Read an extract from the book describing the night of the murder

Even by the standards of blood-soaked, Latin-American history, the atrocities committed by the Guatemalan army in the early 1980s are infamous. At the height of the madness, entire Indian villages were razed to the ground. Children were beheaded and shovelled, along with their mothers, into mass graves. When a group of Mayan Indians took refuge in the Spanish embassy in 1980, security forces did not hesitate to storm the building, slaughtering embassy staff and all but one of the Indians. The survivor was later snatched from a hospital bed and murdered.

Some 200,000 civilians were killed or “disappeared” in the civil war, most of them by the army. But Guatemalan dictators were able to shrug off complaints from Europe about their sickening violations of human rights because they had the backing of Washington, which regarded them as a rampart against communism in the “back yard”.

Today, however, the killers have lost their political protection and pressure is growing to make the generals, long untouchable, pay for their crimes. Francisco Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder will no doubt encourage that process. It focuses on the murder in 1998 of Bishop Juan Gerardi (an affable figure fond of whisky and jokes), two years after the signing of a peace accord that was supposed to have put an end to the political violence. He was found bludgeoned to death in his garage in Guatemala City just days after the church human-rights commission that he headed had published a lengthy report on atrocities by the army. It included names of officers who had ordered massacres of peasants in the highlands.

The story will resonate well beyond the Americas. From Northern Ireland to South Africa, recent history has been haunted by the question: is it better, in the interests of national reconciliation, to forget the sins of the past or to pursue those who committed them?

Gerardi was no radical (the United Nations published a similar report about army atrocities), but he was a target nonetheless: political murder, and fear of it, is so common in Guatemala, writes Goldman, that “even the drunks are discreet”.

He takes the reader on an unsettling journey that is, at the same time, strangely uplifting for, as one witness after another is intimidated or murdered, the courage of those trying to solve the killings seems ever more remarkable and results in army officers being tried for the first time for their crimes.

The events related by Goldman, a Guatemalan-American novelist, are as bizarre as any work of Latin-American magic realism: for a long time, the chief suspect in the case was an alsatian called Baloo who belonged to the possibly homosexual priest who shared the parish house with Gerardi. The dog, too arthritic even to move its hind quarters, let alone savage a bishop, was, “taken into custody” on suspicion of biting Gerardi on the head. The bishop’s body was exhumed so that a famously unreliable forensic scientist from Spain could prove the theory. American experts at the examination, however, insisted that a blunt instrument (the lump of concrete found next to the body, for instance) had shattered Gerardi’s skull.

Contrasting with that farce, befitting a banana republic, was a sophisticated campaign by military intelligence to mislead and intimidate investigators and to discredit reformists in the church who were seen as a threat to the military hierarchy. Most of the beggars who slept outside the parish house turned out to be informers for the military; some of these “witnesses” saw a shirtless man running from the garage on the night of the murder, suggesting a row among homosexuals. Next came rumours of the crime being linked to a criminal gang led by the illegitimate daughter of another bishop.

The truth eventually emerged: two powerful figures in the now-disbanded intelligence unit were sentenced to 20 years in prison for orchestrating the killing. Others above them, possibly even a former president, may have been just as responsible. Goldman hopes that they will be prosecuted one day: amnesties, he believes, encourage only more killing.

What is more, some crimes in Guatemala were too ghastly to forgive, he argues. The body of one woman he knew in the 1980s was found with her dead baby by the side of the road, his finger nails torn out by torturers so that the mother would tell them what they wanted to know.

“Nobody has ever been found guilty in those crimes, or tens of thousands like them,” writes Goldman. “I don’t think there should ever be a legal amnesty for whoever planned and executed murders like those.”

Read on... websites:

http://entertainment. timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_ and_entertainment/books/article3209901.ece
An extract from Goldman’s book describing the night of the murder

THE ART OF POLITICAL MURDER: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? by Francisco Goldman
Atlantic £16.99 pp228

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £15.29 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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