Free The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman Page B

had been inside the parish house taking photographs, he responded that he didn’t have any advance security. Accompanied by the MINUGUA investigators, Conte Cojulún went to speak with the suspicious men, who insisted on talking with him alone. After a few minutes, the two men left the park, and Conte Cojulún spoke to Fernando Penados. “Listen, Fernando, they’re with the EMP,” he said. “Don’t make such a big deal out of it.”

    A T SOME POINT during that long night, Helen Mack and the bishop’s protégés from ODHA, Ronalth Ochaeta, Edgar Gutiérrez, and Fernando Penados, huddled together on the ground in one of the inner patio gardens of the parish house and had a conversation, which, as the situation developed over the next few days, resulted in a decision that ODHA should form its own team to document the case. Experience had taught them that it would be naive to assume that an investigation conducted by the government would not be biased, or that it would go after the most obvious suspects, the people in the Army, or with ties to the Army, most threatened by the REMHI report.
    The idea that ODHA should form its own team seems to have been Helen Mack’s. She also suggested that night that forensic anthropologists from ODHA should attend the autopsy of the bishop’s body. ODHA teams were participating in the exhumations of clandestine graves and massacre sites then being conducted throughout the country, and Ochaeta phoned two of the forensics specialists.
    Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez agreed that they shouldn’t leave the parish house until the bishop’s body was taken to the morgue. “I just sat there,” Ochaeta recalled. “I’d get up, sit down, get up. Edgar too. Nobody said anything. I think an hour, an hour and a half went by. We just looked at each other without saying anything.”
    Helen Mack, though, was in constant motion. She had gone to fetch her friend Dr. Mario Iraheta, a respected forensics specialist, and bring him to San Sebastián. Now she came to sit with the men from ODHA. “
Chafas cerotes hijos de la gran puta
,” she burst out.
Chafas
is slang for military officers;
cerotes
is a common Guatemalan vulgarism, something like little pieces of shit. “
Chafas cerotes hijos de la gran puta!
” she repeated several times. “
Estos pisados fueron
—those assholes did it.” Then she took out her cigarettes and sat smoking in silence.

    In the parish house garage, Dr. Iraheta worked alongside Dr. Mario Guerra, head of forensics for the Judicial Morgue. They carefully washed the murdered bishop’s wounds, cleaning the blood from the face, which had received repeated blows with some hard object—apparently, the triangular chunk of concrete—delivered with almost inconceivable ferocity. The most obvious wounds were fractures in both cheeks and around and across the nose, bloody bruises over the right eye, and multiple bruises in the back of the skull. The left ear was a particularly excoriated mass. On the bishop’s neck there were bloody scratches that indicated a struggle—marks that might have been caused if the zipper of his jacket was pulled against his skin while he fought to free himself, or perhaps when a thin gold chain, affixed to a religious medal, was torn from around his neck.
    Bishop Gerardi had apparently received the first blows as he emerged or was pulled from the car. Axel Romero discovered a lens from the bishop’s eyeglasses in the pocket on the inside of the door on the driver’s side. There was blood inside the car, and grains of concrete. The keys were missing, and the Public Ministry towed the car away that night. Later, when ODHA was told that they could take the car back, Nery Rodenas went to get it, bringing the spare set of keys left behind at the parish house. When the car’s ignition was turned on for the first time since the night