel's murder was political.”

In a way, it was what Mario had most dreaded—confirmation that his brother's murder might be related to his work at ODHA. Still, he told me, he hadn't seen any evidence in support of the conclusions in the folder. And the prosecutor's office was not likely to take action anyway.

When we got back to the ODHA office, one of Mario's brothers was waiting for him. They had agreed, it so happened, to meet that afternoon to compose some phrases for a plaque on Darinel's gravestone. They set to work, but after a while Mario couldn't take it. He went out of the room and walked away somewhere.

In the covered corridor running around the patio and the offices off it, ODHA's employees were occupied with routine duties. The Indian mayor of Nebaj—in the Ixil Triangle, far away in the mountains, one of the areas most affected by the war's violence—had arrived accompanied by three women in traditional dress. They went into a little conference room with another young lawyer who was the newest member of ODHA's legal team. I ran into Rodrigo Salvadó near the front door. He introduced me to a hulking, big-bellied youth with long hair and a beard whose name was Christian Ozaeta and who was developing a program for teaching the REMHI report in Guatemalan schools. Out in the corridor, ODHA's executive director, Nery Rodenas, was taping an interview for a documentary film about the upcoming tenth anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accords. “Can a state of war that has divided a country for decades really end,” the interviewer asked, “with just a signature on a piece of paper?”

The sky had darkened and a heavy downpour splashed the old stone tiles of the patio. I sat on a bench, watching it rain. Water rushed from drains and eaves and thunder rumbled in the sky. In his quiet voice, Nery had launched into a reply to the reporter's question that sounded as if it might go on forever.

I
N LATE
A
PRIL
2007, a new judge took over as president of the Constitutional Court, and within days—on April 25, the day before the ninth anniversary of the murder of Bishop Gerardi—the Public Ministry was notified that the guilty verdicts against the Limas and Father Mario had finally been upheld. “After six years, the sentences are firm,” Leopoldo Zeissig wrote to me in an e-mail. “At last the second stage of the investigation can begin.”
He meant the investigation, ordered by the judges in the original verdict, of other suspects in the murder, particularly higher-ups in the EMP. Prosecutors, Zeissig said, would have to establish the crime's chain of command. “Don't forget that the Gerardi crime and the extrajudicial executions carried out during the armed internal conflict have the same pedigree.” The murder's operational structure, what he called the “intelligence channel,” was the same one, Zeissig believed, that the military had employed throughout the war.

Six years earlier, during the trial, Colonel Lima had drawn a similiar connection when he'd warned: “I'm just the point of the spear. Once they've created a judicial precedent, then they're going to go after the others.” He didn't mean just the other murderers of Bishop Gerardi, or only the other war criminals whom the amnesty was meant to protect. For half a century the military's clandestine world had seemed impregnable. The Gerardi case had opened a path into that darkness.