The
death of Bishop Gerardi: what happened next
Read
Matthew Campbell's review for the Sunday Times
SOON AFTER ARRIVING at the parish house on that final Sunday evening of his
life - after Ronalth Ochaeta dropped him off - Bishop Gerardi went out
again. Father Mario later recounted that when he left his bedroom for the
six o'clock Mass, 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.
About 45 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.
Bishop Gerardi and Carmen went to the home of their nephew Javier, where they
watched television and had a simple dinner. Then the bishop drove his sister
back to Candelaria, arriving there at 20 minutes before ten. Carmen watched
her brother drive off in the direction of the church of San Sebastián. At
that hour, investigators calculated, with the streets empty, it was a drive
that the bishop could have made in five minutes, and in no more than eight.
So a few minutes before ten, Bishop Gerardi drove up Second Street and turned
left into the driveway that runs between the San Sebastián complex and a
park. The complex includes a school, the parish house, the garage, and the
church. At night, the park is dark and quiet, and the neighbourhood, which
bustles by day, because it is close to the downtown business area and
government buildings, is mostly deserted.
A dead-end side street, Callejón del Manchén, extends alongside the church of
San Sebastián to the rear of the old National Palace. At the intersections
of Callejón del Manchén and Fourth and Fifth streets, security gates protect
the presidential residence. Also inside those gates were the headquarters of
the Guatemalan Army's Presidential Guard and the Estado Mayor Presidencial
(EMP), or Presidential Military Staff. In recent decades there was probably
no city block in all of Central America more generally feared than that one,
where the EMP and its notorious military intelligence unit were situated.
During the war years, there were rarely any survivors of the EMP's
interrogation and torture sessions.
Local office workers came to the park for lunch. During the day, lavacarros,
car washers, plied their trade alongside the park. But the park was also a
place where tribes of teenagers and small gangs of delinquents staked out
and sometimes fought over territory - tough high school kids, heavy-metal
rockeros, petty thieves, pushiteros who sold drugs, and even a gang of
druggy alleged satanists. Father Mario would tell police that the smell of
marijuana often pervaded the parish house because of youths smoking outside.
On any given night, as many as 14 homeless men and a woman or two would take
shelter in the covered walkway alongside the parish house garage, or on the
plaza in front of the church entrance. Most referred to them as bolitos,
little drunks. The indigents were also called charamileros, from the name
for pharmaceutical alcohol mixed with water that most of them drank, a
concoction also known as a quimicazo, which sped them toward oblivion and
death.
That Sunday evening, two of the indigents - Rubén Chanax Sontay, better known
as El Colocho (Curly), and El Chino Iván Aguilar - were in Don Mike's, a
small liquor-and-grocery store around the corner from the church. Unlike the
owners of similar tiendas in the neighborhood, Don Mike didn't conduct his
business through lowered gates after dark. Customers could watch the small
portable television mounted in a corner.
Alone among the indigents who slept in front of the church, Rubén Chanax
didn't drink alcohol or take drugs. He earned his living as a lavacarro and
Bishop Gerardi let him come into the Chapel of the Eternal Father to fill
his buckets from the tap.
El Chino Iván was a petty thief, a cristalero - who smashed car windows to
steal radios. He drank and used drugs, and had been sleeping in the park for
the past month.
At about seven o'clock that night Rubén Chanax came into Don Mike's where he
found El Chino Iván watching a Chuck Norris movie on TV. The Chuck Norris
movie was to be followed, by the thriller Congo.
Chanax was a passionate movie-goer. Later he would explain that because he'd
already seen Congo several times, he left before it ended, and headed into
the park to sleep. He recalled that the clock in Don Mike's said it was a
little before ten.
He ascended the park's slight incline toward the parish house garage. The soft
lights outside were on. The church sacristan would leave the lights on for
Bishop Gerardi if he was out, and Gerardi would turn them off when he
returned.
Chanax liked to sleep in front of the garage, sheltered by the concrete
overhang. Lately he'd been sharing that space with El Chino Iván. But
sleeping there meant having to get up whenever a vehicle, always Bishop
Gerardi's Toyota or VW Golf - Father Mario didn't drive - came in or out.
The garage door could be opened only from the inside, and there was a
smaller door in one of its panels that Bishop Gerardi would first have to
unlock. Leaving his car in the driveway, he'd step in through the small
door, haul the cumbersome and noisy garage door open, get back into the car,
and drive inside. He always opened and closed the garage door himself. He
never accepted help.
As Rubén Chanax laid out his bedding, he said later, the small metal door to
the garage suddenly scraped open. A man in his twenties stood framed in the
doorway. Chanax described the man as dark-skinned, of medium height and
build, and strikingly muscular. He had large eyes, strong features, a light
beard, and a moustache. But the most striking thing about him was that he
was naked from the waist up. Guatemala City is a mountain-plateau city, and
the nights can be chilly. People don't go around shirtless.
Chanax asked the half-naked man if a car was about to come out. The man
answered, “Simón, ese” - a somewhat gangsterish phrase meaning, “Yeah, man.”
At that moment, a police car drove up Second Street, and the shirtless man
stepped back into the doorway and stood frozen, watching as the patrol car
turned left. Then the shirtless man stepped out again and ran to Second
Street, where he veered right. About five minutes later Chanax saw him
return, but now he was buttoning on a long-sleeved shirt. Chanax said the
shirt was white.
El Chino Iván later said that he left Don Mike's about five minutes after
Rubén Chanax. He was already inside the park when he realised that he'd left
his cigarettes behind. El Chino Iván said that before turning back, he saw
Chanax speaking to a man naked from the waist up.
Moments later, another of the indigents, Marco Tulio, shared a plastic bag of
food with El Chino Iván. Rubén Chanax said that he joined them. At about 11
o'clock every night, Eventos Católicos, a charity organisation that
delivered meals to the homeless, stopped at San Sebastián. But that Sunday
night, a stranger had turned up at the park bearing a special offering:
Kraft cheese sandwiches and three uncapped litre-bottles of beer - “not the
normal thing,” according to El Chino Iván. Some of the bolitos would claim
later that the beer and food must have been spiked with a soporific, because
they quickly fell into a heavy sleep. This was why they hadn't heard or seen
anything unusual. They couldn't even remember Bishop Gerardi returning.
El Chino Iván was usually a restless sleeper, but that night, he said, he fell
into a deep sleep that was undisturbed until six in the morning, when police
roused him. That was when El Chino Iván would describe his own encounter
with the no-longer-shirtless man. After he'd gone back to Don Mike's and
headed back into the park, he came on the same half-
naked man he had spotted talking to Rubén Chanax, except now the stranger was
wearing a shirt that El Chino Iván described as light beige with light brown
checks. According to El Chino Iván, the stranger said, “Compadre, sell me a
cigarette.” El Chino Iván handed him two cigarettes, and the stranger said,
“Buena onda, gracias” - roughly, “Cool, dude, thanks.
Rubén Chanax said that he hadn't partaken of the allegedly spiked food and
drink. He and El Chino Iván lay down to sleep in their usual space and when
the man from Eventos Católicos arrived, he rose to receive his meal and went
back to sleep. The man from Eventos Católicos said that the only unusual
thing that night, apart from how soundly the bolitos were sleeping, was that
the light inside the garage was on.
Don Mike, would claim, in his first statements, that he had closed his shop
before 9.30, and that El Monstruo Jorge and Pablo el Loquito had been
inside. Don Mike would refuse to say much more to investigators. The bolitos
El Monstruo Jorge and Pablo el Loquito didn't seem to have anything useful
to communicate to investigators about that night. But no one will ever
discover if it was simply alcohol and drugs that erased whatever memories
they might have had or if simple fear played a role. Within a few years the
two indigents, like virtually all the bolitos sleeping outside the parish
house that Sunday night - except Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván - would be
dead.
USUALLY, ON ARRIVING back at the parish house on Sunday nights Bishop Gerardi
would phone Juana Sanabria, the parish administrator to let her know that he
had arrived safely. But sometimes Bishop Gerardi forgot, so when ten o'clock
passed that Sunday without any message, Juana Sanabria tried to reassure
herself that there was no reason to worry. She couldn't restrain her
anxiety, however, at 10.30 she phoned the parish house. For the next hour or
so she phoned every 15 minutes, and then, worried about disturbing Father
Mario, gave up. For a long time it was believed that Juana Sanabria had
called the bishop's private line, in his bedroom, which was why, according
to Father Mario, he couldn't hear it ringing. But the sacristan said that
the telephone in the bedroom could be heard throughout the house. Juana
Sanabria later testified that she had called three different numbers.
At about half past midnight, the front door of the parish house opened and
Father Mario stepped out in his bathrobe and pyjamas. Rubén Chanax told
investigators that the priest called out to the row of sleeping bolitos “did
any of you see who came in or went out?” One of the bolitos, known as El
Pitti, and who liked to drink only lethal quimicazo and so had forgone the
spiked beer, answered, “Don't worry, Father, Monseñor went in a while ago.”
Rubén Chanax said that he approached Father Mario and told him that he'd seen
someone come out of the garage and that he had been naked from the waist up.
According to Chanax, the priest said, “Ah, then stay here, because I've
phoned the police.” Chanax's subsequent testimonies would never vary, but
the first police dispatched to the scene of the murder would report Father
Mario's own account of that moment following his discovery of the body in
the garage: “He went to the parish house door, interrogating the bolitos if
they had seen anyone coming in or out, the interrogated answering in the
negative.” Two days later, the priest would again give the impression that
the bolitos had said they had seen nothing unusual, leaving Chanax out.
Father Mario later said that he had changed into his pyjamas around 7.30, and
went to the kitchen to take medicine for a migraine. At about 20 minutes
before ten, he said, he turned on the air conditioner and watched TV in bed.
(Later he would say he was wearing headphones.) He drifted off to sleep at
around 10.20. He woke half an hour later, turned off the TV and lights, and
went back to sleep.
At around midnight, Father Mario said, he turned over in bed and was awakened
by a light shining through the glass pane over his bedroom door. “I got up,
right, and I went to turn off the light and I said to myself, Monseñor
forgot to turn off the light again.” Bishop Gerardi was supposed to turn off
the light in the corridor when he got home. But when Father Mario went out,
leaving Baloo [his German shepherd dog] in his room, he saw that more lights
were on at the end of the corridor. “And that,” he said, “seemed strange to
me.”
The corridor, about 30ft long, ran the length of the house directly into the
garage. The priest continued: “Sometimes, maybe because of the affection you
feel for someone, you don't want to believe that the dead person is that
person, right, and so in the first place, like I told you, I didn't
recognise him, and with so many bolitos coming inside...”
When Father Mario stepped into the garage, he found Bishop Gerardi lying on
his back in a pool of blood between the Toyota Corolla and the wall. His
mouth was open and his brutally battered face covered with blood. His legs
were crossed at the ankles, and his hands at the wrists and resting on his
chest - “and that did seem strange to me, the way he had them crossed, just
the way you saw him, that's how I found him, and also, the sweater was
there.” Near a water tank a blue sweatshirt had been left on the floor. A
triangular concrete paving stone lay not far from the body. There was blood
everywhere.
Father Mario said that he thought: “Maybe there was a fight here inside, and
one of the bolitos died.” He said that he then went back down the corridor
to the front door of the parish house, which was double-locked as always,
and stepped out. That was when he “asked the bolitos if they'd seen
anything, some fight, some argument or anything, and they said no Father,
don't worry Father, Monseñor went in a while ago, and then that's what
killed me, and I went to my room to get a flashlight, and I went back and
shined it in his face until I realised it was him, and when I realised it
was him, I phoned Monseñor Hernández, the chancellor of the Curia.”
First, though, he woke the cook, Margarita López. “Margarita, I told her,
‘They killed Monseñor.' And then the cook went to see, she'd been here
working for Monseñor for as long as he'd been here, she was his servant, and
it was really terrible for her, she began to cry.”
This is an edited extract from The Art of Political Murder by Francisco
Goldman
Atlantic, £16.99
