that later they would most likely deny having made. Even politically compromised and complicit people do not always behave predictably, just as, of course, the most disciplined and intricately plotted crime does not always turn out exactly according to design.
Nery Rodenas, the coordinator of ODHA’s legal team, lived well outside the city with his wife and small children, and he didn’t have a telephone, so someone from ODHA drove to his house and brought him back to San Sebastián. Rodenas had studied law at the public university, San Carlos, at the same time as Ronalth Ochaeta. But while Ochaeta made his name in political circles as a member of the University Students’ Association, Rodenas was the leader of a Catholic students’ group. He had converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism as a teenager. Tersely soft-spoken, Nery Rodenas had the melancholy eyes, rosebud mouth, plump cheeks, and somewhat stiff but gentle air of a clerk in a Botero painting. Of all his colleagues at ODHA—at least the ones I was to get to know—Rodenas was the only devout, practicing Catholic.
Nery Rodenas reached the church of San Sebastián sometime between two and two-thirty in the morning and pushed his way through the crowd gathered in front of the garage door. All around him people were weeping, or conversing in hushed tones, or taking notes and snapshots as Gustavo Soria and the police worked inside the now re-expanded security cordon. Rodenas turned around and saw a man—short, brown-complexioned, with a mustache—taking photographs with a flash, and he realized that he had seen him before. The man wasn’t a photojournalist. Rodenas had seen him in the old colonial city of Antigua, at the trial of the accused murderer of a twenty-year-old milkman named Haroldo Sas Rompich.
THE PRESENCE of the short man who was taking photographs was one of hundreds of threads of evidence that would eventually be woven into the investigation and prosecution of the murder of Bishop Gerardi, Guatemala’s “crime of the century”—the most important, and certainly the most bizarrely spectacular, passionately contested, and convoluted legal case in the country’s history. Years later Rodenas and others would still be pulling on that particular thread, investigating and debating its significance.
One day in February 1996, President Álvaro Arzú, not even a month into his term as president, and his wife had been horseback riding through the countryside near Antigua, accompanied by their EMP bodyguards in a caravan of vehicles and horses, when the milkman Sas Rompich drove into their path in the 1984 Isuzu pickup in which he made his daily rounds. It is possible that Sas Rompich was at least a little drunk. Earlier, he’d stopped at a small country store to drink a few beers to help lighten a hangover, and now he was on his way to the farm where he picked up his milk. Captain Byron Lima, of the EMP Presidential Guard, alertly rode his horse into the path of the oncoming pickup, holding out his hand for the driver to stop, but the pickup kept on coming forward, and the horse reared, throwing its rider, who broke his arm. The pickup then crashed into a parked car by the side of the road. Apparently confused and panicked, the milkman accelerated, then rocked into reverse, and another officer jumped onto the pickup’s running board and reached in for the ignition, trying to bring the vehicle under control. Someone else shot out the rear tires. A guardsman drove his car against the front of the pickup, blocking it, and someone went right up to the pickup with a nine-millimeter pistol in his hand, reached in through the window, and fired three bullets into the milkman, including one into his ear, killing him instantly.
The government subsequently announced that the president’s bodyguards had heroically prevented an attempted double assassination of President Arzú and his wife. No one could deny that the milkman had given the first couple a scare. The first lady had turned and galloped her horse into a nearby field, leaping a fence. In the past, the declaration of a threat to the president would have been enough to put an end to the matter. The legal system, the press, and all relevant actors would have asked no more questions. But in the new climate established by the Peace Accords people were willing to entertain the idea that the president’s security guards might have displayed a reckless disregard for human life, perhaps even committed murder.
ODHA lawyers represented the victim’s family at the trial of the guardsman, Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva, who was accused of having murdered the milkman. Mario Domingo’s account of the incident, which was also the prosecution’s, as narrated above, was based on the testimony of the sole civilian witness: a youth who was out riding his bicycle when, as he was about to overtake the slow-moving presidential caravan, he was ordered to dismount and walk alongside.
At the trial, members of the EMP and other military types crowded the courtroom. The short, dark photographer that Nery Rodenas saw the night of Bishop Gerardi’s murder had turned up daily to focus his camera on the people from ODHA and others who had come to observe the unprecedented trial of a member of the president’s security force. He was also seen outside the courthouse photographing the license plates of automobiles. Suspecting that the photographer was not a journalist, Ronalth Ochaeta asked the judges at the trial to demand that he identify himself. The photographer’s identification card revealed that he was from the EMP. In the end, Obdulio Villanueva received a five-year sentence for the murder of the milkman. ODHA had asked for the maximum penalty under the circumstances, thirty years.
That night in the church of San Sebastián, Nery Rodenas sought out Ronalth Ochaeta and Fernando Penados and told them that there was a man from the EMP taking pictures inside the garage. When Jean Arnault, the head of MINUGUA, dispatched his investigators to look into the matter, the photographer identified himself as a member of the director of the National Police’s advance security. By then, Nery Rodenas and some of the others had noticed that the photographer wasn’t alone. A tall, thin man who wore a red baseball cap, with the bill pulled low over his face, accompanied him. Later the man was seen in the park, talking into a portable radio.
Ángel Conte Cojulún, the director of the National Police, arrived at San Sebastián at three in the morning. When he was informed that his advance security had been inside the parish house taking photographs, he responded that he didn’t have any advance security. Accompanied by the MINUGUA investigators, Conte Cojulún went to speak with the suspicious men, who insisted on talking with him alone. After a few minutes, the two men left the park, and Conte Cojulún spoke to Fernando Penados. “Listen, Fernando, they’re with the EMP,” he said. “Don’t make such a big deal out of it.”
AT SOME POINT during that long night, Helen Mack and the bishop’s protégés from ODHA, Ronalth Ochaeta, Edgar Gutiérrez, and Fernando Penados, huddled together on the ground in one of the inner patio gardens of the parish house and had a conversation, which, as the situation developed over the next few days, resulted in a decision that ODHA should form its own team to document the case. Experience had taught them that it would be naive to assume that an investigation conducted by the government would not be biased, or that it would go after the most obvious suspects, the people in the Army, or with ties to the Army, most threatened by the REMHI report.
The idea that ODHA should form its own team seems to have been Helen Mack’s. She also suggested that night that forensic anthropologists from ODHA should attend the autopsy of the bishop’s body. ODHA teams were participating in the exhumations of clandestine graves and massacre sites then being conducted throughout the country, and Ochaeta phoned two of the forensics specialists.
Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez agreed that they shouldn’t leave the parish house until the bishop’s body was taken to the morgue. “I just sat there,” Ochaeta recalled. “I’d get up, sit down, get up. Edgar too. Nobody said anything. I think an hour, an hour and a half went by. We just looked at each other without saying anything.”
Helen Mack, though, was in constant motion. She had gone to fetch her friend Dr. Mario Iraheta, a respected forensics specialist, and bring him to San Sebastián. Now she came to sit with the men from ODHA. “Chafas cerotes hijos de la gran puta,” she burst out. Chafas is slang for military officers; cerotes is a common Guatemalan vulgarism, something like little pieces of shit. “Chafas cerotes hijos de la gran puta!” she repeated several times. “Estos
