Guatemalan elections

Francisco Goldman on Guatemalan Elections

New Evidence Suggests Guatemalan Presidential Candidate
Played Role in 1998 Murder of Human Rights Activist
Bishop Juan Gerard

Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/31/145216
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

General Otto Perez Molina is slightly trailing in polls
ahead of Sunday's run-off election in Guatemala. The
acclaimed Guatemalan novelist Francisco Goldman joins
us to talk new evidence linking Gen. Perez Molina to
the 1998 murder of a beloved Guatemalan human rights
activist. Goldman writes about the case in his first
book of non-fiction, "The Art of Political Murder: Who
Killed the Bishop?" [includes rush transcript]

In Guatemala, millions of voters will 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 Álvaro Colom against hard-line
former army general, Otto Pérez Molina.

General Perez Molina, the ex-head of army intelligence,
has promised to 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.

General Perez Molina commanded troops in one of
Guatemala's most violent areas and has been implicated
in a number of political crimes. Now, new evidence
suggests Perez Molina may have orchestrated the 1998
murder of beloved Guatemalan human rights activist,
Bishop Juan Gerardi. Known in Guatemala as "The Crime
of the Century," Gerardi was bludgeoned to death near
his home in Guatemala City on April 26th, 1998. Two
days earlier, he had released a four-volume report that
found the Guatemalan Army primarily responsible for the
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.

Writer Francisco Goldman has spent the last seven years
investigating the case. In his latest book, "The Art of
Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?" Goldman
provides a detailed account of Gerardi's murder and an
exhaustive investigation into was was responsible.
Francisco Goldman is an acclaimed American Guatemalan
novelist. He is the author of three novels, including
"The Long Night of White Chickens." "The Art of
Political Murder" is his first non-fiction book. He
joins me today in the firehouse studio.

* Francisco Goldman. Acclaimed American-Guatemalan
novelist. He is the author of three novels, including
"The Long Night of White Chickens." His latest book is
his first nonfiction work. It's called "The Art of
Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?"

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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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.