GUATEMALA CITY is a uniquely ugly place. The mid-nineteenth-century American travel writer John Lloyd Stephens described it as “a mere speck in the middle of a vast plain,” but by 1998 it was a sprawling, choked, polluted, impoverished, claustrophobic metropolis with a population of 3 million and a level of so-called ordinary crime and a homicide rate that made it, even though Guatemala’s civil war was over, one of Latin America’s most dangerous and violent cities. Its best feature is its horizon: on a clear day, immense volcanoes seem to loom so near that you might think it an illusion, as if the light possesses a magnifying quality. Sometimes the volcanoes belch plumes of black smoke, covering the city in ashes, or a crater glows like a flaming planet in the night sky.
The first night I was in the city, a Saturday, I waited until eleven, maybe a little later, to take a taxi to the church of San Sebastián. I wanted to begin there at the same time of day that Bishop Gerardi had his final encounter in the garage. It can take an hour to drive the twelve blocks or so to the church from the Hotel Spring, the inexpensive pension where I was staying, because the traffic is so bad, but at night the darkened, empty blocks glide by. Late at night, downtown Guatemala City resembles a vast, grimy old cemetery. The streets are shadowy, with steel gates pulled down over the fronts of shops and businesses, making them look like long, deserted rows of dilapidated tombs.
The taxi dropped me off, and I stood outside the dark park, which ascends gently upward toward the church. I took a few tentative steps into it and stopped to stare at a bulky human figure silhouetted against the backdrop of the parish house, in the muted glow of a light over the door. The figure seemed to be staring back at me. I retreated to the sidewalk, annoyed at myself. Then I turned, walked back into the park, and stopped again. The figure came toward me. It was a young policeman in a bulletproof vest. He had a partner, also in uniform and with a similar vest, who had been sitting in the shadows, out of view. Laid out in a row of darkened humps, sleeping under ragged blankets in front of and near the metal garage door, were the bolitos, looking just as they must have that night when Bishop Gerardi drove his white VW Golf inside for the last time.
Suddenly a white van with scratchy rock music coming from a speaker on its roof drove up Second Street and stopped at the foot of the drive. One of the policemen ambled down to the van and returned with a young man carrying two plastic bags filled with rice and beans. He was from Eventos Católicos, the charity that brought food to the bolitos at night.
The indigents woke up, and one of them shouted, 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.