It wasn’t so much that he was perfect for her or she for him. It was more about the fact that he was right for her. Right for her and right for them both. They seemed right for each other. Those around them, the chattering classes to the finca born, seemed enamored with what they wanted to see – perhaps with what they wanted to project of themselves – in the handsome young couple, as they clucked approval at a courtship that struck of glamour in those parts.

She was of well-healed Dominican emigré stock who’s family had left the island in a hurry with the fall of Trujillo and his barons. His family were “Chapines” through and through. They had arrived from Spain generations ago and had once upon a time established their good name farming Guatemalan Indigo. Their relative opulence had since dwindled, in part due to misfortune further fueled by cavalier neglect, and not much remained of their former patrimony save for a good name and a family home in Antigua still bursting with selected objects of exquisite taste.

They met in Santiago de Chile in the late sixties. Chile had been her family’s port of call after their flight from the Dominican Republic and it was there that her father, a pilot, had found work flying for LAN. His father was the Guatemalan ambassador to Chile and overlapping social circles soon brought them together. When they met he was in his penultimate year of veterinary medicine at the university where she planned to enroll in the same course the following year and no doubt it was their mutual love of animals – both of them being consummate equestrians – that helped to cement the bond between them. Their engagement was soon announced, duly being recorded in the social columns of the Santiago press, with the wedding taking place in Miami in the summer of 1969 shortly after completion of his studies the previous winter.

Within a few months the young couple moved to Guatemala with the help of a considerable loan from her father that helped set him up initially in coffee farming. Three boys were produced in rapid succession. Hard graft, social connections and an astute mind ensured it all went rather well for him and within a few years not only had he managed to repay his father in law in full, as the owner of a number of lucrative coffee plantations, but he was also expanding his interests regionally and across borders to include investments in cotton and sugar cane farming and livestock rearing. She, in the meantime, had concluded her studies and had begun to set up a number of veterinary clinics around the country that, amongst other things, were able to provide a number of “pro bono” services to the impoverished and less fortunate. His apparent interest in these projects was matched by his willingness to bank-roll the bigger investments at no profit to himself. In 1977 he was offered an advisory post of considerable importance within the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food and two years later he was nominated Vice Minister. By 1979 the couple were leading an enchanted life that permitted them to rear their young family in considerable comfort. They were wealthy, influential and well-connected; liked and respected in equal measure by their peers for what was deemed to be their charm, their energy and their integrity… but perhaps also for their youthful good looks.

He was quite unprepared for what occurred three years later on one of his plantations. It’s not that this was the first time that a body had been found on his land. The murky waters of rural life in the back country being as they are meant that the odd settling of accounts amongst the native inhabitants of his domains often implied brutal injuries and the occasional death that were universally thought best left alone and un-investigated. The Minister’s nephew had been missing for a night and most of the following day when he was found gaping and twisted, half naked behind some shrubs, caked in crusts of mud and dried blood, his throat slit and with horrific injuries to other parts of his body that would suggest he might have been barking up the wrong tree. The young man had been taken on the previous year as a trainee manager at the Minister’s insistence – a recent graduate of not much promise from an unremarkable American college – and placed under the close supervision of one of the Vice Minister’s trusted foremen to “learn the business” of sorts. By all accounts the lad had taken his responsibilities lightly and had been found wanting in just about every respect, being given to all manner of base distractions. Barring the ghastly nature of his injuries, the end he suffered seemed to surprise no one; least of all the incumbent Vice Minister. But the matter, in this case, could not simply be wished away and the authorities were called in to investigate, to his considerable concern and embarrassment. The Attorney General’s office took charge of the investigation, making the right noises and asking the right questions to counter the consternation in the national press, but quite soon the lines of inquiry seemed to dissolve into thin air and it all seemed to end up in nothing at all, as was to be expected. The Vice Minister went quietly to see his boss to tender his resignation and it was duly accepted. Whatever else was said between them behind those closed doors no one will ever know. It was the last time they spoke. He went back to managing his business interests and the Minister went back to managing his ministry. Everyone concerned seemed to have wished the scandal away.

It was the inadvertent investigations of a clever journalist, writing for a British broadsheet, that five years later fanned the embers of this little scandal back to flames. Whilst connecting the dots of an apparent international conspiracy to launder vast amounts of money being generated from the traffic of cocaine to Europe and North America, this journalist implicated the Minister as being a known close friend and a possible crony of a Panamanian banker who had gone to ground after being issued with an international arrest warrant. In no time the international press was all over the story and the United States began to press its friends and allies in Latin America for explanations and the expected Turk’s Heads. The government of Guatemala duly summoned the Minister to testify before their equivalent of a commission of inquiry and, naturally, his ex Vice Minister was sucked into the maelstrom by association.

After much scrutiny of their public and private lives, with countless witnesses being called to testify, the commission found that neither of them could be implicated in any wrong-doing regarding the money laundering scandal and were excused from any further inquiries regarding this issue. They were found to have acted honourably as respective Minister and Vice Minister and were exonerated of all charges. The incident involving the Minister’s nephew was ruled to be Death by Misadventure and the matter was closed. The Minister was allowed to return to his ministry and the ex Vice Minister went back to administering his businesses. Curiously, one aspect of the ex Vice Minister’s life that came to light under cross-examination – a secret he had kept from all his family and friends – was seemingly glossed over by the commission and not mentioned in their final verdict. It transpired that for the last thirteen years he had financed several stables that raised prize fighting cocks; birds that changed hands for considerable sums within the region. At the very least, a conflict of interests perhaps?

His wife left him not long after the commissions’ findings were made public and she returned to the Dominican Republic. He, I’m told, now lives in Argentina.