The Art of Political Murder (16 page)

But the guns, and the millions of quetzales in debt—these were discovered later—weren't the reason that the young priest was dismissed from his post. Father Sergio “was having problems of the Lewinsky sort,” the new rector, José Mariano Carrera, told me. “As I understand it, his being removed was due to denunciations by various female teachers before the ecclesiastical Curia.” Teachers and, it turned out, the mothers of some students, had accused Father Sergio of sexual harassment.

Father Carrera, who was in his sixties, told me that he had been looking forward to retiring to a small coffee farm, but after it became clear that Father Sergio had plunged the venerable school into chaos, Archbishop Penados, an old friend, had asked Carrera to take over. At the time we spoke, only 1 million quetzales of the debt had been paid off. Now the school's accounts were being overseen by a board, but when Father Sergio had been there he could write checks drawing on the school's accounts whenever and for as much as he wished, with no oversight. “Sergio was loved here,” Carrera said. “Before he left, he gave away four pistols to his friends at the school. And, of course, dogs.” (Sergio had bought four pedigreed German shepherds that lived in his house at the school, and he bred them.) The new rector had also discovered an account at the Popular Bank of Florida in the name of both Orantes brothers, Sergio and Mario.

Father Mario traveled to Houston at least twice a year to receive treatment for his migraines and other ailments at the Methodist Hospital there. Carrera told me that Baloo also went to Houston. “I know that dog traveled to the United States one time,”
he said. “It was paid for with this school's money. Sergio took the dog to Houston on a plane, so that his brother wouldn't be sad.” In Houston, Father Mario reportedly stayed in an apartment owned by his wealthy ordination godmother.

Monseñor Hernández, the chancellor of the Curia—the Church's highly placed power broker, the man to see in Guatemala City if you needed a bureaucratic snag resolved, the man with connections and influence everywhere—had handled Father Sergio's dismissal from the post of rector very discreetly, arranging for his transfer to another parish, with a certificate stating that he had run the Colegio San José de los Infantes responsibly. “Monseñor Hernández is like Richelieu,” Carrera said. “He's in charge of the ecclesiastical government's business.” The new rector paused a moment, as if to reflect silently on the ethical dilemma he was presenting. “Archbishop Penados said we have to show that we're not hiding anything,” he continued, as if arguing with himself. “What information we have, we have to give…. What seems so strange to me is that, well, these are priests. One has to have confidence in their sanctity. If Hernández knew about what Sergio was doing, he should have told the other bishops. Archbishop Penados should be able to believe in his priests—believe in them and love them.” Carrera paused again. “The archbishop is very tired. I feel bad for him. The man he most trusted was Gerardi. His absence has been very painful for him, with good reason.”

Shortly after Father Sergio's problems at the school became known, he left Guatemala. At the time of the murder, he was a Jesuit novitiate at a seminary in Panama. “Sergio is very intelligent,” Carrera said. He characterized Father Mario's godmother as “a dangerous woman.” And, he said, “I'll tell you that, personally, I am afraid of Sergio.”

The rector then gave voice to the thoughts that inevitably arose from the conversation we'd been having. “If you absorb this information, you're going to notice that something like this”—he
meant Father Sergio and what had happened at the school—“can seem to have a connection to a crime like that.” He meant Bishop Gerardi's murder. “And that's crazy, no?”

Something like this
can seem to have a connection to a
crime like that
. That would be the seemingly irresistible logic behind so much of the suspicion, speculation, and tendentiousness that was beginning to envelope the Gerardi case, and that was only a small fraction of what lay ahead. So much could be made and so much would be made to
seem to connect
. That endlessly exploitable situation was what the ODHA lawyer Mynor Melgar was referring to when he said of those who plotted the crime that when they considered who Bishop Gerardi was sharing the parish house with—Father Mario—“they must have felt like they'd won the lottery.”

M
ARTHA
J
ANE
M
ELVILLE
N
OVELLA
, Father Mario's great friend and patron, was an unmarried woman from the family that owns Guatemala's cement monopoly. She was known for her elegant beauty and iron sense of privacy as well as for lavish charity to the most conservative wing of the Church. She also made accomplished recordings of herself singing religious music, which she gave out to family and friends. José Toledo, the lawyer who had soon replaced García Pimentel as Father Mario's representative, told me that Melville Novella and Father Mario met when she audited a theology class in which he was a Salesian seminary student. A Guatemalan who had married into the Novella family and who asked to remain anonymous said that relatives had confided that Melville Novella was obsessed with the priest and that on her frequent trips to Europe she zealously shopped for gifts for him. Melville Novella was the likeliest source—his brother Sergio's bank accounts were another—of the many expensive items found in Father Mario's bedroom. Bishop Gerardi used to tease the priest about the way he “exploited” that “poor woman.”

A Guatemalan woman, a self-described “observer” of Guatemalan society, told me that when they were both in late adolescence,
Martha Jane Melville Novella was “the most beautiful woman in all Guatemala.” Melville Novella's first boyfriend, the woman told me, was an aristocratic polo player, “with the dark skin and handsome looks of a Bedouin. He was beautiful. He drove a gray Jaguar. You'd see them here and there and they were the most beautiful pair of
novios
anyone had ever seen. They were together from the time she was fifteen until she was in her twenties, but they never married.” Later Melville Novella married a man who became a politician. But as soon as they returned from their honeymoon, the Guatemalan society observer told me, the couple separated. An aura of mystery and secrecy subsequently enveloped the heiress.

One evening I phoned Martha Jane Melville Novella. I gave my name to the maid who answered the phone, then listened to a long train of footsteps recede and then return across what I imagined to be a highly polished floor. The maid asked the purpose of my call. I answered that I was a journalist from New York, then listened to the footsteps go away and come back again. The maid said that her mistress wasn't in.

T
HE FABULOUSLY WEALTHY WOMAN
from the family with a cement monopoly, a financial supporter of the most conservative wing of the Church, and the middle-class mother of two priests who was herself the niece of a politically conservative and powerful prelate, Archbishop Rossell, and who perhaps saw the Church as a place where her sons could advance in society just as her uncle had advanced—these were Guatemalans who would naturally prefer the old Church, close to the military and ruling establishment, cozy with privilege, over the modern, more activist one, with its “Preferential Option for the Poor” and its Bishops' Conference that issued pro-reform pastoral letters such as the “Clamor for Land” in 1989.

“The Orantes were always very disrespectful to my uncle,” Fernando Penados told me. He said that Father Mario's mother,
Marta Nájera de Orantes, was so angry at Archbishop Penados over the removal of Sergio from the prestigious post of rector of the Colegio San José de los Infantes that she refused to speak to him at Monseñor Gerardi's last birthday party. Two weeks after the bishop was killed, Father Mario went to see the archbishop and asked to be elevated to the post of parish priest at the church of San Sebastián. When the archbishop declined to grant his wish on the spot, Father Mario angrily departed without even saying good-bye.

Fernando Penados knew from experience that investigating the murder of a priest is always a delicate matter. Priests are expected to live purer lives than other people, and when evidence to the contrary turns up it is assumed that such “disappointing” personal behavior must have something to do with the crime. (The
something like this
that connects to the
something like that
.) The investigation of Bishop Gerardi's murder, Fernando knew, wasn't going to be an exception. The “documentation” by ODHA of the murder on behalf of the Church was exposing elements of the lives of the clergy that were not very attractive.

“Our responsibility was to get the facts, but we were worried about what position the bishops would take when confronted with them,” Fernando told me. Nevertheless, when he warned Bishop Mario Ríos Montt, Gerardi's successor as the head of ODHA, that a full investigation into the murder meant opening the Guatemalan Catholic Church to further embarrassment and scandal, “Monseñor Ríos said, ‘If we have to purify the Church in order to get to the bottom of this crime, then we'll purify the Church.'”

O
TTO
A
RDÓN HAD
, clearly, decided to pin the murder of Bishop Gerardi solely on Father Mario and to ignore ODHA's insistence that Military Intelligence was involved. It didn't help that in July, following the priest's arrest, Ronalth Ochaeta was quoted as saying, “From the time of Jesus, the Church has always had its Judases.” People inside ODHA were annoyed with Ronalth for playing into Ardón's hands. But he told me that he didn't regret his statement about Judases. “I believe that Mario knows more,” he said. “Of that I am sure.”

Ronalth Ochaeta had been involved in human rights issues since the early 1980s, when he was a young graduate of the law school at the University of San Carlos and was teaching some courses there. Antigovernment guerrilla organizations were recruiting students—“crassly co-opting them,” in Ronalth's words—with free flights and junkets to Mexico, and the government was cracking down. More than a dozen student leaders “disappeared” or were simply murdered. Ronalth Ochaeta did legal paperwork for students who were in danger and wanted visas to the United States, and he would spend hours arguing on their behalf with embassy functionaries. Then he realized that he was being followed, that he was under surveillance, and he canceled the classes he was teaching, began staying away from the university, and started a small law practice in Guatemala City.

As a lawyer, Ochaeta traveled frequently to Cobán, the provincial capital of Alta Verapaz, where he had grown up, to work with his brother in the pastoral social office, a charity and aid group. It was there that he met Myrna Mack Chang, the young anthropologist, who frequently came through Cobán to meet with Church officials regarding the plight of displaced internal refugees, the subject of her research and activism. Around this time, Archbishop Penados was looking for young people to work with Bishop Gerardi, who was setting up what would become ODHA. Gerardi had been the bishop of Verapaz when Ronalth was a boy and had given Ronalth his First Communion and had also shut down the school in which he studied. When Ronalth finally went to see Bishop Gerardi for a job interview, he described their last encounter, eighteen years before. “So it's you!” laughed Gerardi. “And what happened to you after I closed your school?” The bishop told Ronalth that working in human rights would be dangerous, and that there wasn't any money yet to pay him. Ronalth said that the money didn't matter, that he had his law practice, and that he would work for the bishop part-time. After nine months, as international donations made ODHA more solvent, the bishop asked what he thought a fair salary would be for full-time work. Ronalth said more than a law professor at the University of San Carlos earned, and less than a judge, and Gerardi agreed.

Ronalth Ochaeta worked with Bishop Gerardi until 1993, when he and his new family were forced by threats into exile. He spent a year studying for a master's degree at the University of Notre Dame law school in South Bend, Indiana, and then returned to ODHA. He said to me that his years with Bishop Gerardi were “a long tortuous path where the occasional joy of saving a life compensated for the daily grind of feeling utterly impotent in our work.” Ronalth was worn out. He had assumed that he would leave ODHA after the REMHI report was published, but the murder of the bishop had changed everything. The dark cloud of fear in which years of human rights work had
submerged his wife, Sonia, and their two small children at last seemed too much to ask of them, and of himself. One evening, in a moment of unguarded pessimism, he said to me that Bishop Gerardi's murder had left him feeling that everything—the years at ODHA, REMHI, fighting for human rights in Guatemala—had been futile.

O
TTO
A
RDÓN HAD BEGUN
suggesting that Bishop Gerardi had actually been assaulted in or on the threshold of Father Mario's bedroom, that the bishop had stumbled on something that Father Mario didn't want him to see. “Who were the people who carried Monseñor Gerardi from the spot where he was attacked to the spot where he died?” Ardón had demanded of Father Mario during the interrogation on the day of his arrest. The priest answered that he didn't know, because he had found the bishop dead in the garage.

I went one morning with Ronalth Ochaeta to the church of San Sebastián, to look at the crime scene. There were lit candles and a vase of flowers along the garage wall, facing the spot where Bishop Gerardi's body had lain, his head in a pool of blood. There had been double streaks of blood smeared to that pool from a larger one near where Gerardi's Volkswagen Golf was parked, indicating that the bishop's body had been dragged about twelve feet. Ronalth speculated that the double streaks were made by the bishop's buttocks dragging along the floor while his body—which was bulky—was hoisted by two people, one holding him under the arms, the other by the legs. The bishop's blood-soaked jeans had been tugged down well below the line of his underpants, as would happen to someone pulled along like that. Ronalth's theory was that the killers were worried that the blood might seep outside, under the garage doors, to where the
bolitos
were sleeping. But the prosecutors were arguing that the blood streaks had been made with a mop, in order to plant misleading evidence.