Who killed the Bishop?

Last year my favourite book was Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel which is partially set in the Trujillo-era Dominican Republic. I'd previously enjoyed Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, a story which also looked into the corruption and violence of that time in the country's recent history. So, I was intrigued to read that Junot Diaz was less than complementary about Vargas Llosa and wondered why.

When I looked around I kept on finding references back to another book, Francisco Goldman's "The Art of Political Murder", so I went out and bought that. Goldman is a novelist and journalist and this is an extended piece of journalism following the bludgeoning to death of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala City in 1998. Gerardi, who had been associated with Liberation Theology, was killed almost immediately after the publication of "Guatemala: Never Again" a 1400 page report detailing "the 'disappearances' massacres, murders, torture and systemic violence that had been inflicted upon the population of Guatemala since the beginning of the 1960s".

Goldman's book starts with the murder and soon dives into the chaos that ensued. With multiple characters involved, many of whom turn out to be not quite who they seem at first, the situation is a mightily confusing one. Early on the authorities chief suspect appears to be a fellow priest's elderly German Shepherd dog. In a macho culture it isn't long before the investigators are alleging a clandestine gay liaison to have resulted in the 75 year-old bishop's death. Witnesses, both potential and actual, disappear or are killed.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the church authorities didn't trust the government investigators and so they set up their own investigative team called "Los Intocables", The Untouchables. The majority of the book traces the work that these few, quite insanely brave young men undertake to try and get at the truth.

It's a sharply written piece that, for me, worked by virtue of first making me quite utterly confused as to what could have been going on and then showed how the strands of the investigation were able to knit together some kind of sense from all the obfuscations and false trails that the murderers had laid.

It's a book that raised a lot of questions in my mind. How do you try and establish a functioning democracy in a place that is so screwed up by years of foreign interference and civil war? How would I react in such circumstances? There are homeless drunks in this tale who act with a courage I doubt that I could find. And for a secular lefty, just how easy is it to read a story where the Catholic Church and the Americans turn out to be the goodies?

Oh, and Vargas Llosa? Well, very early on he wrote an article supporting the theory that it was the dog that did it. After reading this I think I get a sense for why Junot Diaz doesn't respect him for that.