The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman Page A

shirtless man. He had brown skin, big eyes, a big round face, a wide mouth, a small mustache, a light beard, and curly hair, cut short, “military-style.” When challenged by his interrogator about the haircut, Chanax insisted that he had spent thirty months in the Army and could recognize a military haircut when he saw one. According to El Chino Iván’s later testimony, the shirtless man’s hair was not curly, and he didn’t have a beard.
    Rubén Chanax told his interrogators that about ten nights earlier a man known to the indigents as El Chino Guayo had turned up at the church to sleep, and that he’d asked what time Bishop Gerardi usually returned to the parish house at night. Chanaxclaimed to have answered that he didn’t know. El Chino Guayo was described by some of the other indigents as a crackhead with a violent temper who sometimes started loud fights outside the parish house. The police went to El Chino Guayo’s house at six in the morning, and though the youth, the son of an Army man, was in some ways an interesting character, he turned out to be the first of many apparently false leads.
    W HEN THE PARISH HOUSE was finally calm and empty of people, Otto Ardón, his assistants, and some police specialists were able to conduct a more relaxed and relatively thorough inspection. They found blood drops in a little room by the garage where ironing was done, and more on the wall outside it. They found specks and small stains of blood on other walls; there were still more traces of blood that they missed and that ODHA would find later.
    The evidence recovered from the garage that morning included the discarded sweatshirt, which would turn out to have some bloodstains and a few human hairs; the concrete chunk, also bloodstained; some sheets of rumpled newspaper; and a few fingerprints and handprints that might be related to the crime.
    As they were leaving San Sebastián for the morgue that morning, the MINUGUA investigators were startled to hear one of the few female indigents, a woman known as Vilma, chanting in a slurred way that the bishop had been murdered by
huecos
—homosexuals.
    T HE AUTOPSY got under way at about nine in the morning. Dr. Mario Guerra, head of forensics for the morgue, and the other doctors who performed and observed it were hardly facing a deep forensic mystery. “Fourth-degree facial cranial trauma” was listed as the official cause of death. A fracture and cuts on one thumb, plus the marks on his neck, seemed to indicate that Bishop Gerardi had put up a brief, furious struggle.

    On the back of the bishop’s head were four distinct punctures, in the shape of an arc. Rafael Guillamón, who monitored the autopsy for MINUGUA, thought they looked like marks left by a blow delivered with “brass knuckles.”
    The assistant prosecutor, Gustavo Soria, came into the autopsy room and said that an anal swab—to check for signs of recent homosexual penetration—was to be performed on the bishop’s body. “Orders from above!” said Soria. When Guillamón recounted this story to me many years later, he snorted sardonically that the orders, coming from Military Intelligence, of course, were from General Espinosa, the former commander of the EMP who had recently been promoted to head of the Army High Command. “Soria worked with Military Intelligence,” Guillamón said.
    Was Guillamón correct? People had turned up that night, at the church and elsewhere, he said, like actors walking onto a stage to perform their roles. Some knew their roles in advance. Maybe others had arrived at the church, assessed the situation, and quickly understood what their roles should be. But were some of the people whose actions later seemed suspicious merely grossly incompetent? Were some fated to be suspected because of their intrinsic oddness, or because they had other secrets and vulnerabilities? Who were the actors in the crowd