Deadly violence appears to be a daily occurrence in Guatemala, where even the president of the small Central American nation has been accused of being the author of a recent murder of attorney. Thousands of President Alvaro Colom’s supporters thronged the central square of Guatemala City on May 17, while in another public space his accusers demanded justice for Rodrigo Rosenberg, who had accused in a video before his death that the president and his wife were plotting his murder. Rosenberg’s murder, like thousands of others, has gone unsolved just as the detritus of decades of civil war, torture, and genocide smolder beneath the surface of a land beset by social inequalities, narcotrafficking, maladministration, and ethnic tensions.
Drug gangs known as “maras” have been associated with hundreds of murders of women that remain unsolved, while they have been known to order killings from cells in prisons that are largely within their control. These gangs actually had their genesis in the U.S., largely in Los Angeles in the Latino barrios. They now also have operations in the Central American isthmus where they are involved in trafficking narcotics and human beings north through Mexico to the U.S.
The police, despite assistance from Spain and the U.S., are sometimes outmanned and outgunned in firefights that resemble those unleashed in Mexico along the border with the U.S. where drug gangs are battling a turf war.
On May 28, assailants attacked an inter-urban bus on a main thoroughfare in Guatemala. In that case, three persons were shot to death in the robbery. In another case, a police officer was shot to death on another inter-urban bus near Lake Amatitlán on its way to Jutiapa, a region near El Salvador. On the same day, reports indicated that three other individuals were also murdered in an around Guatemala City.
The public’s sense of outrage appears to have been piqued not only by the accusations lain at the feet of the country’s chief executive, but crimes even more senseless and inhuman. In the hamlet of Chicamán, in San Lucas Sacatepéquez – known for the colorful clothing and weavings of the local Mayans – a woman lamented her daughters who are no more. On May 28, three girls – aged 7, 8, and 12 – were slaughtered on their way to school. Still dressed in their uniforms, the ravaged bodies of the girls were found near their backpacks. Their throats were slit.
In similar cases, outraged citizens have carried out extrajudicial executions of suspected criminals. While the police say they have the name of a suspect who may have menaced one of the girls who had witnessed a burglary earlier in the week, Socoreque vowed justice saying “three little angels have died.” For her part, Norma Cruz – human rights activist of the Survivors Foundation – offered her condolences to the girls’ mother, as well as legal counsel in order to find the perpetrators of the crime. On the evening of May 29, some 250 young people gathered to pray for peace at the landmark Obelisk monument, some bearing a black and white banner inscribed "Justice." Bearing candles and joined by numerous adults, the Youth for Peace Movement had put a call out for participants on Facebook.
As for President Colom, a wealthy businessman who has had to defend himself from accusations that he himself is tied to narcotrafficking and money-laundering, insists that Guatemala is changing for the better. Following the public accusations that he and his wife orchestrated the murder of Attorney Rosenberg, he held a press conference denounced as “dung” the presumption of his guilt. He also flew in scores of town mayors on private planes to Guatemala City to rally in his support.
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