ReportageThe 1966 classic documentary thriller, In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote is the progenitor of the book under review. Capote's investigation of the quadruple Kansas murder, by interviewing local residents and investigators, and collating thousands of pages of notes became the prototype of the non-fiction novel.
Norman Mailer's 1968 Armies of the Night continued that wonderful mélange of historiographical and novelistic discourse. Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez built his wonderful novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold on the foundation stone of Capote's In Cold Blood, and then later, in 1996, he wrote the enthralling News of a Kidnapping about Colombian drug cartels.
And now, 40 years after Capote, Francisco Goldman, born to a Guatemalan mother and a Jewish-American father, following on from a novelistic career in which he was short-listed for the Impac Dublin Literary Award, has written a non-fiction account of the assassination of Guatemalan bishop Juan José Gerardi in 1998. Like Capote before him in Kansas, Goldman researched documents, interviewed witnesses and participants, and trudged through the mean streets of Guatemala in search of evidence that might throw light on the murky facts and hypotheses that surrounded, and indeed still surround, this case.
GOLDMAN'S ACCOUNT IS a verbal equivalent of that stunning and horrific 2002 Brazilian film, City of God. It simply seethes with violent action and counter-action, conspiracy and intrigue. Like the character Rocket in Fernando Meirelles's brilliant film, The Art of Political Murder has as its key witness Ruben Chanax, a paid spy and homeless car washer who testifies, goes into exile, and bit by bit allows a picture to be composed of the murder and the events and characters surrounding it.
Bishop Gerardi, a leading human rights activist, was brutally murdered in the garage of his house on a Sunday night in 1998, two days after the publication of a 400-page, church-sponsored report that effectively implicated the military in the murders and disappearance of some 200,000 civilians. The team of investigators (who called themselves Los Intocables ("the Untouchables") locked horns with the American-backed Guatemalan authorities, infiltrated and interviewed members of the country's youth gangs, encouraged and supported human rights lawyers and activists to stick with the case until the first-ever convictions were attained of Guatemalan army officers in a human rights crime. Goldman does not exonerate the US for its overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, which heralded decades of military violence, directed mainly against a defenceless Mayan Indian population.
Bishop Gerardi's investigative team was a thorn in the side of the authorities, who sought to discredit Gerardi even after his murder, by putting forward bizarre allegations about his supposed homosexual propensities, about the possibility that he was killed as a result of a lovers' quarrel. There was even a suggestion that a priest's old German shepherd, Baloo, was responsible. One of the more surrealistic aspects of the case was the imprisonment of the wretched dog and the exhumation of the bishop's corpse in a search for bite marks.
One of the subtexts of Goldman's book is the way that another book written about Gerardi's murder by two European journalists, Bertrand de la Grange of Le Monde and Maite Rico of El País, has been meticulously exploited by, among others, the Peruvian novelist and right-wing commentator, Mario Vargas Llosa, to undermine the version of events recounted by Goldman. But the findings of these two journalists have been convincingly rebutted and in detail by the co-ordinators of the human rights report, the publication of which appears to have been the reason for Bishop Gerardi's assassination. Vargas Llosa, de la Grange and Rico effectively negate the decades-long genocide that marks Guatemala's recent history. Goldman's account, by contrast, in the light of evidence amassed, has a sure ring of truth about it.
THERE ARE SOME negatives about this book. The self-aggrandising role Goldman sometimes adopts when he goes about describing his own role as investigator of the crime is to be regretted. While his book is strong on detail, at times this overwhelms the reader. This is at the expense of providing a wider picture of clandestine forces at work in Guatemala since the 1960s, whose presence, obvious to anyone who has spent time in that country, is almost certainly a contributing factor to the tragic dénouement of this case. While there is no direct evidence to suggest the rise of evangelical Protestantism in Guatemala and its association with the US-sponsored Alliance for Progress are factors in the case of the bishop's murder, the effects of the Alliance for Progress's programmes of military and police assistance to counter "communist" tendencies in Guatemala are indisputable, and they are pervasive. Excellent research has been produced in this area by Stephen Streeter, and published in Third World Quarterly in 2006. Too often in Goldman's book the bigger picture of political malfeasance and skulduggery is ignored in favour of the multitudinous and discrete local actions and theories that surround the bishop's murder. That said, this book is a significant one.
Ciaran Cosgrove is head of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin
The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? By Francisco Goldman Atlantic Books, 396pp. £16.99