people began to suspect that Bishop Gerardi’s murder had occurred on the date it did because those who planned the crime knew that the investigation would fall to Ardón. He had only two assistant prosecutors working under him on the Gerardi case, including Gustavo Soria. By contrast, a case involving corruption and contraband rackets had twenty investigators assigned to it.
Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván, the two indigents who were taken into custody the night of the murder, had given conflicting descriptions of the shirtless man, which resulted in quite different composite sketches of the “suspect.” Nevertheless, the sketches had been widely published in the Guatemalan press as the face of Bishop Gerardi’s murderer. Chanax’s and El Chino Iván’s perusal of mug shots led to the arrest, three days after the murder, of Carlos Vielman, a young, alcoholic, sometime indigent. At the police lineup in which Vielman was presented to the witnesses, hidden in a row of other young men, Chanax said that the man without a shirt was not among them, but El Chino Iván positively identified Vielman as the man he had sold cigarettes to that night. Vielman was much shorter than the man both witnesses had earlier described, and he had tousled curly hair. One side of his face was grotesquely swollen from a dental infection. He seemed nearly retarded and had been imprisoned in the past, most recently for public drunkenness, though for only about five days. He had been released from jail less than a week earlier, and had celebrated by embarking on a drinking binge that lasted up to the moment of his arrest.
During the initial interrogation of Vielman, Otto Ardón had bellowed at him: “Confess that in the moment in which Monseñor Juan José Gerardi Conedera was entering the parish house … at about ten at night, you attacked him with a piece of concrete with which you gave him several blows until you caused his death!” Vielman, apparently utterly bewildered, responded with the same words throughout the interrogation: “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
It was almost inconceivable that Vielman, who was lame in one arm, could have wielded the heavy chunk of concrete. The church of San Sebastián was far from his usual stomping grounds by the bus terminal. And what reason could he have had for murdering Bishop Gerardi? Robbery didn’t seem a plausible motive. The bishop’s gold ring and his wallet with fifty dollars inside it had been left on his person. The only things that were missing were the keys to the parish house and to the bishop’s car, the chain from around his neck, and his cheap plastic Casio watch.
ODHA checked out Vielman’s alibi, which seemed solid. After sweeping up, as he often did, in La Huehueteca, a little cantina near the bus terminal, he’d been paid with a bottle of cheap cane liquor, which he shared with other indigent friends, and then he had slept there. Nevertheless, Otto Ardón continued to insist that Vielman was the perpetrator. Ardón may simply have been eager to arrest anyone and perhaps hoped that Carlos Vielman would provide an adequate scapegoat. Or perhaps he really was as incompetent as Edgar Gutiérrez said he was. Gutiérrez had been educated in Mexico as an economist and was responsible for much of the REMHI report’s shape and content. His gentle, soft-spoken demeanor belied an intensely cerebral and complex personality. Gutiérrez’s public calls for Ardón’s removal poisoned relations between ODHA and the prosecutors, although it is hard to imagine that a spirit of collaboration could ever have flowered between them.
The lethargic, seemingly diffident Ardón—the prosecutor bore a remarkable resemblance to an unsmiling Alfred E. Neuman, the cartoon character who is the face of Mad magazine—had been bemoaning to everyone his unlucky fate in drawing such a high-profile, implicitly dangerous case. He let it be known that he had nothing to gain from prosecuting it, that it would be bad for his career. Sometimes, in a tone of weary bravado, he said the pressures and complications of the case didn’t allow him to sleep at night.
VERY QUIETLY, HARDLY NOTICED, FBI agents had slipped into the country a few days after the murder and were aiding Ardón and the prosecutors. Rubén Chanax had passed a polygraph test the FBI administered in which the only question he was asked was if he had seen a shirtless man step out of the garage. El Chino Iván refused to take the test.
In late May, Ardón sent pieces of evidence to the FBI laboratories in Washington, D.C., to find out if the blood or hairs found in the blue sweatshirt corresponded to Vielman’s, or if any traces of Vielman’s body fluids or DNA were on the bishop’s clothes. The results of all those tests would be negative. It was to be an ongoing routine in the investigation. Guatemalan prosecutors would send evidence and samples to Washington and then wait with bated breath for the results, which on every occasion disappointed them. One reason was that the prosecutors were often requesting the wrong kind of information. There was a great deal of Bishop Gerardi’s blood in the garage, tracked all over the house, and left in traces on the walls, but there was not much in the way of incriminating evidence waiting to be discovered in it. And a great deal of potentially crucial evidence had been lost. The single, rather small, bloody footprint found by the bishop’s body, the first and seemingly most promising piece of evidence, was never matched, at least not publicly or officially, to the footwear of any named suspect or witness.
President Arzú responded to the crime by appointing a High Commission of notables, including Rodolfo Mendoza, the minister of the interior, to whom Ronalth Ochaeta had passed the license-plate number. The Church declined to participate, arguing that the work of investigating the crime should be left to those who were presumably better qualified: the police and prosecutors. The Church feared being trapped into sanctioning an official whitewash. It did not go unnoticed that military regimes of the past had typically responded to crises by appointing a political commission.
President Arzú, who was notoriously thin-skinned to begin with, was on the defensive. In his first public interview about the case, published in Prensa Libre, the country’s largest newspaper, Arzú pointed out that just days before in New York City a priest who had done social work in the Bronx had been murdered. “Why should the image of our country be stained,” he said, “and not that of the United States, when these two acts are equally reprehensible and painful?” Throughout the 1980s, when Guatemala was frequently sanctioned for its human rights record, Army and government spokespersons had customarily responded by pointing to the crime rate in New York City and indignantly asking why the UN, American liberals, and human rights organizations weren’t asking for sanctions against the United States as well.
DURING THOSE FIRST DAYS and weeks after the murder, the small team of UN investigators led by Rafael Guillamón, who reported directly to MINUGUA’s chief, Jean Arnault, quietly tried to identify and track down some of the indigents who had slept outside the San Sebastián parish house on the night of the murder. The exact number will probably never be known, but it seems that perhaps eight, though more likely ten or twelve, bolitos were sleeping in the open plaza in front of the church and by the garage that night.
Four nights after the murder, on April 30, three of the bolitos—El Chalupa, El Cachimba, and El Árabe—on their way out of the park to buy a bottle of alcohol, had reportedly been accosted by a group of men who had roughly interrogated and beaten them and even attempted to pull them into a white Mercedes Benz. On another night, shots were said to have been fired into the park.
Some of the bolitos had surprising backgrounds. Two of them, Marco Tulio Rivera and his brother Héctor, were the sons of a former director of the National Police. Marco Tulio had been thrown out of military school as a youth for drunkenness, but Héctor was a civil engineer who had graduated from the military officers’ training academy. Héctor would stay drunk for two months or so, living in the park, then would turn up sober on a highway building crew in the mountains, and then would repeat his odd cycle. He was one of those who said he’d slept through everything the night of the murder. Vilma’s “husband,” the bolito known as Ronco, was also an ex-soldier and claimed to be on the run from a mysterious pursuer.
The bolitos were hardly reliable interview subjects, fogged by drugs and drink and, on the night of April 26 specifically, by whatever soporific they had unwittingly ingested in their unlikely gift basket of cheese
