Death by Firing Squad
Salisbury, Steven G.
By Steven G. Salisbury Guatemala City oberto Giron and Pedro Castillo Mendoza were finally set to leave behind their squalid Guatemala prison. The two field hands had spent three-and-a-half...
...Her face was ruddy, and her breath reeked of liquor...
...Tension and nervousness began to overwhelm some younger journalists, and a couple of them took issue with my inclusion in the first group of cameramen...
...Two blood splotches stained Roberto's shirt on the right side of his chest...
...Before it stood two crude posts, slim tree trunks pitched about a yard apart, where Roberto and Pedro would make their last stand...
...My family will be able to sleep tranquilly," she told a reporter...
...The ladies bowed to his browbeating, and he virtually dragged them before the glare of the camera lights, forming them into a row reminiscent of a criminal line-up, where they squirmed and pouted...
...But the tearful round face of one young executioner—the sole female, who had tucked her hair under her cap to go unnoticed — revealed an emotional ordeal...
...All psychiatrists say so...
...They're both still alive...
...If we cannot execute sentences;' he grumbled, "the penal justice system is useless...
...At a hardscrabble farm, Sonia's mother, Alejandra Garcia, wailed to visitors that swift execution was too kind for her daughter's killers...
...A cordon of special police stood between us and the fence...
...his head dropped to the right, then tilted back and swayed...
...Its members were prohibited from talking to the press...
...But one story was that they had met for the first time drinking the day of the murder...
...They mobbed anyone even remotely related to the story, especially Pedro's sisters, Blanca and Alicia, who were sobbing quietly beside a pick-up truck...
...He warned them to behave...
...When Alvaro Arzu was elected president of Guatemala in 1995, he promised to crack down on crime...
...A volley of M-1 carbines exploded, and a wall of white smoke filled the air with an acrid taste like rotten eggs...
...We ran breathlessly for several hundred meters, along a couple of muddy ruts serving as a road, to a grassy field large enough to accommodate everyone...
...A long, deep scar snaked across the left side of his sunken face, almost reaching his toothbrush moustache...
...An orange muzzle flash leaped...
...Journalists had to settle for being formed into a wide arc ranging from about 3o to 5o yards from the paredon...
...Blanca pushed through the crowd and flung herself against his car door with a thud...
...The American Spectator • fun e 1997 Human rights activists and MINUGUA delegates were smiling, dancing, and shouting, 'We did it...
...Their rickety beds, just a meter apart, had been conquered by mold...
...Pork cracklings...
...Years of hard living had carved deep caverns in the sad faces of Giron and Mendoza, and crinkled their swarthy skin...
...It was, he said, "an accident...
...The judge agreed to talk privately with Blanca later on...
...Besieged, frazzled, and fed up, he just wanted to get the damn thing over with...
...Their faces seemed wrenched in extreme torment...
...Her mother found the girl's body in the shrubs...
...but he had just told the press there was no hope for Pedro and Roberto...
...Hordes of journalists kept badgering him about when the executions would take place...
...He was stupefied...
...screamed the angry crowd...
...He squirmed and dug his heels in the doorway, and a guard gripped his collar and shoved him out...
...Pandemonium erupted...
...He rocked back in his chair, crossed his arms in a punctuating flourish, and jutted his jaw, as if proud of himself for declaring the buck stopped here...
...My husband is such a nice guy," she told me...
...No joke — it's true...
...He also hinted that foreign interference might have influenced their decision...
...and that meant no reprieve for Giron and Mendoza...
...I'm sure he'll do a fine job with the executions," she said...
...One joke followed another, and our car resounded with laughter like a cage of cackling macaws, as we wound our way down the slopes and between hazy green volcanoes in the late-afternoon glow...
...Cockroaches pattered almost everywhere, and flies and mosquitoes buzzed from wall to wall...
...The condemned man's body bounced like bed springs from the impact...
...Then came Judge Gaitan...
...A s the priests performed last rites and anointed the foreheads of the bodies, the firing squad trotted away...
...But this time, MINUGUA was nowhere to be seen...
...Four-year-old Sonia had left her family's shack to go to the latrine on an April afternoon in 1993...
...There were 882 prisoners here, he noted, and he didn't want trouble...
...I blurted out...
...Sonia Marisol had been beaten, her throat slit, and her vagina slashed—apparently to facilitate a rape...
...President Arzu was elected to make peace," said Blanca, "not to kill people...
...White sandbags were stacked against its reddish clay...
...Then—penal director Julio Carrera Jovel was a little more direct: "It's like we're killing lice...
...It was a rare display of Guatemalan punctuality...
...They were captured the day after, and confessed to the crime...
...Lashed to the post to Roberto's right, Pedro looked around—at the crowd, at a pair of cheap caskets, at a red ambulance marked "RESCUE" — and into the unmasked, stoic faces of his executioners...
...By law, as a family member of the victim, she'd been barred from attending the executions...
...He faced a tragic dilemma...
...The commander pointed his pistol inches from Pedro's left temple...
...These reasons weren't enough to keep Gaitan from losing sleep over the prospect of ordering a firing squad into action...
...One of Roberto's arms, stretched behind the post, twitched, and his chest heaved as he struggled to breathe...
...They get stiffies and shoot their wads...
...Boom...
...Insects hummed in the warm breeze...
...Just ahead was the paredon — the wall of 45 death...
...We proceeded to the front gate 3o yards from the condemned men's blockhouse cell...
...The execution had already been delayed two months...
...The first scheduled date was July 23, and I had gone to the prison farm in Escuintla to interview the doomed pair three days before, along with Penal Director Carrera Jovel...
...He was dressed neatly in white clothes and a white baseball cap...
...Criminals should suffer like they made their victims suffer...
...When in early September a court appeal got a temporary stay of the July 23 extension, the citizenry exploded in an uproar...
...Whatever MINUGUA's freckled lady with brown hair and eyeglasses said, the executions were stayed nearly two hours before schedule...
...Nor, if the condemned men survived the fusillade, did he want the press to film or photograph the tiros de gracia —the finishing-off shots to the head...
...The only gesture of defiance came when Pedro tossed his head as guards tied white-dotted green handkerchiefs around the condemned men's faces...
...This shows our system works...
...The firing squad had failed to hit their hearts from six meters...
...His head flew back, his ratty hair jumped...
...41 46 June 1997 • The American Spectator...
...About six meters —the distance stipulated by law—separated them from the posts that would bear their human targets...
...The public wasn't supposed to be present, but near both ends of the arc, teenage girls wearing cheap makeup and children singing nursery rhymes formed gaggles around the assembled authorities...
...A civilian court rejected their arguments and convicted them...
...The blue and white stripes of Judge Gaitan's shirt diffused the glare of the camera lights as he sat at a decrepit table before more than a hundred journalists...
...Riots nearly erupted in the streets...
...It would be the most disgraceful day of my life," Arzu later said, "if I pardon them...
...And angry mobs have on occasion taken STEVEN G. SALISBURY is a writer living in Guatemala City...
...His face turned stem, and he slapped his slicked black hair across his bald spot...
...Higher courts said nothing, and Gaitan set the executions for 6:oo a.m., September io...
...the press had flouted his order and photographed the tiros de gracia anyway...
...The few human rights activists and clergymen scattered among us in the clearing seemed resigned to the execution...
...But it was perfume compared to the nauseating stench of their dank, cramped quarters...
...The gas chamber: "Ah how sentimental...
...He challenged President Arzu, saying that if he wouldn't commute their sentences, he at least ought to have the "balls" to shoot them himself...
...The throng had found shelter from a hellacious rain storm under a corrugated tin roof over the entrance to the jail...
...The only bold color on their stony faces came from the blood around their mouths...
...Roberto slumped over at the waist and slid sideways...
...bone fragments and gray matter shot out from the right side of Pedro's skull...
...Such talk exacerbated the impatience of a public tired of the dangers of its mean streets...
...I darted back and forth along the semicircle before eventually settling on the right side, near the white armor-plated paddy wagon where Roberto and Pedro were confined...
...But Pedro's body flinched and remained upright...
...It didn't matter...
...It was like the rifle range at a carnival, where the gun sights are fixed to miss...
...His head was bowed, his eyes shut...
...The new date with death was ghoulishly appropriate: Friday the 13th...
...Journalists pushed and wiggled for position...
...But the lanky young man insisted...
...We rode together to the prison in a battered old yellow Nissan...
...Hanging: "I used to be a justice of the peace and examined corpses of guys found hanged...
...This has been a long road...
...How would you like to eat roasted meat like that...
...Wearing a white guayabera shirt and thick eyeglasses, the 61year-old fireplug was in such a jovial mood that he phoned his second wife from the car and asked me to greet her...
...The firing-squad commander drew his 9mm pistol and moved in for the kill, his crunching steps fixing us in unbearable suspense...
...He was also a native, yet his condescending air highlighted one of Guatemala's most intractable problems since before the Spanish conquest: severe class divisions...
...shouted the journalists, their hopes for a sensational story smashed...
...The sisters begged for their brother's life, and wailed about the poor but beautiful childhood they had shared with him...
...They declined, saying they had already given enough interviews...
...Pork cracklings...
...But not as good as the movies...
...I guess it makes you just choke all up...
...Like Pedro he was handcuffed behind his back...
...The decision to televise the spectacle was testament to the growing demand for something—anything—to stop the country's constant violence and blood-letting...
...About the only decoration was a little portrait of Jesus, flanked by candles, rising from the polished granite floor and leaning against the back wall...
...That rejection came during the first week of September...
...It bothers me a lot," he said...
...It's too cruel," the judge declared...
...Sonia Marisol's mother later testified that she had seen Giron and Mendoza fleeing the scene...
...The death penalty is popular in violencetorn Guatemala, and likely to remain so, despite the recent,' widely televised execution of two men who killed and raped a four-year-old girl by a squad of soldiers that couldn't shoot straight...
...The two field hands had spent three-and-a-half years in jail for the rape and murder of Sonia Marisol Alvarez Garcia...
...They certainly couldn't call the police —the cops were outraged because they hadn't been allowed to join the firing squad...
...As guards tied him to a post with worn white rope, he lifted his head a second and let out a deep sigh...
...Just a couple of rounds had appeared to hit each man...
...A couple of smaller dots of blood seemed to ooze from Pedro's groin and right kidney area...
...Judge Gaitan was too shocked to notice the furious clatter of cameras...
...But a seven-year-old boy was unimpressed...
...And we don't want sensationalism...
...That's no good...
...A chubby doctor yanked the condemned men's blindfolds down for an obligatory check...
...Tall and broad-shouldered, the 38-year-old U.S.-educated jurist struck a sympathetic figure...
...The smell of glowing cigarettes cut the fragrance of greenery, and tobacco smoke formed a bluish haze in the dim light of hanging lamps...
...Enraged mobs broke windows and denounced the justice system...
...Roberto didn't open his eyes from start to finish, and quietly mumbled what seemed to be prayers...
...Gaitan thought the call was now his...
...Legislators had been calling for obstruction of justice charges against its freckled female delegate, who was accused of intimidating judges to postpone the executions...
...Later they retracted their confessions, and claimed that the police had tortured them and planted hair, blood, and other incriminating forensic evidence...
...A putrid black slime flourished on the walls in the humid tropical heat...
...Don Julio asked me about the electric chair, and when I said I thought the first prisoner executed in it had caught fire, Don Julio's face lit up in a brilliant smile and he shouted with joy...
...his time things were much more orderly...
...And judge Gustavo Gaitan Lara of the First Court of Sentence Execution was caught in the cyclone...
...They became a video hit...
...r Cc he condemned men are in there," said Don Julio, pointing at a dirty blockhouse of pink stone and whitewashed concrete...
...Guards kept journalists from approaching the firing squad...
...It's important that children watch this, so that they learn," said one man...
...But Gaitan couldn't set a date until the condemned men's appeals were rejected...
...It wasn't long before we were allowed inside the second gate for a press conference...
...To organize coverage, the press had started a list of photographers, cameramen, and reporters...
...Pedro, 39, was illiterate and had never been to school...
...She sounded about half Jovel's age...
...He was a hard worker, they said, and a good father...
...Of the twenty executioners only half had been firing live ammunition...
...Roberto, a 47-year-old drifter, had already served ten years in prison—for killing his brother...
...Then the commander nonchalantly turned his back to us, bent over, and cleaned Roberto's brains out with a loud shot in the temple...
...Faced with his ordeal, however, Roberto remained defiant...
...His face was as ashen as the surface of the moon...
...Suddenly the wagon's heavy backdoor swung open with a star-fling clang and Pedro appeared...
...When the soul is pulled out through the bullet holes, it's more painful than it is for a woman giving birth...
...There was momentary silence...
...Do you know of the United States...
...we were allowed in: first cameramen, then photographers, and finally reporters...
...Roasted meat...
...When I visited their cell, they stank of stale sweat...
...Shoot the judges...
...A stream of blood poured out of the wound...
...he ribbed his blue-eyed chauffeur Leonardo and 18-year-old valet Cesar, sitting up front...
...Most Guatemalans, however, weren't in the mood to party upon hearing of the new reprieves...
...It's important," he said slowly, as if talking to children...
...The doctor reported to the authorities, and Judge Gaitan gave a nod...
...The first rays of dawn began burning off a thin mist that had left the ground wet and slippery...
...A bucket in a corner reeked of feces and urine...
...As an intensifying tidal wave of protest crashed against the judicial system, higher courts allowed Judge Gaitan to reschedule the executions a few days later...
...Mierda...
...The doctor waddled back, looking like an outdoorsman in his brown-andwhite plaid shirt, and pronounced Roberto and Pedro dead...
...Its only redeeming qualities, he said, were that it would alleviate prison overcrowding and save money for a penal system that couldn't afford to feed and supervise its prisoners adequately...
...A Johnny-come-lately waltzed through the crowd to ask them for an interview...
...It's too easy...
...But all day, the Spanish-language TV networks broadcast them from Mexico to Argentina...
...The girls couldn't believe Pedro was guilty, yet what could they do...
...He had hardly parked his car outside the second gate and walked inside the prison compound when a delegate from the United Nations mission, known by its Spanish acronym MINUGUA, buttonholed him a few yards from the pair's cell...
...Platoon—aim...
...I need to talk to you...
...The smell of manure was overpowering and inescapable...
...Lethal injection...
...At least they die with smiles on their faces...
...Swaying in ill-fitting blue jeans and a red-and-white sweat shirt, he looked groggy, as if drugged or drunk...
...that they cut them into pieces without compassion, for they don't deserve any...
...Executions were the day's hot topic...
...It was about as rustic as you can get, nothing more than a dug-out side of a rise in the ground, framed by trees and bushes...
...They did not seem to be sympathetic figures...
...This is for the United States...
...It's the will of God," said an old lady with pink eye, trying to comfort Blanca with a hug...
...Tripods snapped open...
...No one seemed more exasperated than the judge, who, upon reappearing from inside the jail compound, said that three Supreme Court judges had overruled him on technical grounds...
...She never returned...
...The executions were cool," he admitted...
...Fire...
...First, I would amputate one of their fingers, then a hand, then an arm, so that they feel the pain that Sonia Marisol felt when they raped her, and cut her throat...
...His job was to carry the death sentence out, yet he was personally against capital punishment...
...The crowd gasped...
...Wearing a sporty pink shirt and wide-brimmed black hat appropriate for a cocktail party, Gaitan idled his blue Volvo before the front gate...
...Miles away at a small farm, Alejandra Garcia thanked God...
...Telephoto lenses clicked into camera bodies...
...The press had won its appeal to film and photograph the executions, and at 4:30 a.m...
...Someone had to take the bull by the horns, and he was determined to do it...
...Journalists made small talk beside their vehicles parked along the main driveway, outside the penal farm's front gate...
...Shoot the lawyers...
...I would like to hear them groaning in pain...
...The firing squad: "That must really be painful...
...Now, on the morning of September 13, 1996 —a very unlucky Friday the 13th — Roberto Giron and Pedro Castillo Mendoza were on their way to face a firing squad, and to make history—their dual execution was to be televised, not only throughout Guatemala but across Latin America...
...I'm Pedro's sister," she wailed through the car's half-open window...
...44 June 1997 • The American Spectator After lunch, on September 9, leaning over his flimsy metal desk in his small corner cubicle, Gaitan threw his mild manner to the wind and said, "If I don't hear otherwise by 3:30 this afternoon, I blow them away tomorrow morning...
...Clean-shaven and resolute, the firing-squad commander began to give orders for his shooters to prepare at six o'clock sharp...
...The weather was T fine and dry, and the dark sky before sunrise was clear and starry...
...A friend had taped them and invited me to watch them at a barbecue...
...Police statistics indicate there were more than 3,500 murders in 1996, about twice the New York total...
...Professional courtesy disappeared...
...From evening till morning, throngs of journalists pulsated outside Canada Penal Farm, in sticky heat that turned everyone's hair and skin to paste...
...he stumbled, but the guards kept him from falling with a constant grip...
...Neither he nor Roberto seemed to listen to Judge Gaitan reading their death sentences a few steps to their left...
...Roberto and Pedro claimed they hadn't known each other before being imprisoned together...
...42 June 1997 The American Spectator justice into their own hands, sometimes even lynching people for crimes as minor as stealing chickens...
...Don Julio asked about the other methods of execution in the United States, and like a precocious student, always had gems of wisdom to contribute...
...But that wasn't the only thing bothering him...
...Roberto trailed by a few seconds...
...Twenty soldiers in bluish-gray uniforms and black caps stood at ease, facing the paredon in two rows of ten...
...pondered Don Julio, as everyone called him, using the Spanish term of respect...
...Their skinny, bony bodies had toiled for years in the Guatemalan fields, never taking home more than three dollars a day...
Vol. 30 • June 1997 • No. 6
