True Crime

Following the 1996 peace accords, Guatemala theoretically became a civilian-ruled democracy. But as this book argues persuasively, the nature of power did not really change, and the country remained hostage to shadowy military forces whose anticommunist mission had morphed into criminal enterprise, employing an army of informants. This system thrived in an atmosphere of conservative politics, media compliance and social prejudice in which many affluent Guatemalans looked down on the Mayan Indian poor whose cause the guerrillas championed.

The human rights activism of Bishop Gerardi's team was an intolerable challenge to this system, Goldman writes, and his slaying was no random crime. It was the calculated lashing out of a threatened monster; a symbolic act in a mighty confrontation between two major institutions, the military and the church; and a "complex chess move" designed to preserve a culture of privilege and profit.

The masterminds of the murder went to extraordinary lengths to disguise it as something else. Titillating rumors were planted in the press and the public imagination, with just enough plausibility to be believed: Gerardi had been the homosexual victim of a violent lovers' spat. He was done in by his housekeeper's vixen daughter and her gangster boyfriend. He was attacked by a German shepherd named Baloo who belonged to the secretive, fetishistic parish priest.

This last version gained such currency that the poor dog was imprisoned, the bishop's corpse was exhumed to look for bite marks, and cars sprouted bumper stickers saying, "Free Baloo!" Lurid gossip became official truth, dutifully repeated by the national media and sucking in even the distinguished Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who opined in 2004 that the plot had been concocted by an array of "scoundrels, opportunists and petty politicians" and that the actions of the church's human rights investigators were "supremely suspicious."

Behind the soap-opera smokescreen lay a plot of breathtaking ruthlessness and seemingly infinite reach. Guatemala's military intelligence apparatus seemed to know everything about everyone, and its methods of intimidation ranged from blackmail to whispered phone threats to sadistic atrocities -- one investigator's brother was found dead, his arms and legs torn off. Witnesses vanished, fled into exile or suddenly recanted. "It was in the long post-execution stage," Goldman writes, "that the murder of Bishop Gerardi was especially masterful."

Slowly, however, the pieces of the puzzle began to fit together. Much of the evidence came from a demi-monde of vagrants, informers and ex-soldiers whose portraits are among the most riveting and revealing parts of the book. They were both accomplices and victims of the system, nobodies who could be manipulated, abandoned or eliminated when necessary.

The key witness was Rub¿n Chanax, a jobless former soldier who had been paid to spy on the bishop and gradually found the courage to tell what he knew. He appears again and again in the book, each time imparting more information about the crime, himself and the sinister system that employed him. Most chilling are his descriptions of training for an elite intelligence unit, which included being forced to decapitate a puppy and shoot a civilian couple chosen at random.

Several major figures in the drama are more opaque or complex, including two convicted in the murder. One is Father Mario Orantes, the owner of Baloo, a man of bizarre habits and relationships whose apparent role in the crime was never clarified. The other is Army Capt. Byron Lima, a former intelligence official who projected spit-and-polish rectitude but ran lucrative rackets inside prison and hinted at a vast conspiracy behind the bishop's death.

The author also plays a crucial role in the book, weaving in and out of the drama as he tracks down nervous witnesses, plucks facts from webs of deception, reflects on the tragic history of his homeland and unforgettably evokes a world of subtle but omnipresent evil that Bishop Gerardi and his colleagues sought to chronicle as a warning to future generations. Above all, The Art of Political Murder is a passionate cry of outrage that should be read and passed on by anyone who believes, as Goldman proves here, that truth is always more improbable than fiction. *

Pamela Constable, a staff writer and former foreign correspondent for The Post, is co-author of "A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet."