Garcia's Heart (5 page)

 

In briefings and interviews, then-U.S. ambassador to Honduras Jack Binns made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military. In the fall of 1981, Binns, an appointee of the Carter administration, was recalled to make way for the appointment of John Negroponte. Before leaving Tegucigalpa, Binns took pains to warn Washington of a possible link between death squad activity and Álvarez.

Negroponte's relationship with Álvarez was significantly more cordial: Binns's concerns were dismissed, military aid to Honduras
(under the jurisdiction of Álvarez) increased from $4 million a year in 1981 to $77.4 million a year in 1985, and U.S. administration support for a regional peace initiative for Nicaragua dissolved as Honduras became the training ground and logistical base for the anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan Democratic Force (
FDN
).

What followed in Honduras during these years were summary arrests of union leaders, journalists, political figures, and sympathizers. For years, bodies would be found dumped in fields or along rivers, some bearing evidence of torture, much of which could be traced back to the activities of Battalion 316 and General Álvarez. In contrast to Binns's assertion that Álvarez was modelling a campaign against subversives based on Argentina's “dirty war,” Ambassador Negroponte's opinion of General Álvarez remained highly positive, lauding him (in recently declassified state department “back-channel” memos from October 1983) for his “commitment to constitutional government.” This was also the prevailing opinion of the Reagan administration that, in 1983, awarded General Álvarez the Legion of Merit for “encouraging the success of democratic processes in Honduras.”

 

Elyse went on to tell the stories of the survivors, those who'd kept quiet for years about what had happened to them. After talking to that customer in Hernan's store, she was introduced to others, each new voice lending weight to the story. These histories formed the basis of the twelve indictments issued against García de la Cruz, as he was then known.

The charges against Hernan were clear. He was the physician present during interrogations, and while it was disputed whether he physically participated in torture, it was Hernan whom the torturers consulted, it was Hernan who revived the patients after the electric shocks made them lose consciousness.
Electrocution was the method of choice in the Lepaterique secret jail known as
INDUMIL
, a Battalion 316 installation, where electrodes were attached to the genitals of suspected communists and shocks were given with increasing frequency and intensity as the interrogation proceeded. What wasn't immediately clear was why a civilian physician had been recruited to Battalion 316 when so many military personnel with medical training were available. It was Elyse, in the course of her research, who came up with the answer in the form of a memo, also made public by the Honduran government in 1994, issued from Álvarez himself to a subcommander at Lepaterique requesting that “more skilled medical personnel be recruited” to oversee the health of the detainees during interrogations, as they were “expiring prior to potential useful tactical disclosures.” The Honduran military was still struggling along the learning curve of techniques adopted from their Argentine tutors and decided that it needed the specific skills of a cardiologist in resuscitating those who developed near-fatal arrhythmias after their initial electrocutions. García was their man.

There were other hypotheses for Hernan's participation: a sense of patriotic duty in the all-out war against the communists, the suggestion being that, despite having no previously declared political stance, his time training in America had sensitized him to the dangers of communism and cemented his trust in any policy supported by the United States. There were theories half-heartedly put forward by Elyse, ones that didn't particularly relate to Hernan as much as seem like a laundry list of sociopathic rationalizations: the desire for career advancement, class hatred, pursuit of vendettas, and personal depravity.

After Patrick first heard the accusations from Elyse in a small room at Caltech in the summer of 1998, when they were no more than absurdities, he clung to the most harmless explanations, that the allegations were trumped up or that it was all nothing more than a case of mistaken identity. But as the months passed and Elyse's articles appeared and no rebuttal came, Patrick was finally forced to consider that Hernan could have been present during such acts; yet this admission was always qualified by the belief that Hernan must have been coerced or tortured himself. Hernan had to have been a victim too.

After a year at Caltech, he'd accepted a faculty position back in Boston, and it was there, in the autumn of 2000, that he heard the news that Hernan's wife, Marta, had died. Patrick had been away for ten days in Portugal–a vacation grafted onto the tail end of a meeting, the young academic's standard mode of travel–and returned home to hear his mother's voice on his answering machine. One message among many, right after the reminder that his car was due for servicing. His mother said there had been an accident, and she gave him the slim details she knew, but Patrick wouldn't remember any of them. All he could think about was Marta. Already dead a week. Already buried. What had he been doing on that day the week before? Was that the day he skipped a plenary session to do some sightseeing in Lisbon? For some reason, he was obsessed with trying to remember what he'd eaten that day, hoping it hadn't been something he'd enjoyed, wanting it to be anything other than a local delicacy savoured at the very moment his friend lay dying. Then came the thought of Marta's children and Hernan, weathering through a life that had become absurd in its clustering of grief. The funeral had
come and gone, and embarrassed about the reason he'd missed it, he'd sent a card to Hernan instead of calling.

He'd listened to his mother's message again and again. She had been uncharacteristically vague about what had happened, and it wasn't until a few days later, when the newspaper clipping she sent finally arrived, that he understood why. The article was one of those matter-of-fact page three summations filled with the details of murders and drownings and other violent misadventures of the last news day. Below the fold he saw her name. Marta García, age fifty-seven, wife of the
NDG
resident under investigation for possible war crimes, had been killed in a car accident. Single vehicle. Seat belt unused. The concrete support of an overpass and an icy road at night cited as contributing factors. An investigation was ongoing.

The next spring, with the publication of
The Angel of Lepaterique
, Patrick was faced with the final, definitive assault on the Garcías. There was no surprise in the attack on Hernan–most of the allegations had been made in the newspaper reports. But in addition to what was expected about Hernan, Elyse had speculated about the nature of Hernan and Marta's relationship, going so far as to claim that Marta's death had been no accident, but was instead the deliberate act of a woman who knew the truth, a confirmation of the charges against her husband. But the bulk of
The Angel of Lepaterique
was focused on Hernan, making it clear that the man present in the interrogation rooms at Lepaterique had been him, positively identified, his presence documented and corroborated and in no visible way coerced. Unlike so many Hondurans who had disappeared into the grasp of Battalion 316, there was never any evidence that Hernan had been kidnapped. Marta had filed no report with the police after
that first absence in 1981. He left and came back three days later, nine days after Álvarez's initial memo was drafted.

But Hernan García also had his supporters, who didn't deny he was present at Lepaterique but argued that instead of committing barbarous acts he had tried to save countless lives amid the most atrocious, coercive conditions imaginable. There were dissenting witnesses to support this notion–two former detainees and two military personnel who attested that Hernan's actions during the interrogations were more consistent with someone wanting to give aid. Another witness claimed it was Hernan's voice she heard shouting “Enough” during one of her interrogations. There had also been a groundswell of dissenting opinion in America that, on days when Patrick felt hopeless, could be psychologically reconfigured into support for Hernan. A well-known right-wing American radio personality had, in the midst of his daily invective, taken up Hernan García as his
cause célèbre
: a man falsely imprisoned on trumped-up charges to be tried in a court that had no authority, a situation that no American would countenance, but one that the weak-kneed folks up in Canuckistan would bend over backwards for. In
his
eyes, he said to his audience (syndicated to 112 stations nationwide, local numbers in the Arbitron '05 report showing a 5.1 share in one of America's biggest markets, and pistol-whipping competitors in the prized 25-to-44 demographic), Hernan García was a patriot and a victim of revisionist history–after all, hadn't President Reagan awarded the Legion of Merit to the head guy involved in all this? Was this how we repaid our compatriots who fought the war on communism? Was this how we treated a man who had served in a war on terror before we even knew what a war on terror was? As the trial
started, Hernan's name began speckling the blogosphere–most sources regarding his silence as a noble gesture, as a tacit refusal to acknowledge the authority of the tribunal–and a detailed daily recap of the trial's progress appeared, where the case against him was dissected and mocked by a thousand echoing voices and the whole process dismissed as little more than a liberal-guilt show trial. What followed from these new ethereal supporters was an alternative narrative of Hernan García to refute the one put forward by Elyse Brenman, García as hero and healer, successful immigrant small-business owner, now a convenient victim offered up on the altar of internationalism and political correctness. Patrick watched uneasily as Hernan was championed in this manner, a Dreyfus for the neo-cons. It was a relief, in a way, the political antidote to
The Angel of Lepaterique
, and Patrick supposed he would have welcomed it had those involved not been completely indifferent to Hernan the person, and their motivations not been tainted by ideology and a reflexive bias against Elyse Brenman's version. As the trial approached, noise from both sides of the argument rose in unison: there were candlelight vigils for the victims of Lepaterique at college campuses throughout New England and news that the Democratic Voice, a think-tank specializing in Latin America policy-making, had offered support to the Garcías and were sending a representative to Holland to observe the proceedings–“simply to ensure fairness.”

Marcello di Costini, with his client mute in the defendant's chair, had the dissenting witnesses on the stand for the better part of two weeks prior to Patrick's arrival in Den Haag, trying dervishly to spin their words into a larger narrative worthy of competing against the chorus of damning testimony. Several
witnesses had gone so far as to attest that the conditions in the camp improved after Hernan had been brought there to replace the military's doctors. Marcello spoke to Patrick on the phone after one particularly good day of testimony, excited and for the first time sounding optimistic, proudly telling Patrick that he had finally been able to advance the notion that Hernan was a man caught in terrible circumstances, a man whose instincts were to heal, whose intent was good.

But if that was Hernan's intent, it was lost on many of the witnesses who were now on the stand. The majority of witnesses called said that Hernan García de la Cruz worked to prolong their misery, that unconsciousness was a relief of which he repeatedly deprived them. They swore that the first thing they saw as they regained consciousness was Hernan García's face, that they looked into his eyes and saw nothing human there.

Patrick had clung to the mock-heroic fantasy for months himself, thinking it impossible for a man to do the things Hernan had been accused of and then carry on with a normal life. Then he read profiles of the physicians stationed in Auschwitz and learned of the common delusion among them: how the routine of selecting certain prisoners for death was perversely transformed in their minds into the act of saving others. Under the necessary conditions, any action could be rationalized as necessary, as inevitable, as morally justified. Men like Hernan had done terrible things and gone back to their quiet lives as husbands and fathers and physicians. Perhaps Hernan was deluded, Patrick thought, caught up in a situation that didn't permit judgment, that paralyzed judgment.

But this was a matter of more than sincerity, more than what Hernan García believed he was doing. The tribunal was about what he had done.

And he was accused of doing terrible things.

Half of the next morning's session was all Patrick could take. Again, no García in the courtroom. But the trial carried on and the testimony continued, intensifying even, making him wonder if Hernan was absent because he could not bear to hear what was being said against him. The facts arrived and were assembled into a wall of truth. Another witness, a thin man in his sixties with a face like hammered copper and thickets of white hair, took the stand and gave his account of events between November 1982 and April 1983. He had been a teacher and a grass-roots organizer in San Pedro Sula, where he had been picked up on a warrant for sedition. He had been beaten and revived, then more soundly beaten. He spoke about what was done to him after he could no longer talk. A mask made out of an inner tube had been tied around his head. Patrick recognized scattered Spanish words:
cabeza
and
capucha
. The union organizer's testimony was disembodied further by its transmission through the voice of a female translator, a voice of gentle determination now describing, in first person, in smooth and impeccable English, the abuse his penis and scrotum were subjected to.