The Art of Political Murder (47 page)

Mario Domingo was in West Virginia, in his wife's hometown, and I made plans to meet him to celebrate. I pictured it snowing there, probably because it hadn't snowed all winter and in New
York everyone was nostalgic for snow. Mario deserved to feel victorious and vindicated. Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico had described him in their book as “tormented,” and he liked to joke that this was one thing, at least, they'd gotten right. He was suffering from nearly every stress-related ailment imaginable and was taking a few months' respite, studying English at a local community college. Mario had been planning to go back to Guatemala City in March for the next round of legal battles, whatever those would be.

In some ways, Mario Domingo's life story exemplified Guatemalans of his generation. He grew up in the Río Azul valley, in the village of Buxup, part of the municipality of Jacaltenango, which is situated in the western mountains, near the Mexican border. His family are Popti Indians (though Mario had a paternal grandmother who was mestizo, the source of his somewhat lighter complexion). Mario's childhood was spent in extreme poverty. He could remember long stretches of time when he and his siblings were fed nothing but tortillas and a soup of
chilis
and water. A younger sister died of malnutrition.

When Mario was a teenager, he went to live in Huehuetenango, the departmental capital, to study at the Normal School there. He was visiting his family and helping his uncle and other men from their village harvest corn in January 1982 when the Army massacred the inhabitants of a neighboring village, El Limonár. The men saw smoke rising from burning houses and heard gunfire and explosions. Soon afterward, most of Mario's family joined the exodus of people from Jacaltenango who crossed the border to refugee camps and settlements in Mexico. Mario stayed behind and graduated from the Normal School the following year. He had no money and didn't know what to do or where to go. His hometown, Buxup, was by then pretty much deserted, so he decided to join his family in Mexico. But he was turned back at the border, twice, and even ended up spending four days in a Mexican jail.

Mario made his way to Guatemala City, where an American Quaker group provided him with a scholarship and a loan so that he could study law at the University of San Carlos. By the time his parents returned from Mexico, Mario was working as a labor lawyer, and he helped his family settle and gain land titles in what eventually became Central America's largest squatters' barrio, the Colonia Mario Alioto López, on the outskirts of Guatemala City. One after the other of his younger brothers (he had eight siblings) followed in Mario's footsteps, attending the public university and becoming activists.

I planned to meet Mario in West Virginia at the end of January, after I returned from a business trip. But on January 26 he telephoned my apartment in New York. My wife answered. An unspeakable thing had happened. Mario's youngest brother, Darinel, a twenty-one-year-old law student, had been murdered. Darinel had been tortured and shot. Not just tortured—his limbs had been torn from his torso.

Mario said he was going back to Guatemala to take care of his family. He couldn't bear to think that his little brother had been murdered in retaliation for his work on the Gerardi case, that the killing might be a warning about future investigations. It had occurred less than two weeks after the verdicts against the Limas were upheld. Mario insisted that he didn't want to jump to conclusions. Guatemala, after all, was awash in violence. The police were carrying out one of their
limpiezas social
, social cleansings, targeting delinquents and randomly killing poor urban youths on the chance that they might belong to gangs. Perhaps his brother had been accidentally caught up in that. But mutilating their victim? That was what the
maras
sometimes did, and it seemed unlikely that Darinel had somehow made himself an enemy of such a gang.

Like the murder of Bishop Gerardi nearly eight years earlier, the murder of Darinel Domingo
looked
as if it might be a common crime. But, behind our silence, we all—Mario, his friends, and the
people he worked with—knew what such a murder could have been meant to accomplish. Mario Domingo was the only litigation lawyer at ODHA working on the Gerardi case. No one else had the experience and knowledge that he possessed. The Public Ministry had abolished the office of the special prosecutor. Arturo Aguilar, Mario's only legal assistant, hadn't even graduated from law school yet. Fear and doubt struck those working on or associated with the Gerardi case. They all had wives, children, and families to worry about.

I went down to West Virginia to see Mario when he returned from Guatemala. We had dinner with his in-laws in a Mexican restaurant and drove back to their house, where Mario and I sat in the kitchen until dawn with a bottle of bourbon. Darinel had gone out to meet friends on the morning of January 21, Mario said. It was a Saturday, and that night he phoned to tell his parents he wouldn't be returning until the next day. The call—Mario was able to determine this with the help of someone in the telephone company—was made from a pay phone in Zone 1, downtown. Darinel had a girlfriend, also a law student, so it didn't seem strange that he wasn't coming home. But that was the last his family heard from him.

Darinel was a cheerful extrovert who had never been in trouble with the law; nor did he have a reputation as a troublemaker, and he wasn't known to have enemies. On weekend nights, he liked to drink beer with his friends. His family were frantic when they hadn't heard from him by Monday. On Tuesday, when they read a brief notice in
Prensa Libre
that the mutilated body of a young man had been found by a ravine in Zone 12, they ruled out the possibility that it might be Darinel because the paper reported that the body was tattooed. Darinel had no tattoos.

The mutilated body had been taken to the morgue in Amatitlán, just outside the city, and on Thursday, when some of Mario's brothers learned that three more corpses had been taken there, they decided to have a look, just in case. None of the three bodies
that had come in most recently was Darinel's, but the morgue attendant suggested that they look at the other body that nobody had claimed—the one that had been described in the newspaper, erroneously, it turned out, as tattooed. One of Mario's brothers went in to see. The face was too decomposed to recognize, but there was a bracelet around the ankle of a leg that had been detached from the body. Mario's brother instantly identified the ankle bracelet as one his little brother used to wear. He recognized the T-shirt on the torso too. Both legs had been torn from the body, and one was still missing.

The family took Darinel Domingo's remains home to Jacaltenango for burial. (“We
jacaltecos
are like elephants,” Mario told me. “In the end we always want to return to where we were born.”) A few days later, on Monday, February 6—Mario had by then arrived in Guatemala—the police found the other leg in the weeds about two hundred yards from where the torso had been found. Next to it was Darinel's
morral
, an Indian-style woven shoulder bag that he used as a kind of knapsack, and lying on the ground beside it was his identification card. Whoever had murdered Darinel had wanted the body to be identified.

Darinel had probably been killed on Monday. Mario told me that it had been determined that Darinel's legs had been hacked off when he was still alive or very soon after he was dead, before rigor mortis could set in. Often a victim's legs will be cut off after they have stiffened, in order, for example, to be able to fit a corpse into a car trunk. While in Guatemala, Mario also discovered that before the murder, another of his brothers, a social worker, had received death threats by phone.

On Mario's first night back in Guatemala, a friend drove him home from the airport. He'd just stepped inside with his suitcases when the walls lit up with the lights of an ambulance that was followed by police cars. Mario went outside, stopped a police car, and asked what was happening. The policeman told him they had just found two bodies nearby and were looking for another two.
Over the next week, twelve bodies in all were found in the surrounding hillsides, ditches, and fields. Four of the victims were simple construction masons. An eleven-year-old boy had been tortured, his teeth yanked out.

During the previous six years, Mario reminded me that night we sat drinking at the kitchen table in West Virginia, there had been 23,000 homicides in Guatemala. It was a wartime casualty rate. Females accounted for 20 percent of all homicide victims, and over the last three years the number of murdered women and girls in Guatemala had doubled. A lead editorial in
elPeriódico
on March 16, 2006, deplored the violence. “The blood-frenzy with which killings are occurring in Guatemala is exceeding the limits of our imaginations,” the writer said. “People talk about macabre initiation rites for armed gangs, of conflict between mafia capos and
maras
, about destabilizing actions carried out by the parallel state, of violent acts of revenge by illegal groups or the clandestine security apparatus, of psychopaths who kill for pleasure…. Although it sounds like a litany, we never tire of repeating that the only way to humanize our society is through the rule of law.”

Half a century after the United States intervened in Guatemala and created the modern Guatemalan Army, and after the United States supported armed forces of similar character in El Salvador and Honduras through decades of conflict, those three countries had this in common: they were societies that had some of the highest murder rates in the world, and in which the powerful and well connected acted with impunity.

After thirty-six years of internal war and ten of so-called democracy and peace, Guatemala's best hope for warding off the chaos of a totally failed state still lay in the creation and enforcement of an independent legal and judicial system. Functioning democratic institutions—hadn't these been promised in exchange for an abruptly altered national destiny and all the violence and death that ensued whenever the United States intervened in another country? If such a project couldn't be achieved in a speck of
a country like Guatemala, how could it be achieved anywhere else?

With MINUGUA gone from Guatemala, ODHA and other human rights groups had come to rely on the U.S. embassy for vigilance and support. In the kitchen in West Virginia, Mario Domingo acknowledged the historical irony of that. “Sometimes,” he mumbled wearily, “it seems ridiculous.”

Mario had decided to go back to Guatemala. It would be a temporary stay. His immediate concern was to get his terrified family members—as many as were willing to go—out of the country, into foreign asylum programs. After that, he wanted to do what he could about his brother's case. But he had his wife and small child to worry about too. Maybe he'd be able to find a job or a scholarship in some other country. He didn't think it was very likely that he would be returning to ODHA and the Gerardi case. Maybe it was time, he said, for someone else, a new generation, to carry the case forward. Arturo Aguilar would soon be getting his law degree. Arturo had talked it over with his wife. They were both aware of the dangers involved, but he was determined to stay at ODHA, and stay on the case.

“Y
ESTERDAY
I
WAS
in a café-bar in Zone 1 until very late, one near the corner of the National Palace,” Claudia Méndez wrote to me from Guatemala City. “I decided to follow the route the taxi had taken that night on those same streets. It was around eleven. I went around the block several times and past that
callejón
. I drove around the church again. Everything looks so different now…. I felt so sad. How is it possible that we still can't decipher the truth about those last moments?”

Who killed Bishop Juan Gerardi? Most of the men—Colonel Lima seems the only certain exception—who had planned the murder remained free, as did many of the men who had actually taken part in the operation. How many people, in the end, participated in the crime? It depends, I think, on what one means by
“participated.” There are those who think that such a controversial and risky assassination could never have been carried out without the collusion of at least a few people from each of the country's most powerful sectors—military, private, and governmental—with the Oficinita as the likely conduit. For many months before the murder, influential rightist voices had been publishing opinion pieces denouncing the threat Church activists such as Bishop Gerardi represented. By some measures, the murder was a logical and even inevitable expression of the values of broad segments of Guatemalan society—a “culture of death … of fear,” as Pope John Paul II described it a few months after the bishop's murder.

I
T DIDN'T TAKE LONG
for the
patadas de abogado
—the attorneys' last desperate kicks—to manifest themselves. Following the Supreme Court's ruling, the defendants and their lawyers had thirty days to contest it before the Constitutional Court, which is the highest court in Guatemala and which rules on the constitutionality of lower courts' verdicts. Contesting a verdict is done through an
amparo
—a common legal term throughout the Spanish-speaking world—which is neither an appeal nor a mere motion. It has no exact equivalent in the U.S. system. On February 12 the defense lawyers filed their
amparo
, which recycled old arguments, such as that their clients' constitutional rights had been violated because Rubén Chanax's “contradictory testimonies” had been accepted as evidence; that the Church shouldn't have been granted co-plaintiff status; and that the defendants should be convicted for covering up and not as accomplices, because no one could say exactly whose accomplices they were (i.e., Hugo remained a mystery).

Meanwhile, there was a new allegation of corruption in the case, supported by a supposedly incriminating video that was broadcast on Guatemalan television. Escobar Blas, who just before his recent retirement from active duty had been promoted to
colonel, had been personally making the rounds of newspaper offices with copies of the video. It showed a meeting, taped by the Public Ministry, between Celvin Galindo, when he'd just become the special prosecutor, and his predecessor, Otto Ardón, along with other Public Ministry officials, as well as a major from Arzú's EMP, who shouldn't even have been there. The tape showed them watching a television monitor on which videotapes purportedly from Father Mario's collection were being shown. You couldn't actually see what they were watching, but when the tape was shown on television an off-camera voice portentously announced that they were porno videos. You could hear, in a barely audible voice, Ardón defending his scenario of a domestic crime and dog bites. Because Galindo subsequently disregarded Ardón's scenario in his own investigation, the Limas' lawyers were alleging a conspiracy. That was it.