The Art of Political Murder (21 page)

I
TOOK A TAXI
to Colonia Lourdes, in Zone 17, one day, hoping to talk to Colonel Byron Lima Estrada. The colonel lived in a two-story, modern, middle-class home that, on its ground floor, had the little grocery store, the sort of
tiendita
that grandmother might run, that the former head of G-2 Military Intelligence now claimed as his main source of income. The store was closed, its steel shutters down, when I arrived. It was a day so bright and sunny that the light seemed to rebound off high, whitewashed walls in a way that made me squint. I rang the doorbell. A middle-aged woman with possibly bleached blond hair, pale and puffy-eyed as if from weeping, came to the door. This was the colonel's wife—the woman who had supposedly
overheard the conversation between her husband and other retired military officers, who had said to him, “
No te rajes, Lima
”—Don't get cold feet.

The colonel's wife told me that her husband wasn't in, and before I could say anything else, she wrote down a telephone number in my notebook and invited me to call. She asked, nervously glancing up and down the street, “You're with MINUGUA, no?” I said no, that I was a journalist. She gaped at me, a bit abashed. Then I wrote down the number of my rented cell phone and gave it to her.

I'd noticed, while reporting this story, that if I managed to conduct myself with a certain peremptory air, as if I was one of those people who have the right to ask things, people assumed that I must be involved with the UN mission. Which suggested that MINUGUA was really getting around.

That evening, I stopped by the offices of
elPeriódico
, Guatemala's small but best newspaper, as I did on most days, to talk with the reporters covering the Gerardi case. The paper's owner and editor, José Rubén Zamora, was from a famous publishing family and he had upheld and even surpassed the family legacy. Thus he had been the target of several assassination attempts, which he had survived with the weird luck that the very brave sometimes have. He'd founded
elPeriódico
, funding it mainly with donations from a wide circle of admirers and friends in and outside Guatemala. That evening at the office something unsettling happened. I was talking to the editor of the newspaper's literary page when my cell phone rang. I answered, and a deep, florid voice boomed, “I am Colonel Byron Lima Estrada.” I'd been having trouble with my phone, which was a clunky, old-fashioned model, and I often got sudden intrusions of storms of static. I heard very little of what the colonel said next, but he sounded worked up. I could hear him yelling behind the storm, his words obscured. I said loudly into the phone that I couldn't hear him, and asked if we could talk later or meet, but the static, and his incomprehensible shouting, went on
for quite a while. All I could make out was Colonel Lima saying, in his deep, lowing voice, “There will come a day, there will come a day, and it won't be long from now …” and then the static storm swept in and drowned out the rest. After I hung up, the editor I'd been visiting with said that I'd turned pale. I tried phoning back a number of times, that night and the next day, and finally was able to explain to a younger-sounding man who answered that I hadn't been able to understand what the colonel had said when he called. The young man said that the colonel had already said everything he had to say to me.

Knowing that I'd put myself on Colonel Lima's radar made me uneasy, although I didn't really think that anything was going to happen to me, an American citizen. With the world community watching, it would be very hard for the Army to get away with a homicide even against my friends at ODHA, no matter how ingenuously it was disguised. I knew that. But when I came home at night I was frightened by the darkness of my room at the Spring, whose only window opened onto a small patio, and I worried about the flimsy lock on the door. Stuck in traffic on gray afternoons in late September, I'd feel overwhelmed by a very particular sadness, something that seemed to come from the unconscious memory of the street itself, of all the people who were driving or just walking to or from someplace—an office, a church, the movies, school—and must have had a last moment of panic or grief or resignation, realizing that there was no escape and that they would never get home. Only one person in the whole country had ever been held accountable or castigated as the person responsible for any of those people not making it home, only
one:
Sergeant Noel Beteta, Myrna Mack's killer.

I was living in Guatemala City in 1984 and 1985, the years when Colonel Lima—though I didn't know it then—was the head of G-2 Military Intelligence. I was living in my late grandparents' house in the old center of the city, near the church of San Sebastián, trying to write my first novel and also doing freelance journalism, mainly
in other Central American countries. If I had to go to Managua, San Salvador, or Tegucigalpa, I usually had friends, other freelancers and stringers, whose houses I could stay in, and when they came to Guatemala City, they were welcome to stay in my grandparents' house. My friend Jean-Marie Simon, the photographer and human rights investigator, lived in the house for a while.

One day a black Jeep Cherokee pulled slowly alongside Jean-Marie and me as we were walking to the corner store for a beer. The Jeep came to a stop, and three or four men, in denim and leather jackets, got out, opened the rear door, and reached inside, presumably for weapons. We threw ourselves down behind a row of parked ambulances belonging to a little private hospital, and then, when a bus suddenly drove between the Jeep and us, we got up, ran alongside it, and jumped on. The men got back into the Jeep and took off like a rocket down the avenue, running red lights.

The next day I went to the U.S. embassy to report the incident, which had obviously been aimed at Jean-Marie. The official I spoke to seemed to have already heard about it. His exact words were, “It's what we call a heavy-handed tail, meant to send a message. Believe me, they could have splattered you all over the sidewalk like tomato sauce if they'd wanted to.” His advice was to leave Guatemala, but I was too broke. I didn't have the money for a plane ticket, and at that time I had no real place to go home to. Jean-Marie simply had too much important work in Guatemala, and wasn't going to leave. Years later I ran into that same diplomat in Mexico City, when he was attached to the U.S. embassy there. He recalled the incident and said that he couldn't believe we hadn't left.

I'll never forget those months. There were incidents in which “they” broke into homes or apartments and horribly mutilated their victims (a woman from the Swedish embassy, for example, who was rumored to have maintained close contacts with guerrillas). I rigged up homemade alarms in my grandmother's
house: glass bottles on chairs beneath every window, an escape rope leading onto the patio. I lost about thirty pounds just from nervousness, and developed a tic in my cheek. This time of fear and sadness—but also of unforgettable intensity—stayed inside me like a dormant infection that can sometimes be stirred back to life, even by a glance.

So I think you will understand how relieved and grateful I was when, fourteen years later, in the fall of 1998, the editor at
The New Yorker
who had said that I could write an article about Bishop Gerardi on spec told me that the magazine would pay for me to move to a better hotel—a hotel with security guards in the lobby, filled with foreign business types and European airline crews and couples who had come to Guatemala from the United States to adopt babies.

D
URING THE YEAR THAT
Jean-Marie Simon and I were living in my grandparents' old house, Guatemala's first group of relatives of the disappeared, Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM), which was modeled somewhat after Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, announced itself in the streets of Guatemala City. They disrupted traffic at intersections, banging on pots and pans, holding up placards with photographs of their disappeared loved ones. Through Jean-Marie, I met their leaders a few times, and visited their main office, where the walls were covered with hundreds of photographs of people who were missing. I was particularly struck by a tall, very pretty young woman named Rosario Godoy de Cuevas, the wife of a recently disappeared trade unionist—recently enough that I'm sure she harbored the faith and the hope that her husband was still alive in some wretched Military Intelligence torture hole, and that there must be some way to save him. Godoy de Cuevas and her husband had a two-year-old son. I liked to watch her, banging on her pot, taller than the other protesters holding up traffic, her chin raised as she shouted her slogans, the emotion showing in her lovely face, her long black hair flowing.

Easter Week is a time of solemn religious observances in Guatemala, but it is also a vacation week. The capital shuts down. Congress closes, and most prominent Guatemalans, including journalists, and also foreigners, particularly diplomats, take off for one of the country's lakes or beaches or mountain chalets, or go to nearby Antigua or Miami or wherever it is they go to relax and enjoy themselves. During that Holy Week of 1985, the GAM's small leadership was almost wiped out. Héctor Gómez Calixto, a thirty-four-year-old baker from Amatitlán, near the capital, was abducted and murdered and found the next day by a highway exit. He had been tortured with a blowtorch, his face was brutally battered, and his tongue had been torn out. His sister, who was also abducted, was viciously raped. Another GAM leader barely escaped with his life, leaping over the wall into the grounds of the Belgian embassy, following an escape from a death squad.

Rosario Godoy de Cuevas spoke at Héctor Gómez's funeral, promising that his death would not be in vain. Three days later, Rosario, her young son, and her twenty-one-year-old brother were abducted from the parking lot of a shopping center. The next day her car was found flipped over in a shallow ditch by a road outside the city. The bodies of Rosario, her brother, and her child were inside. The government announced that it had been a tragic car accident, as did President Reagan's State Department spokesman, and the State Department spokesman's declaration, probably unnoticed by anyone in the United States, was repeatedly played on Guatemalan television.

The journalist Mark Fazlollah, later a distinguished reporter at the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, but at the time a young stringer, was staying in my house, and he decided to do some old-fashioned police reporting. He looked at the car the three had died in, and at the ditch where the accident had supposedly occurred, and concluded that the car had been rather gently rolled into it. He spoke to the doctor who had performed the autopsy confirming that the incident had been an accident. The doctor, who was soon
murdered, could not bring himself to stand by his autopsy report. When Rosario Godoy de Cuevas's relatives went to claim her body at the morgue, they noticed that there were bite marks on her breasts. Her underpants were stained with blood, indicating rape. At the funeral, people noticed that her infant's fingernails had been torn out. The torturers would have done that, torn out the baby's fingernails while the mother was still alive, to try to get her to say whatever it was they wanted her to say.

The Easter Week murders and attempted murders of the GAM leadership and their relatives must have taken a great deal of careful planning, months and months at least, probably longer. (“We had to do much worse things during the war,” Colonel Lima's wife had supposedly heard her husband say shortly before Bishop Gerardi's murder, at the meeting in his garage.) No murders ever shocked or touched me in the way the murders of Rosario Godoy de Cuevas, her baby, and her young brother did. Nobody has ever been found guilty, or officially charged, in those crimes or tens of thousands like them. Accuse me of living in the past if you'd like, but I don't think there should ever be a legal amnesty for whoever planned and executed murders like those.

T
HE TAXI DRIVER TURNED
up again one day in September. He went to see Father Quiróz to discuss some domestic problems he was having. The priest asked for a way to contact him, and the taxi driver gave him a beeper number. After four telephone conversations with the Untouchables, the taxi driver agreed to meet with Fernando Penados, who tried to persuade him to give an official witness deposition. But it turned out that he had relatives in the military who had already threatened him about talking. Fernando said that the taxi driver had changed his job, moved houses several times, didn't want to leave his family, and was terrified. The Untouchables moved him to a spot outside the city.

The Untouchable Rodrigo Salvadó said it made him feel a little sad to think that Carlos García, the murdered taxi driver, wasn't the same one who'd seen the shirtless man and written down the plate number. “If this isn't our driver,” said Rodrigo, sitting in a cubbyhole office, “doesn't it seem kind of inhuman to lose interest, to say, well, this isn't our taxi driver?” The Untouchables had spent months making the rounds of taxi companies and stands in their hunt for the taxi driver who was a witness—a futile effort, it turned out, because like so many nighttime drivers, the witness had leased his taxi from its daytime driver, and had dealt solely with him, rather than with the owner or any other employee of a taxi company. For a while afterward it was even rumored—incorrectly,
I believe—that Carlos García's killers had found the right taxi, but the wrong driver.

Fernando had a productive couple of days around this time. He spent an afternoon at
Prensa Libre
, looking at archival photographs of the trial of Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva, the presidential guardsman accused of killing Haroldo Sas Rompich, the milkman involved in the unfortunate incident that day President Arzú went horseback riding. One of the photographs showed the man he was looking for, the EMP photographer who had also turned up at the church of San Sebastián on the night of the murder of Bishop Gerardi. Fernando told me he felt sure that the photographer and his companion that night had played roles in the operation, that their job was to check up on how the crime had gone, to learn what evidence might have been left behind and what mistakes had been made, and to listen to what people were saying.