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 his longtime cook, Imelda Escobar, and several of her relatives, including her daughter, Ana Lucía, and a nephew named Dagoberto Escobar. It was Dagoberto who, around midnight, had answered the phone when Father Mario called about the bishop’s murder. Monseñor Hernández had been asleep since around ten. When he came to the phone, he asked Father Mario, whom he had known since Mario was a child, if he had called the police and firemen. When Father Mario answered that he hadn’t, Hernández told him to do so immediately.
Ana Lucía Escobar, La China, said later that she was awoken by her mother, and that she dressed as quickly as she could, and that she then drove Monseñor Hernández, along with her cousin Dagoberto, to the church of San Sebastián. She said that she remembered glancing at the digital clock in the car and noting that it was a little past midnight, and that they made the drive quickly.
After telephoning Monseñor Hernández, Father Mario made other calls, to his parents and to friends in Houston, Texas, where he often went for medical treatment. He phoned the distraught Juana Sanabria at ten minutes past midnight. When Father Mario told her that the bishop had been killed, and that he was in the garage, she suggested that maybe he was only badly wounded, but the priest repeated that Monseñor was in the garage, and said that she should come immediately and to bring her parish house keys. “I fell apart and couldn’t utter a word,” she would recount later, “and my legs went weak, and my body wouldn’t respond, the news had such a horrible impact, and then I said, Father, I don’t feel well.” So he told her to stay where she was. She turned on the radio and sat listening to the live coverage from San Sebastián that soon commenced. But first she had her daughter phone the bishop’s nephew, Axel Romero, a lawyer, who remembered receiving the call at precisely twelve-fifteen. Romero phoned Father Mario at the parish house to verify the terrible news, and the priest asked him to come right over.
When Monseñor Hernández arrived at San Sebastián, Father Mario led him into the garage. Hernández asked the priest if he’d given the bishop the last rites, and when he answered that he had not, Hernández performed the holy sacrament.
Ana Lucía Escobar told me later, over the telephone, in her small, softly melodic voice, that Monseñor Hernández then came to get her in the parish office. “He took me by the arm and walked me down the corridor, and he said, ‘Monseñor is dead, do you want to see him?’ At first I said yes, but when we got there, and I saw the blood, I said no, and went back.” Ana Lucía was put to work making telephone calls to inform church authorities and others of the bishop’s death. First she phoned Archbishop Penados. Ronalth Ochaeta’s cell phone was turned off. Then she phoned Dr. Julio Penados. Using a church directory that was in the office, she phoned bishops, members of the Episcopalian Conference, and other parish priests. The people who received those calls telephoned others in turn and the news of Bishop Gerardi’s murder, invariably met with exclamations of incredulity and shock, was quickly relayed throughout the city, the country, and beyond. Telephone records would reveal that one of the calls from the parish house was made to a pay phone outside a military academy in San Marcos. The likeliest explanation was that it was a wrong number: the pay phone’s number was only one digit off from the telephone number of the Bishop of San Marcos, Álvaro Ramazzini. Still, the day after news of the mysterious call appeared in a newspaper, the phone itself vanished, torn from its post.
Monseñor Hernández sent Ana Lucía to pick up Father Maco, Marco Aurelio González—“the priest with the two Saint Bernard dogs,” as Ana Lucía described him—at the church of La Candelaria, because the priest didn’t drive.
At twelve-forty AM, the firemen of Substation 2 had received a telephone call from Father Mario, who didn’t identify himself, informing them of a dead body in the San Sebastián parish house. Five minutes later, a detachment of firemen left in an ambulance.
At twelve-forty-eight, Father Mario finally phoned the police. He and one of the bolitos, El Monstruo Jorge, waited outside the church, and when they saw a police car passing in front of the park—it was now ten past one—they shouted and waved their arms, but the car kept on going. Five minutes later the firemen arrived and went into the garage,
