The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman

of the bishop’s death, the air conditioner and radio came on simultaneously. The bishop hadn’t had the chance to turn either off. The assailants must have reached in, switched the ignition off, and yanked out the keys.
    Sometime before dawn, when the firemen took Bishop Gerardi’s body to the morgue, Ronalth Ochaeta and Edgar Gutiérrez walked over to the ODHA offices. They had to prepare a statement. In a few hours, people would be awakening to the shocking news of Bishop Gerardi’s murder. Everyone—the press, the government, the diplomatic community, all of Guatemala—would be waitingfor the reaction of the Catholic Church and of ODHA. They had to think about what they were going to say.
    Father Mario said later that he approached a crime-scene specialist from the Public Ministry, asked for permission to clean up the garage, and was told to go ahead. Margarita López; the sacristan, Antonio Izaguirre; and Julio Trujillo, whose job it was to tend to the venerated statue of the Virgin of Sorrows of Manchén, set to work mopping up the bishop’s blood and cleaning the garage. Trujillo found more bloody footprints in the entrance of one of the little offices at the back of the garage, but he was told to keep mopping, and he did.
    When the cleaning up of the garage—the destruction and washing away of evidence that might have still remained at the crime scene despite the earlier chaos and carelessness—became a scandal in the press, Father Mario repeatedly insisted that someone from the Public Ministry had told him that it was OK. The priest couldn’t identify that person by name but said he was a tall man with a beard. By then Father Mario had become the focus of much speculation and suspicion, public and private. So when no one from the Public Ministry stepped forward to take responsibility for the “error,” or to identify the “bearded man,” many assumed that the priest was lying, and that he had ordered the cleanup of the garage entirely on his own.
    Edgar Gutiérrez told me later that while he realized that people say the opposite about Father Mario’s demeanor that night, he personally did see the priest quietly weeping. Others described feeling strangely chilled when, after Bishop Gerardi’s body was taken to the morgue and the garage and house had been mopped and cleaned, the priest emerged from the parish house, expressionless, immaculately dressed and groomed, to walk his German shepherd, Baloo, in the park.
    Margarita López laid the bishop’s robes out on his bed, and later that morning Father Mario took the clothing to the funeralhome. He oversaw the dressing of the bishop’s corpse and assisted the undertakers in reshaping the ruined face so that it would resemble the living one as much as possible.
    At about six in the morning El Chino Iván, roused from his night of soporific-induced deep sleep, had told the police of his encounter with the shirtless man, and had handed them the quetzal bill that he said the stranger had paid him in exchange for two cigarettes. Then El Chino Iván slipped away, disappearing into the city. Two days later, he would turn up at MINUGUA’s office, claiming that he feared for his life, and soon after he joined Rubén Chanax in the subterranean life of a protected witness in the custody of the Guatemalan police.
    Meanwhile in the early morning hours of April 27, in the Public Ministry, Rubén Chanax was giving the first of his many official statements. He wouldn’t get a chance to sleep until ten o’clock that night, twenty-fours after he had walked out of Don Mike’s. Along with the prosecutors, observers from MINUGUA, and the director of the police, three of the young men from ODHA were present for Chanax’s interrogation. He seemed a little frightened but calm, Nery Rodenas recalled, and clearly wasn’t muddled by alcohol or drugs. Once again, Chanax described the