The Art of Political Murder (38 page)

Zeissig told me, indignantly, that the accusations against him, about fabricating evidence, were completely untrue. There was no stage of the investigation that hadn't been verified by the UN mission. He'd never denied access to MINUGUA at any moment, so there was an independent record of every step he and the other prosecutors had taken. (By contrast, in 1999, in its ninth annual report, MINUGUA had reported that its verification efforts in the Gerardi case had been “obstructed” by Otto Ardón, “who systematically refused access to the case file.”)

Leopoldo Zeissig grew up in Mixco, a large urban municipality five miles outside Guatemala City. He worked his way through law school (it took him twelve years), and when he graduated, in 1994, he took a job in the Public Ministry. He was an assistant prosecutor under Celvin Galindo, investigating homicides and kidnappings, when the bishop was murdered. He learned about the killing while watching CNN before going to work. His first thought was that it must be a political crime. “But how could such a thing have happened?” he remembers thinking. In postwar Guatemala, murders like that weren't supposed to occur anymore. Later, when Otto Ardón's dog-bite theory emerged, “it seemed incredibly strange to me. It was becoming a public joke. But I said, I can't judge. I don't know the case.”

After Celvin Galindo took over the Gerardi case, on December 17, 1998, he and Zeissig met for dinner several times. They talked about the various scenarios, including the one involving Valle del Sol, the criminal gang. Galindo told Zeissig that the police considered the Valle del Sol scenario “burned”; that is, they had investigated the gang every which way, and as far as Bishop Gerardi's murder was concerned, “there was nothing there.” Zeissig asked
Galindo if he intended to investigate a political motive in the crime, and he answered, “Everything is on the table.” But Galindo was under pressure to prosecute Father Mario. In a meeting at the Conquistador Ramada hotel, the head of the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis, Howard Yang, pressured Galindo to take Father Mario to trial. (Yang was the man who had been dispatched by President Arzú to intimidate Judge Henry Monroy into charging only Father Mario for the murder.) Galindo yielded to the pressure and proceeded with the charges against the priest. But then Judge Monroy decided to free Father Mario, though provisionally, keeping him under investigation.

On February 17, 1999—the day before Judge Monroy gave Father Mario provisional freedom—the taxi driver, Diego Méndez Perussina, testified before going into exile in Canada. “I think Celvin began to realize it was a political crime when the taxi driver gave his statement in front of Judge Monroy,” Zeissig said. It had been widely reported that Galindo was about to arrest members of the military, most probably Major Escobar Blas and Captain Byron Lima. I sensed that Zeissig now regretted not having charged the major himself. He believed that Captain Lima and Major Escobar Blas had been linked in criminal activities before Bishop Gerardi's murder and that Escobar Blas, especially, had a grisly secret history, including, possibly, having been one of the masterminds of the kidnapping for ransom and subsequent murder of a wealthy college student named Beverly Sandoval Richardson, a widely publicized case. Captain Lima, who was part owner of a gun shop and shooting range, was alleged to have engaged in arms trafficking. Zeissig told me that he believed Captain Lima knew Ana Lucía Escobar and that he had provided logistical help to the Valle del Sol gang for bank robberies and kidnappings. (The Spanish investigator for MINUGUA, Rafael Guillamón, told me later that Ana Lucía and her gangster boyfriend, Luis Carlos García Pontaza, used to practice firing their weapons at Lima's shooting range.) One of
Zeissig's early sources in the investigation was an underworld informer who said that Captain Lima and Major Escobar Blas had provided weapons to the gang. But when Zeissig pressed the informer to testify before a judge, the informer refused, because he feared being killed in reprisal.

“That's the big problem with being a prosecutor,” said Zeissig. “The truth commission could bring information out anonymously, but we have to bring it before a judge. Otherwise, what good is it?”

We spoke about the often exasperating but dramatic days when Rubén Chanax had finally begun to talk. This was after Chanax and El Chino Iván had been transferred from the custody of the police to that of the Public Ministry as protected witnesses, when Zeissig decided to give Chanax work washing their cars as part of a strategy to gain his cooperation. Piece by piece, his story had come out, or anyway as much of it as he was willing to tell: Father Mario's involvement, Captain Lima and Villanueva turning up in the black Jeep Cherokee to move the bishop's body, and so on. Some days they didn't talk about the case at all. “We'd just watch television,” Zeissig said, recalling that Chanax especially liked Pokemon cartoons. “He'd see the first scene, and then tell you the rest of the episode.” In the evenings, on the way back to the Hotel Arlington, Chanax's police guards would always ask him what he and the prosecutors had talked about. His answer was always the same—they'd watched movies, watched television, told
chistes
, nothing more.

During that time, soon after Chanax had finally begun to collaborate as a witness, Zeissig had given him another polygraph test, the first one that had been administered to him since the test given by the FBI, shortly after the crime. Chanax was asked four questions:

1. Did you see someone come out of the parish-house garage? When Chanax answered yes, the test indicated that he was telling the truth.

2. Did you see Father Mario Orantes kick the small garage door shut? Chanax's affirmative answer seemed truthful.

3. Did you see somebody move the cadaver? Chanax's yes again seemed truthful.

4. Do you know the person who came out without a shirt? Rubén Chanax answered that he didn't know the shirtless man, and the polygraph machine indicated the symptoms of a lie.

The shirtless man, Chanax finally admitted, was “Hugo,” and he told the prosecutors what he knew—at least
some
of what he knew—about him.

But Rubén Chanax was becoming frightened. What if Military Intelligence found out that he'd been talking? Already Chanax had received a warning in the Hotel Arlington from someone who came in off the street and told him that if he kept squealing he was going to die. Sometimes Captain Lima jogged by and tried to catch Chanax's eye when Chanax was at his window or in the doorway. One day Chanax briefly stepped out of the hotel to buy something in the little shop next door, and a man there said, “Be careful, because Byron Lima is watching.”

It was the possibility of a stealthy visit from Hugo that terrified Rubén Chanax most. Hugo was apparently a notorious G-2 assassin. One of his nicknames was Multicolores, for his ability to disguise himself. Multicolores might come disguised as a policeman, as a salesman taking a room for the night, or as one of the lovers who used the hotel for inexpensive trysts. He took his victims by surprise, often strangling them with a piece of fishing line. Chanax begged the prosecutors to move him to another hotel. But Zeissig told him that moving would look suspicious. “They'll suspect you've talked to us,” he said. “Go on like nothing has happened. Trust us. And whatever you do, don't tell El Chino Iván that you've talked.”

Chanax had told the prosecutors that on the night of the murder El Chino Iván stayed behind in Don Mike's store, that is, away
from the park, longer than he'd admitted. Maybe El Chino Iván had never even seen the shirtless man. Maybe Chanax had told El Chino Iván about what he'd seen that night, and then El Chino Iván had elaborated his own versions, or so Zeissig suspected. El Chino Iván still dreamed, as when he'd first turned himself into MINUGUA, of going to the United States. It was unclear what Rubén Chanax hoped for, other than to stay alive and out of prison. Up to that point, he hadn't asked to be taken anywhere, other than to the movies. One day he said to Zeissig, “You've given me the importance as a human being that I deserve.”

Leopoldo Zeissig said that when Rubén Chanax had to confront Obdulio Villanueva and then both of the Limas at evidentiary hearings in February and April 2000, Zeissig lost any doubt that his witness was telling the truth. He was convinced by the manner with which Chanax held his own, refusing to back down in the face of the military men's often belligerent ire, accusations, and even ill-disguised threats. “I haven't sold myself, and I haven't been told what to say, and I'm not a liar, like you,” he'd defiantly retorted to Colonel Lima Estrada. “You were in the store! It's not my fault you were there.” Captain Lima tried to discredit Chanax with a garrulous tirade aimed at exposing his confusion about, for example, what uniforms various EMP units wore, and finally, in an exasperated outburst, Lima had uttered his memorable threat, asking the former park vagrant and car washer what he would do if a video turned up implicating
him
in the crime. Chanax had responded, “If you say so, it's because you know.” After that hearing, Zeissig had asked Rubén Chanax what he'd been referring to, and he'd answered, “Because they filmed it.”

The prosecutors argued—and at the trial, the judges agreed—that Rubén Chanax's
basic
story never varied. Over time he added to it, but without altering its core sequence. Eventually his reason for doing so would become clear. Chanax repressed details to avoid implicating himself in the crime. When he felt safe enough—
seguro
—he told more. These dynamics made him a dangerous
witness, but since Guatemala had no equivalent of the U.S. federal witness protection program, he couldn't, in exchange for total immunity, have revealed everything, including his own role in the crime, and then have been provided with a secure new life, even a new identity. Being a “protected witness” in Guatemala meant that he was safe from prosecution as long as there was a special prosecutor who was inclined to protect him. If a prosecutor with a different perspective took over the case, he might lose that protection.

It was Rubén Chanax, Zeissig told me, who'd left the small, bloody sneaker print on the garage floor. (He'd washed the blood from his shoes in the park's fountain.) There had also been footprints at the rear of the garage, not sneaker prints, leading into the sacristy, as if someone had fled that way. “The footprints going into the sacristy were never documented in the investigation,” Zeissig told me. “Ardón lost all that stuff.”

It seemed strange to me that Otto Ardón, during those crucial first days, had never tried to match the sneaker print to Rubén Chanax. It was as if he knew that this particular witness shouldn't be scrutinized too closely. If Chanax's sneakers had matched the print, Ardón would have had someone to charge in the crime right away. But Chanax was unlikely to keep silent about what he knew while prosecutors marched him toward a possible death sentence as Bishop Gerardi's murderer.

“He was terrified we were going to accuse him too,” Zeissig said. “It was delicate. It's not right to threaten a witness with prison if he doesn't tell you the whole truth. It's better to try to win his confidence, let him see that we can keep our word, and that, within what the law permits, we can get him out of trouble.”

Once he'd given his pretrial testimony, Rubén Chanax had to leave Guatemala for his own safety. But he was not a promising candidate for any country's political asylum program. He didn't leave Guatemala until April 24, 2000, when the prosecutors finally sent him to Mexico City on a regular tourist's visa. They
bought him a suit and tie so that there would be less chance of his encountering any problems at passport control. Zeissig recalled that when he and his staff went to the airport to see Rubén Chanax off, “Some of the assistant prosecutors became sentimental.” When Chanax's first ninety-day tourist visa expired, Jorge García of the Public Ministry's Witness Protection Service went to renew it. (García would eventually succeed Zeissig as prosecutor of the Gerardi case.) Ninety days later, García renewed it again, but when that visa expired Chanax would become an illegal alien. Finally he was granted refugee status by the UN Refugee Commission, which provided a temporary solution.

The prosecutors had rented a small room for Chanax in a poor neighborhood in Mexico City and had given him barely enough to live on—eventually they would only pay his rent of eighty dollars a month—but he soon found work, first as a carpenter, and then in a taco stand. The owner of the taco stand found out who he was and become protective of him. The owner also had a fleet of taco trucks that he sent to fairs outside the city, and Chanax sometimes was sent along to work in them. He called Zeissig at his office using a prepaid international calling card in different pay phones. He was happy to be working.

Once Zeissig visited Mexico City and went to the taco stand. “He served us,” Zeissig recounted. “To see him working there, at the skillet … it made me feel … not tenderness…. I don't know. Poor Rubén, I thought. There he is, finally working at an honest job.”

Zeissig knew that the defense attorneys would call Rubén Chanax to testify at the trial. They were already boasting that they would be able to “destroy” him in court. But nobody could force him to come back to Guatemala, and Zeissig thought he might refuse.

During Zeissig's last visit to Mexico, Chanax asked, “If I testify, then I'll have the opportunity to tell everything?”

“What do you mean by everything?” Zeissig responded.

“I want to clear my conscience,” Chanax said.

So there's more, Zeissig thought. “We'd intuited it, of course,” he recalled to me. “But how could you get him to say it? You can interrogate, but …”

This was when Chanax first told Zeissig that he'd been contracted by Military Intelligence to spy on Bishop Gerardi long before the night of the murder. “Why do you think I slept in front of the garage door?” he asked. “He had to wake and move me to drive his car inside. That's how I always knew when he came and went.” He told Zeissig the same story that would later stun (and outrage) the courtroom, about being contracted by “the colonel” to spy on Bishop Gerardi in “Operation Bird.” He told Zeissig that the park of San Sebastián was full of informers, though he never knew who they all were, or what role each one had. He said that El Chino Iván was an informer for Military Intelligence as well.