| Guatemalan court overturns convictions in
bishop’s killing
By PAUL JEFFREY
In what church leaders described as a setback for justice in
Guatemala, on Oct. 8 an appeals court in Guatemala City ordered a new trial for
four men convicted of slaying a Roman Catholic bishop in 1998.
“This is disappointing and very frustrating. After all this
time, we had hoped that we could move forward toward learning more of the
truth. Instead, this is a giant step backwards,” Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini
of San Marcos told NCR.
The Fourth Court of Appeals annulled last year’s conviction
of three military officers and a Catholic priest for the assassination of Juan
Gerardi, the auxiliary bishop of Guatemala City who headed the feisty
archdiocesan human rights office. Gerardi was beaten to death just two days
after he released a landmark report that blamed the military for most of the
200,000 deaths and disappearances during the country’s civil war, which
ended in 1996.
The appeals court ordered a new trial for Col. Disrael Lima
Estrada, Capt. Byron Lima Oliva, and Sgt. Jose Villanueva, each of whom had
received 30-year sentences for the crime, and for Fr. Mario Orantes, a priest
who had received a 20-year sentence for complicity in the murder. The three
military officers are expected to remain in prison pending a new trial. Orantes
remains hospitalized under guard in a Guatemala City clinic.
The appeals court claimed the three judges in last year’s
trial had relied uncritically on the testimony of Ruben Chanax, a homeless man
whose testimony had placed the defendants at the scene of the crime. Chanax,
who testified that he had been paid by Lima Oliva and Lima Estrada to spy on
Gerardi, now lives outside the country in a witness protection program.
The appeals court also cancelled the lower court’s order to
investigate the involvement of other high-ranking military officials in the
assassination, an investigation that never really began because the government
failed to dedicate personnel and resources to the task.
Church leaders were not totally surprised by the appellate court
decision. The archdiocese had taken out full-page ads in major Guatemalan
newspapers the day before, warning that something was afoot.
Auxiliary Bishop Mario Rios Montt called the appeals court ruling
“a rash and irresponsible decision that puts at risk the process of
consolidating justice in the country. … It’s nothing but a willful
concession to the enemies of peace in Guatemala.”
Rios said the church “had never trusted the
impartiality” of the head of the three-judge appeals court, Willevaldo
Contreras, who was twice removed from proceedings related to the Gerardi case
at the request of the church human rights office. Contreras’ presence on
the appeals panel was part of what Rios, adopting the title of a Gabriel Garcia
Márquez novel, described as “the chronicle of a verdict
foretold.”
The church rights office announced it would appeal the decision to
the country’s Supreme Court. Should that court refuse to alter the
appellate decision, a new trial for the four once-convicted men would take at
least three months to prepare.
Capt. Lima Oliva said a new trial would demonstrate his innocence.
He claimed he was only implicated in the case because church activists dislike
the military. “The army is a target for this bunch of communists, who
don’t understand that the war ended and we signed peace accords,” he
said.
Like the original trial, the appeal process was closely monitored
by international human rights groups. Amnesty International issued a statement
claiming the appellate court decision was “typical of past tactics
seemingly intended to discourage, exhaust and bankrupt those trying to combat
impunity in Guatemala.” The London-based group suggested that one
objective of the court decision “may be to allow even more time to
intimidate or buy off those whose testimonies were crucial to the initial
conviction.”
During the three years between Gerardi’s killing and last
year’s trial, seven witnesses were killed. Six witnesses, two prosecutors,
and one of the trial judges fled the country in fear of their lives.
The appeals court ruling came less than a week after another
high-profile case reached a conclusion. On Oct. 3, Col. Juan Valencia was
convicted of ordering the 1990 assassination of Myrna Mack, an anthropologist
who worked closely with Gerardi in investigating the lives of indigenous people
displaced by the army’s counterinsurgency campaigns. Mack was stabbed 27
times outside her Guatemala City office. In 1993, Noel Beteta, a sergeant in
the elite presidential guard, was convicted of her killing. In a jailhouse
confession, Beteta claimed he had been ordered by his superiors to carry out
the crime.
That the trial of the “intellectual authors” of
Mack’s assassination took place at all is due to the dogged persistence of
Mack’s sister Helen, a mild-mannered conservative businesswoman who
belonged to Opus Dei. Angered by her sister’s killing and the subsequent
cover-up, Helen Mack overcame her own shyness and political reluctance to
relentlessly push the justice system to give her a chance to finally face in
court the men she believes masterminded her sister’s killing.
It was a long road. During the 12 years it took to bring the case
to trial, the case passed through the hands of 30 judges; no one wanted to risk
handling it. A police investigator and a witness were murdered. The Myrna Mack
Foundation, set up by Helen to honor her sister, spent $3 million on the case.
In the course of her odyssey, Helen Mack left Opus Dei, started hanging out
with Jesuits and Maryknollers, and became an extraordinary symbol of ordinary
people standing up to their homicidal government.
When the verdict came down, Helen Mack declared she was
“partially satisfied;” although Valencia was convicted, two other
officers were found not guilty. Yet even the partial victory was big news. The
conviction of Valencia, who was assistant director of the presidential guard
when Mack was killed, marked the first time in Guatemalan history that someone
was convicted for using their authority to order a murder. Human rights
activists celebrated, though not for long. “The verdict in the Mack case
was a hard blow to the generals, and there was tremendous pressure on the
appeals court judges to set things right by overturning the Gerardi
verdict,” said Mario Higueros, dean of Latin American Mennonite Seminary
in Guatemala City.
Ramazzini said the decision to overturn the guilty verdicts in the
Gerardi case was one of the latest factors contributing to “a renewed
environment of terror and fear in Guatemala.” In recent months, Guatemalan
human rights activists have endured a steady escalation of threats, murders and
other intimidation.
Church workers have been among the targets of harassment. Earlier
this year, forensic anthropologists working on several church-sponsored
exhumations of mass graves received death threats. On Feb. 21, a suspicious
fire in the Catholic church in Nebaj destroyed files containing evidence about
35 war-time massacres in the north of the province of El Quiche. In March,
Ramazzini started receiving death threats because of his support for landless
peasants; Ramazzini was last threatened in 1996, the year the war ended. In
July, Egon Hidalgo, a human rights educator among migrants in Ramazzini’s
diocese, was beaten, and since then has received repeated death threats,
reportedly from wealthy migrant smugglers upset about the church’s
interference with their business.
To many in the church, this is more than mere déjà
vu. “Although there is no proof these events originate with the same dark
forces as in the past, that’s what we suspect. This is their style. We
fear the dark forces are still here, still strong,” said Rodolfo
Valenzuela, the bishop of La Verapaz.
Paul Jeffrey is a free-lance writer who lives in
Honduras.
National Catholic Reporter, October 25,
2002
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