Guatemala – Journey into Evil Read online

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘They were executed.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘They were burnt.’

  ‘You had your men pour gasoline over them and set fire to them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  That was Muñoz’s last word on the tape, and for all Serrano knew his last on this earth. Guerrilla voices read brief extracts from the Geneva Convention and some UN-sponsored accord on human rights – the pompous bastards! – before the voice of the questioner pronounced sentence. There was an eerie gap of several seconds, and then the sound of a single gunshot. Serrano had heard the tape through twice before, and was expecting it, but the report still made him jump.

  In the garden outside, his daughter had turned over, and was treating her bare breasts to the afternoon sunshine. Behind her the Indian gardener was absent-mindedly scratching his behind as he directed the hose at the scarlet bougainvillea.

  Serrano decided he needed to know more about the history of ‘The Ghost’.

  The following day, shortly one o’clock, Chris Martinson was sitting in Antigua’s Restaurant Dona Luisa, waiting for his lunch to arrive. The place was as crowded as usual, with a clientele about equally divided between locals and gringo tourists, but Chris had managed to get the seat he wanted, on the terrace overlooking the interior courtyard. On the previous day a bird he had not recognized had paid an all-too-brief visit to the ornamental palm below, and he was hoping for a repeat performance.

  He turned to one of the two newspapers he had just bought in the square, the one printed in Spanish, and started reading the lead story.

  According to the Guatemalan Daily Planet an elaborate hoax had recently been played on those members of the international press corps who liked to defame the nation’s security forces. Subversivos responsible for the murder of Army Major Alfonso Lujan Muñoz had fabricated a tape purporting to contain an interrogation of the young major, and a counterfeit admission of guilt in regard to certain crimes, all of which were known to have been committed by the subversivos themselves. Unfortunately for the perpetrators of this vicious hoax, voice identification experts had been able to establish that the speaker on the tape was not in fact Major Muñoz.

  ‘And there goes another flying pig,’ Chris murmured to himself. He reached for the Daily News, the English-language newspaper for tourists and Guatemala’s resident British and American community, and looked for another account of the affair. He expected to find at least a different slant – the Daily News, for reasons which no one seemed able to fathom, was allowed a unique latitude when it came to criticizing the authorities.

  Sure enough, the writer managed to pour scorn on the official version of the story without directly contradicting it. ‘We can only wonder,’ he wrote, ‘that after forty years of incessant defeat the subversivos should still have the leisure time, the technology, and the system of communications necessary, to mount such an elaborate hoax.’

  Chris smiled to himself, and cleared a space for the arriving chicken sandwich and papaya licuardo. The trouble with Guatemala was that most of the time it was hard to believe the evidence of your own ears and eyes. The accounts of atrocities committed by both sides were probably exaggerated, but he had no reason to believe that they were imaginary. And yet the country was so eye-achingly beautiful, and not just in the matter of landscape. Costa Rica, which Chris had visited several years earlier, had beautiful countryside, but compared with Guatemala it seemed somehow bland, two-dimensional.

  It was the people who made Guatemala magical, the Mayan Indians, though how they did it was hard to say. They certainly looked picturesque in their colourful traditional costumes, and their religious ceremonies seemed like a fascinating glimpse into an earlier world, but it was more than that. Something to do with the depth of their commitment to the reality of community, perhaps. An American whom Chris met had argued that Westerners here somehow just locked on to the missing piece of their own social jigsaw – a sense of belonging. Here among the Mayans, he claimed, it had somehow miraculously survived.

  Chris wasn’t sure he agreed, but he had yet to hear a better explanation. Every gringo he had talked to since his arrival had felt the same sense of magic. The only people who didn’t, or so it seemed, were the Ladinos, the Spanish-speaking non-Indians who made up thirty per cent of the population and one hundred per cent of the ruling elite.

  Certainly the family Chris was staying with as part of his language course had little good to say about the Indians or their culture. Their ambitions were all directed towards total submersion in the wonders of the West. Exciting memories of visiting the McDonald’s in Guatemala City vied with distress at there not being one in Antigua.

  Chris finished the milk shake and paid his bill, walked downstairs and emerged from the dark corridor into the brilliance of the sunlit street. Antigua was a beautiful town, with its grids of cobbled streets, its mostly one-storey buildings painted in a pleasing variety of pastel shades, and its myriad colonial churches and monasteries. And all of it nestling beneath the three volcanoes: the towering Agua to the south, and Acatenango and the ever-smoking Fuego, ‘Fire’, to the south-west.

  Chris looked at his watch and found he still had fifteen minutes before his afternoon class was due to begin. The bookshop he had noticed the previous day was just across the street, and finding a convenient gap in the one-way traffic he walked over. He was examining the window display when a reflected movement caught his eye. A man had started to cross the street behind him but then apparently changed his mind. He was now standing on the opposite pavement, staring at Chris’s back. Then, as if suddenly aware that Chris was watching his reflection he abruptly turned away, and stood gazing down the street.

  Chris went into the shop and, after a minute or so of browsing among the natural history books, sneaked a look out of the window. The man was nowhere to be seen.

  He decided he was being paranoid.

  Five minutes later, walking across the main square, he stopped to tie his shoelaces and noticed the same man, some thirty metres behind him, staring vacantly into space.

  Lieutenant Arturo Vincenzo ran a hand through his luxuriant black hair and scratched the back of his neck. ‘So how did they manage it?’ he asked his cousin. ‘How did they get the body all the way from the Cuchumatanes to the front door of the Swedish Embassy without anyone seeing anything?’

  Captain Jorge Alvaro shrugged and took a slug from the bottle of Gallo beer. ‘El Espíritu works in mysterious ways,’ he said sardonically.

  The two men were in a bar on Zona 1’s Calle 14, just around the corner from the Policia Nacional building, where Vincenzo’s Department of Criminal Investigation had its headquarters. Alvaro worked for G-2, and the cousins’ meetings were as often dictated by mutual business as they were by familial ties. This time, though, Vincenzo was simply indulging his curiosity – the DCI had not been invited to share in the Army’s latest public relations disaster.

  The early evening hour ensured that the bar was almost empty, but Vincenzo kept his voice down in any case. ‘He is not in our files under that name,’ he said. ‘But…’

  ‘He is not known under any other name,’ Arturo growled. ‘Do you want another beer?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Alvaro lifted a bottle and raised two fingers at the boy behind the bar.

  ‘When was he last heard of?’

  ‘Nineteen eighty-three. Maybe. We first heard of the bastard around 1979, but by 1983 it was looking less and less likely that only one man was involved. If there was, then he must have had a fucking time machine – his name was coming up in the Atitlán area, the Cuchumatanes, even way out in the Petén, and pretty much at the same time.’ He picked up the fresh bottle and poured it into the empty glass, shaking his head as he did so. ‘There’s no way it could have been the same man.’

  ‘If there’s one thing those Indians can do, it’s walk.’

  Alvaro grunted. ‘They can’t fly, though, can
they?’

  Vincenzo grinned. ‘Thank Christ for that.’ He took another slug of beer. ‘Weren’t there any eyewitness descriptions of him or them?’

  ‘Hundreds of them – that was the problem. Most of them were unwilling witnesses, and no doubt most of them lied with their last breath. So El Espíritu was tall, short, dark, fair, blue-eyed, black-eyed – you name it. Absolutely fucking useless. The only semi-reliable description we had came from two English soldiers.’

  ‘What? How did that happen?’

  ‘Remember in 1980, when that guerrilla group took over the Tikal ruins for several days?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘They took about twenty tourists hostage, most of them English. The whole business lasted four days, I think. The guerrilla leader…’

  ‘El Espíritu.’

  ‘So he claimed. He would only negotiate through foreign intermediaries, and, like I said, most of the tourists were English, so they sent in a couple of their soldiers from Belize, men from that group which had handled the Iranian Embassy siege in London a few months earlier…’

  ‘The SAS.’

  ‘Yeah, that was them. Anyway…’

  ‘There’s one of them here now,’ Vincenzo interjected. ‘In Antigua.’

  Alvaro was surprised. ‘Doing what?’

  ‘That’s what we wanted to know. He picked up a tail at the airport – the usual routine – and on his first night here he had dinner with the British Military Attaché, which isn’t routine for tourists. So we kept the tail on him and had the London Embassy check him out. He’s still on active service with the British Army, the SAS Regiment, but not for much longer. And he is currently on leave, improving his Spanish at one of the schools in Antigua.’

  ‘Your people have checked that out?’

  Vincenzo looked hurt. ‘Of course. He’s doing just what he’s supposed to be doing.’

  ‘How old is he?’ Alvaro asked.

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘Then he couldn’t have been one of the men at Tikal.’

  Vincenzo smiled. ‘Now that would have been a coincidence.’

  Alvaro shrugged and gulped down the rest of his beer. ‘I have to get back,’ he said as he got to his feet.

  ‘I thought you were finished for the day.’

  ‘I just remembered something.’

  Alvaro walked briskly across the street to where the big Mercedes with smoked-glass windows was parked, and drove it slowly back to G-2 headquarters, his brain mulling over the idea which his cousin had unwittingly presented to him. The two English officers, whoever they were, had not only seen El Espíritu, but presumably had also heard him speak. And perhaps, in the spirit of co-operation between armed forces, one or both of the Englishmen could be persuaded to identify the voice on the tape.

  Less than a mile to the north, Tomás Xicay was one of five Indians sitting in the back of an open truck, but the only one among them who was keeping an impatient watch out for their driver. Logic told him he was in no danger of apprehension – there was no Army major’s body hidden in this truck – but he couldn’t help feeling vulnerable. Beyond the cathedral, which loomed into the sky above the market, lay the city’s main square and across that stood the Palacio Nacional, which housed, among other things, the offices of the dreaded G-2.

  Guatemala City was not easy on the nerves, and Tomás found himself wondering for the tenth time in as many minutes why he had chosen to stay the extra couple of days once their mission had been accomplished. To see his uncle was the obvious answer, but his uncle had hardly been at home, and his aunt had been turned into a nervous wreck by his mere presence in the house. There would be no next time, Tomás decided. Or at least not until the war was won.

  It was getting dark now, and even a couple of his fellow travellers were beginning to stir with impatience, muttering to each other in Cakchiquel. This wasn’t a language Tomás was fluent in, but the gist of the conversation was clear enough – where the fuck was the driver?

  Tomás rearranged his legs on the wooden floor. Judging from detritus scattered across it, the truck had arrived at the Central Market that morning loaded with squash, but now, like the many others waiting nearby, it was empty save for those taking passengers back into the Western Highlands.

  On the nearest truck three Indian women were wearing the traditional skirts of San Pedro La Laguna and conversing in his native language, Tzutujil. Tomás had grown up in Santiago Atitlán, another large village on the shores of Lake Atitlán, and thought perhaps he recognized one of the women. But he made no attempt at contact – it had been almost ten years since he had lived in his home village, and he had no desire to draw attention to himself.

  The driver arrived at last, wearing the smile of several beers on his face. But his driving skills seemed unimpaired, and soon the truck was threading its way out of the capital and on to the Pan-American Highway. As it climbed the first of many winding inclines the last slice of setting sun was briefly visible between distant volcanoes, and then night descended, reducing the world to those stretches of tarmac, verge and cliff face which fell within the glare of the truck’s headlights.

  Staring out into the darkness Tomás found himself studying a mental picture of his father.

  Miguel Mendoza Xicay had been tall for an Indian, five feet nine inches by the American count, and he had worn his hair long, the way he believed their Mayan ancestors had always done. He had not been an educated man – how could he with no school in the village of his childhood? – and it seemed likely that he had been too good-hearted to understand the realities of life in Guatemala. The family had access to a little land on the slopes of the volcano behind the village, and they had grown beans, coffee, corn and various fruits. The prices they received were always derisory, and no money could ever be saved, but the family only rarely went hungry, and there was usually the additional cash the children earned from making and selling handicrafts to help them through the worst times.

  Then the Army had come, and established a camp only a couple of kilometres outside the town. The amount of land available to the townspeople shrank as Indian deeds went mysteriously missing and other claimants appeared with deeds which the local Spanish-speaking authorities fell over themselves to approve. The local people protested and the most vocal swiftly disappeared, never to be seen again, either dead or alive. Rumour had it that most of them had been thrown from helicopters, still conscious, into the smoking maw of San Pedro.

  Through all these troubles Miguel Xicay had tenaciously clung to the hope that somehow the Army’s behaviour was an aberration, that if the authorities only knew what was really happening then they would step in and put a stop to it. No one expected life to be fair, and no one expected the rich Ladinos to behave like true Christians, but he found it hard to believe that such a campaign of brutality and murder could be sponsored by a government.

  It was no accident that the man whom Tomás’s father most admired was the local priest, an American named Stanley Rother. The father had arrived in Santiago Atitlán in the mid-sixties, and like Miguel Xicay he had watched the escalating brutality with a mixture of horror and disbelief. When the Army called a meeting of all the village leaders he had listened with mounting rage as the local commander blamed all the killings, the rapes, the tortured corpses, on the communist subversivos, and furthermore demanded that the villagers report any suspicious behaviour to the Army.

  He had got slowly to his feet, and in a silence pregnant with dread, told the Army commander that no one was fooled, that everyone knew it was the soldiers who raped and killed and tortured, and that they must stop these acts against man and God.

  The next morning Stanley Rother had been shredded by automatic gunfire in the doorway of his church.

  Tomás’s father had gone out that evening to talk with his friends, and had never been seen alive again. His body had been found on the volcano slopes a week later, minus tongue, eyes and hands. The twelve-year-old Tomás had not been meant to see it, but
he had, and he was not sorry. He had needed to imprint it on his brain like a scar, because only then could he be sure never to forget.

  And nor would he, he thought, as the truck laboured its way up another slope. Not that he needed that one dreadful memory any more. In the thirteen years which had passed since that day he had lost a mother, two brothers, many friends – and all of them still lived inside him.

  His father especially so.

  I knew him and still he is there in me…

  Tomás’s hand moved involuntarily towards the pocket where he kept the dog-eared copy of Neruda’s poem. It was too dark to read, but that didn’t matter – he knew all the pages, all the lines, off by heart.

  ‘I, who knew him, saw him go down,’ the inner voice recited. ‘Till he existed only in what he was leaving – streets he could scarcely be aware of, houses he never would inhabit. I come back to see him and every day I wait …’

  2

  Luis Serrano leaned back in his leather swivel chair, fingers intertwined behind his head, and ran his tongue along his upper lip, tasting the trace of brandy which still clung to his moustache. Through two walls he could hear the TV football match his son and friends were watching, and the faint rat-a-tat of fireworks in the distant Plaza Mayor was audible above that. Presumably the Indians were dragging one of their Jesus statues around the square, choking themselves on incense as they went.

  Serrano leaned forward once more, and absent-mindedly tapped the report with his right index finger. He now felt reasonably certain that the El Espíritu who had been such an irritant in the early eighties, and the subversivo on the tape from Quiche, were one and the same man.

  It was not a good time for his reappearance. The Americans wanted a negotiated settlement with the subversivos, and the Government’s ability to impose one that was lacking in any specific commitments – one that avoided any discussion at all of the land issue – rested on the Army keeping a strong upper hand in the rural areas. The last thing anyone needed was the public resurrection of some old Indian hero, and more humiliations like the Muñoz business.