The art of political murder : who killed the bishop? / Francisco Goldman

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"When, on a Sunday night in April, 1998, Bishop Juan Gerardi was viciously bludgeoned to death in his parish house garage in Guatemala City, one of the most sensational, controversial and momentous murder cases in contemporary Latin America began. Was it a political assassination or a sordid domestic crime? The case became a fight over the destiny of a country just emerging from decades of civil war and awash in corruption and violence. Was justice possible or was it just a quixotic dream?" "The first nonfiction book from acclaimed novelist Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder is a suspenseful chronicle and reconstruction of a crime and an investigation in the tradition of Truman Capotes In Cold Blood and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's News of a Kidnapping." "Bishop Gerardi was murdered two days after he had presided over the publication of an unprecedented human rights report that found the Guatemalan Army primarily responsible for the war-time deaths and disappearances of 200,000 civilians, setting the stage for future charges against the military of crimes against humanity. The Army was the obvious suspect in the murder, but for decades its assassins had been free to kill with impunity." "But why, others asked, would the Army have killed the bishop two days after the release of the report? The government's explanation was an increasingly bizarre story of a crime of passion that cast suspicion on the Church itself. That scenario, relentlessly pursued by the first prosecutor assigned to the case, involved homosexual liaisons, dissolute priests, a criminal gang led by the glamorous love child of an important prelate, and a German shepherd linked to the crime by a forensics expert in Spain." "The Art of Political Murder takes the reader deep inside the phantasmagoric and upside-down world of a broken state, where powerful CIA-trained Military Intelligence chiefs have gone from fighting guerrillas to working for drug cartels; where judges scheme against the law; where honest justice workers are vilified in the media while convicted murderers are given newspaper columns; a "democracy" where real power is clandestine, and society is controlled through blackmail, extortion, omnipresent informers, violence, and fear."--BOOK JACKET.