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The New York Review of Books
May 23, 2002
Victory in Guatemala
By Francisco Goldman
"Just when we thought we'd recovered an environment that made it possible to
live in peace, they answered: Here, take your dead man, who tried to
discover the truth."
‹Bishop Ríos Montt, head of the Guatemalan Archdiocese's Office of Human
Rights (ODHA), at the trial of the accused murderers of his predecessor,
Bishop Juan Gerardi
1.
Last June 7 three military men, two of them officers, were convicted in a
Guatemala City courtroom of having participated in a military intelligence
unit's brutal, politically motivated murder‹ "extrajudicial execution" was
the legal term used‹of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, the founder and
director of the Guatemalan Archdiocese's Office of Human Rights (ODHA). A
parish priest was also convicted as an accomplice in the crime. It was a
verdict that most Guatemalans had never expected to hear, at least not yet,
and certainly not in relation to this crime.
Until June 7, no military officer had ever been found guilty and sentenced
to prison in Guatemala for a political murder‹one commissioned and carried
out with the help or acquiescence of a state institution (the military, in
particular)‹even though, over the last quarter-century especially, the
military amassed a record as the hemisphere's greatest violator of its
citizens' human rights, responsible for the murder of as many as 200,000
unarmed civilians. Also unprecedented was the inclusion in the judges'
verdict of an order for a criminal investiga-tion against the likely
"intellectual authors"‹i.e., planners‹of the crime: the commanding officers
of the convicted soldier's military unit, implicated during the trial in
Bishop Gerardi's murder.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
For over three years incidents of intimidation and threat marked the
prosecution of the bishop's murderers. Before the trial began over a year
ago, a judge, a government prosecuting attorney, and several key witnesses
had to go into exile; intruders entered the home of Mynor Melgar, the head
of ODHA's legal team, which was helping to prosecute the case, and, in front
of his wife and small children, forced him to kneel on his bathroom floor
with a pistol held to his head, then told him it was just "a warning."
Indeed, the trial's scheduled opening in March 2001 had to be postponed
after two grenades exploded in Judge Yassmín Barrios's backyard. Throughout
the trial, the Public Ministry's prosecuting attorney, Lepoldo Zeissig, his
wife, and his infant child were forced to live like protected witnesses in a
drug lord's case, and, after the verdict, were finally driven by threats to
go into exile.
Since the trial, the defense has waged an even more relentless campaign in
the press to undermine the verdict. They have accused the judges of
corruption and of having yielded to the pressures of foreign governments,[1]
and have accused the witnesses‹most of them members of the underclass‹ of
having sold their testimony for the supposed financial benefits of exile.
Capitalizing on much of the confused reporting of a complex and largely
circumstantial case, and on the public's cynicism about government
institutions generally, the defense lawyers have succeeded in creating a
climate of popular opinion that could provide sufficient cover to any judge
who might overturn the convictions on appeal.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1996, when the thirty-six-year civil war was finally ended by UN-brokered
peace accords, the UN and the EU, along with the US and several
nongovernmental organizations, joined in the enormous task of helping a
traumatized Guatemalan society maintain that peace. They intended to "build
democracy" while participating in the country's debate over how to deal with
human rights crimes of the past.
Successfully bringing the Bishop Gerardi murder case to trial was an
important result of this debate. The new president, Alfonso Portillo, who
took office in January 2001, had promised in his election campaign to
resolve the Gerardi case; however, once he took office he did not even share
with the prosecution the results of his government's internal investigations
into the crime. Nevertheless, he has tried to take credit for the
convictions. However courageous and persistent many Guatemalans‹especially
the young activists of the bishop's ODHA group‹were in pursuing the case,
without the constant monitoring and sometimes direct intrusion of MINUGUA,
the UN peacekeeping mission, and pressure from several foreign governments,
including the United States, it is doubtful that the trial could have taken
place at all. Whatever the final outcome of the forthcoming appeal, it gave
Guatemalans for the first time an account of the inner workings of
Guatemala's army covert intelligence units, which for decades have spread
terror throughout the country.
2.
On the Sunday night of April 26, 1998, just before ten, after returning from
dinner with relatives, Bishop Juan Gerardi, a robust seventy-five-year-old,
had driven himself back to the San Sebastián Church parish house, in the old
center of the city near the official presidential residence and the former
National Palace. Moments after pulling his white VW Golf into the garage, a
swift and brutal beating left him lying dead on the floor, his skull
shattered. Ten or so minutes later a homeless man, one of about a dozen who
regularly slept in front of the parish house garage, saw a bare-chested
young man step out through the garage's small side door. Known as el hombre
sin camisa, the man without a shirt, he left a blue sweater behind on the
garage floor and a large, rough-edged triangular chunk of concrete, the
presumed murder weapon, in a pool of blood.
The shirtless man disappeared after the murder, and has never been caught.
But by the end of the trial, several witnesses identified him as "Hugo," a
former Guatemalan special forces soldier and agent of G-2 military
intelligence, in the occasional employ of the Presidential High Command, or
EMP, a unit based just blocks from San Sebastián Church. Two of the three
military men convicted, Captain Byron Lima Oliva and Specialist José Obdulio
Villanueva, had belonged to that unit, which is responsible for guarding the
president's security, among other tasks. The EMP, which has always had its
own intelligence unit, formerly known as the Archivo, but now considered
subordinate to Guatemalan army intelligence (G-2), has been suspected of
many assassinations and disappearances during the 1980s and 1990s.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two days before his murder, Bishop Gerardi had made public Guatemala: Never
Again, a four-volume report on the civil war's atrocities that was produced
by the Interdiocesan Project for the Recuperation of Historical Memory
(REMHI). It was compiled from testimony gathered mainly by Church volunteers
throughout the country and documentary sources such as declassified US State
Department documents. The report identified by name more than 52,000 of the
war's estimated 200,000 civilians killed or disappeared, and it concluded
that the Guatemalan army was responsible for some 80 percent of those
deaths, the guerrillas less than 5 percent.
In the report's 1,400 pages, the human voices of the Guatemalan tragedy are
preserved as they are nowhere else. According to a former Peruvian general,
Rodolfo Robles Espinoza, an expert on the military in Latin America, who
testified for the prosecution during the trial of the bishop's murderers,
REMHI painted a picture of "a genocidal army" that, during the 1980s
especially, had gone on a rampage of massacres against the rural Mayan
population, while routinely murdering, disappearing, and torturing civilians
it saw as political opponents.
According to Edgar Gutiérrez, the former director of REMHI and a protégé of
the bishop‹now working as the head of the Office of Strategic Analysis in
President Portillo's government ‹Gerardi had initiated REMHI largely because
he knew that the imminent signing of the peace accords was going to result
in a UN-sponsored truth commission. Gerardi understood that most Mayan
villagers wouldn't feel secure cooperating with UN investigators unless the
Catholic Church could dispel some of their fears about speaking out, and
help prepare for the second, more ambitious, project. The bishop had also
let it be known that evidence collected by REMHI would be available to
people who might later seek justice against either the military or the
guerrillas. Thus an obvious motive for the murder was to punish Bishop
Gerardi for publishing a report that could ultimately threaten the
military's immunity from prosecution for such crimes, and to issue a warning
against following his lead. Gutiérrez and others at the ODHA maintained that
the elaborately staged murder was also a scheme to divert attention from the
report to a scandal-tinged mystery and media circus. In this they succeeded.
When the huge UN-sponsored report Memorial of Silence was released in 1999,
a year after the REMHI report and the bishop's murder, it presented an even
darker picture, finding the military responsible for more than 90 percent of
civilian deaths, and formally charging the Guatemalan army with genocide
against the rural Maya. Under the peace accords, both sides had agreed to a
general amnesty from prosecution for war crimes. But under international
law, there can be no amnesty for crimes against humanity, such as genocide.
That law cleared the way for many of the court cases which have since been
initiated in Guatemala.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bishop Gerardi founded the ODHA in 1986. It was the first human rights
center in Guatemala capable, through the Catholic Church's diocese network,
of providing legal services, protection, and educational programs to human
rights workers throughout the country. Since the peace accords were signed,
the ODHA has been providing psychological counseling to victims of violence
and participating, along with other organizations, in the excavations of
massacre sites.
The ODHA's mostly secular staff of lawyers, psychologists, and
anthropologists work in a two-hundred-year-old Spanish colonial-style
building next to the Metropolitan Cathedral, adjacent to the former National
Palace and just a few blocks from San Sebastián Church. On April 26, as soon
as they heard about the bishop's murder, some of the ODHA's younger
activists rushed over to San Sebastián Church, where a crowd had already
formed and was walking around the body in the garage and in and out of the
parish house. From the start, they could hardly expect much in the way of
useful forensic evidence to emerge from such a contaminated crime scene.
They also assumed that the police and Public Ministry investigation of the
bishop's murder would not go after the most obvious suspects, the army or
people with ties to it. They decided to document the murder investigation on
their own. The team that worked with the ODHA's lawyers consisted of four
university students, only one of them with experience in criminal
investigations.
Jokingly calling themselves Los Intocables, they initially saw their role as
defensive: they would try to learn enough to refute any false evidence that
might be put forward during the investigation. But useful information about
the crime, much of it anonymous, flowed through the ODHA anyway, and soon
they found themselves at the forefront of the most publicized and
politicized legal battle in Guatemalan history.
3.
Some of the most powerful evidence, the ODHA investigations began to see,
pointed to Captain Byron Lima Oliva, a young aide-de-camp in the EMP's elite
Presidential Guard, and to his father, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, who had
commanded troops in some of the most violent theaters of the war, and who in
the mid-Eighties was named the head of the Guatemalan army's main
intelligence section (the G-2). Colonel Lima was regarded as a leader of a
powerful group of retired officers and war veterans who continue to wield
power within the military, and are among the most vulnerable to pros-ecution
for past human rightsrelated crimes.
Guatemalans become rich in the military, often through such activities as
narcotics trafficking and auto theft. Recent civilian presidents, including
Portillo, have been unable to force the military to relinquish its control
over internal national security, that is, intelligence, as mandated by the
peace accords. Early in the trial, Edgar Gutiérrez testified that a few
weeks after the bishop's murder, he and other ODHA members had asked the
government to look into the participation of both Limas. An aide to then
President Álvaro Arzú had answered that they couldn't investigate the
President's security personnel because to do so would be to "bring the game
to"‹i.e., antagonize‹"the Cofradía." The Cofradía, the name given to
religious brotherhoods in Guatemalan folk religion, is a group of active and
former soldiers created at the end of the Seventies inside military
intelligence. According to Gutiérrez, "Military and paramilitary structures
became accustomed to working with total impunity. Civilian governments
weren't capable of dismantling them. Because this impunity protects them, it
intimidates and prevents anyone from denouncing them."
Another reason for Bishop Gerardi's murder was also given: if the REMHI
report's conclusions led to prosecution of the military for past crimes,
then it could also loosen the military's hold on real power, on the state's
overdeveloped intelligence apparatus, and on criminal rackets, which all
depend on their being able to commit crimes without fear of going to prison.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first chief prosecutor appointed to the investigation by the Public
Ministry was Otto Ardón, a former lawyer for the Guatemalan air force. Ardón
proposed that the murder was a domestic crime involving another priest. He
was careful not to call it a homosexual crime out of fear of inflaming
Catholic sensibilities, but that was widely inferred. When a top-ranking
military officer said the murder had resulted from a fight among
homosexuals, the charge was soon echoed by a leading conservative columnist
in the nation's largest newspaper, and then widely repeated. This led to the
arrest in July 1998 of the sickly thirty-four-year-old Father Mario Orantes,
who had shared the San Sebastián parish house with Bishop Gerardi. Along
with other pieces of evidence, the priest's contradiction-filled and
implausible accounts of his behavior put him under suspicion.
Nobody at the ODHA thought the somewhat sybaritic priest‹his bedroom in the
parish house turned out to be an Imelda Marcoslike lair with luxurious
designer clothing, an expensive TV set, and a 9mm Walther pistol ‹murdered
the bishop, but they did suspect him of complicity: of being too ashamed or
terrified to admit to being a willing conspirator, or being coerced or
entrapped by those responsible for the murder. He may, for example, have
opened a door to let the assailants in or out. Neither the ODHA nor the
prosecutors believed the priest when he said that he remained in his bedroom
and did not notice anything during the crime, and then that he was shocked
to find the body lying in a pool of blood in the nearby garage. And though
the garage was well-lit, he claimed he didn't recognize the body as that of
Bishop Gerardi, his housemate of eight years.[2]
The faked charge of "crimes of passion" has long been used to explain
assassination in Guatemala. Ardón rejected Orantes's account and proposed
instead that during the fatal argument in the garage the priest had sicced
his German shepherd, Baloo, on the bishop. An eccentric forensic
anthropologist in Spain, from photographs, identified wounds on the bishop's
head as dog bites. But the ODHA introduced its own experts from the United
States, including the forensic dentist and FBI consultant who had been
called in at the trials of Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy. He testified that
Bishop Gerardi had probably been attacked by at least two assailants,
including one who had struck him across the front of the face with an object
like a steel pipe.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In March of 2001, when the Bishop Gerardi murder trial finally got underway,
many of the important prosecution witnesses had left the country because of
threats and intimidation; others peripherally connected to the case, who
might have been able to corroborate aspects of other testimony or even
provide new information, had been murdered or had died in suspicious ways,
including many of the indigents, los bolitos, known to each other by such
names as "Lollipop," "The Monster," "El Chino," and "Roast Meat," who'd
regularly slept in front of the San Sebastián parish house garage, and were
there on the night of the murder. They may have been drugged that night by
someone who left them food and open quart bottles of beer. This would
explain why the indigents slept like stones through the night, and why only
Rubén Chanax Sontay, the indigent informer who would emerge as a key
witness, and who did not drink beer, remained awake.
As in most developing countries, Guatemala's crime laboratories lack the
resources for doing reliable forensic studies. The ODHA's lead lawyer, Mynor
Melgar, told me, "Usually the only real evidence you can take to trial is
the testimony of witnesses. And people can buy witnesses, intimidate them,
they can kill them. And that is what makes trying cases in Guatemala very
complicated." This was certainly true of the Gerardi murder trial, which
depended almost entirely on witnesses. Nevertheless witnesses' testimony
gave a fairly continuous account of the crime. They included a taxi driver,
since living in exile, who had driven past the church just after the crime
and seen a shirtless man with what appeared to be a tattoo on his arm
standing by a white Corolla, while other cars sped past him the wrong way
down a one-way street. Because, as a drug user, the taxi driver was always
watching out for the police, he'd memorized the Corolla's license plate
number, 3201, which was later traced to the Ministry of Defense; a few years
before, the plates had been assigned to a military base there under the
command of Colonel Byron Lima.
The second key witness for the prosecution was a thief, Gilberto Gómez
Limón, who in 1998 had been imprisoned along with Specialist José Obdulio
Villanueva, the third military defendant, who belonged to the same unit, the
EMP, as Captain Lima. Gómez Limón was serving a sentence of two and a half
years in the same Guatemalan prison, in Antigua‹a half-hour or so drive from
the capital‹as Specialist Villanueva, who was serving a two-month sentence
for killing a milkman who'd unwittingly driven his truck into the path of
then President Arzú. Gómez Limón knew that Villanueva had worked as the
President's bodyguard, and he told the court that the day Villanueva had
entered the prison to serve his term, the authorities had warned him: "Don't
touch him in any way, because he works for the State."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gómez Limón described how he observed Villanueva leave the prison‹ as
inmates who paid off guards could easily do‹at 5:30 on the morning before
the murder, return for roll call at 5:30 that evening, and then disappear
once more during the night when the murder occurred. After he came back to
the prison at dawn, he was, Gómez Limón testified, anxious to see the
morning television news:
"A la gran chucha! It's time for the news! He was sitting in the plastic
chair, and he looked the way he looks at you, as if he wants to punch you.
Then Villanueva explained, That is a priest, and they killed him. And I
thought it was my own craziness when I thought, Oh, and it happened when he
was out."
In the courtroom, Gómez Limón, with a black ponytail and wearing a bulky
bulletproof vest, also described the many threats that were made against his
family, his children, his brothers. "And then they come and tell my family
they're paying 20,000 quetzales so I won't say anything. And they come again
and they're offering 100,000 quetzales so I won't say anything.... Yesterday
they came [to my brother] for a third time and they want to know, What's
your brother going to say? Many strategies have they tried, to stop me from
telling the truth."
The well-tailored defense lawyers‹ mostly of European blood or very lightly
mestizo, in contrast to the prosecution lawyers, judges, and witnesses, who
tended to be darker, shorter, more mestizo, some with Indian surnames‹ began
a three-hour cross-examination of the witness. Throughout, Gómez Limón
seemed oblivious to their condescension and their evident annoyance at being
unable to cow the lower-class, dark-skinned witnesses.
But it was one of the defense lawyers, Ramón González,[3] who, sensing that
the witness was growing weary from riding the dangerous bull of his own
desperate fear, and pushing for a dramatic courtroom moment of his own,
provoked the cross-examination's most memorable revelation, when he pressed
the witness to describe what happened in prison after he had spoken to the
prosecutor:
Gómez Limón: Stay inside [the guards told him]. Inside, all the time I had
to stay inside. They had me worried about poison. They brought me my food. I
couldn't even buy a soft drink. They came to see me.... A person from
MINUGUA [the UN peacekeepers] came. They put me in this place, a safe place,
near the guard house. People said, Why did you get mixed up in this, if
Villanueva is a killer?
Defense (shouting): How is it they came three times, offering money? You
took an oath! Give me the names! Can you tell me the names of the people who
offered the money!
Gómez Limón: ...Those people are here, the ones who are offering the money.
The first who came was [his jailhouse lawyer] Paco. Then came the lawyer who
is right there. [He points to Roberto Echevarría, Captain Lima's chief
defense lawyer.] He'd come right from the Ministry of Defense, they say.
Roberto Echevarría, an especially caustic cross-examiner, was now being
accused before the court of having attempted to buy the witness.[4]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The third key witness, Rubén "El Colocho" (Curly) Chanax Sontay, was a young
homeless man who lived in San Sebastián Park, and who had seen the man
without a shirt emerge from the garage on the night of the murder. He had
made a statement before the trial began that he'd encountered EMP Specialist
Obdulio Villanueva, along with another person he knew only as Quesén, by the
park in front of the San Sebastián parish house on Sunday morning, April 26,
and that Villanueva had warned him to stay away from the park until ten that
night, because "someone was going to die."
The defense had called Chanax as a witness because his pre-trial statements,
if unchallenged, would be devastating to the accused. So, under heavy
protection, he was returned from exile as a "star witness." Chanax, a former
soldier, used to work as a car washer alongside the park, near EMP
headquarters and the military intelligence offices behind the presidential
residence and National Palace. EMP agents frequently walked through the
park, and sometimes had their cars washed there; the car washers knew many
of them by name.
In court, Rubén Chanax Sontay added new details. He testified that, in 1997,
Captain Byron Lima's father, Colonel Lima, had recruited him as an informer
for the G-2, or military intelligence. "I needed money, and I accepted. He
gave me a phone number. Report everything you see here. I had to call every
Saturday. Three months later he says, Now I have a special job for you. I
want you to watch Monseñor" (Bishop Gerardi). When he phoned to inform on
the bishop, he was simply to say the code words "Operation Bird."
With that revelation, aspects of Chanax's story seemed more credible. Why
had Villanueva warned him, a vagrant, to stay out of the park because
someone was going to die? It now seemed plausible that he had warned him
because he knew that Chanax was an informer. A little after nine o'clock
that night, Chanax and, later, El Chino Iván Aguilar, another of the
vagrants, were in a little neighborhood shop owned by a man known as Don
Mike, watching a movie on the small portable television set there. The
neighborhood, at that hour, was deserted. Colonel Lima, according to Chanax,
came into the shop with three men he didn't recognize. The men huddled at
the counter, drinking beer, talking. In that shop, in order to have a direct
line of vision of the San Sebastián Church parish house, all Colonel Lima
had to do was go outside into the street and cross to the opposite sidewalk.
The colonel, as a leader of the powerful war veteran officers group, was an
obvious suspect. He was particularly threatened by the potential prosecution
of human rights crimes after the bishop's report. "What was the accused
doing in that shop?" the judges asked in their verdict. After taking into
account Colonel Lima's connection to the license plates that the taxi driver
had noted down, as well as his own belated and unconvincing attempts to
manufacture an alibi for his whereabouts that night, the judges decided in
the verdict that it was "by all lights logical" to assume that the colonel
"had knowledge of what was happening in the San Sebastián parish house."
They concluded that his criminal complicity was "not confined to whatever
control he had over what was going on in the vicinity, but rather that his
participation began much earlier, when he contracted military informers to
monitor Monseñor Gerardi." Even if he only had knowledge of the murder
happening half a block away, the judges wrote, he also had criminally
complicit "dominion" over the crime‹i.e., the power to prevent it.
While he denied having been at the shop at all, Colonel Lima had no
convincing alibi for his whereabouts that night. Nor did the defense lawyers
dispute the claim that his unlikely presence at the shop, as witnessed by
Chanax, would be incriminating‹and in their verdict the judges found that it
was. Instead, the defense argued that the shop did not even exist. After
Chanax gave his testimony the shop's sign was removed, as was the clock
Chanax had identified on the wall, while the shop's owner refused to talk.
The night of the murder, a little before ten, Chanax left the shop and
started back to the park. When he saw how tranquil everything seemed there,
he decided that what Villanueva had told him hadn't happened, and began to
prepare his bedding in front of the garage door where the other bolitos
slept. It was then he saw the man without a shirt.
"I knew he worked for the EMP," Chanax testified, and identified the man as
"Hugo." After an exchange of a few words, the man walked off, leaving the
door open. Minutes later a black Grand Cherokee Jeep arrived, and two men
dressed in black got out through its rear door: Specialist Obdulio
Villanueva, carrying a small video camera, and Captain Byron Lima. According
to Chanax, Captain Lima said, "Vos, vos serote, [you little shit], come help
us‹like that, but with stronger words, I can't say them here.... He grabs my
arm, and pushes me inside. They gave me a pair of gloves, the kind doctors
use." There was a body lying face down on the floor in a pool of blood,
although Chanax didn't realize that it was Bishop Gerardi until they turned
the body over. While the men from the EMP arranged the bishop's body‹legs
crossed just so, hands crossed under the chin‹Chanax, as he'd been told to
do, scattered some newspapers around the blood, as if to create an
impression that a struggle had taken place. Villanueva carried in a large
chunk of concrete, which he set down in a pool of blood. Before the pair
drove away Captain Lima told Chanax, "If you talk, you'll end up just the
same as this one."
The small garage door had been left open. Chanax went to the parish house's
main door and rang the bell several times, but no one answered, until
suddenly Padre Mario Orantes appeared at the small garage door, wearing a
long, black leather coat. Chanax told him, "Padre, they left the door open,"
and before he could say anything else, the priest said, "Gracias Colocho,"
and kicked the door shut.
Chanax, claiming he didn't know what else to do, says he lay down to sleep.
As a military intelligence informer, he would have understood he had less to
fear by staying there and doing as he'd been told. At midnight Padre
Orantes, now dressed in a bathrobe, came out again, and addressed the row of
bolitos, "Múcha" (boys), "Did you see who came in, who came out?" Chanax
said that, referring to the man without a shirt, he had answered, "The only
one was the muchacho who came out a while ago. But [Padre Orantes] didn't
even say anything, he just went back inside." The priest came out again
sometime later, and told the bolitos that Bishop Gerardi had been murdered.
He took Chanax aside and said, "Tell them what you know, everything except
that I came to the door." Chanax was then driven away by the police.
4.
The prosecution's case did not depend on Chanax alone. One other witness,
the EMP specialist Jorge Aguilar Martínez, was even more important. Unlike
Chanax he didn't appear at the trial, but his sworn testimony was read into
the record. He had been former President Arzú's personal waiter and worked
shifts as a concierge at the EMP's headquarters behind the presidential
residence. Before he left Guate- mala, his life had been in such danger that
he'd ended up in a foreign political asylum program with a new identity,
forbidden by his host country from having contact with anybody connected to
the Bishop Gerardi case.
In 1999, when work on the case seemed stalled, two of the young Intocables,
searching for information that may have been overlooked, found a letter from
a Guatemala City worker claiming that he knew someone who knew someone who
knew something. What followed was like the patient work of ants. It took
months for the Intocables to persuade one person to introduce them to
another. The chain at last led to Aguilar Martínez's wife, who managed to
convince her husband to speak to the ODHA, in spite of the prohibition.
Aguilar Martínez told them that on the last Sunday of April 1998, he'd been
on duty, assigned to work the 6-PM-to-dawn shift at the EMP installation as
concierge at the main gate. Sometime between 8:00 and 8:30, a red Trooper
SUV, carrying Major Escobar Blas, of the EMP's Protection Service,
Specialist Galiano, and two more unidentified specialists from that same
unit "that used to be called the G-2" stopped at the gate on its way out.
Major Escobar asked for Captain Dubois, Aguilar Martínez's superior that
night, and reported "sin dieciocho" (no problem), and drove off. It could
very well be that Major Escobar was transporting the specialists to San
Sebastián Church, which they would somehow enter, and there, inside the
parish house garage, await Bishop Gerardi's arrival an hour and a half
later.
Captain Dubois then instructed Aguilar Martínez not to register the comings
and goings of vehicles and specialists in the ledger that night, as he
normally would have been required to do. He was only to man the telephones
in that office, which included a private line for Major Escobar Blas. He was
also ordered to tell the rest of those on duty that, from that moment on,
they were prohibited from entering the "presidential patio," as the EMP's
sealed-off section, behind the presidential residence, is called.
Shortly after nine Aguilar Martínez began receiving telephone calls on Major
Escobar Blas's line every three or four minutes, reporting, "sin dieciocho,"
"no problem," and finally one that said, "a bomb in front of the José Gil
drugstore," which, according to the judges' later interpretation, were "code
words whose meanings were understood...by Major Escobar Blas."
Between 10:20 and 10:30, a black Cherokee Jeep, with polarized windows and
without plates, drove into the EMP. "In this vehicle were Captain Lima,"
Aguilar Martínez testified, "a young man I knew only as Hugo, and three more
people, who were completely dressed in black, wore black caps with visors,
and dark glasses." Later in his testimony Aguilar Martínez described the
same tattoo that the taxi driver had also glimpsed on "Hugo"'s arm:
parachute corps wings, around the word Kaibil, the most dreaded Guatemalan
army special forces unit during the war.
When he got out of the jeep, "Captain Lima went down the corridor that leads
directly to Colonel Rudy Pozuelos's office." Colonel Pozuelos was the head
of the EMP; in the EMP's chain of command, only the president was higher.
Colonel Pozuelos returned with Captain Lima, got into the black Cherokee
with the others, and left. Five minutes later a phone call reported that
there was a "dieciocho," danger, a problem. Captain Dubois rang an alarm,
and everybody in the EMP that night, according to Aguilar Martínez, spilled
out into the "presidential patio." Some hours later, at 1:30 on Monday
morning, the soldiers milling about outside were told that Bishop Gerardi
had been murdered at the church across the street from the Third Street exit
of the EMP. Later that morning soldiers were summoned to "a meeting in the
patio of the presidential residence," with Colonel Reyes Palencia, the
commander of the Presidential Guard, and a lieutenant colonel from the G-2,
and were told that they were "strictly prohibited from talking about or
revealing anything that had happened the day before."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In their closing arguments, the defense sounded desperate. Repeatedly, the
other defense lawyers shouted, "Chanax lied!" and accused him of being the
murderer, in league with organized crime. The silver-haired Julio Citrón, a
victorious champion of the military in trial after trial, based his
summation on the argument that you couldn't convict anyone of being an
accomplice in an extrajudicial crime if you didn't know who had committed
the murder, as well as on the ludicrous claim that Colonel Lima couldn't
have been in Don Mike's little shop because that shop didn't exist (in the
court records the address had been written down incorrectly).[5]
In their closing arguments, the prosecutors and the ODHA's lawyers laid out
their case. The murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi was a politically motivated
crime of state, they said, conceived in retaliation for the REMHI report and
as a scheme to obscure its message. It was an elaborately planned execution
carried out by an unknown number of Guatemalan military intelligence
operatives, and set in motion on the morning of Sunday, April 26, with
Specialist Villanueva leaving the Antigua prison, and Captain Byron Lima
flying in from an overseas training mission. The lawyers asked for proceso
abierto, open criminal investigations, against, among others, some of the
likely "intellectual authors" of the crime, EMP Majors Villagrán and Escobar
Blas, and the head of the EMP at the time, Colonel Rudy Pozuelos.
The verdict against the military men on trial convicted only three of the no
doubt numerous military participants in the crime. They were convicted not
as individual "criminals" and "murderers," but of having "taken part" in a
politically motivated act of state-sponsored murder. It was a long-planned
operation, an elaborately staged murder and cover-up, involving a great many
more military men, freelance operatives from the murky world where organized
crime and military intelligence units overlap, and others, perhaps even
civilian politicians and corrupt church officials, including Padre Orantes.
There were probably stakeouts in the park that night (a couple seen
snuggling on a bench in the dark), infiltrators among the vagrants and car
washers (Chanax Sontay, for one), and getaway drivers set into motion‹by
Colonel Lima, perhaps, standing on the sidewalk opposite the shop, staring
into the park and parish house garage‹to scoop up the "specialists" dressed
in black as they fled through the various exits of San Sebastián Church;
while the shirtless "Hugo" allowed himself to be seen, quietly igniting
rumors that it had been a "crime of passion." But nobody had planned on an
alert and suspicious taxi driver, with a knack for memorizing plate numbers,
to drive right into the middle of the operation. And they certainly never
planned on the tenacity of the ODHA, and then, just as remarkably, of the
young chief prosecutor, Leopoldo Zeissig, who refused to be corrupted or
cowed as his predecessors had been, not to mention the trio of similarly
stalwart young judges who had presided over the trial.
The convictions opened the way for a more complete investigation of what
happened that April night, and after. In his closing statements, Mynor
Melgar made clear that the ODHA would not cease from pursuing that case even
if it meant eventually bringing charges against officers of higher rank than
Colonel Pozuelos‹or even former President Arzú himself.
5.
Back in the 1980s, it had been a commonplace among US politicians and
reporters to claim, when speaking of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras,
that death squad paramilitaries and the national armies of those countries
were not one and the same. Recently, Stephen Kinzer of The New York Times
claimed that Bishop Gerardi had been murdered by mysterious "thugs who
reject the idea of peace, many of them renegade army and police veterans,
[who] still roam at night." But Bishop Gerardi was not murdered by
"renegades." The Bishop Gerardi trial placed before the judges and the
Guatemalan public convincing evidence that Guatemalan military intelligence
and the EMP had carried out the crime, a peacetime murder, in the same
manner that those units had carried out so many other murders during the
decades of war.
In a prison interview with the Guatemalan journalist Claudia Méndez, Colonel
Lima himself, referring to another case, sent a message to the Guatemalan
military: "I'm just the point of the spear. When they create a precedent,
that which they call jurisprudence, then they're going to go after the
rest...." He then listed human rights cases pending against the military,
such as the Dos Erres Massacre case (in which 350 peasants, the majority of
them women and children, were slaughtered in 1982); and the trial of the
officers accused of being the "intellectual authors" of the murder of Myrna
Mack, the anthropologist-activist stabbed to death by a since-imprisoned EMP
specialist on a downtown street in another faked "crime of passion." Both
cases have been held up in the courts‹the Mack case for seven years‹through
the tactics of defense lawyers and colluding judges. In a country with
sturdier legal and police institutions the Gerardi case would not have had
to be pursued by a human rights organization. Overturning the verdict in the
Gerardi case on appeal would be a demoralizing defeat for all of those who
have been trying for decades to end the military's long impunity in the
Guatemalan courts; it would also, of course, end any criminal investigation
of other military intelligence officers accused of being "intellectual
authors" of the bishop's murder.
And the verdict could be overturned.[6] All it would take is a presiding
judge of the old style, a crony of the military. Indeed the judge who will
be hearing the appeal has been accused by the ODHA of being such a man. They
have sued to have him recused, but lost.
Yet there will be many pressures on the appellate judge. The greatest is
that he will have to justify his ruling on the meticulous three-hundred-page
verdict to the Guatemalan public and press. But whatever happens, it is a
fact that at the Bishop Gerardi murder trial, a powerful case, in the face
of extraordinary intimidation, was successfully made in court against
Guatemalan military officers, their convictions were won, and the inner
workings of a military intelligence operation to commit a political murder
were exposed and detailed as never before. That in itself was its triumph.
Notes
[1]Following the grenade attack against Judge Barrios, US Ambassador
Prudence Bushnell and other foreign diplomats had held a meeting to support
the judges. The "meeting" was portrayed by the defense as interference in
the case.
[2] See my article "Murder Comes for the Bishop," The New Yorker, March 15,
1999.
[3] González was the lawyer for Margarita López, the housekeeper at San
Sebastián, a fourth defendant who was acquitted at the trial of charges of
having withheld evidence.
[4] Other testimony against Villanueva came out during the trial: for
example that Villanueva had been eligible for parole on April 24, two days
before the murder, but chose not to leave the prison until four days later.
[5] The defense, in trying to portray the witnesses as motivated by greed,
perhaps was counting on confidentiality agreements with asylum-providing
embassies to keep the truth about such witnesses from emerging. The
defense's views have found their way into the press. One example is the
article on the Gerardi case which appeared last August in the prominent
Mexican and Spanish magazine Letras Libres, which claimed that Aguilar
Martínez had "turned up at the ODHA's door" to peddle his story and, on that
pretext, discarded his testimony entirely. The article also ignored the
testimony of the still-imprisoned Gómez Limón.
[6] The appeal is pending as I write.
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