Free The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman

said no, and directed him to another bathroom in the house. Ochaeta watched Father Mario going into his bedroom and thought it was odd, the way he opened the door just enough to be able to slide in sideways.
    The attorney general, the head of the Public Ministry (a presidential appointee), arrived and embraced Ochaeta. “
Hijos de puta
, this has all the marks of
los de allí enfrente
,” he said—“of those from just over there.” He obviously meant the EMP’s military intelligence unit. He telephoned another prosecutor from his office, Fernando Mendizábal de la Riva, who came to the church and, soon after arriving, remarked to Rafael Guillamón, MINUGUA’s chief investigator, “This looks like the work of
esa gente
—those people.” In Guatemala such euphemisms are easily understood. But Mendizábal de la Riva was known to be a friend of General Marco Tulio Espinosa, who until his recent promotion to head the Army High Command had been the head of the EMP, and was now seen as the most powerful figure in the Guatemalan Army. So even people with powerful political appointments, like the attorney general, and a friend of the Army’s most powerful general, were capable of spontaneous observations that later they would most likely deny having made. Even politically compromised and complicit people do not always behave predictably, just as, of course, the most disciplined and intricately plotted crime does not always turn out exactly according to design.
    Nery Rodenas, the coordinator of ODHA’s legal team, lived well outside the city with his wife and small children, and he didn’t have a telephone, so someone from ODHA drove to his house and brought him back to San Sebastián. Rodenas had studied law at the public university, San Carlos, at the same time as Ronalth Ochaeta. But while Ochaeta made his name in political circles as a member of the University Students’ Association, Rodenas was the leader of a Catholic students’ group. He had converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism as a teenager. Tersely soft-spoken, Nery Rodenas had the melancholyeyes, rosebud mouth, plump cheeks, and somewhat stiff but gentle air of a clerk in a Botero painting. Of all his colleagues at ODHA—at least the ones I was to get to know—Rodenas was the only devout, practicing Catholic.
    Nery Rodenas reached the church of San Sebastián sometime between two and two-thirty in the morning and pushed his way through the crowd gathered in front of the garage door. All around him people were weeping, or conversing in hushed tones, or taking notes and snapshots as Gustavo Soria and the police worked inside the now re-expanded security cordon. Rodenas turned around and saw a man—short, brown-complexioned, with a mustache—taking photographs with a flash, and he realized that he had seen him before. The man wasn’t a photojournalist. Rodenas had seen him in the old colonial city of Antigua, at the trial of the accused murderer of a twenty-year-old milkman named Haroldo Sas Rompich.
    T HE PRESENCE of the short man who was taking photographs was one of hundreds of threads of evidence that would eventually be woven into the investigation and prosecution of the murder of Bishop Gerardi, Guatemala’s “crime of the century”—the most important, and certainly the most bizarrely spectacular, passionately contested, and convoluted legal case in the country’s history. Years later Rodenas and others would still be pulling on that particular thread, investigating and debating its significance.
    One day in February 1996, President Álvaro Arzú, not even a month into his term as president, and his wife had been horseback riding through the countryside near Antigua, accompanied by their EMP bodyguards in a caravan of vehicles and horses, when the milkman Sas Rompich drove into their path in the 1984 Isuzu pickup in which he made his daily