The Art of Political Murder
Who Killed the Bishop?
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In this New York Times Notable Book, the Pulitzer Prize–finalist undertakes his own investigation into the murder of a Guatemalan bishop.
Named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Economist, and the San Francisco Chronicle
Two days after releasing a groundbreaking church-sponsored report implicating the military in the murders and disappearances of some two hundred thousand Guatemalan civilians, Bishop Juan Gerardi was bludgeoned to death in his garage. Gerardi was the country’s leading human rights activist, but the Church quickly realized it could not rely on police investigators or the legal system to solve the crime.
Instead, Church leaders formed their own investigative team: a group of secular young men who called themselves Los Intocables—the Untouchables. Author Francisco Goldman spoke to witnesses no other reporter was able to reach, observing firsthand some of the most crucial developments in this sensational case. Documenting the Latin American reality of mara youth gangs and organized crime, The Art of Political Murder tells the incredible true story of Los Intocables and their remarkable fight for justice.
“Becoming by turns a little bit Columbo, Jason Bourne and Seymour Hersh, Goldman gives us the anatomy of a crime while opening a window to a misunderstood neighboring country that is flirting with anarchy.” —The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Goldman (The Divine Husband, etc.) pursues in his first nonfiction book the infamous murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi, the Guatemalan human rights leader murdered after the release of his multivolume report on the genocidal terror campaign led by the army in the 1980s and '90s, in which 200,000 people disappeared or were killed. The book, which began as a New Yorker piece, casts light into the darkest corners of this tortuous case, the U.S.-supported war in Central America and the continuing legacy of violence and corruption. The large cast and myriad details can be overwhelming, but overall Goldman manages a clear narrative (aided by a "dramatis personae" and chronology). Drawing on a wealth of sources, including interviews, declassified documents and court records, his meticulously researched book is an impressive organizational achievement, as well as a vital moral accounting. Goldman who was baptized in Gerardi's church of San Sebastian, attended by his Guatemalan-born mother invests this eye-opening account with a layer of personal reflection. Like Latin American writers Garc a M rquez, Vargas Llosa or Carlos Fuentes, his journalism isn't so much a departure from his fiction as an extension of his concerns with the fraught landscapes where "truth" is as contested as the soil underfoot, yet central to battles waged over it.
