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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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The Art
of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? By Francisco Goldman |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Darkness Novelist
Francisco Goldman’s first non-fiction book is The Art of
Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? He must have decided that as
fiction this story would be too unbelievable to be accepted. In a detailed,
methodical manner, Goldman describes the 1998 murder of Guatemalan Bishop
Juan Girardi, who was killed following the release of a report he issued on
the culpability of the Guatemalan army for the massacre of over 200,000
people over thirty years. With great skill, Goldman shows how the army
carried out Girardi’s murder, and how the trials of defendants were
manipulated. This is a finely written book that shows the work of a dedicated
journalist prowling through the darkness of a corrupt system for seven years
trying to find out the truth. Here’s an excerpt, from
the end of Part I, Chapter 2, pp. 59-62: When the parish house was
finally calm and empty of people, Otto Ardon, his assistants, and some police
specialists were able 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 Sebastian 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. The
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 Guillamon, 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 Guillamon 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," Guillamon said. Was
Guillamon 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 outside and inside the
church of San Sebastian that night? Were any of the indigents and bolitos actors in the sense that
Guillamon meant? Was Vilma, the female indigent chanting that the bishop had
be murdered by "fags," an actress? The chancellor of the Curia or
La China—Ana Lucia 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 Arza? All
would eventually be targets of suspicion. It
was obvious, at least if the accounts of both Ruben Chanax and El Chino Ivan
were true, that the man without a shirt had meant 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. The Art
of Political Murder will open the eyes of many readers to a darkness that
can envelop a society. Steve
Hopkins, November 20, 2007 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Art of Political Murder.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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