In 1998, when the REMHI report appeared, no Guatemalan military officer had ever been convicted or imprisoned for a crime related to human rights, although a few cases had resulted in convictions against low-level soldiers and members of militias. Some major cases had been stalled in the courts for years, and the amnesty decreed by the peace accords was meant to prevent any more such cases from going forward. But under international law there were conditions in which the amnesty might one day be breached or partially overturned, and Guatemala: Never Again, it would later seem obvious, helped to make those conditions seem within reach. Bishop Gerardi had let it be known that evidence collected by REMHI would be made available to people who might later seek justice against either the military or the guerrillas, should circumstances permit.
So the REMHI report introduced unpredictable and unforeseen dynamics into Guatemala’s postwar climate. It loudly initiated a public conversation—responsible for 80 percent of the war’s crimes!—that the Guatemalan Army and its allies had not expected to have to tolerate, certainly not within the country. By anticipating the looming, more authoritative report sponsored by the UN, and by breaking taboos against speaking out and assigning blame, REMHI posed a direct challenge to the amnesty and to the Army’s uncontested position at the center of Guatemalan society. There was much at stake in preserving that position. Initially empowered as protectors of the country’s oligarchy and of the United States’ cold war goals, the Army had became a power unto itself, its officer corps constituting an elite social class that looked after its own interests.
But how could murdering Bishop Gerardi in retaliation for the REMHI report—two days after its publication—have served those interests?
2
SOON AFTER ARRIVING at the parish house on that final Sunday evening of his life—after Ronalth Ochaeta dropped him off—Bishop Gerardi, without even changing his clothes, went out again. Father Mario later recounted that when he left his bedroom for the six o’clock Mass, on the short walk down the corridor to the sacristy and the church, he passed the garage and saw that both of the bishop’s vehicles—a beige Toyota Corolla and a white VW Golf—were parked there. When he headed back to his room about forty-five minutes later, the VW Golf was gone. But there was nothing unusual about that. As he did every Sunday night, Bishop Gerardi had picked up his sister Carmen at her home—the same house where they’d spent their childhood, in Candelaria, one of the city’s oldest and most venerable barrios. The Gerardis had grown up across the street from the home of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, whom they had known as children. There was a statue of Asturias in a traffic island in front of the two houses.
Bishop Gerardi and Carmen went to the home of their nephew Javier, where they watched television and had a simple dinner of plátanos, beans, and cheese. Then the bishop drove his sister back to Candelaria, arriving there—as she was able to recall later, because she’d asked him the time—at twenty minutes before ten. They lingered in the car awhile, talking, before saying good-bye. Carmen watched her brother drive off in the direction of the church of San Sebastián. At that hour, investigators later calculated, with the streets empty of traffic—by day they were usually impossibly jammed—it was a drive that the bishop could have made in five minutes, and probably in no more than eight.
So a few minutes before ten, Bishop Gerardi drove up Second Street and turned left into the driveway that runs between the San Sebastián complex and a tree-filled park. The complex includes, in a row, a Catholic school building, the parish house, the garage, and the church. The park is traversed by a paved walkway leading from Sixth Avenue to the raised plaza in front of the church doors. At night, the park is dark and quiet, and the neighborhood, which bustles by day, because it is so close to the downtown business area and government buildings, is mostly deserted. Shops were shuttered, offices and school buildings were empty, and the heavy wooden doors of faded residences were securely locked. San Sebastián is an old parish, dating nearly to the founding of the city in the late eighteenth century, but the church itself, which is of modest size, with two bell towers, one at each corner, was twice destroyed by earthquakes and twice rebuilt during the past century. A remnant of the colonial era, a statue of the Virgin of Sorrows of Manchén, her chest pierced by numerous swords, her pale polychrome face ethereally sad, lips parted to expel a gentle sigh of pain, stands in a side chapel.
A dead-end side street, Callejón del Manchén, extends two blocks, between Third and Fifth streets, from alongside the church of San Sebastián to the rear of the old National Palace. At the intersections of Callejón del Manchén and Fourth and Fifth streets, guarded security gates protect the presidential residence, which is situated between them. The very wealthy and patrician President Arzú, who is descended from Spanish colonial viceroys and archbishops, was the first Guatemalan president to choose to live in his own home instead of in the presidential residence, which was being used for business and formal ceremonies. Also inside those gates were the headquarters of the Guatemalan Army’s Presidential Guard and the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP), or Presidential Military Staff. In recent decades there was probably no city block in all of Central America more forbidding or generally feared than that one on Callejón del Manchén, where the EMP and its notorious military intelligence unit, formerly known as El Archivo, were situated. The EMP and the Presidential Guard, aside from overseeing the personal security of the president and his family, sheltered, among its approximately 500 members, an elite anti-kidnapping commando unit. During the war years, there were rarely any survivors of the EMP’s interrogation and torture sessions. (According to declassified U.S. documents, Guatemalan Military Intelligence—G-2—and the Archivo, though technically separate, worked hand in hand.) Looming on the other side of Fourth Street, just outside the gates and only about 200 feet from the church, is the modern white-concrete and black-glass multistory building of the Secretariat of Strategic Analysis (SAE), a government information-gathering agency that up until 1998, at least, was also integrated into the military’s intelligence structure.
So the church of San Sebastián is located in an interesting neighborhood, inside an Army security perimeter. The park itself, it would turn out later, when investigators and journalists subjected it to anthropological scrutiny, was its own complex and busy little world of sometimes clashing subcultures. Local office workers came to the park for lunch or snacks purchased from the food stands lining the sidewalks, or to sit on a park bench for a contemplative shoeshine. Young lovers snuggled on the shaded benches along the paved paths in the afternoons. During the day, lavacarros, car washers, plied their trade alongside the park, filling their plastic buckets with water from the fountain. Some of the car washers were alcoholic indigents, but most were not, and almost all belonged to a union that collected small dues at an office downtown where classes were offered on such subjects as how to negotiate prices with customers.
But the park was also a place where tribes of teenagers and small gangs of delinquents staked out and sometimes fought over territory—tough high school kids, heavy-metal rockeros, petty thieves, pushiteros who sold drugs, and even a gang of druggy alleged satanists who always wore black and who sometimes burst into the church to interrupt Masses, shouting obscenities. Young athletes came to play basketball and fútbol in the little basketball court near the Chapel of the Eternal Father, on the Third Street side of the church. Later Father Mario would tell police investigators that the smell of marijuana often pervaded the parish house because of the youths smoking outside, in front of the parish house door, and that sometimes they smoked crack. It was naturally assumed, given the character of the neighborhood, and its nearness to the seat of government and military security and intelligence installations, that some of the park’s denizens, the vendors, shoe-shine men, car washers, and petty criminals, must be orejas—ears, informers.
On any given night, as many as fourteen homeless men and a woman or two would take shelter in the covered walkway alongside the parish house garage, or on the plaza in front the church entrance, which was commonly referred to as the “atrium.” They slept in beds made from old cardboard and tattered blankets that they folded and stored by day
