The Art of Political Murder (42 page)

El Chino Iván now repeated the story about how he, not Father Mario, had closed the door of the garage. Chanax, he said, had warned him, “You don't know what just happened there inside the garage. And now you've left fingerprints and your DNA on the door.” Worried, El Chino Iván had spat on a piece of cardboard to wipe the door clean. His tone grew nearly hysterical as he insisted on his version. Chanax diffidently shrugged and agreed: “
Así fue
.” That's how it was. But later he
said, “If you want to believe him, believe him. If you want to believe me, believe me.”

Of course it was maddening, for the story made little sense. That El Chino Iván had tried to wipe away his “DNA” with his own spit seemed plausible. But it was harder to believe that he hadn't at least peeked through the open door, into the illuminated garage, to see what had happened there. On the other hand, might Rubén Chanax have lied after all when he said that he'd rung the doorbell, and that Father Mario had come to the little garage door in his long black leather coat and closed the door? Was that story completely credible? What was Father Mario, in his black leather coat, doing in the garage, alone with the bishop's corpse?

What if both El Chino Iván and Rubén Chanax were lying about that particular moment and incident? Rafael Guillamón later told me what he thought had occurred immediately after the murder, after Hugo (if indeed Hugo existed), Captain Lima, and Villanueva (and whoever else) had come to and gone from the scene of the crime. Rubén Chanax, he believed, had then entered the parish house from the garage and walked down the corridor to Father Mario's bedroom door. He had knocked at the door to let the priest know that the gruesome deed had been accomplished. That would explain, Guillamón surmised, the traces of blood found later outside Father Mario's door. Of course if that
was
what had happened, it was not something Chanax was going to admit. Chanax would have found another way to reveal the priest's involvement, while suppressing his own. It wasn't as if Father Mario would then counter that “lie” with the true, equally incriminating version.

Chanax did not lack imagination. A good, even trained, observer, he noticed people, how they spoke, how they moved, what they wore. He knew how to shape his information (factual or not) into a narrative. He withheld information to protect himself, but also others. One key to deciphering Chanax was to decipher his
secret loyalties, some emotional and others tactical. Whatever else it was, Chanax's saga was also about staying alive. Any number of missteps might have cost him his life. By the spring of 2003, nearly two years after the trial, it seemed that Guatemalan Military Intelligence knew exactly where to find him. Yet Rubén Chanax was still alive.

Chanax had told the interrogators from MINUGUA that El Chino Iván was in “G-2 counterintelligence.” Those who believed that El Chino Iván was working for G-2 also believed that his and Rubén Chanax's roles were complementary. Chanax's job had been to watch and inform on Bishop Gerardi. El Chino Iván's job had been to watch and inform on Chanax. If Chanax told the Public Ministry or police interrogators one thing, it was El Chino Iván's role to tell them another.

As witnesses they were, indeed, “less than ideal.” It was all enough to drive an earnest, dogged lawyer like Mario Domingo crazy. Often, when talking about the two witnesses, he grew outraged, and his squinty expression became contorted. “They're both
hijos de puta
,” he'd exclaim, “and they were both in on the plan. But one kept quiet and stayed in his role. The one who talked because he finally got bored and fed up was Rubén Chanax!”

I
N
A
PRIL
2004 Helen Mack won her case against the Guatemalan state. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights—the Hague of the Americas—ruled unanimously that the murder of Myrna Mack had been planned and carried out by a clandestine intelligence unit within the EMP. In a landmark decision, the judges outlined the modus operandi by which the Army and government had employed state institutions and even civilian entities to stall and misdirect criminal investigations and prosecutions. They addressed the manner in which courts were incorporated into the military's strategies and examined the role of judges who knowingly abused the appeals process and who applied specious arguments in their rulings. The decision identified courts and judges that had acted in
concert with the military throughout the long history of the Mack case, including Wilewaldo Contreras's Fourth Court of Appeals.

The judges of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights described the various stages of a politically motivated homicide as typically carried out by the Guatemalan Army, especially by Military Intelligence. First came the preparation and planning, followed by the second stage, the actual execution of the victim. But there was a third stage, which the judges described as a continuation of the murder itself, as much a part of the crime as the prior stages. That third stage included the methods used by Military Intelligence to subvert the courts and the role of complicit judges in preventing justice from being done; and also the crucial role of misinformation, especially disseminated through the media, used to discredit opponents and create confusion.

It was in the long post-execution stage that the murder of Bishop Gerardi was especially masterful. I do not know whether particular journalists consciously spread misinformation or actually believed in the integrity of their Military Intelligence and government sources. It is reasonable to assume that when Mario Vargas Llosa wrote his essay on the Gerardi case and on the book
Who Killed the Bishop?
for
El País
, he was convinced of the truth of what he was writing. It may have been overly eager, unguarded ideological sympathy or prejudice; or the vanity of a Great Man of Letters, seduced, after many decades of adulation, into a sense of his own infallibility; or a case of what Borges had in mind when he wrote that no man, outside his own specialty, is not gullible; or some combination of these that led the distinguished novelist to accept at face value an extraordinarily controversial book's most far-fetched assertions as facts not requiring independent verification, and then to join his voice to the book's smears and accusations.

“
B
UENO, ITS NOW ALMOST ELEVEN
in the morning on monday who knows why i'm writing this because if i don't get out of this i hope that this gets to the press so that they will know who i was in truth and that i'm not how they say … if i end up dead or far from here because now i only have two roads in all this but like i said that's life but i'm not afraid because there's no reason i should be. but if they capture that rat i hope he suffers because what he did has no pardon because someone like el padre didn't deserve that kind of death. the way they gave it to him
.”

That, with no attempt to faithfully translate misspellings—although the writer's forgoing of most capital letters has been retained—is from a twenty-six-page diary kept by Rubén Chanax from July to August 1998, when he and El Chino Iván had been in police custody for three months. Across its first page was scrawled the title: “
Thoughts and memories from the Hotel Monterrey
.” In those pages, Chanax more than once asked himself if he'd done the right thing by becoming a witness, wondered what the future held for him, and acknowledged the risks he was taking. “
i get out of this, or they'll kill me
.” Repeatedly, he wrote about being depressed and bored by his confinement. “
You don't even notice if there's any sun … one day they took us to the police station and there was sun but when we came out everything
was black with ashes from the volcano and like i said one of these days it will rain fire and i won't even notice
.”

Sometimes Chanax wrote about how much he missed his friends in the San Sebastián park, whom he considered his “
true family
.” He wrote, “
Tried to find my mother with the police with mimigua
[MINUGUA]
but they came and told me she didn't want to know anything about me. that i'm a thief but that's a lie because none of the people in the park who know me would make those kinds of comments about me … i'm too deep into all this and how am i going to get out of this i have no one unlike the other
[El Chino Iván]
he has family they visit … a while ago they celebrated his birthday he said come with me and my family and i didn't accept for one reason because with me from the day i was born nobody ever celebrated mine nor do I think they ever will. Bueno, i'll go on tomorrow.”

New entry: “
Bueno Here i am again and i'm too angry and sad … it's now three months that i've been shut in and i'm too bored what i need is simple some T-shirts, some pants some shoes and to go to the movies three times a week … before I write more I want to make clear i am not doing this out of any interest and as for being a false witness, i am not that. and anyway, i don't care who ends up guilty whoever it is i don't care. bueno, this is what i saw that night, at around 6 i got to san Sebastián park
.”

Here Rubén Chanax dutifully scrawled the familiar story: his instant soup, Don Mike's, going back to the parish house, the shirtless man stepping from the garage. “
i didn't know that person so I didn't give it much importance … characteristics of that person height about one meter seventy
[five feet eight inches]
color of skin brown a round face hair cut in a military style large eyes normal nose and beard in the goatee style. he was wearing black caterpillar boots blue pants discolored old without a shirt. he came back with a shirt. then the other one came and everything ended i didn't sleep that was about ten thirty p.m
.”

His writing changes when he gives his description of the shirtless man (to whom he didn't give “
much importance
”),
suggesting a practiced method of remembering and writing down people's physical characteristics and attire. Of course he knew that prosecutors or investigators were likely to read his little diary; he had to be careful what he wrote there. But who, after all, was “Hugo”? Why couldn't, or wouldn't, Chanax tell prosecutors who he was, or where to find him? They were little closer to identifying him than when he'd been known only as the “shirtless man.” He was believed to be an assassin from Military Intelligence, his identity closely guarded, protected by several aliases.

One of the most convincing suggestions about Hugo's true identity was produced by none other than Fernando Penados, when he was working as an investigator for Edgar Gutiérrez, the first civilian head of the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis. Fernando wrote a report on one “Roberto Rodríguez García, alias ‘Hugo' el Karateca. Identity card number e-05 47015,” born in 1966 in Santa Lucía Cotzumalguapa, Escuintla, in the hot southern lowlands. He was a former Kaibil counterinsurgency soldier, a parachutist, and, reported Fernando, “a member of the EMP under Arzú and for a while under Portillo, until he began to feel ‘
localizado
,'” or close to being identified. “But they tell me he's still on active duty in Military Intelligence.”

No photograph of Hugo el Karateca was found, but a tiny photo taken for Roberto Rodríguez García's identity card when he was eighteen was located. Leopoldo Zeissig blew it up on his computer screen and called Rubén Chanax into his office. An assistant prosecutor later told Mario Domingo that Chanax went stiff with fright at the sight of the image. But Zeissig told me that he hadn't noticed any reaction in Chanax at all. At any rate, when Zeissig asked, Chanax said he didn't recognize the person. The photo, however, depicted a “Hugo”—if he was the same man—at about half the age he'd been on the night of the murder.

R
UBÉN
C
HANAX WAS LIVING
in a notoriously seedy barrio in Mexico City, a city of more than 23 million inhabitants. To say
that he was working again as a
taquero
is not to give much away. The number of taco stands in that city could be a metaphor for infinity; a lifetime might not be long enough to visit every one. I first met Chanax in February 2005. I was just passing through and had to be back in New York the next day. A friend from Guatemala, someone Chanax trusted, was there for the weekend. We went to the taco stand and found Chanax at work.

Rubén Chanax was smaller of stature than I'd imagined, but also brawnier. The backs of his strong, knotty hands had several large warts. He had classic Mayan features—the sloping nose and forehead—and a melancholy air. His large, black, deerlike eyes gave him a boyish aspect. That day we spoke only briefly. He had to return to work. I told Chanax that I would be back in a few weeks, and that I hoped we'd be able to talk. Chanax said it was best to look for him before he started work in the afternoon. He lived in a shabby little apartment building directly across the street from the taco stand.

I didn't have a chance to return until three months later, in May. Because Chanax's apartment had no doorbell, he'd told me that I should stand on the sidewalk and call up to his window. The pane was broken, covered by black plastic garbage bags. I was worried that he wouldn't remember me. From the sidewalk, I shouted his name, and after a while the black plastic was tugged back and Rubén Chanax's face appeared. He called down that I should go around to the front. He came to the door in floppy shorts and a baggy T-shirt. It was eleven in the morning, but he seemed sleepy, and his eyes were bloodshot. He glanced nervously up and down the street. I suggested we go somewhere nearby to talk and invited him to breakfast, but he seemed hesitant to accept the offer. As we stood in the door talking, two men appeared, one middle-aged, the other young, and took him aside and spoke with him out of my earshot. They were neighbors. They knew something about his situation, apparently, and looked out for him. I remembered that these same men, or at least the
younger one, had appeared during that first visit three months before.