[R-G] Francisco Goldman on Guatemalan Elections

[Anthony Fenton]

Francisco Goldman on Guatemalan Elections
New Evidence Suggests Guatemalan Presidential Candidate Played Role  
in 1998 Murder of Human Rights Activist Bishop Juan Gerard
by Amy Goodman
	
November 02, 2007
Democracy Now
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=20&ItemID=14189

AMY GOODMAN: In Guatemala, millions of voters head to the polls on  
Sunday for the second round of general elections to pick a new  
president. The runoff vote pits three-time center-left candidate  
Alvaro Colom against hard-line former army general Otto Perez Molina.

  General Perez Molina, the ex-head of army intelligence, has  
promised to expand the police force by half and to use the military  
to fight crime. He closed out his campaign on Monday in the city of  
Villa Nueva.

GEN. OTTO PEREZ MOLINA: [translated] We want a Guatemala with  
justice, not inequality. I tell you, I am convinced and have no doubt  
that there will be a change on November 4th, with a strong hand, mind  
and heart, with "Cayo" Castillo and Otto Perez, the best option.

AMY GOODMAN: General Perez Molina commanded troops in one of  
Guatemala's most violent areas, has been implicated in a number of  
political crimes. Now, new evidence suggests that he may have  
orchestrated the 1998 murder of the beloved Guatemalan human rights  
activist, Bishop Juan Gerardi.

Known in Guatemala as "the Crime of the Century," Bishop Gerardi was  
bludgeoned to death in his garage in Guatemala City, April 26, 1998.  
Two days earlier, he had released a four-volume report that found the  
Guatemalan army primarily responsible for the overwhelming number of  
deaths and disappearances of as many as 200,000 civilians over four  
decades.

Gerardi's murder set off global repercussions in political and human  
rights circles. The case was one of the most sensational and  
controversial in Latin America's history. Three army officers and a  
priest were ultimately convicted of the crime.

We're now joined by author Francisco Goldman, who has spent the last  
seven years investigating the case. His book is called The Art of  
Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? Goldman provides a detailed  
account of Gerardi's murder and an exhaustive investigation into who  
was responsible. Francisco Goldman is an acclaimed Guatemalan  
American novelist. He is the author of three novels. We welcome you  
to Democracy Now!

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: Thank you, Amy. It's a pleasure to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: This is nonfiction, this one, your latest book?

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: This is nonfiction, but written almost in the form  
of a novel. It's a narrative chronicle of a nine-year legal case,  
really.

AMY GOODMAN: This is a major charge you are making on this eve of the  
Guatemalan election.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: It's a charge that I'm repeating, because I was  
led to it by two of the major sources for me throughout the book.  
It's funny, because it's actually only a few pages of the book where  
this charge emerges, when the key -- first the key witness in the  
case, apparently a park vagrant, who was situated outside the parish  
house where the murder took place the night of the murder, but who  
was actually an army intelligence agent who had been planted there  
and, in fact, had a role in the murder.

AMY GOODMAN: The vagrant?

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: The vagrant, Ruben Chanax, who years later, he was  
a key witness when the case finally went to trial. And I tracked him  
down when he was living in Mexico City as a semi-protected witness  
and working in a taco stand. And in the course of our conversations,  
when we went over the case time and time again, every detail of the  
case, it emerged that at the crime scene -- you know, we know that  
the crime was being monitored by three military officers who were  
sort of overseeing events from a little store nearby the church that  
night. He had, in the legal case, identified one, Colonel Lima  
Estrada, one of the men who eventually was imprisoned, but he  
repressed the names of two, for his own reasons, including staying  
alive. And he told me that one of those men was General Otto Perez  
Molina.

Now, just him saying that wasn't really enough; I needed obviously  
confirmation. The confirmation for me came from the most important  
source I had, a man named Rafael Guillamon, a former Spanish  
intelligence agent who headed the UN mission's internal investigation  
into the Gerardi murder. And when he interrogated this Chanax, this  
vagrant, two days after the murder, he first heard it from him. Now,  
this investigation was conducted for the UN's internal knowledge, not  
to share with prosecutors, and so it stayed secret all these years.  
And then he had even more proof.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the significance of Bishop Gerardi and the  
significance of the report that he released.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: When the '96 peace accords, which ended the thirty- 
six-year war, were signed between -- the UN-sponsored accords between  
the Guatemalan guerrillas, who were in a quiescent role, and the  
victorious Guatemalan army, the army was able to dictate, among other  
things, a blanket amnesty for all human rights crimes that had  
occurred during that war, in which 200,000 civilians were  
slaughtered. It also allowed for a UN sort of truth commission that  
would be allowed to look into the past, but wouldn't be able to name  
names, name military units who were responsible, and so forth.

And Bishop Gerardi thought that this kind of covering- up of the  
truth was not going to be healthy or good for Guatemala, and he  
sponsored his own -- the Catholic Church, through the Archdiocese  
Office of Human Rights, sponsored their own human rights report. And  
as the Church, they were the only organization in the country,  
through the parishes, that could reach into every community. And he  
trained 700, you know, pretty humble people, people from local  
churches, to go out into these communities, into these highland  
villages that were so shielded off by speaking, you know, sixteen  
different Mayan languages and traumatized by years of violence,  
massacres. There is such a thick taboo against speaking out and such  
fear of outsiders, but the Church, they're not seen as outsiders. So  
they went in there for years and collected testimonies.

And on April 24th, two days before his death, he released the most  
unprecedented, extraordinary four- volume report, in which he managed  
to identify, for example, 400-plus of the 600 massacres we now know  
occurred in the war. He managed to list -- that's the whole fourth  
volume -- 53,000 of the dead by name, of the 200,000 people we know  
that died. And he found the army responsible of 80% of the crimes,  
the guerrillas only 5%. He made it -- he did name names and military  
units and made it clear that if the amnesty could ever be breached,  
he would make this documentation available to prosecutors and to  
families seeking justice. Now, this was an unbelievable impertinence.  
When the army had signed the peace accords, they had never expected  
to have to put up with something like this. And so, they obviously  
decided they had to do something.

Now, the real question, why it's the art of political murder, is the  
question everybody asks, is why do they kill him two days after the  
report comes out, not, say, days before? And the answer to that,  
right, gets to the whole institution of impunity in Guatemala. When  
you know you don't have to face justice, when you've never faced  
justice before, that gives you sort of, you know, the equivalent of  
what Virginia Woolf said to a fiction writer was "a room of one's  
own," you know, that freedom of imagination to dream up an  
extraordinary crime.

And what this crime was, was pure theater. They rigged up a  
theatrical event that involved a man with no shirt stepping out of  
the garage after Bishop Gerardi had been murdered; the vagrant  
planted there to see him, who had probably taken part in the murder;  
immediately, in all different sophisticated ways, rumors coming out  
that it had been a homosexual crime of passion, which resulted --

AMY GOODMAN: By a priest.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: By a priest. A corrupt prosecutor, corrupt judges,  
corrupt media, everybody contributing to this farce. And the story of  
the book is how this was -- what should have been, for the  
government, a slam-dunk case to pin the whole case on this poor,  
pathetic priest who shared Bishop Gerardi's parish house. You know,  
they claim that he had sicked his dog, and they claim they found  
signs of dog bites in Bishop Gerardi's skull, and it was ridiculous.

But in Guatemala, this kind of theatrical crime would ordinarily  
succeed, and would have if not for the efforts really of the young  
people portrayed in this book, young secular people in their twenties  
within the Church, who formed their own investigative unit, named  
themselves "the untouchables." And it's just extraordinary. If it  
hadn't been for the efforts of these four young guys and the small  
team of lawyers at the Church, who, through their own detective work,  
brought in the first important witnesses in the case and miraculously  
succeeded in derailing this phony prosecution.

And then, after that, finally -- this is a case that saw more than  
ten people related to the case murdered, two prosecutors chased into  
exile, judges chased into exile, countless witnesses in exile. But  
finally, through the most extraordinary bravery of a handful of  
people, the convictions managed to go through. There was a historic  
trial. It was the first time Guatemalan military officers had ever  
been found guilty of taking part in a state-sponsored politically  
motivated execution.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, General Otto Perez Molina is running for  
president.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: He's running for president, and when these  
accusations emerged in the press, because this is just a few  
paragraphs, but back in June a Guatemalan newspaper ran them. And he  
immediately began to get himself in trouble with all kinds of, well,  
lies, right? First, he said I had written my book because I was in  
the pay of another politician. Later he accused me of being part of a  
narco campaign of defamation and political assassinations directed  
against him.

Then he said -- for instance, he tried to say, "I have no knowledge."  
You know, when he responded to what had appeared in the paper, he  
said, "I don't know Captain Lima," one of the imprisoned military  
men. Well, we knew from the UN that he and Captain Lima were  
constantly having cell phone calls when Lima was in prison. And the  
funny thing is, people in Guatemala immediately started to email the  
newspaper, giving details of the thirty-year relationship between  
Captain Lima and Perez Molina. So why did he lie about this?

And even more importantly, the UN mission investigator told me that  
-- because Perez Molina claimed that he was in Washington, D.C. the  
week the murder happened and that he had a passport that showed this.  
But the UN investigator told me, pay no attention to his passports.  
He is a military intelligence person. He uses multiple passports, and  
we know that three nights after the murder, he had dinner -- Perez  
Molina had dinner with the UN mission chief, Jean Arnault,, who  
wanted to sound him out about his theories about the murder, because  
he's an intelligence chief. And he thought this would never come out.  
And he thought he had an alibi. But then, even after this came out, a  
Guatemalan paper went and investigated, and they found that he had  
seven passports registered in his name, confirming the UN's  
skepticism about his claims, and so forth. And since then, since  
these kinds of allegations came out, he has ducked his last three  
debates with his opponent, because they think he's afraid of  
answering questions about this case and other crimes, and his poll  
numbers have started to dip.

And just yesterday -- this is very important -- just yesterday, it  
came out and broke, and it's already been picked up by international  
wire services, two reporters from El Periodico, the same newspaper,  
have discovered that Perez Molina's campaign has links to narcos. And  
they wanted to publish this information, and they immediately began  
to get death threats, and the paper was under a lot of pressure. And  
they've had to go to the Office of Human Rights basically to ask for  
help and protection, and want to get this story out. So this just  
broke yesterday.

AMY GOODMAN: When you say "narcos," you mean?

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: The narco cartels, because what's at stake here,  
right -- it's important for people to understand, what's amazing  
about this case is the bridge between 1980s violence and twenty-first  
century violence.

AMY GOODMAN: Over fifty deaths of political activists and candidates  
leading up to this election on Sunday.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: We have fifteen seconds.

  FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: OK. Well, military intelligence used to fight  
guerillas. Right now, with political power, it's all about organized  
crime, and that's what they're trying to hold onto. And that's the  
faction, that's the kind of power that General Perez Molina is trying  
to legitimize.

AMY GOODMAN: Francisco Goldman's book is called The Art of Political  
Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? I want to thank you very much for  
being with us.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: Thank you. It was a pleasure.