0802143857 (N) by Francisco Goldman

Author:Francisco Goldman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2007-04-17T21:00:00+00:00

The attorney general finally agreed to speak to President Portillo the next day, during their weekly Thursday meeting. Edgar Gutiérrez, now a member of Portillo’s government, told me what happened. “The chief of police went to the president’s office,” he said, “and the president called me. When I arrived, he showed us the arrest orders. The president, with the order in his hand, said, ‘Look, if you use conventional methods to capture these people, they’re going to get away. Choose the most trustworthy people you have, don’t use telephones or radios, and order a surprise operation to capture them.’”

It would be President Portillo’s most direct intervention in the Gerardi case.

At four o’clock that afternoon, Zeissig received a call on his cell phone from his wife: the news had broken on television that a police operation was under way in Colonia Lourdes. Captain Lima was arrested at home. His father, Colonel Lima Estrada, was apprehended at a house in another part of the city.

The operation to capture Obdulio Villanueva at his small rural farmhouse lasted from five to ten in the morning on January 22, during which time the suspect engaged the police and soldiers who came to arrest him in a gun battle that lasted two hours. Father Mario, who was still in Houston, Texas, returned to Guatemala to turn himself in weeks later, while court orders were being prepared for his extradition.

In the ensuing weeks, Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva’s lawyers presented proof that their client had been freed from prison, having served his sentence, two days after the murder of Bishop Gerardi. But prosecutors found some of his old cellmates who explained that Villanueva had frequently received visits from military officers, and that he was sometimes allowed to sleep outside the prison, in hotels in Antigua—the beautiful old town is a major tourism destination, with majestic ruins of churches and convents from a colonial-era earthquake. Unfortunately, none of the prisoners was willing to say this on the record. Finally, there being no evidence against him other than Rubén Chanax’s testimony, the judge ordered Obdulio Villanueva freed.

Mario Domingo and Nery Rodenas had by then sheepishly confessed to Leopoldo Zeissig that the earlier witness from the EMP, the presidential waiter Aguilar Martínez, had also implicated Obdulio Villanueva in the crime, but that ODHA’s lawyers had asked him to withhold that information from his deposition, because it seemed incredible. Zeissig was furious. Even if they’d instructed Aguilar Martínez not to mention Villanueva, ODHA still should have informed him. Then he and his assistants could have quietly begun investigating months before anyone else learned that Villanueva was a suspect. Chanax’s testimony and the subsequent arrest orders, Zeissig presumed, had given Villanueva’s protectors enough time to cover their man’s tracks and ensure the silence of other prisoners.

But there was one small breakthrough. Zeissig managed to establish that Sergeant Major Obdulio Villanueva had remained on active duty, drawing a salary as a member of the EMP, while he was in prison.

THE LIMAS’ DEFENSE TEAM was

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