The Art of Political Murder. Francisco Goldman

What? How? Impossible?

      “They attacked him when he was coming into his house and killed him.”

      Ronalth Ochaeta said he was on his way to San Sebastián, and he hung up. A moment later the phone rang again. It was Dr. Penados, telling him to stay put, that he was sending his son Fernando over to pick him up. In a daze, Ochaeta went back into the bedroom. Sonia was sitting on the bed with the lights on. “What happened?” she asked, and he answered calmly, “They killed Monseñor,” and added, a moment later, “Hijos de la gran puta”—sons of a big whore. Sonia wailed, “I’m afraid! Don’t go, please don’t go!” and began to sob.

      From far away on the Tulum Zu highway, empty of traffic at that hour, he heard the engine of a speeding car and knew it was Fernando Penados, on the way to pick him up.

      FERNANDO PENADOS, the archbishop’s twenty-eight-year-old nephew, had been awakened by his father and told of the murder of Bishop Gerardi. The bishop had been Fernando Penados’s mentor. Fernando’s family had always hoped that he would become a priest. As an unruly teenager with all too secular interests he’d even been sent to live in the Archbishop’s Palace in the cathedral, where his family arranged for him to have a seminarian as a roommate. “To see if he could influence my behavior,” Penados would tell me later. “But in the end I didn’t comprehend much of the process in which I was immersed. And the seminarian decided to leave the seminary.” Penados, who kept his hair short, almost in a crewcut, and wore dark sunglasses all the time and T-shirts that showed off a weight lifter’s biceps, had an improbably grandiloquent but often playful way of speaking. It wasn’t until he was twenty and went to work for Bishop Gerardi at ODHA that he found what felt like a true calling.

      When describing his years working under Bishop Gerardi, Fernando Penados frequently used the phrase “my formation.” Investigating human rights cases was “a part of my formation,” as was this or that memorable conversation, beginning with the two-hour monologue Bishop Gerardi had delivered on Guatemalan political realities during what was supposed to have been his job interview in 1990. Bishop Gerardi frequently took trips abroad to represent ODHA in various international forums, and Fernando Penados occasionally accompanied him. He relished the closeness they shared on those trips, especially on the long flights to Europe. “They were a part of my formation, those ten hours in the air, something I took advantage of,” he said. “Talking about how he saw the Army, the war, the civilian sector, the inner workings of the Church, always accompanied by a pair of wiskitos.” They would sip their whiskeys and talk, Penados said, “about the everyday problems that arise. Well, maybe not so everyday. For example, when I was working with him there was a period when I was going through a divorce. I talked about how difficult it was within my family, which was so conservative. He was at my wedding. I was married by the archbishop and two priests, in the cathedral. They really had me roped up!” He felt that Bishop Gerardi understood him and gave him helpful advice.

      Investigating human rights cases for ODHA was probably the best education in criminal investigation that could be had in Guatemala. By the time he was twenty-three, Fernando Penados had been involved in some of the country’s most notorious and murkiest crimes, including the murder, in 1990, of the young anthropologist Myrna Mack Chang, who was stabbed twenty-seven times on a downtown street in a political execution faked to resemble a crime of passion or drug-frenzied robbery. Mack was murdered primarily because her research on the war’s impact on highland Maya communities, especially internal refugees such as those living in the resistance communities hidden deep in the mountains, had brought her to the Army’s attention. (The Army denied the existence of the resistance communities.) The extraordinary investigation and unprecedented court fights that followed, driven by the relentless perseverance of Myrna’s sister Helen Mack, had resulted in the arrest, trial—after twelve judges resigned from the case because of death threats—and conviction, in 1993, of the “stabber,” Noél Beteta, an Army sergeant and operative in the EMP’s covert intelligence unit, the Archivo.

      The Myrna Mack case was at that time the last known instance in which a Guatemalan police homicide detective had dared to investigate evidence pointing to the Army’s participation in a political murder. The detective, José Mérida Escobar, was a young officer known for his firm character and exceptional tenacity. José Mérida had selected another young police detective, Julio Pérez Ixcajop, to be his assistant, and they soon received warnings from a policeman who knew that Noél Beteta was the killer and that he was from the EMP’s Archivo. The policeman told them to be careful, “because there are some things that should be investigated, and others not.” When José Mérida persisted, he began receiving threats. He was demoted and then arrested on false charges of dereliction of duty. At his departmental hearing, he revealed that he’d discovered evidence of the Archivo’s involvement in Myrna Mack’s murder. A few weeks later, in October 1990, José Mérida was assassinated in a park across the street from the National Police headquarters. He took four bullets in the face. A platoon of armed police standing nearby looked on. “They left him to die like a wounded animal,” another former criminal investigations police officer would testify before the International Court of Human Rights, in San José, Costa Rica, years later.

      The National Police was no place to learn how to be a homicide detective. Fernando Penados took courses in various aspects of criminology sponsored by the FBI and by the French and Spanish governments, and then, in 1996, when he was twenty-six, he left ODHA to take a job as subdirector of investigations in the Public Ministry—more or less the Guatemalan equivalent of the U.S. Department of Justice—a job from which he soon resigned, because, as he put it, “there were too many criminals working there.” At the time of Bishop Gerardi’s murder, he was teaching at the National Police Academy, as well as studying business administration at Rafael Landívar University.

      That Sunday night—or Monday morning, by then—after Penados picked Ronalth Ochaeta up at his home (he said he found Ochaeta in a nearly catatonic state), he drove the less than four miles to the church of San Sebastián in about four minutes. They rode in silence, although finally Penados asked, “What do you think?” and traded a few observations, such as that the church was only a block from the headquarters of the EMP. But it seemed impossible that the Army would dare to murder the bishop. Fernando Penados was on the verge of weeping, and Ochaeta said, “Now isn’t the time.” He said that they had to stay calm, that they would need all their wits.

      It was about one-twenty-five when they reached the church. The police and firemen (the latter have the job of collecting dead bodies in Guatemala, and function as ambulance drivers too) had arrived and were inside the garage. There was more than one Japanese compact parked among the cars in the drive. The door of the parish house was answered by Ana Lucía Escobar, a pretty young woman known as La China. Ana Lucía was a member of the household of Monseñor Efraín Hernández, the chancellor of the Curia, and she was destined for a lasting role in future speculations about the crime. Fernando Penados asked Ana Lucía—he’d known her since childhood—“¿Qué pasó?” and remained behind a moment, talking with her, while Ronalth Ochaeta went into the house. Ochaeta walked down the corridor connecting the priests’ bedrooms to the kitchen and garage, which was already full of people. The cook, Margarita López, intercepted him, wailing, “¡Se nos fue! ¡Se nos fue!” He’s been taken from us! Just then Father Mario approached. Father Mario was a bulky, phlegmatic, yet refined-looking person, and he had a serene expression on his thin-lipped, pale face. His eyes were magnified by the lenses of a large pair of designer glasses. “And without my having asked him anything,” Ochaeta recalled later, the priest launched into his story of how he had found the bishop’s body—the light that woke him, the body he hadn’t recognized, and so on. “There he is, lying in the garage, do you want to see him?” asked the priest. Ochaeta said no, and turned into the kitchen, where Monseñor Hernández was huddled with two other priests.

      AS CHANCELLOR of the Curia—something like the chief administrator of the archdiocese—Monseñor Efraín Hernández was third in the Church hierarchy, behind Archbishop Penados and Bishop Gerardi. His parish was El Calvario, a massive old church located at Eighteenth Street and Seventh Avenue, in one of downtown Guatemala City’s busiest and seediest districts. Monseñor Hernández shared the parish house with