The Art of Political Murder (37 page)

T
HE EARLY PROMISE
—dim as even that had seemed—of President Portillo's government had quickly faded. Portillo had not been
able to free himself from the influence of military strongmen and mafiosos any more than any of his predecessors had. Portillo's EMP was as criminal as Arzú's—it was just a different clique of corrupt officers. No one believed that Portillo, whatever his true intentions, had much control over his own administration. Abroad and in Guatemala, the attempts to bring General Ríos Montt to justice for war crimes had stalled, and he remained the president of the Congress and the real leader of the FRG Party. The vice president of the Congress had accused human rights organizations of being “behind a plot to destablize the country.”

In 2000, when Edgar Gutiérrez had become head of the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis, he'd found the agency's files on the Gerardi case ransacked and emptied. But President Portillo said that he had ordered an internal investigation into the Gerardi case, and he promised to share the results. If—as seems likely—such an investigation was ever conducted by Portillo's government, no one in ODHA or the prosecutors' office ever saw a report of it. Fairly or not, ODHA's lawyers blamed Gutiérrez for Portillo's failure to deliver on his promise. The government finally issued a two-page report stating that it had no information about the case beyond what had already been produced by the Public Ministry.

Leopoldo Zeissig, after twenty-one months of enduring constant threats, resigned as special prosecutor and left the country with his wife and child. Just before leaving, he granted an interview to Claudia Méndez. “The defense is criticizing you for having on your side a vagrant, a taxi driver, and an EMP specialist who was by turns a waiter and a janitor. The defense is heavily criticizing them for being of such a low level,” she said. Zeissig responded, “At ten at night in San Sebastián's park, you're not going to find lawyers and engineers. Let's talk about the military officers, who are supposedly of a higher level. What happened when they testified at the trial? They lied.”

The defense lawyers' continual harping through the media about the “low level” of the witnesses—most were men with Indian features and surnames—also played all too easily on widespread and deep Guatemalan class and racial prejudices and insecurities.

W
ITHIN WEEKS OF THE VERDICT
, ODHA was dug in again, preparing for a battle to recuse one of the judges, Wilewaldo Contreras, who would try the appeal. “Because he's a corrupt judge,” Melgar said to me, “who has made money in exchange for freeing criminals. Also, he is a personal friend of Cintrón, and of the group of lawyers defending the Limas, and from a good source we know he's disposed to reverse the sentence. What we don't know is in exchange for what.”

The Vatican had finally named a new archbishop, elevating Monseñor Quezada Toruño from Zacapa. When Quezada Toruño was bishop of Zacapa, his diocese was the only one that declined to participate in REMHI. Within days of taking his new job, the archbishop convened a meeting of bishops to vote on whether or not to shut down ODHA. Nine voted in favor, nine against—a clear sign of how severely the prosecution of Father Mario and the scandalous revelations surrounding the Gerardi case had split the Church. Archbishop Quezada demanded a full audit of ODHA's accounts, but in the end he ruled that ODHA woud stay open and continue its mission, including its role as co-plaintiff in the ongoing Gerardi case.

PURGATORY

For five years. Isn't quick to say. And isn't it long to live. And lonely.

—Jean Rhys,
Wide Sargasso Sea

T
HE EUPHORIA OF THE SPRING
of 2001, when the guilty verdicts were read, did not last long. Almost immediately the results of the trial were called into question. In the fall, two European journalists, Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico—the journalists who during the trial had extolled the virtues of Dr. Reverte Coma, the Spanish dog-bite theorist—published an article in the Mexican and Spanish magazine
Letras Libres
accusing the prosecution and ODHA of being “the intellectual authors of a conspiracy” that had made the defendants “sacrificial lambs.” The defense lawyers in the Gerardi case, according to the article in
Letras Libres
, considered the prosecution witnesses “less than ideal.” The authors quoted one of the Limas' lawyers, Roberto Echeverreía Vallejo: “The whole case rested on fabricated witnesses. It's truly a monstrosity.” And they repeated, with no sign of irony, the remark of a military officer to the effect that “it's another Dreyfus case.”

In their article and in later writings about the case, de la Grange and Rico seemed unaware of the effort involved in ODHA's search for each of its witnesses. The EMP waiter Aguilar Martínez, the former G-2 spy Oscar Chex, and even the taxi driver were represented by the European journalists as having simply appeared at ODHA's door.

But there was little public response from ODHA to the accusations. Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez were large
personalities who had known how to present ODHA's position to the public. After they left ODHA, there was no one who could handle such tasks. Even Mynor Melgar, who was implacable in the courtroom, had a shy demeanor outside of it. Melgar returned to the Public Ministry as a prosecutor early in 2002, and the face of ODHA was projected by the soft-spoken, even retiring Nery Rodenas and the excitable Mario Domingo, who swallowed his consonants and spoke so quickly that people had trouble understanding him. The Gerardi case was complex and bewildering. In hindsight, ODHA's failure to cultivate relationships with Guatemalan journalists, to help them understand how the case had been assembled, was a costly mistake.

There was virtually no support for the verdicts in the trial in the Guatemalan press, other than occasionally in
elPeriódico
, where Claudia Méndez worked as a reporter. And this wasn't only because the media were owned and run by conservative elites, people sympathetic to the military and to former president Arzú. President Portillo's government had turned out to be the most corrupt—and that
is
saying something—and despised administration in recent Guatemalan history. Even people on the political left had a grudging attitude toward the verdicts in the Gerardi case after President Portillo tried to claim the outcome as an achievement of his presidency. (Judge Cojulún publicly rebuked Portillo for “taking a bow by tipping someone else's hat.”) And many thought that Edgar Gutiérrez, who had been so closely identified with ODHA's investigation, had “betrayed” the human rights community by taking a prominent post in Portillo's government. The terrain had been well prepared for a public-relations disaster when, in November 2003, Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico's book about the case,
¿Quién mató al obispo? Autopsia de un crimen politico, (Who Killed the Bishop?—Autopsy of a Political Crime
), was published. The book was treated as a major turn of events, and its charges were ceaselessly trumpeted.

In 1998, de la Grange and Rico had published another book,
Marcos, la genial imposture
, that purported to unmask Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, as a malevolent fraud; this was pretty much the position of the Mexican government. Their central thesis about the Gerardi case was that the Limas and Villanueva had been falsely accused and that prosecution witnesses had fabricated their testimony in exchange for personal gain, usually a one-way trip into a financially well-compensated exile, a life of ease. Ana Lucía Escobar, Monseñor Hernández, and the Valle del Sol gang played a central role. And, of course, Dr. Reverte Coma's dog-bite theory got its due. Edgar Gutiérrez and Ronalth Ochaeta were depicted as corrupt masterminds and conspirators. De la Grange and Rico more or less floated all the scenarios as simultaneous possibilities without offering any serious evidence to prove or connect them. A conspiracy of breathtaking scope was alleged, involving an enormous number of people and without any institutional oversight, any chain of command, or any central authority to enforce their obedience and guard their silence.

In February 2004, Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America's most admired novelists and easily its most famous political pundit, would weigh in on the Gerardi case in Spain's leading newspaper,
El País
. Vargas Llosa, a political conservative and avowed Thatcherite, had run for president of Peru in 1990, losing the election to Alberto Fujimori. Since then he'd resided mostly in Europe, and he had become a Spanish citizen. The opinion essays that he regularly published in
El País
were reprinted throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He seemed to draw the information for his piece on the Gerardi case exclusively from de la Grange and Rico's book, which was like writing about Senator John Kerry's experiences in the Vietnam War if one had read only
Unfit for Command
, the attack by the Swift Boat veterans. It wasn't a formal book review, although it was certainly a rave. Through their
“rigorous investigation, tireless comparisons and scrupulous analysis,” wrote Vargas Llosa, the authors of
Who Killed the Bishop?
had exposed a sinister scheme at the heart of the Gerardi case to “cover up for the truly guilty ones, sacrificing innocents and engendering a monumental distortion of the truth, … an operation in which a handful of little scoundrels, opportunists, and petty politicians reaped excellent personal rewards.”

Vargas Llosa accepted the idea that Baloo had left bite marks in Bishop Gerardi's skull and that poor witnesses, particularly Rubén Chanax, had gone, “thanks to the crime, from living on nothing and in the streets to being maintained and protected abroad by the state. Their testimony was continuously molded—altered, twisted, adapted—throughout the process in such a way that they seemed submissively subject to the dictates of the archbishop's human rights group, ODHA, whose actions throughout this story are supremely suspicious, to say the least.”

Vargas Llosa wrote that “the first prosecutor of the case, Otto Ardón, who tried to follow this lead”—the dog bites—“received so many attacks and threats that he had to resign and fled the country.” It was a through-the-looking-glass version of the Gerardi case. Otto Ardón never “fled” the country, at least not in the sense the word seems intended to imply. He took a brief vacation after the fiasco of the exhumation and then resigned from the Public Ministry. He was never in exile. (Indeed, Ardón was soon spotted working in Guatemala City, in the law office of Irvíng Aguilar, Obdulio Villanueva's defense lawyer.) The prosecutors Celvin Galindo and Leopoldo Zeissig, who had investigated the involvement of the military in the crime, were the ones who had actually fled real threats, going into exile, although de la Grange and Rico claimed that the threats were exaggerated. They portrayed Zeissig as never having been subjected to anything more frightening than a single ambiguous call, with music playing, on his cell phone.

I
N THE SUMMER OF
2002, I had flown down to the South American city where Leopoldo Zeissig was then residing with his wife and small child. Dry, sandy-looking Andean mountain slopes, like enormous dunes, closely surrounded the city, making it feel like an impermanent place, overly vulnerable to avalanches and winds, though in fact it was one of the oldest cities in the Americas. We met in the lobby of the hotel where I was staying and spoke there for the duration of an entire working day and much of the next. Zeissig had a job with the legal staff of a German foundation and was also attending law school, studying the consolidation of the rule of law in emerging democracies.

After the verdict, Zeissig said, he had phoned the attorney general, Adolfo González Rodas. Zeissig had been promised a job with a lower profile after the trial, and he told González Rodas that his successor would inherit the Gerardi case in good shape. The next morning, however, he was stunned to read in
Prensa Libre
that, according to the attorney general, he would be staying on as special prosecutor of the Gerardi case. He met with González Rodas and was informed that he was the only one qualified to lead the case forward into its next, highly perilous stage, which would include pursuing criminal investigations against Major Escobar Blas, Colonel Rudy Pozuelos, and other EMP leaders that could eventually reach as high as General Espinosa and even the former president, Álvaro Arzú.

Zeissig asked for a vacation to think things over. He was under pressure to arrest some of the EMP leaders immediately—before the verdicts could be appealed—on the basis of evidence that had emerged during the trial. But he didn't feel the case was strong enough yet. He didn't want to ask for arrest orders only to see the EMP officers go free in a few months. If an element of fear also influenced his hesitation, who could blame him? He was still receiving telephone threats. Then, in July, he learned that the Public Ministry was planning to discontinue his security detail. He decided that the time had come to take his family
out of the country. They left on a Saturday morning. Zeissig didn't want his security guards to notice he was leaving, so a friend went ahead to the airport, taking their two suitcases. Zeissig left his house carrying just his laptop, and he purchased one-way tickets to El Salvador at the airlines counter.