to meet or even to exist.
ODHA believed that the early evidence and leads in the case—the unexplained presence of the two men from the EMP at San Sebastián on the night of the murder, the license-plate number, the activity the taxi driver had glimpsed on the street by the church, the anonymous tips about the Limas—indicated that the murder was carried out by, or at the very least aided by, a clandestine intelligence unit, most likely from within the EMP. But some members of President Arzú’s inner circle were convinced that they had access to far better information than was available to ODHA. They knew that a different spin could be put on the crime, shifting responsibility from the Army to the Church. In this version, which would soon be developed by prosecutors, the murder was a domestic crime of passion, un lío de homosexuales. That is how, according to witnesses, it was described by none other than General Marco Tulio Espinosa, the head of the Army High Command, at a cabinet meeting the morning after the murder. This piece of highly confidential information, for the moment too explosive and too disrespectful to be made public to a shocked, grieving, largely Catholic nation, was passed by President Arzú and members of his government and military officers to influential businessmen and media figures. It went through diplomatic back channels and soon began sprouting, in whispers and innuendo, everywhere.
The homosexual angle was played up most grotesquely by Mario Menchú, an abrasive, hustling defense lawyer of little particular accomplishment or renown who offered his services, at no charge, to the indigent Carlos Vielman. As a defense lawyer, he could hardly have been more ineffective, but he displayed a talent for getting himself into the newspapers, and he also aroused suspicions. Instead of asking that Vielman’s friends from the cantina La Huehueteca be called to testify about his client’s whereabouts on the night of the murder—the most obvious defense—why did Menchú take another tack?
“I’ve been consulting medical forensics specialists,” the agitated lawyer announced at an impromptu press conference, “and they say these kinds of crimes have something to do with passion. Why? Because the aggressor causes the total destruction of the face and head, true? Even the destruction of the genital organs. How many blows did Monseñor Gerardi receive in his face? … This also has something to do with, for example, the sexual deviations, … such as homosexuality, necrophilia, eating cadavers, pedophilia.” Menchú implied that the deviant he had in mind was Father Mario. “Why don’t they want to interrogate Mario Orantes?” he asked. “Why doesn’t he want to help?” He said that an exhumation of the body and an examination of the bishop’s genitals would prove his theory.
Mario Menchú’s innuendos about Father Mario’s sexual proclivities elicited a predictable uproar and condemnation. But the comments also sent doubt and comic titillation rippling through the vast, irreverent world of whispered rumor and gossip, probably the most effective form of media in a largely illiterate country. And Church spokesmen barely responded. Edgar Gutiérrez and others at ODHA already considered the crime-of-passion scenario to be a key element of the crime itself: not just a smoke screen but a trap set to ensnare the Church in such a way that the more the Church leaders and ODHA struggled against the charges, the more they would end up debilitating and dividing themselves. This was because the Church had serious vulnerabilities, and its enemies in the Army knew about them. As Edgar Gutiérrez remarked in an interview, “Mario Menchú says out loud what Military Intelligence is saying in whispers.”
In early June, Fernando Linares Beltranena, a conservative lawyer who had made his reputation defending accused military officers and narco traffickers and who also wrote a regular column for Prensa Libre, became the first of what would soon be a number of journalists and commentators to discuss the putative crime of passion and the possibility that Bishop Gerardi had been a homosexual. Linares wrote a column that was a particularly strained piece of devil’s advocacy: “Is it defamatory to describe Bishop Gerardi as a presumed homosexual?” he asked. “How do the homosexuals feel, whether confessed or in the closet, that their lifestyle should be called an insult or a dishonor? If there were a pro-gay association in Guatemala, they would have protested by now, like the American group defending Versace, recently killed in Miami. It’s true that priests take a vow of chastity, but not of castration, and their natural sexual impulse stays alive…. The dishonor to Gerardi is his cruel and vile assassination, not the suggestion of his presumably practicing a certain lifestyle.”
Dina Fernández, an influential columnist and editor at Prensa Libre and a graduate of Columbia University’s School of Journalism—I’d met her when she was a student there, and we’d become friends—had been responsible for Prensa Libre’s publishing, in its Sunday magazine, a summation of the REMHI report that appeared on the day the bishop died. She had recently given birth to her first child and was trying to be more cautious about what she wrote. Since the murder—and the columns she’d published in response to it—an armed bodyguard had been accompanying her everywhere. But she couldn’t stop herself from answering Linares’s column with a furious one of her own: “It awakens suspicions that the crime-of-passion version came, with the speed of lightning, from the most powerful man in the Army.” She was referring to General Marco Tulio Espinosa and his alleged comments about the murder being a consequence of a homsexual squabble. “As was to be expected, the calumnies made the murder seem banal, anesthetizing those who didn’t want to see it as the political step backward it implies,” Fernández wrote. “Find a copy of REMHI and read Noél de Jesus Beteta’s confession of his assassination of the anthropologist Myrna Mack: there it is explained very well how crimes planned in the EMP are executed to look like common violence.”
Although Dina Fernández hadn’t named General Espinosa, he answered with an indignant public letter denying her charge and portraying himself as an offended and faithful Catholic. He even invited her to his office for an interview. When Fernández arrived, General Espinosa, his chest bristling with medals, was sitting behind a vast desk flanked by three other military officers and a soldier who was videotaping the meeting. At one point, Fernández commented on the general’s collection of elephant figurines, about a hundred and forty of them, made of marble, glass, ivory, and so on. “The elephant has a long nose to sniff out danger,” General Espinosa said to her by way of explaining his collection, “big ears to be able to listen to everything going on around him, strong tusks for defending himself, a thick skin for resisting dagger thrusts, and a very short tail that nobody can grab hold of.” It could have been a maxim for operational survival in the cutthroat world of Guatemalan Military Intelligence.
General Espinosa had come out of the Air Force, and it was said that President Arzú had chosen him to lead the EMP because that branch of the military was less politicized than others, less contaminated by the military excesses and power struggles of the past. Colonel Rudy Pozuelos, Espinosa’s successor as head of the EMP, had also come out of the Air Force, as had other officers now at the top of the organization. Pozuelos was Espinosa’s relative by marriage.
SENSING THE WAY THE WIND was blowing, Fernando Penados had made several attempts to speak with Father Mario, and to offer him help from ODHA in arranging precautionary legal representation. After Mario Menchú’s insinuations appeared in the press, Ronalth Ochaeta also tried to reassure the priest. But Father Mario tersely rebuffed all of ODHA’s initiatives. In June he announced that he had contracted the services of Vinicio García Pimentel, one of Guatemala’s most prominent defense attorneys. García Pimentel had defended the EMP guardsman for the murder of the milkman Sas Rompich. He also represented the elderly Olga Novella, whose kidnapping for ransom by guerrillas on the eve of the 1996 Peace Accords had nearly derailed the signing. Olga Novella was quickly freed, and the guerrilla commandant who had carried out the kidnapping became the last “disappeared” person of the war, a circumstance for which the EMP’s anti-kidnapping commando unit was later revealed to be responsible.
Threatening telephone calls arrived regularly at ODHA’s offices. Nery Rodenas’s wife had recently given birth again, and when he picked up the phone—he had one now—it was often to hear a recording of a desperately wailing child. Threats were called in against the archbishop, who publicly denounced the obvious tapping
