The final movie-like features of this case have to do with the man accused of killing Carpio, a .45 caliber revolver and the bullets that took the life as well of Alejandro Avila Guzmán, Juan Vicente Villacorta Fajardo and Rigoberto Rivas González. These three friends of Carpio were with him on their way to a political rally of the Unión del Centro Nacional (UCN) in Guatemala’s heartland. They were gunned down on July 3, 1993, during an ambush staged by more than 30 armed and hooded men believed to have been members of the Civil Self-Defense Patrols (PAC). The attack occurred at a spot known as the curve of Molina del Tesoro, some nine miles from Chichicastenango, in Quiché province.

A Sentence is Revoked

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals on April 30, 1999, overturned the 30-year sentence being served by Juan Acabal Patzán, convicted for the murder of Carpio and his companions. Faulty data in a ballistics report was the basis for the appeal court’s reversal of the sentence imposed in October 1997 by the First Criminal Court.

Acabal Patzán was acquitted because, like any convict, he was given the benefit of doubt under the legal system. He also had been convicted in Amatitlán for two other slayings, of Francisco Ajmac Ixcoy and Juan Patzán Péérez -committed before the Carpio murder. The courts also ordered the immediate release of others implicated in the Carpio case, including Marcelino and Nazario Tuy Taniel, brothers sentenced to five years ’imprisonment, with right to parole, for making and possessing explosives, and two other persons.

The judges determined that the weapon and cartridges presumably used in the Carpio crime were not logged in the evidence control section of the National Police nor in the laboratory’s internal control register. According to the ruling, the ballistic technician Oscar Abel García Arroyo had said that the barrel rifling in the gun seized from Acabal Patzán matched the markings in the slugs taken from the victims’ bodies.

The court questioned what objects had been subjected to the technical analysis and noted that García Arroyo’s testimony was inconsistent when he asserted that the barrel of the analyzed weapon had been changed. This certainly created doubts.

Faced this contradiction, the appeals court threw out Acabal Patzán’s conviction because of the questionable ballistics report by García Arroyo -who as a result faced prosecution for giving false evidence.

Problems of Obsolete Data

The caliber of the revolvers and the rounds was a problem of out-date data that has become crucial in solving the case. It always was an issue that was plagued with irregularities that became clear from the day of the crime itself and continued throughout the police and judicial investigation.

Evidence was never formally submitted. The bullets removed from the victims’ bodies and other evidence (photos of the autopsy) gathered by the police at the scene of the crime disappeared. The detective in charge was involved in a traffic accident on the road between Quiché and Guatemala City, which resulted in a mysterious disappearance of evidence. In October 1994, the Quiché police chief was murdered. Augusto Medina Mateo had been the first person to investigate the slaying of Carpio.

Four days after Carpio’s death, his cousin, the president of Guatemala, Ramiro De León Carpio, announced that 11 members of a criminal gang calling itself the “Churuneles” had been arrested. They were at first accused of the crime, but the police reported that the arms seized from the gang members were .22 caliber and a dummy pistol. The victims had been shot with .45-caliber and 9mm weapons.


Reconstruction of the murder of Jorge Carpio Nicolle and his three companions, committed in El Quiché, in the interior of Guatemala.

The weapons of the Churuneles also disappeared. It was only after several months of insistence by the Carpio family that the authorities revealed the negative results of paraffin tests done on the gang members.

Mario Enrique Gómez Ayala, head of G-2, the army’s intelligence unit, insisted on July 7, 1993, that the gun used to kill Carpio, seized from the Churuneles, was the same one used to kill Lt.Col. Juan José Furlán. But this bit of intelligence was discounted when a report issued by the police criminal division blamed the murder of Carpio and his party on members of the civil patrol from San Pedro Jocopilas in Quiché province. Acabal Patz án belonged to that unit.

Although this report was ready in September 1993, it was not released publicly until May 1994, after the diocesan human rights office had issued its own conclusions. These were that the Carpio murder was politically motivated and was carried out by members of the San Pedro Jocopilas patrol.

In March 1994, President De León Carpio said that tests run by the FBI and Mexican ballistics experts confirmed that the .45 caliber handgun seized from civil patrolman Acabal Patzán when he was arrested on August 26, 1993, matched the one that fired the bullets that killed Carpio and his companions. The bullet shells matched the ones found at the crime scene, the president said.

Since then, however, Marta Arrivillaga de Carpio, who survived the assault that resulted in her husband’s death, disputed that finding. She argued that it was impossible for one person to have fired on two vehicles, killed four persons and wounded another all with the same weapon.

Other contradictions surfaced months later when the president told Carpio’s widow that the barrel and trigger of Patzán’s revolver had been changed,according to the test done by the ballistics technician, García Arroyo. This development later planted the seed of doubt in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

Karen Fischer, who was Carpio’s private secretary at the UCN, said in a report to the IACHR that President De León Carpio had never made available “the ballistic reports of the FBI, the Spanish Civil Guard and a Mexican government expert.” It was the president, she added, who had allowed the weapon to leave the country for ballistics testing without “court authorization.”

Fischer also accused the then minister of government, Arnoldo Ortiz Moscoso, of ordering “Roberto Solórzano and Oscar Abel García Arroyo to take the seized gun to Washington.” She identified Mario René Cifuentes, then director of the national police, as having authorized the removal of the weapon from the country.

An Open Door

The expectation of those who firmly hope for this crime to be solved is that the appeals court ruling will open the door to prosecution of “other officials who have failed in their duty to investigate” as well as the masterminds of the crime.

Arrivillaga de Carpio was pleased that the development will allow the probe to continue and the culprits of the quadruple murder to be identified. “We believe,” she was quoted as saying (Siglo Vientiuno, April 29, 1999) “that the two investigations were a farce to cover up the army’s report, called Operation Utatlán, which was never made public.”

That report supposedly would contain the army’s initial investigations of the crime, the existence of which was vehemently denied by various military and national political figures.

Arrivillaga de Carpio demanded that President De León Carpio disclose who it was who pressured him not to investigate the murder of her husband.

Fischer, a former daughter-in-law of Carpio and a leader of the Alliance against Impunity -a Guatemalan human rights organization -said the army applied pressure to keep the crime forever unsolved. She said that Victor Augusto Echeverría, then commander of Military Zone 20 based in Quiché, sent the report in question to his superiors. This report was never made available to the inquiry, and neither was the FBI’s.

The Carpio family as a result stressed that it was convinced the crime was carried out on orders of the military high command.

Beyond the Verdict

Despite all the confusion planted along the way and the court’s April 1999 ruling, there are some coincidences -sunbeams penetrating the heavy mantle of impunity - that give a better understanding of the Carpio case.

The early police investigation, the Carpio families inquiries, the report of the archdiocese, the IAPA findings and all the missing or distorted evidence point to a crime that is not the work of common

criminals but of the civil patrol -those 30 hooded men. Likewise, all this strongly indicates the presence of a mastermind, made up of powerful Guatemalan groups, possibly the army and G-2, who may have acted in response to a politico-military conspiracy.

The ruse sought to silence Carpio, who opposed a general amnesty -and editorialized about it in his paper, El Gráfico -designed to pardon all those involved in the self-coup staged by president Jorge Elías Serrano on May 25, 1993.

Karen Fischer also added new elements to the case, investigated by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights under file no.11,333. The IAPA made available to that inquiry the results of its own investigationundertaken in 1994 and 1996.


Jorge Carpio Nicolle (standing, second from right) at the official announcement that an attempted self-coup by President Jorge Serrano Elías on May 25, 1993, has been thwarted.

Under the headline “For the Ears of the Third Court,” (El Periódico, 2/16/99), Fischer published excerpts of the material she had sent the IACHR, which said:

“Four years and four months had to pass before the eighth judge to [investigate] the crime against Jorge Carpio, Juan Vicente Villacorta, Rigoberto Rivas and Alejandro Avila, handed down his ruling. He lef t us with one man arrested since 1993 -Juan Acabal Patzán. It was demonstrated that the patrolman did not murder any of the victims. Now it’s up to the appeals court to clear the slate and open proceedings against the other perpetrators, accomplices and the following persons:

“Gen. José Domingo García. He denied having threatened Carpio to keep him from objecting to congressional approval of the general amnesty bill. He also denied that the army was pressuring for amnesty. The denials were proved false.

“Gen. José Luis Quilo, chief of the defense high command at the time. He never made available the reports sent by the commander of Military Zone no.20 regarding the four murders.

“Gen. Víctor Augusto Vázquez, then commander of that military zone. He refused to name the of ficer and 15 soldiers who were the first to arrive at the crime scene, even before the national police officers.

“Ramiro De León Carpio, Guatemalan president at the time. He concealed for 10 months the new investigation of patrolmen and military agents, a probe that replaced the one done of the Churuneles. He never shared the ballistic reports produced by the FBI, the Spanish Civil Guard and a Mexican government expert. He authorized the removal of evidence without court approval. He lied when he said the army never investigated the case.

“Col. Ricardo Bustamante, then director of the archive. He denied having carried out any investigation or having interrogated and filmed the survivors, extrajudicially, as was later proved to be case.

“Col. Mario Alfredo Mérida González, then director of intelligence.He denied that G-2 conducted any investigation. However, he did acknowledge that army personnel were the first to arrive at the scene to investigate.

“Lt. Cols. Víctor H. Rosales and Mario Enrique Gómez. Rosales, who never released the results of the investigation. Gómez, a senior officer of the national police, was one of the officers sent to Quiché and Solola to investigate. He took part in the Utatlán Plan, according to Ministry of Defense documents, but denied it in his testimony.

“Arnoldo Ortiz Moscoso, then minister of government. He concealed the new investigation of patrolmen and agents. He ordered Roberto Solórzano a Oscar Abel García to remove the seized weapon in Washington.

“Mario René Cifuentes, then chief of police. He concealed the new investigation and authorized removal of the weapon. He reduced the list of suspects from 20 to 10. He was called to testify three times and refused on each occasion, which is an offense.”

After making these assertions and before knowing that Acabal Patzán would be acquitted in 1999, Fischer concluded her account with the urgent plea: “Let the people decide whether justice was done in putting only one man in jail.”

Unjustified Delays

Beyond these flaws, the Carpio case has faced legal obstacles for nearly six years, such as the excusing of several judges and the resignation of 11 public prosecutors - several because of threats and personal attacks on them, as in the cases of Abraham Méndez and Ramiro Contreras.

Finally, in view of the various decisions of the IACHR, it is very debatable that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals did not agree to blame the Guatemala government for delays in solving the Carpio case. The IACHR judgment regarding the case of Mexican journalist Héctor Félix Miranda, reported in this chapter, clearly establishes what are reasonable periods to apply the law and the guarantees governments must bring to the investigative and legal processes.

The Carpio case does not fit these standards and the deficiencies outlined clearly demonstrate that its solution has been unjustifiably delayed.