Guatemala in uproar after lawyer predicts own murder
Rodrigo Rosenberg shot two days after recording YouTube video at friend's offices in Guatemala City
Sunday, 17 May 2009
Rodrigo Rosenberg, a middle-aged Guatemalan lawyer, has become an unlikely YouTube star in macabre circumstances. In a video recorded last Friday at the offices of a friend, he sits behind a desk and talks at the camera for 15 minutes.
"If you are hearing this message," Rosenberg begins, "unfortunately, it is because I have been murdered by the president's private secretary, Gustavo Alejos, and his partner, Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of Álvaro Colom and Sandra de Colom [Guatemala's president and first lady]."
Two days later, on Sunday, Rosenberg was shot while riding his bicycle in Guatemala City. He died on the street.
"I do not want to be a hero," Rosenberg says at one point during the sensational video that was distributed at his funeral on Monday, but he has now become a martyr in a nation weary of drug running, money laundering and corruption, and with one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Rosenberg explains that he was a lawyer who would have preferred to continue quietly practising his profession, but it was the murder of two clients in April that led directly to his own death.
According to Rosenberg, one client, Khalil Musa, was a successful businessman who had been invited to join the board of the agricultural bank, known as Banrural, where he discovered that drugs money - Guatemala is a key transit point for drugs traffic to the US - was being channelled into "non-existent" social programmes run by the first lady.
Musa, his lawyer said, was a man of regular habits and so not a difficult target. In April Musa and his daughter, Marjorie, were murdered. Rosenberg claimed to have documents that connected their murders to the president, the first lady and Alejos.
The video has caused uproar in Guatemala City, where demonstrators have demanded the president's immediate resignation while equally vocal groups have insisted that Colom stay.
After a brutal military dictatorship lasting nearly 40 years to 1996, many Guatemalans believe that even a civilian president accused of murder is better than instability that could open the door to military rule. To reinforce his position, the president flew 250 mayors to the capital to pledge their support.
At a press conference, President Colom dismissed the affair as a plot to destabilise the government and said that he would not resign because "I was elected, there is no evidence beyond the video and since it's a recording, it does not count".
But he could be wrong. According to friends of Rosenberg, the lawyer was planning to present his evidence abroad. On Tuesday, the prosecuting authorities raided Banrural, but the president's case was not helped when the chief prosecutor was photographed leaving the president's office on Monday after what he insisted was a "routine" meeting.