The Art of Political Murder. Francisco Goldman

On Saturday nights, Bishop Gerardi customarily dined with Juana Sanabria and her teenage daughter in their home, and then they would watch a movie starring Cantinflas, the classic Mexican comedian, on television. Perhaps nobody was closer to Bishop Gerardi than Juana Sanabria and her daughter. But sometimes Bishop Gerardi forgot to call, so when ten o’clock passed that Sunday without any message, Juana Sanabria at first tried to reassure herself that there was no reason to worry. She couldn’t restrain her anxiety, however, and, at ten-thirty she phoned the parish house. For the next hour or so, Juana Sanabria said, she phoned every fifteen minutes, and then, worried about disturbing Father Mario, she gave up.

      For a long time it was generally believed that Juana Sanabria had called the bishop’s private line, in his bedroom, which was why, according to Father Mario, he couldn’t hear it ringing. But the sacristan said that the telephone in the bishop’s bedroom could be heard throughout the house. Later, Juana Sanabria testified that she had called three different numbers at the parish house that night. She understood the dangers that came with having published the REMHI report, and she’d noticed, that last Saturday night when Bishop Gerardi was in her home, that he was preoccupied, so much so that he hadn’t even stayed for the Cantinflas movie, which always made him laugh. Juana Sanabria would testify that when neither Bishop Gerardi nor anybody else answered any of the parish house phones on Sunday night, she was overcome with fear and foreboding, and began to weep.

      At about half past midnight, perhaps somewhat earlier, the front door of the parish house opened and Father Mario stepped out in his bathrobe and pajamas. Rubén Chanax told investigators later that morning that the priest called out to the row of sleeping bolitos: “Muchá”—which can be short for muchacho, or muchacha, or, as in this case, the plural of those (boys, or youths)—“did any of you see who came in or went out?” One of the bolitos, who was known as El Pitti, and who liked to drink only lethal quimicazo and so had forgone the presumably spiked beer, answered, “Don’t worry, Father, Monseñor went in a while ago.”

      Rubén Chanax said that he got up from his blanket and approached Father Mario and told him that he’d seen a muchacho come out of the garage and that this muchacho had been naked from the waist up. According to Chanax, the priest said, “Ah, then stay here, because I’ve phoned the police.” Chanax’s many subsequent testimonies would never vary regarding what he told the priest, but the first police investigators dispatched to the scene of the murder would report Father Mario’s own account of that moment following his discovery of the body in the garage: “He went to the parish house door, interrogating the ‘bolitos’ who slept in the external part, to the right of the garage, if they had seen anyone coming in or out, the interrogated answering in the negative.” Two days later, in a declaration given to the special prosecutor assigned to the case, the priest would again give the impression that the bolitos had answered by saying they had seen nothing unusual, leaving Chanax out of his account. But Father Mario’s two subsequent declarations, on May 15 and on July 22, would coincide, at least in that one respect, with Chanax’s.

      Father Mario later told investigators that he had spent Sunday afternoon, after the midday Mass, in his bedroom, watching television and dining on his favorite food, fried chicken delivered from Pollo Campero, a popular fast-food chain. After the evening Mass, he took his eleven-year-old German shepherd, Baloo, for a brief walk in the park. A female parishioner who’d attended the Mass asked to speak with him, and he brought the dog inside and went back and spoke to the woman for about ten minutes. At about that time, the choir members who’d sung in the evening Mass left the church. Back in his bedroom, Father Mario changed into his pajamas at his usual hour, around seven-thirty, and went to the parish house kitchen to take medicine for a severe migraine condition. In the kitchen he spoke briefly to Margarita López, the cook, and to the sacristan, Antonio Izaguirre. Usually Margarita López, after serving breakfast, had Sundays off and went to spend the day with her family, but on this Sunday, because of a bad chest cold, she had stayed in the parish house. She and the sacristan shared an evening meal and Margarita López retired to her bed. Around eight-thirty, the sacristan went home. Father Mario fed Baloo, washed up, sat down at his computer, and logged on to the Internet. At about twenty minutes before ten, he said, he turned on the air conditioner and watched television in bed. (In later statements, he would say he was wearing headphones.) A Spanish television show that he wanted to see was on at ten-thirty. He watched the news, but drifted off to sleep, he calculated, at around ten-twenty. He woke half an hour later, turned off the television and lights, and went back to sleep.

      At around midnight, Father Mario said, he turned over in bed and was awakened by a light shining through the glass pane over his bedroom door. “Maybe you turn over in bed,” he explained during that first statement to prosecutors in the parish house two days after the murder, “and púchica”—the inoffensive, popular version of another common though more vulgar exclamation: puta! (whore)—“what’s going on, and then I said, what’s going on, and I got up, right, and I went to turn off the light and I said to myself, Monseñor forgot to turn off the light again.” Bishop Gerardi was supposed to turn off the light in the corridor when he got home. But when Father Mario went out, leaving Baloo behind in his room, he saw that more lights were on at the end of the corridor. “And that,” he said, “seemed strange to me.” The corridor, about thirty feet long, ran the length of the house, from the bedrooms of Father Mario and the bishop, past two small patios, the kitchen, and the cook’s bedroom, directly into the garage, which is in an open area at the end of the house that connects to the church. The priest continued: “But look, licenciado”—the proper form of address for a lawyer—“sometimes, maybe because of the affection you feel for someone, you don’t want to believe that the dead person is that person, right, and so in the first place, like I told you, I didn’t recognize him, you saw how he was, right, he was unrecognizable, so I didn’t recognize him, and with so many bolitos here coming inside …”

      When Father Mario stepped into the garage, he found Bishop Gerardi lying on his back in a pool of blood between the Toyota Corolla and the wall. His mouth was open and his brutally battered face was covered with blood. His legs were crossed at the ankles, and his hands, “his manitas,” said Father Mario to the investigators from the prosecutors’ office two days later, “his little hands were, I don’t know how they were but yes, right, his little hands were how you saw them, he had them like this”—crossed at the wrists and resting on his chest—“and that did seem strange to me, the way he had them crossed, just the way you saw him, that’s how I found him, and also, the sweater was there.” Near a water tank in the garage, a blue sweatshirt had been left on the floor. A triangular concrete paving stone lay not far from the body and some blood. There was blood everywhere.

      Father Mario said that he thought, “Maybe there was a fight here inside, and one of the bolitos died.” He said that he then went back down the corridor to the front door of the parish house, which was double-locked as always, and he unlocked it and stepped out and that was when he “asked the bolitos if they’d seen anything, some fight, some argument or anything, and they said no Father, don’t worry Father, Monseñor went in a while ago, and then that’s what killed me, and I went to my room to get a flashlight, because I didn’t think the light was sufficient, not in the garage or anywhere, and I went back and shined it in his face until I realized it was him, and when I realized it was him, I phoned Monseñor Hernández, the chancellor of the Curia.”

      First, though, he woke the cook, Margarita López, knocking on her door. “Margarita, I told her, ‘They killed Monseñor.’ And then the cook came out and she went to see, she’d been here working for Monseñor for as long as he’d been here, she was his servant, and it was really terrible for her, she began to cry.”

      AT ABOUT ONE O’CLOCK in the morning, Ronalth Ochaeta was awakened by the ringing of the telephone in his living room. It wasn’t uncommon for the Ochaetas to receive calls in the middle of the night, anonymous voices speaking insults and threats or making weird, menacing sounds. Usually Ronalth’s wife, Sonia, got up to disconnect the phone, but this time she didn’t want to get out of bed, so Ronalth did. Instead of unplugging the phone, he answered it, and he was surprised to hear the voice of Dr. Julio Penados, who asked how he was, where he was, and