police arrived fifteen minutes later. A video taken by firemen provides a relatively composed look at what would, within half an hour, be a chaotic and overrun crime scene. The camera moves as slowly as a deep-sea diver’s cinematography around the garage, which is illuminated by fluorescent lights. The white VW Golf is parked on the right side of the garage, behind the beige Toyota. The bishop is lying on his back in the narrow space between a potted palm by the garage wall and the front tire of the Toyota. There is a large pool of blood around his head. His body is partially covered by a rumpled white sheet, and the cuffs of his jeans and his big shoes, the left foot crossed oddly over the right, protrude from underneath. There is a smaller pool of blood on the floor near the VW’s front door, which is slightly ajar. The triangular concrete chunk lies beside it on the polished, speckled stone floor, close to an upright, empty Pepsi bottle. Crumpled pages of newspaper are strewn about. Two vivid, parallel streaks of blood on the floor lead away from the VW to where the body lies, ending at the bishop’s shoes. The blue sweatshirt is on the floor. And a few feet from the body, near the bishop’s head, planted as if it were the last step of someone lifting off into flight, there is a bloody footprint.
In the kitchen, the refrigerator had been left open, and it appeared that at least one of the intruders had drunk from a half-filled pitcher of orange juice that had been full when Margarita López had gone to bed that night. A half-eaten raw hot dog was found in the dirt of one of the potted palms in the garage. An assistant prosecutor assigned to the case would deduce later that night that the piece of hot dog might have been left there by a stray cat that was frequently seen about the house.
DURING HIS YEARS as executive director of ODHA, Ronalth Ochaeta often displayed a temperamental and pugnacious personality that struck some as supercilious. He made enemies and, sometimes, mistakes. But he also, as the coming months would show, often made headway where a more restrained or passive personality might not have. When Ochaeta stepped into the kitchen of the parish house, Monseñor Hernández, a small, plump figure with a rabbit-like face and slanted, almond-shaped eyes, said to him, “This is what happens for trying to investigate the past.” And Father Maco, the priest whom Ana Lucía had gone to pick up at La Candelaria, said, “Yes, I was never in agreement with that.” Ochaeta snapped, “You were never in agreement with anything that Monseñor did, so don’t give me stories.” Monseñor Hernández broke in, “Well, what are you going to do now?” And Ochaeta answered, incredulously, “What am I going to do? You mean what are we going to do!” A third priest, a Spaniard whose surname was Amezaga, a Church conservative, stared at Ochaeta and then said, “But you in ODHA have the experience and should know what to do.”
Then a furious Fernando Penados stormed into the kitchen and said, “Ronalth, come out here! These people are already altering the crime scene! They’re shit! I asked them to widen the area inside the security cordon and they don’t want to!”
The first policemen to arrive had hung yellow tape around an area enclosing the body and the two cars. Even the bloody footprint had been left outside the perimeter of that first cordon, as well as other footprints at the back of the garage. Various crime-scene specialists had arrived soon after, as had the lawyer Axel Romero, the bishop’s nephew, among many others. People were walking around the body, and into and out of the garage and parish house. Some were even ignoring the yellow tape, stepping over it, and eventually it was knocked down. The tape itself became stained with blood. People tracked blood throughout the house.
Fernando Penados shouted at the police, ordering that the cordon be made wider. They obeyed, but then moved it back again. “Of course, later they made it much bigger,” Penados recalled later, “but by then the crime scene was totally contaminated.” Penados went outside and began shouting and kicking at the somnolent bolitos to wake them up, because surely they had seen or heard something.
THE CROWD GREW. Edgar Gutiérrez, from ODHA, was there, as was Helen Mack. Years before, Gutiérrez, who was an economist, had worked for a foundation with Helen’s sister Myrna, the young anthropologist murdered by the EMP’s Archivo. Before her sister’s death, Helen Mack, whose physical resemblance to the character Peppermint Patty in “Peanuts” was often remarked on, was a shy, sheltered real-estate agent from a religiously devout Chinese-Guatemalan family. She belonged to the ultraconservative Roman Catholic order Opus Dei, no less. Helen Mack was still working in real estate and finance, but she was also the founding director of the Myrna Mack Foundation. Her long and still ongoing pursuit of justice for her sister’s murder had made her Guatemala’s most formidable and admired human rights activist. Intelligent and seemingly fearless, Mack projected a focused and even cold implacability along with the most disarming emotional vulnerability, often breaking into heartrending tears when discussing her sister’s murder or having to address the press after yet another discouraging reversal in the courts. Eloquent in public, in private she was usually considerate and kind but also straightforward, blunt, and often astonishingly salty. In that way she resembled Bishop Gerardi, with whom she’d worked closely over the years. Fernando Penados liked to say that it was his dream to one day be head of the Presidential Guard, but only when Helen Mack became president.
Jean Arnault, the French head of the United Nations Peace Verfication Mission, which was assigned to monitor Guatemala’s compliance with the Peace Accords, also arrived on the scene. The multinational mission, which was referred to by its Spanish acronym, MINUGUA (min-U-gwa), was a ubiquitous presence in Guatemala. Arnault was accompanied that night at San Sebastián by Cecilia Olmos, a Chilean working at MINUGUA’s headquarters in Guatemala City, and Rafael Guillamón, a veteran investigator from Spain with years of expertise in Arab counterterrorism. Guillamón, who was in his early forties, was broad-shouldered and compact, with a scruffy reddish beard. He was MINUGUA’s chief police investigator, and he and his small team of two other agents reported solely to Jean Arnault.
The prosecutors of the Public Ministry were assigned cases according to a numeric rotation system, and that weekend Prosecution Unit 6, which was led by Otto Ardón Medina, was on duty. Gustavo Soria, one of the assistant prosecutors from Unit 6, had arrived at San Sebastián shortly before his boss that night. Ardón, a lugubrious, retiring man, mostly hung back and watched the younger, comparatively sleek and self-confident Soria direct the police.
Outside the garage, the groggy indigents told the police that Rubén Chanax had information. He was the only one among them who didn’t drink, they said, and so he’d “seen everything.” Chanax told the prosecutors and the police about the shirtless man who’d stepped out of the garage. He was whisked away to a police station, and his long journey as a protected witness, in the custody of the National Police and the Public Ministry, began.
Back inside the house, Ronalth Ochaeta was struck by Father Mario’s seemingly preternatural serenity, and by how neatly dressed he was, all in black, in a black leather jacket, his hair looking recently washed and combed. He abruptly asked the priest what had happened, and Father Mario again launched into his story. Later, when Ochaeta asked if he could use the bathroom in the priest’s bedroom, Father Mario said no, and directed him to another bathroom in the house. Ochaeta watched Father Mario going into his bedroom and thought it was odd, the way he opened the door just enough to be able to slide in sideways.
The attorney general, the head of the Public Ministry (a presidential appointee), arrived and embraced Ochaeta. “Hijos de puta, this has all the marks of los de allí enfrente,” he said—“of those from just over there.” He obviously meant the EMP’s military intelligence unit. He telephoned another prosecutor from his office, Fernando Mendizábal de la Riva, who came to the church and, soon after arriving, remarked to Rafael Guillamón, MINUGUA’s chief investigator, “This looks like the work of esa gente—those people.” In Guatemala such euphemisms are easily understood. But Mendizábal de la Riva was known to be a friend of General Marco Tulio Espinosa, who until his recent promotion to head the Army High Command had been the head of the EMP, and was now seen as the most powerful figure in the Guatemalan Army. So even people with powerful political appointments,
