The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman Read Free Book Online Page A

Perhaps nobody was closer to Bishop Gerardi than Juana Sanabria and her daughter. But sometimes Bishop Gerardi forgot to call, so when ten o’clock passed that Sunday without any message, Juana Sanabria at first tried to reassure herself that there was no reason to worry. She couldn’t restrain her anxiety, however, and, at ten-thirty she phoned the parish house. For the next hour or so, Juana Sanabria said, she phoned every fifteen minutes, and then, worried about disturbing Father Mario, she gave up.
    For a long time it was generally believed that Juana Sanabria had called the bishop’s private line, in his bedroom, which was why, according to Father Mario, he couldn’t hear it ringing. But the sacristan said that the telephone in the bishop’s bedroom could be heard throughout the house. Later, Juana Sanabria testified that she had called three different numbers at the parish house that night. She understood the dangers that came with having published the REMHI report, and she’d noticed, that last Saturday night when Bishop Gerardi was in her home, that he was preoccupied, so much so that he hadn’t even stayed for the Cantinflas movie, which always made him laugh. Juana Sanabria would testify that when neither Bishop Gerardi nor anybody else answered any of the parish house phones on Sunday night, she was overcome with fear and foreboding, and began to weep.
    At about half past midnight, perhaps somewhat earlier, the front door of the parish house opened and Father Mario stepped out in his bathrobe and pajamas. Rubén Chanax told investigators later that morning that the priest called out to the row of sleeping
bolitos: “Muchá
”—which can be short for
muchacho
, or
muchacha
, or, as in this case, the plural of those (boys, or youths)—“did any of you see who came in or went out?” One of the
bolitos
, who was known as El Pitti, and who liked to drink only lethal
quimicazo
and so had forgone the presumably spiked beer, answered, “Don’t worry, Father, Monseñor went in a while ago.”
    Rubén Chanax said that he got up from his blanket and approached Father Mario and told him that he’d seen a
muchacho
come out of the garage and that this
muchacho
had been naked from the waist up. According to Chanax, the priest said, “Ah, then stay here, because I’ve phoned the police.” Chanax’s many subsequent testimonies would never vary regarding what he told the priest, but the first police investigators dispatched to the scene of the murder would report Father Mario’s own account of that moment following his discovery of the body in the garage: “He went to the parish house door, interrogating the ‘
bolitos’
who slept in the external part, to the right of the garage, if they had seen anyone coming in or out, the interrogated answering in the negative.” Two days later, in a declaration given to the special prosecutor assigned to the case, the priest would again give the impression that the
bolitos
had answered by saying they had seen nothing unusual, leaving Chanax out of his account. But Father Mario’s two subsequent declarations, on May 15 and on July 22, would coincide, at least in that one respect, with Chanax’s.
    Father Mario later told investigators that he had spent Sunday afternoon, after the midday Mass, in his bedroom, watching television and dining on his favorite food, fried chicken delivered from Pollo Campero, a popular fast-food chain. After the evening Mass, he took his eleven-year-old German shepherd, Baloo, for a brief walk in the park. A female parishioner who’d attended the Mass asked to speak with him, and he brought the dog inside and went back and spoke to the woman for about ten minutes. At about that time, the choir members who’d sung in the evening Mass left the church. Back in his bedroom, Father Mario changed into hispajamas at his usual hour, around seven-thirty,