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 of his private telephone line and the fact that ever since Bishop Gerardi’s death his mail had been arriving opened. Everyone in ODHA had always known that they were subject to surveillance and infiltrators, but the dangerous-looking men posted on the sidewalk outside their doors were becoming more brazen. A priest who had worked on REMHI and whose parish was in the notorious La Limonada slum began to receive threats and was forced to leave the country.
IN HIS FRUSTRATION that none of the blood evidence or the few fingerprints taken from the crime scene had been matched in the FBI labs to Carlos Vielman or anyone inside the parish house—the priest, the cook, the sacristan—Special Prosecutor Ardón requested that fingerprints be taken from every corpse that turned up in the Guatemala City morgues. A buried body missing both hands and the head was exhumed, and Ardón sent tissue samples from the corpse, known as “XX,” to the FBI as well.
One night in late May, at an evidentiary procedure conducted at the church of San Sebastián, Ardón turned up with the two protected witnesses, Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván, to reenact what they had seen on the night of April 26. A policeman played the role of the man without a shirt. Father Mario, other members of the prosecutor’s office, and people from ODHA and MINUGUA were also assembled outside the garage.
The small metal door in the garage scraped open, and the subdued fluorescent light from inside penetrated the darkness. A policeman-actor stepped into the narrow doorway, naked from the waist up, in jeans and boots. He hesitated and then took off, running across the park toward Second Street, just as Chanax had described.
The young Untouchable Rodrigo Salvadó, the anthropology student, told me later that the performance gave him goose bumps.
On June 18 Otto Ardón returned to the church of San Sebastián to take a statement from Father Mario, the fourth the priest had given. Two forensics specialists, one medical and the other dental, accompanied him. They tossed a blue plastic ball to Baloo, and after the dog had retrieved it a few times, the dental forensics specialist examined it and, apparently satisfied, placed the ball inside a plastic bag. They dipped the dog’s paws in ink and pressed them onto a piece of paper to make prints.
In July, Ronalth Ochaeta traveled to Madrid with Bishop Gerardo Flores to present the REMHI report there. It was a trip he had intended to take with Bishop Gerardi. In response to a reporter’s question about whether he thought the Guatemalan government was seriously investigating Gerardi’s murder, Ochaeta said that he feared the government was engaging in a cover-up, and that so far it had refused to investigate any of the information ODHA had passed on to it through the High Commission: the license plate, and the anonymous tips implicating the Limas. It was the first time that these pieces of potential evidence against the Limas and the military had been mentioned publicly. Archbishop Penados was said to be frantic with worry that when Ochaeta returned to Guatemala, he would be arrested for his comments. But he came back into the country without incident.
Declassified U.S. embassy diplomatic cables from 1998, dating from the immediate aftermath of the murder, reveal that early on in the case embassy officials regarded ODHA and its claims with skepticism. They regularly expressed sympathy and respect for President Arzú, and even seemed unsuspecting of the military: “The military vigorously denies that any of its members were involved in the murder.”
ON JULY 21, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited Guatemala and called for a thorough investigation into Bishop Gerardi’s “abominable murder.” He warned, “We don’t want to give the impression that impunity is something that Guatemalan society tolerates or will tolerate.” The next day, a detachment of some 150 special-forces policemen in black berets, armed with automatic rifles and wearing bulletproof vests, surrounded the park and the church of San Sebastián. It was as if they had come to lay siege to a terrorist cell. Otto Ardón was there too, of course, with a warrant for the arrest of Father Mario for the murder of Bishop Gerardi. But Father Mario wasn’t at home. It was his day off and he was at his parents’ house, having lunch. He was reached there by telephone and told to return to the parish house immediately, which he did, although the police wouldn’t let him past their security perimeter. He insisted that he lived there, but the police said that their orders were to not allow anyone in.
The attention of the assistant prosecutor, Gustavo Soria, was directed to the police line at the edge of the park and the tall, pudgy man wearing large-frame designer glasses, a white shirt with bold blue stripes, gray wool trousers, and a brown suede jacket. Pleading confusion and innocence, tears streaming down his face, Father Mario was handcuffed and led into a police van. Margarita López, the cook, was brought out of the parish house, sobbing loudly. She’d been arrested for destroying and concealing evidence, mainly because, on the priest’s orders, she’d helped mop up the crime scene. Baloo was also taken in that day, as material evidence. Baloo was a large dog, but his hindquarters were weak and he had to be shoved, practically hoisted, into the back of a pickup by dog trainers from a private security firm hired by the Public Ministry. On the pickup’s bumper someone had scrawled the words “MINUGUA OUT” with a black marker.
Portly Nery Rodenas, dripping sweat, and Mario Domingo came running all the way from ODHA’s offices as soon as they heard the news. They showed their identification and the police let them pass. Inside the house they found Pablo Coello, a Spanish Civil Guardsman appointed by MINUGUA to work with the prosecutors, directing the police in a search for evidence in the priest’s luxuriously appointed bedroom. Mario Domingo heard one of the policemen exclaim, “All these photos of Baloo! He has more photographs of the dog then religious images!”
Gustavo Soria called out that he had made a new discovery, and Mario Domingo joined the crowd outside the bedroom door, craning his neck to see. The assistant prosecutor, with a malicious smile, was pointing his index finger at a little drawer—he’d just closed it after looking inside—in a wooden table near the door. Theatrically, he reopened the drawer and, using a handkerchief, pulled out a black Walther .380 pistol. “Then, without using the handkerchief,” Mario Domingo wrote later, “he popped open the cartridge and raised the pistol to his eye.” The gun was loaded.
Two days later, Otto Ardón summoned ODHA’s lawyers to the parish house for their first formal meeting in three months. The prosecutors’ team had practically moved into the parish house by then. Forensics experts and a Public Ministry psychologist who had prepared a profile of the imprisoned priest were gathered there. Ardón, smoking like a film noir detective, gestured toward a table that was covered with photographs from Bishop Gerardi’s autopsy. He drew attention to a photograph that showed four small puncture-like wounds, in the shape of an arc, in the skin on the bishop’s skull. The arrest of Father Mario and Margarita López, and the incarceration of Baloo, had been precipitated by the conclusions of a forensic anthropologist in Madrid,