then another, a domino effect of waking bolitos. I saw their wild-haired heads turning, eyes blinking open in grime-blackened faces as they pushed themselves up off their cardboard beds.
“¡La policí-í-í-í-a!” one began to taunt, voice thick with false fright and real mockery. “¡Ayyy! ¡Ayyy! ¡La policí-í-í-í-a!” And then another, in a sarcastic singsong, cawing, “We didn’t see a thing! ¿Nosotros? Us? Who, us? We didn’t see aaaanything. We don’t know aaaanything.” Were these really the same bolitos who were in the park the night Bishop Gerardi was killed? I had been told that the bolitos had scattered to other parks, or dropped from sight. But some of them, apparently, had drifted back.
The next morning, Sunday, the previous night’s howling wraiths were sitting quietly on benches, looking like circus clowns who’d been shot out of cannons and stunned into a stupor by a hard landing. Car washers worked along the sidewalks. Bright orange flower petals had dropped from towering fuego del bosque trees and were spread prettily over the grass and concrete pathways. Since the murder, the park, which now had a twenty-four-hour police presence, had become a favorite make-out spot for adolescents. A female bolito, frumpy and dirty, with a sagging face and feral black hair, was sitting against the wall of the parish-house garage. She looked something like that inebriated woman, despondent and dazed, in the café in the famous Degas painting. She said her name was Vilma. This was the Vilma the investigators from MINUGUA had heard muttering about homosexuals having killed Bishop Gerardi.
The beloved bishop’s murder, followed by the arrest of Father Mario, and innuendos about a homosexual crime of passion, had, of course, hit like a succession of earthquakes in the old parish of mainly middle-class and poor residents, of old-fashioned manners and morality, where scandals are buried secrets within families. Father José Manuel, Father Mario’s replacement, a trim young man with a reserved and thoughtful air, told me that attendance, especially after the arrest, had fallen off drastically, though it was starting to come back now. “There’s been so much confusion,” he said.
None of the people I approached as that morning’s Baptism Mass let out wanted to discuss the crime or its impact on the parish. Only a man selling cotton candy would venture an opinion. Father Mario had been a very punctual priest, he told me, and would have finished the Mass half an hour earlier than Father José Manuel had. “And I’d be over at the church of the Recoleción by now,” he said, “selling to the people arriving for the noon Mass.”
That afternoon, I had lunch with a friend of a friend of mine in New York, Andy Kaufman, who had spent several years in Guatemala as a founding member of a forensics team that conducted some of the first exhumations of massacre sites in the country. Andy had also worked with MINUGUA and had helped ODHA set up its own exhumation unit. His friend was close to people in ODHA and was familiar with their version, though not the details, of the Gerardi case. During the four months since the murder, ODHA and the prosecutors from the Public Ministry had been, under great pressure, investigating the crime and pursuing theories about it, building their competing narratives. ODHA, Andy’s friend said, was firmly convinced that it had been a political assassination, most likely carried out by the military. Apparently, ODHA had some evidence of its own, including credible anonymous tips and a possible key witness who, unfortunately, neither ODHA nor anyone else could find. Nobody at ODHA believed the scenario involving dog bites, or that Father Mario had been the murderer.
After lunch that Sunday, I strolled through the mildly crowded downtown streets, thinking over what Andy’s friend had told me. I stopped at the Metropolitan Cathedral, where a Mass was in session, and stood at the side of the altar, behind a faded velvet cordon. A man was playing an organ and there was a choir consisting of a small number—five? eight? I no longer remember—of mostly middle-aged and elderly women of very humble appearance. One was dressed partially in Indian garb, with a woven shawl around her shoulders. She seemed prematurely withered and gaunt, her black hair roughly cut and greasy-looking. I especially remember the way she kept glancing at me, this stranger who was watching her and the choir too intently, her eyes filled with nervous fear. Her fear ignited, or rather revived, mine, like the disease the Indians call susto, a “fright” that you can catch like a cold, fear leaping from someone’s glance into your own, a low-grade contamination that felt so familiar that it was just like stepping back into the past, into the Guatemala of the war years and its suffocating atmosphere of paranoia.
I KNEW THAT I NEEDED to gain the confidence of people at ODHA, but it was not an opportune moment. A reporter from the Miami Herald had recently published a story alleging that Father Mario was a homosexual, citing an anonymous source close to ODHA. I learned later that the reporter had quoted from an off-the-record conversation, or so his source insisted. In any case, the incident had caused problems for ODHA, especially within the Church, and it fed a long-standing distrust of journalists, both Guatemalan and foreign. Andy Kaufman’s contacts were more immediately helpful at the offices of the UN mission, MINUGUA, and I quickly found an ally there in Cecilia Olmos, who had gone to San Sebastián the night of the murder with Jean Arnault, the director of MINUGUA, and Rafael Guillamón, its chief investigator. Olmos was a Chilean woman in her forties with a leonine mop of reddish hair. If the UN mission couldn’t help Guatemalans solve the Gerardi case, she said to me one day, then she didn’t see what reason it had for being in the country.
The ODHA office was in a Spanish colonial building nearly two centuries old in the Metropolitan Cathedral complex, two blocks from the headquarters of the Presidential Guard and four blocks from the church of San Sebastián. Its massive double wooden doors—they looked more like the gates to a medieval castle—opened onto a courtyard paved with rough gray stones where vehicles were parked. Visitors buzzed an intercom in the blackened stone frame of the entrance and, once admitted through a small door set in one of the larger ones, stepped into a vestibule where a receptionist sat behind bulletproof glass. An open corridor with a red-tiled roof ran around an interior courtyard, with offices, workrooms, and storage areas opening onto it.
On my first visits to ODHA I met with Ronalth Ochaeta, who was friendly enough and reasonably forthcoming, but careful. He phrased his answers to my questions as if he expected to see them printed in a newspaper the next day. He did, however, let me hang around a bit, and one day he introduced me to Fernando Penados, who was in charge of the murder investigation and was obviously the key person for me to talk to. But Fernando came off as intimidating and hermetic, and he rebuffed my first attempts to interview him. I got around that with the help of Cecilia Olmos, who fed me morsels of information from MINUGUA that I could drop. This went on for a while, until Fernando finally, he told me later, said to some of his colleagues, “How has that pisado—asshole—found out so much?” Which led to what would become many, many conversations.
Ronalth Ochaeta (front right), carrying the coffin of Bishop Gerardi
Fernando Penados’s tough-guy air seemed at odds with his upbringing as a possible prince of the Church, although it was leavened by a good-natured charm. There was also, I eventually realized, an impressionable side to Fernando—a touch of immaturity and romantic or overheated imagination—but he was hardly a naïf. He told me that during the discussions between ODHA and the Church about forming an independent team to investigate the bishop’s murder, he had proposed two options. “One, we can form a team that will be able to conduct a real criminal investigation,” he had said. “People with incredible experience in investigating cases, but who, because of their past, have their vulnerable points. If we pay them well, these people will find the person who came out of the garage without a shirt. Or, two, we can form an ODHA type of team, with clean, trustworthy people. People who don’t have experience in criminal investigations.” The Church authorities, said Fernando, “in the very logical and wise explanations that they gave me,” decided, of course, that they couldn’t pay the sort of people he was talking about. “They said, ‘We’ll have an ODHA-type team just to document the
