The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman Page B

outside and inside the church of San Sebastián that night? Were any of the indigents and
bolitos
actors in the sense that Guillamón meant? Was Vilma, the female indigent chanting that the bishop had been murdered by “fags,” an actress? The chancellor of the Curia or La China—Ana Lucía Escobar? The parish-house cook? Even someone from ODHA? And who had the important “offstage” roles? General Marco Tulio Espinosa (“the most powerful man in the Army”)? Or even President Arzú? All would eventually be targets of suspicion.
    It was obvious, at least if the accounts of both Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván were true, that the man without a shirt hadmeant to be seen, or did not mind being seen, by at least two of the park’s indigents when he stepped out of the garage that night. He left a sweatshirt behind on the floor. Was that to make it seem as if the terrible act of violence had somehow involved an act of love or lust? So that later, when witnesses spoke up, it would suggestively connect the shirtless man, the sweatshirt on the floor, the murdered bishop? But why, if it really was the same man, did he come back minutes later wearing a shirt? And where did the stranger go?
    Those were some of the questions, based on the most obvious early information available, that were contemplated in the first hours and days after the murder, which made headlines across the world. Denunciations of the crime and calls for justice poured in from political and religious leaders, including Pope John Paul II. It was widely assumed, of course, that the bishop was killed in retaliation for the REMHI report, though it was hard to believe that his enemies could respond with such reckless brutality, no matter how threatened or angered they were.
    How realistic was it to expect that the murderers would ever be brought to justice? Guatemalans had only to look at the region’s recent history of “unimaginable” homicides to feel discouraged. Though a UN truth commission in neighboring El Salvador had confirmed what had been widely alleged since the crime occurred, that Archbishop Romero had been murdered by government assassins, no charges had ever been brought in that case, nor had any serious criminal investigation been sustained. To the north, in Mexico, the murder of Cardinal Posadas in 1993 remained unsolved, as did the assassination of the reformist presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, in 1988. The more shocking the crime, it seemed, the more powerful or powerfully connected the criminals, and in Latin America powerful people almost never end up in prison.

    Nevertheless, as Ronalth Ochaeta said in the statement given to reporters that first morning, it was inconceivable that a crime of such magnitude could occur only hundreds of feet from some of the government’s most sophisticated security units and surveillance apparatus and remain unsolved for long.

II
THE INVESTIGATION
    THE UNTOUCHABLES AND
THE DOG-AND-PRIEST SHOW
    Peace would then be a form of war, and the State a means of waging it.
    â€”Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power”

1
    T HE CHURCH OF S AN S EBASTIÁN was my mother’s church when she was young. During her adolescence she gave handwriting lessons in its school for boys. When I was an infant, my grandparents and my mother brought me to the church of San Sebastián to be baptized. My mother married an American from a Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant family, and though I spent my early childhood bouncing between Guatemala and the United States (and between religions) I grew up mostly in Massachusetts. In the 1980s, when my grandparents were no longer alive, I returned to Guatemala frequently and lived in their house, once for an unbroken stretch of about two years, in an upstairs apartment that had belonged to my unmarried great-aunt. I was in New York in the spring of 1998 and followed the story of Bishop Gerardi’s murder and its