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Authors: Francisco Goldman
The Art of Political Murder
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Also by Francisco Goldman
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The Ordinary Seaman
The Divine Husband
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WHO KILLED THE BISHOP?
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN
Copyright © 2007 by Francisco Goldman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Parts of this work have appeared in
The New Yorker
and the
New York Review of Books
.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4637-4
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
Por los que creyeron
. For the believers.
And in memory of
Darinel Domingo Montejo, José Mérida Escobar,
Mama Lotti, and others unnamed
No hay nada más injusto que lo justo
.
Nothing is more unjust than what is just.
âLope de Vega
Neighborhood of the Murder
San Sebastián Parish House
Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera (1922â1998)
THE MURDER
APRIL 26, 1998
O
NE
S
UNDAY AFTERNOON
, a few hours before he was bludgeoned to death in the garage of the parish house of the church of San Sebastián, in the old center of Guatemala City, Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera was drinking Scotch and telling stories at a small gathering in a friend's backyard garden. Bishop Gerardi's stories were famously amusing and sometimes off-color. He had a reputation as a
chistoso
, a joker. “In a meeting with him, you would get this whole repertoire of jokes,” Father Mario Orantes Nájera, the parish's assistant priest, told police investigators two days later. “I wish you could have known him.” Guatemalans admire someone who can tell
chistes
. A good
chiste
is, among other things, a defense against fear, despair, and the loneliness of not daring to speak your mind. In the most tense, uncomfortable, or frightening circumstances, a Guatemalan always seems to come forward with a
chiste
or two, delivered with an almost formal air, often in a recitative rush of words, the emphasis less in the voice, rarely raised, than in the hand gestures. Even when laughter is forced, it seems like a release.
Guatemalans have long been known for their reserve and secretiveness, even gloominess. “Men remoter than mountains” was how Wallace Stevens put it in a poem he wrote after visiting “alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.” Two separate, gravely ceremonious, phantasmagoria-prone cultures, Spanish
Catholic and Mayan pagan, shaped the country's national character, along with centuries of cruelty and isolation. (At the height of the Spanish empire, ships rarely called at Guatemala's coasts, for the land offered little in the way of spoils, especially compared with the gold and silver available in Mexico and South America.) In 1885, a Nicaraguan political exile and writer, Enrique Guzmán, described the country as a vicious, corrupt police state, filled with so many government informers that “even the drunks are discreet”âan observation that has never ceased to be quoted because it has never, from one ruler or government to the next, stopped seeming true.
Bishop Gerardi was a big man, and still robust, though he was seventy-five years old. He was over six feet tall and weighed about 235 pounds. He had a broad chest and back; a prominent, ruddy nose; and thick, curly gray hair. After the murder, his friends recalled not only his sense of humor and affection for alcohol but also his voracious reading, his down-to-earth intelligence, and a nearly clairvoyant understanding of Guatemala's notoriously tangled, corrupt, and lethal politics, which made him by far the most trusted adviser on such matters to his superior, Archbishop Próspero Penados del Barrio, a less worldly figure. Soon after Penados was named archbishop, in 1983, he had recalled Gerardi from political exile in Costa Rica. As the founding director of the Guatemalan Archdiocese's Office of Human Rights (Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala), which was usually referred to by its acronym, ODHAâpronounced OH-dahâGerardi became one of the Catholic Church's most important and visible spokesmen and leaders.
The gathering in the garden on that last afternoon of Bishop Gerardi's life was a celebration of the completion of
Guatemala: Never Again
, a four-volume, 1,400-page report on an unprecedented investigation into the “disappearances,” massacres, murders, torture, and systematic violence that had been inflicted on the population of Guatemala since the beginning of the 1960s,
decades during which right-wing military dictators and then military-dominated civilian governments waged war against leftist guerrilla groups. An estimated 200,000 civilians were killed during the war, which formally ended in December 1996 with the signing of a peace agreement monitored by the United Nations. The Guatemalan Army had easily won the war on the battlefield, but making peace with the guerrillas had become a political and economic necessity. Still, the Army was able to dictate many of the terms of the agreement and engineered for itself and for the acquiescent guerrilla organizations a sweeping amnesty from prosecution for war-related crimes. This “piñata of self-forgiveness” was an ominous beginning for an era supposedly based on such democratic values as the rule of law and access to justice, as well as demilitarization.
The peace agreement endorsed a truth commission sponsored by the UNâthe Historical Clarification Commissionâwhich was intended to establish the history of the crimes of the previous years. But many human rights activists, including Bishop Gerardi, who had participated in the peace negotiations, doubted that the UN commission would be able to provide a thorough accounting of events. The commission was not permitted to identify human rights violators by name or assign responsibility for killings. Testimony given to the commission could not be used for future prosecutions. As a counterweight, under Gerardi's guidance, ODHA had initiated a parallel and supportive investigation, the Recovery of Historical Memory Project (Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica), known as REMHI (REM-hee), which in April 1998 produced
Guatemala: Never Again
. Bishop Gerardi wrote an introduction to the report.
On Wednesday, April 22, Bishop Gerardi, along with Ronalth Ochaeta, a thirty-three-year-old lawyer who was the executive director of ODHA, and Edgar Gutiérrez, the thirty-six-year-old coordinator of REMHI, held a press conference to brief reporters on the general content of
Guatemala: Never Again
. When a reporter
asked if they were taking extra security precautions, Gerardi ceded the microphone to Gutiérrez, and turned to whisper in Ochaeta's ear, “
Qué vaina
,” which is not exactly translatable, but in this context meant something like, “Damn.” Shortly after the murder, Ochaeta saw a newspaper photograph that captured the instant after that whispered exclamation. The bishop had just settled back in his chair, a look of grim preoccupation on his face.
The next evening, Thursday, April 23, Bishop Gerardi and his associates invited journalists and influential personages to a dinner in the Archbishop's Palace in the sprawling Metropolitan Cathedral complex, near the church of San Sebastián. That night, copies of the first two volumes of
Guatemala: Never Again
â“The Impact of the Violence” and “The Mechanisms of Horror”âwere handed out. While the guests dined, Bishop Gerardi explained REMHI's methodology, and afterward he took questions. Over a two-year period, he said, some 800 people had undergone intensive training for interviewing and collecting testimony for the investigation. Operating from thirteen regional centers, the “reconciliation facilitators” had spanned out across the country. Guatemala's population is at least 60 percent Mayan Indian, and the Maya, the rural peasantry especially, had borne the brunt of the war's carnage. Well over half of the interviews for
Guatemala: Never Again
had been conducted in fifteen Mayan languages and the rest in Spanish.