Uncover What Violence Begets

In 'Art of Political Murder'

by Daniel Alarcón, San Francisco Chronicle, September 16, 2007

In "The Long Night of White Chickens," Francisco Goldman's masterful first novel, the protagonist Flor describes her deep, anxious love for Guatemala: "You don't live in a small country so much as with it, in a way comparable to how you might find yourself sharing your life with a not necessarily complex but completely involving and painfully demanding person."

Take Goldman's new book - "The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?" - as a love letter to that painfully demanding nation. In late April 1998, on a Sunday evening, Bishop Juan Gerardi was killed in the garage of the parish house where he lived in Guatemala City, bludgeoned to death with a slab of concrete as he stepped out of his car. Two days before his murder, Gerardi had published "Guatemala: Never Again," a 1,400-page report on the myriad human rights abuses committed by the armed forces in the course of its decadeslong war against leftist rebels. About 200,000 civilians were killed in this conflict, and the victims of this indiscriminate state-sponsored violence were mostly Guatemala's indigenous poor.

For 19 years Guatemala was on the United Nations' list of countries with the worst human rights records, and though peace accords had been signed in 1996, at the time Gerardi's report was published, not a single Guatemalan military officer had been convicted for human rights violations. Given the conclusions of the report - that the army, for example, was responsible for 80 percent of the war crimes - Gerardi expected the report to be controversial. He was already counseling his co-investigators to leave the country for a while, but he made no such contingencies for his own safety. He was a bishop in an overwhelmingly Catholic country, after all, and probably felt protected by his prominence.

The story of this crime - of its origins, its implications and the conviction of Gerardi's murderers - is brilliantly recounted here. Though he is better known as a novelist, Goldman began his career as a journalist, reporting on the Central American wars for Harper's throughout the 1980s. His new work reads with all the tension of a thriller, as Goldman brings to bear his many narrative gifts to unravel the complex tale of Gerardi's assassination.

The protagonists of "The Art of Political Murder," apart from Gerardi himself, include the doggedly persistent and unflappable team of investigators nicknamed the Untouchables, a couple of homeless drunks who know much more than they will admit to, a terrifying Army colonel who threatens witnesses by miming pistols with his hands, an infirm and geriatric dog named Baloo (for a time the prime suspect) and a mysterious, shirtless man who appears and disappears like a mirage, but who may be one of Guatemala's most fearsome political hit men.

Keeping all these characters - and many more - straight is no small accomplishment; rendering a political landscape as complex and scarred as Guatemala's with beauty and precision is truly impressive. A culture of impunity, born of 36 years of civil war, now fueled by drug money, has misshapen Guatemalan politics for decades, and neither the 1996 peace accords nor the United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission has been able to undo the damage.

Goldman is clear-eyed and unsparing as he describes the country's fitful attempts to right itself, and it's not a pretty sight. The "art" referenced in the title is not the murder itself but the cover-up: a baroque, multilayered and often successful plot to sow confusion regarding every aspect of the crime. There is a hall-of-mirrors quality to it all: As the investigation plows on, unlikely theories, scurrilous rumors and blatant lies compete with and often drown out the truth. Intimidation too is fundamental to this art, and when this fails, there is always violence itself, scrupulously carried out, without hesitation or apology. The pages of "The Art of Political Murder" are a catalog of fear, as well as a testament to those who refused to be intimidated.

Miguel Ángel Asturias, the Guatemalan novelist and Nobel laureate - and a childhood neighbor of Gerardi's - was asked in a 1970 interview about the relationship a writer has with reality in a country like his. He said, "There are events which really happen and afterwards become legends, and there are legends which afterwards become events; there are no boundaries between reality and dreams, between reality and fiction, between what is seen and what is imagined."

The murder of Gerardi is just such an event, and it needed a writer like Goldman. It is a special admiration I have for Goldman - for his brio and audacity as a storyteller, for his nerve and his courage as a journalist. "The Art of Political Murder" is both a page-turner and a searing indictment of a corrosive brand of politics that has overwhelmed a nation. The book's heroes are the Guatemalans of extraordinary bravery who zealously pursue Gerardi's killers, who, like Goldman himself, do not shrink from the facts, who expose government and military complicity at every stage of the crime.

These days, the hope engendered by the convictions of Gerardi's killers seems far, far away. Former Gen. Otto Pérez Molina, whom Goldman names as the intellectual author of the murder, came in second in last Sunday's first round presidential election. The Gerardi assassination is just one more allegation for a man often implicated in extrajudicial murders and other human rights violations. Now Pérez Molina will face Álvaro Colom, a businessman allied with a center-left party, in a runoff later this year, with spiraling crime and lawlessness as one of the central issues of the campaign.

The election cycle has already been marred by violence, with 49 candidates, senior party officials and their family members murdered. Pérez Molina has promised "a firm hand" to bring Guatemala's preposterously high murder rate (second only to Colombia's in all of the Americas, and rising) down by any means necessary - a chilling statement from a man of Pérez Molina's ilk.

Yes, there are two military officers - a father and son - in prison for the murder of Gerardi, but this result did not come easy, nor have these convictions pulled Guatemala out of its existential crisis. A small country awash in drug money, this is a Central American nation that seems to have lost its way - a nation whose bleak present makes "The Art of Political Murder" all the more urgent. In these dark times, Goldman offers a rare gift: a reason for hope, a story about the limits of impunity, an improbable and inspiring case study of success.

Daniel Alarcón is associate editor of Etiqueta Negra and the author of two works of fiction, including the novel "Lost City Radio."