The Art of Political Murder (51 page)
Read The Art of Political Murder Online
Authors: Francisco Goldman
February 18, 1999
Father Mario is provisionally released.
February 25, 1999
Final report of the UN Historical Clarification Commission,
Memory of Silence
, is published.
May 28, 1999
Ronalth Ochaeta's resignation as director of ODHA is announced. Nery Rodenas becomes new director. Ochaeta moves to Costa Rica.
August 25â26, 1999
Jorge Aguilar MartÃnez of EMP (the presidential waiter) testifies before judge and goes into exile.
September 25, 1999
Baloo dies.
October 7, 1999
The special prosecutor Celvin Galindo and his family flee into exile.
October 15, 1999
Leopoldo Zeissig becomes special prosecutor.
December 26, 1999
Alfonso Portillo, a populist, wins runoff election for president. General RÃos Montt is elected president
of the legislature. Edgar Gutiérrez will be appointed head of the government's Secretariat of Strategic Analysis.
January 17, 2000
Rubén Chanax testifies about what he saw the night of the murder.
January 19, 2000
Arrest orders are issued for Colonel Lima Estrada, Captain Lima Oliva, Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva, and Father Mario. Arrest order is reissued for the parish-house cook, Margarita López.
January 21, 2000
The Limas are arrested.
January 22, 2000
Obdulio Villanueva is captured in a gun battle.
February 9, 2000
Father Mario, threatened with extradition, returns to Guatemala from Houston, Texas, and checks himself into a private hospital to avoid prison.
April 24, 2000
Rubén Chanax goes into exile.
September 14, 2000
Third Sentencing Court decides that the Limas, Sergeant Major Villanueva, Father Mario, and Margarita López should be tried together.
November 28, 2000
Carlos GarcÃa Pontaza of the Valle del Sol gang is arrested.
January 29, 2001
Carlos GarcÃa Pontaza dies in prison.
March 23, 2001
Trial begins.
June 8, 2001
Trial ends. Colonel Lima Estrada, Captain Byron Lima, and Sergeant Major Villanueva are each sentenced to thirty years in prison. Father Mario gets a twenty-year sentence. Margarita López is freed.
July 2001
Leopoldo Zeissig goes into exile. His assistant, Mario Leal, succeeds him as special prosecutor.
August 2001
The European journalists Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico publish an article in the Mexican and Spanish magazine
Letras Libres
critical of the prosecution and in support of the defendants.
October 3, 2002
Colonel Juan Valencio Osorio is convicted of intellectual authorship of the murder of Myrna Mack.
October 8, 2002
Verdicts in the Gerardi case are overturned on appeal.
November 30, 2002
Mario Domingo and Jorge GarcÃa visit Rubén Chanax in exile in Mexico City.
February 12, 2003
Supreme Court reinstates the verdicts in the Gerardi case. A new hearing of the appeal is ordered. Obdulio Villanueva is killed during riots in Centro Preventivo.
September 2003
Jorge GarcÃa becomes special prosecutor.
March 2003
Rodrigo Salvadó and Arturo Aguilar visit El Chino Iván in exile in Costa Rica.
May 7, 2003
Verdict against Colonel Osorio in the Myrna Mack case is overturned.
November 2003
Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico's
Who Killed the Bishop? Autopsy of a Political Crime
is published in Mexico.
December 2003
Oscar Berger, former mayor of Guatemala City, wins presidential election. Former president Ãlvaro Arzú becomes mayor of Guatemala City.
February 22, 2004
Mario Vargas Llosa publishes an article on the Gerardi case in
El PaÃs
.
April 26, 2004
Inter-American Court of Human Rights finds the Guatemalan state guilty in the Myrna Mack case.
March 22, 2005
Appellate court upholds verdicts against the Limas, although it lessens their culpability.
January 12, 2006
Convictions in the Gerardi case are upheld by the Supreme Court.
January 23, 2006
The mutilated corpse of Darinel Domingo, the younger brother of the ODHA lawyer Mario Domingo, turns up in the morgue.
May 16, 2006
The Constitutional Court meets to hear final defense motions (known as
amparos
in the Guatemalan legal system). The defense lawyers do not appear.
September 25, 2006
Three thousand government troops conduct a dawn raid on the Pavón prison. Seven prisoners are killed.
April 25, 2007
Constitutional court uploads verdicts against Limas and Father Mario.
Frontispiece: Courtesy of ODHA
Page 73: Courtesy of Sandra Sebastian
Page 159: Courtesy of Moises Castillo/El Periodico
Page 191: Courtesy of Sandra Sebastian
Page 209: Courtesy of Moises Castillo/El Periodico
Page 255: Courtesy of Moises Castillo/El Periodico
The material presented in this book is the result of eight years of firsthand reporting. I returned to the same questions, incidents, and testimony and discussed them, time and again, with individuals whose understanding of the case developed and changed. Most of the evidence has been, at the least, double-sourced. I tried to stay as close as possible to the people most intimately involved in investigating the case. They include members of ODHA, especially from the legal team and the Untouchables, and members of the Public Ministry, particularly Leopoldo Zeissig, the prosecutor most responsible for developing the case presented in 2001 at the trial. Another important source, beginning with our first conversations in the summer of 2005, was Rafael Guillamón, MINUGUA's chief investigator. Guillamón had never spoken to a journalist before, at least not for attribution. With the exception of his comments of January 2000 to
Prensa Libre's
Pedro Pop, the witness Rubén Chanax had also not spoken to a journalist prior to our conversations. Nor had Leopoldo Zeissig told his story “on the record” before we met in South America, where he was in exile.
Guatemalan journalists, especially those from
elPeriódico
âincluding Claudia Méndez and the newspaper's owner and editor, José Rubén Zamoraâwere enormously helpful to me.
The unpublished manuscript of a richly detailed account of the case,
El Caso Gerardiâcrónica de un crimen de estado
, by Mario
Domingo, was an indispensable source of information. I am extremely grateful to him for sharing it with me.
The official, court-certified transcripts of statements and depositions given by witnesses and, in some cases, suspects, to judges and prosecutors were crucial for assembling an accurate account of the legal process, as was the 292-page verdictâwhich provided a complete record of the trialâwritten by the tribune of judges who tried the Gerardi case in 2001.
The
Annual Reports of the UN Verification Mission in Guatemala
(MINUGUA) provide an authoritative record of the Gerardi case and of developments and incidents in Guatemala, especially pertaining to the peace process and human rights generally, from 1997 to 2004.
The U.S. State Department Annual Country Reports on Human Rights in Guatemala can be read at
http://guatemala.usembassy.gov/
.
The REMHI report.
Guatemala: Nunca Más. Informe del Proyecto lnterdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica
, 4 vols., Oficina de Derehos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala, 1998. An abridged one-volume version is available in English: Archdiocese of Guatemala,
Guatemala: Never Again
, Orbis, 1999. The report is available online in Spanish, French, and German, at
www.odhag.org.gt/INFREMHI/Default.htm
.
Guatemala: Memory of Silence
, Report of the UN Commission for Historical Clarification, February 1999, is available online at
http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/toc.html
.
Important background readings on Guatemala's civil war include the following.
Ricardo Falla,
Masacres de la Selva: Ixcán Guatemala (1975â1982)
, Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 1992. (English edition, Westview, Boulder, Colo., 1994.)
Greg Grandin,
The Last Colonial Massacre
, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 2004.
Robert H. Immerman,
The CIA in Guatemala
, University of Texas Press, 1982.
Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer,
Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala
, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1982. (Rev. and expanded ed., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2005.)
Steven Kinzer,
Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
, Times Books, New York, 2006.
Beatriz Manz,
Paradise in Ashes
, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005.
Jennifer Schirmer,
The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy
, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2000.
Jean-Marie Simon,
Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny
, Norton, New York, 1987.
David Stoll,
Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala
, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993.
Daniel Wilkinson,
Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala
, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Mass., 2002.
I. The Murder
The information about the Alliance for Progress years and the murders of Guatemalans who studied in the United States under U.S. AID study grants comes from Stephen M. Streeter, “Nation-Building in the Land of Eternal Counterinsurgency: Guatemala and the Contradictions of the Alliance for Progress,”
Third World Quarterly
, vol. 27, 2006. Regarding anticommunism as the pretext for antireform repression in Guatemala, Streeter wrote: “The communist threat was in fact a rationalization for bolstering armed forces against a popular revolution against the oligarchy.”
In
Bitter Fruit
, Stephen Schlesinger and the
New York Times
reporter Steven Kinzer wrote: “As the 1980s began, the position of Guatemala's ruling generals and their civilian backers remained
unchanged. By now, the 14,000-member Guatemalan armed forces had become a wealthy caste unto itself. It claimed its own bank, ran an investment fund for its members, and launched industrial projects. Its leaders owned vast ranch acreage and regularly sold protection to large landownersâ¦. Meantime, death squads linked to the Army reached into every sector of national life. Street-corner murders of lawyers, schoolteachers, journalists, peasant leaders, priests and religious workers, politicians, trade union organizers, students, professors and others continued on a daily basisâ¦. The intention of the military leaders was essentially to destroy the political center. Anyone not supporting the regime was almost by definition a leftist, and therefore an enemy.”
Regarding the Guatemalan Army's counterinsurgency strategy in the countryside, Jennifer Schirmer, a scholar who seems to have had unique access inside the Guatemalan military establishment, wrote that although “[t]he guerrillas were not irrelevant to the Army's plans ⦠it didn't matter if the guerrilla was present in the area of a âkilling zone' or not: all were to be eliminated” (
The Guatemalan Military Project
).
The quotations from Bishop Gerardi's early writing are from
Monseñor Juan GerardiâTesitigo Fiel de Dios
, Guatemalan Episcopal Conference, 1999.
An interview with Archbishop Quezada Toruño that includes his account of going to meet Bishop Gerardi at Guatemala City's airport was published in
30 Dias
, April 2004. This periodical is a Spanish-language version of the Italian Catholic church magazine
30 Giorni
.
There was some confusion regarding the arrival of Monseñor Hernández and Ana LucÃa Escobar at San Sebastián on the night of the murder. Monseñor Hernández identified the car in which he was driven to San Sebastián as a red Mazda 323. However, Ana LucÃa Escobar said at the trial that it was a Nissen 323 (a model that does not exist). Rubén Chanax apparently misidentified the Mazda and said that the car he saw drive up to the parish house
was a reddish Toyota. Chanax also described seeing two young people get out of the car: a youth and a young woman with straight hair worn in a ponytail. Apparently the woman was Ana LucÃa Escobar. But before parking, Escobar said, they had let Monseñor Hernández out of the car and he'd gone directly inside. Those minor discrepancies were later invoked to raise suspicions about Monseñor Hernández and Ana LucÃa's involvement in the crime.
II The Investigation
The National Security Archive at George Washington University,
www.gwu.edu
, is particularly useful. See especially the archive's
Electronic Briefing Book
No. 11, on U.S. Policy in Guatemala, 1966â1996,
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB11/docs/
. For a report on Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, written by Kate Doyle and Michael Evans from declassified U.S. documents, see
Electronic Briefing Book
No. 25,
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB25/index.htm
. For the Death Squad dossier, see
Electronic Briefing Book
No. 15,
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB15/press.html
.
