A novelist investigates the killing of a beloved Guatemalan bishop.

Reviewed by Pamela Constable
Sunday, September 30, 2007; BW04

THE ART OF POLITICAL MURDER

Who Killed the Bishop?

By Francisco Goldman

Francisco Goldman, an accomplished novelist who specializes in evoking murky tropical worlds, could easily have concocted a macabre and fantastic plot in which right-wing military officers of a Central American country murder a leftist cleric, then set about terrorizing witnesses and planting salacious rumors to distract the public and cover their tracks. The assassins are never found, the powerful institutions behind them remain entrenched, and justice proves as elusive as a rare quetzal bird flitting through the jungle.

But The Art of Political Murder is not a novel. It is a painstakingly researched account of the assassination of a Guatemalan bishop, Msgr. Juan Gerardi, whose bludgeoned body was found lying in a pool of blood in his parish garage on the night of April 26, 1998, just four days after he and a team of human rights investigators announced the publication of a devastating, 1,400-page report blaming Guatemala's security forces for a 30-year reign of murder, torture, massacres and disappearances.

Goldman's book is both a horrifying expos¿ and a triumphant tale of justice belatedly served in a country where the concept had lost all meaning, of institutional evil unmasked in a place where it had long operated behind a thousand disguises, of plodding police work and personal courage overcoming a culture of impunity and fear.

It is also alarmingly relevant to current events in Guatemala, where a season of national elections has been savaged by political assassination and skullduggery. One of the two leading presidential candidates is Otto P¿rez Molina, a former army general and military intelligence chief who was in office at the time of the Gerardi murder. He has campaigned on a law-and-order platform and has said he would not hesitate to restrict civil liberties to crack down on crime.

Starting from the grisly murder scene, Goldman slowly builds a case against the killers and their shadowy protectors. His journalistic investigation closely tracks a laborious, multi-year inquiry by the human rights office of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Guatemala as well as a badly flawed official prosecution that nevertheless led to the first-ever convictions of Guatemalan army officers in a human rights crime. In the process, he lays bare the inner workings and powerful reach of an amoral shadow state.

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/27/AR2007092701847_pf.html



Bishop Juan Gerardi

"In July 2004, Weller announced that he was engaged to three-term Guatemalan Congresswoman Zury Ríos Montt, daughter of former strongman Efraín Ríos Montt.<12> On November 20, 2004, the two married at her father's home in Antigua Guatemala, his second marriage and her fourth. (Zury Ríos has also used the combined parental surname Ríos Sosa, but in Guatemala she is nowadays best known by her father's name, Ríos Montt; her personal website uses the hybrid married form "Ríos-Montt de Weller". <5>) The marriage is believed to be the only inter-parliamentary union in the world."

i guess there maybe more than one reason to resign/not run for congress again....

here`s jerry....

http://weller.house.gov/
Congressman Jerry Weller : 11th District Of Illinois

and his wife
http://www.zuryrios.com/
Zury Rios-Montt

and her daddy



"In 1999, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú presented charges for torture, genocide, illegal detention and state-sponsored terrorism against Ríos Montt and four other retired Guatemalan generals, two of them ex-presidents. Three other civilians that were high government official between 1978 and 1982 were also indicted. In September 2005 Spain's Constitutional Court ruled that Spanish courts can try those accused of crimes against humanity even if the victims were not of Spanish origin. In June 2006, Spanish judge Santiago Pedraz traveled to Guatemala to interrogate Ríos Montt and the others named in the case. However, at least 15 appeals filed by the defense attorneys of the indicted prevented Pedraz from carrying out the inquiries.

On July 7, Pedraz issued an international arrest warrant against Efraín Ríos Montt and former presidents Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores and Romeo Lucas García (the latter of whom had died in May 2006 in Venezuela). A warrant was also issued for the retired generals Benedicto Lucas García and Aníbal Guevara. Former minister of the interior Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz, who remains at large, and ex-chiefs of police German Chupina Barahona and Pedro García Arredondo are also named on the international arrest warrants. For his part, Ríos Montt admitted in a July 2006 press conference that there were "excesses" committed by the army during his rule, but strenuously denied his culpability <3>.


On January 17, 2007, Ríos Montt announced that he would run for a seat in Congress in the election to be held later in the year. As a member of Congress he would be immune from prosecution unless a court suspended him from office. <4> He won his seat in the election, which was held on September 9, and will lead the FRG's 15-member congressional delegation in the new legislature. 31 members of the United States Congress sent a letter to Guatemala's attorney general in April 2007, urging Ríos Montt's arrest". <5>


nice family....