As Osorno and I approached, I saw a grizzled, wiry, bearded, and long-haired man in a dirty T-shirt who was serving customers, passing sodas and such through the bars of his little shop. It was undoubtedly don Mike himself; I hadn’t seen him since 2001, but he was easy to identify by the missing fingers on one of his hands. I didn’t want to speak with him, almost as if I now had a physical aversion to the darker and more painful aspects of what had been my long involvement in that crime; I just wanted to hurry past. But Osorno, true to his insatiably curious nature, stopped to talk to him. “Are you don Mike?” he asked, and the suspicious and fearful-looking man behind the lowered gates denied that he was. He said instead that he was don Mike’s son, even after a young customer approached and greeted him as “don Mike.” Osorno nonetheless began to question him about the night of the murder, which led don Mike quickly into a brief succession of revealing statements. “What a bunch of liars those judges and prosecutors were, you see where this shop is! How could they see what was happening from here?” he said, referring to the powerful military-intelligence officials who had supposedly come to his shop to monitor the carrying out of that extremely risky political assassination. “You can’t see the church from here!”

But I, like don Mike, had been present the day in 2001, during the Gerardi case trial, when the tribunal of judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys had travelled from the courtroom to the little tienda for an evidentiary procedure, while police sharpshooters stood guard atop surrounding rooftops. I remembered how the prosecutor, Leopoldo Zeissig, had left the shop, crossed the street at a slight diagonal to the opposite sidewalk, and established clearly that, from where he stood, he could see directly into the park and to San Sebastián Church and its parish house garage. Now don Mike told Diego Osorno and me, “Look at all the people walking past here on the sidewalk, who’s going to believe that any military officers would do that here, with so many witnesses around?” But, of course, this was a Saturday afternoon, and the crowded sidewalk included many people coming from the festive protest against Pérez Molina taking place nearby—punk-rock bands were performing in the plaza in front of the National Palace that day. In 1998, late on a Sunday night, only blocks from the country’s most-feared military intelligence installations, there was no one out on these sidewalks. Why was don Mike making such farfetched assertions, which could easily have fooled anyone who didn’t know the details of the crime? Because he still embodies a time when nobody dared to accuse the Guatemalan Army of anything, when such dissembling was rote. At night, don Mike, even though his shop is still open, turns off all the lights and stands in the darkness behind the barred gates, knowing that passersby can’t see him, though he is standing there looking out. His ongoing fear and paranoia were palpable. He was like a figure frozen in time.

The June, 2001, trial resulted in the first-ever convictions of Guatemalan military officers for a state-sponsored execution. When he took the stand, Chanax had directly implicated all three of the military men who were eventually found guilty. Two of them, Captain Byron Lima Oliva and Sergeant Obdulio Villanueva, Chanax claimed, had turned up at the garage immediately after the murder to inspect and alter the crime scene. The third man convicted was the captain’s father, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, a former head of G-2 intelligence. He, according to Chanax, was one of three military men in don Mike’s store. But who were the other two men in the store—men who weren’t convicted for the crime but who had played a role in it?

During his many long pretrial conversations with Zeissig, the prosecutor, and Rafael Guillamón, the Spanish investigator for MINUGUA, the U.N. peacekeeping group then assigned to the country, Chanax had identified one of the two military officers who he said had been inside don Mike’s by a photograph; he didn’t know the officer’s name, or that the man he’d identified was an officer in the E.M.P. And then Chanax also named Pérez Molina as one of the officers in the store, and as one of the plot’s leaders. “But he was obviously too terrified of the general [Pérez Molina] to say anything about him on the stand,” Guillamón told me. Chanax confirmed his accusations against Pérez Molina during an interview in 2005 that we had in Mexico City, where he was living, very quietly, as a U.N. protected refugee. Guillamón, who subsequently became an investigator for CICIG, never lost his confidence regarding Chanax’s reliability as a witness; Chanax’s testimony about the convicted men, Guillamón later emphasized in a conversation we had, “withstood the challenges of several appeals over many years.”

Eventually Pérez Molina would refute the allegations, saying that he was in Washington, D.C., on the night of the murder, serving as a Guatemalan delegate to the Inter-American Defense Board, and that he had passport stamps to prove it. Yet an investigation by Claudia Méndez Arriaza, then a reporter at el Periódico who had been covering the Gerardi case for years, revealed that Pérez Molina actually possessed at least six passports, and could have come and gone from Guatemala using any one of those. Other journalistic investigations poked holes in his account, but in the end the question of Pérez Molina’s whereabouts that night can probably only be established by a criminal investigation and court trial. As Pérez Molina ascended to power, the Gerardi case came to a halt, even though prosecutors assigned to it continued to amass evidence. People were frightened of the former general’s power and of the violence he represented, as well as of the power of other figures potentially implicated in the case; attempting to prosecute the crime’s chain of command was considered too politically controversial and, to quote a phrase one often heard, “potentially destabilizing.” Like Chanax in the courtroom, people didn’t dare voice their accusations in public, out loud. Perhaps now, in the coming years, the Gerardi case will go forward again.

Back in 2007, when “The Art of Political Murder” came out in English, el Periódico published some translated excerpts, including a paragraph in which Chanax identified Pérez Molina as one of the men in don Mike’s store. Pérez Molina, in fact, was mentioned in only a few passages in that very long book, which tries to offer a detailed narrative of the crime and investigations and legal battles that followed. But when given his chance to reply by the newspaper, Pérez Molina reacted as if the whole book had been about him, and as if he had known about it in advance. “We have information that that book was paid for by a rival politician,” he claimed, without naming the politician or providing any proof. Back in 1998, of course, when I began the research that would culminate in the book, I was only dimly aware of Pérez Molina, if at all, and certainly never anticipated that he would become a Guatemalan Presidential candidate. And, even more strikingly, Pérez Molina avowed that he did not personally know Captain Byron Lima. Some readers of the newspaper immediately wrote in, anonymously, to attest to what is now known to be a close, personal, almost mentor-protégé relationship between the two men. More crucially, Rafael Guillamón told me that MINUGUA had documented several prison visits to Captain Lima by Pérez Molina. Back when he was with MINUGUA, Guillamón predicted that, in exchange for keeping quiet about what he knew and not implicating other officers in the Gerardi crime, Captain Lima would be given free rein to establish and rule over a criminal mafia from prison. This prediction came true.