State of Impunity

On Sunday morning, May 10, 2009, Rodrigo Rosensberg, a successful Guatemalan lawyer, was shot three times in the face as he rode his bicycle near his Guatemala City apartment. The murder would have become another statistic in a country plagued by corruption and impunity, and where Mexican drug cartels exert increasing influence, had it not been for a video Rosenberg recorded 3 days prior to being murdered. In the video, distributed after his death, Rosenberg points fingers from the grave and accuses Guatemala’s president Alvaro Colom, the First Lady Sandra Torres, the president’s private secretary Gustavo Alejos, and Gregorio Valdes, a top campaign fundraiser for president Colom.