The Art of Political Murder Read Online Free PDF

[Hernández] when the soldiers came and surrounded the house. They cut up the señoras with knives, they killed them, five people in all. When the corpses were on the ground they started burning the house, they threw the corpses on the fire
. Case 4912, Xix Hamlet, Chajul, Quiché, 1983.
    The burning fat runs outside, look, how the fat of the poor women runs. It looks like when it rains and the water runs in the gutters. The fat runs like that, pure water. And what’s that? I thought as I went in, and pure fat was coming out of those poor women, pure water comes out
. Case 6070, Petanac, Huehuetenango, 1982.
    A reader might emerge from those pages ready to believe the Guatemalan Army guilty of any crime it might ever be accused of. That would later pose a problem for those who had to investigateand prosecute the case of Bishop Gerardi’s murder. They would have to resist drawing prejudicial conclusions emotionally rooted in the savagery of the recent past.
    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
    S OON 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