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Guatemalan President Gets U.S. Support As
Murder Scandal Rolls On
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Guatemalan
President Gets U.S. Support As Murder
Scandal Rolls On
Guatemala - A senior U.S. official visited
Guatemala on Monday to show support for
President Alvaro Colom, who has been facing
public protest due to alleged involvement in
a lawyer's murder, news reports said.
Colom restated his innocence of all charges
at a meeting with U.S. Undersecretary of
State for Latin America David Robinson, a
Guatemala government spokesman told
reporters Monday.
Colom has already received support from the
Organization of American States following
the accusation, made by the slain lawyer
Rodrigo Rosenberg in a posthumous video,
that the president had ordered the murder.
In Guatemala, however, the scandal has been
growing and exposed divisions between the
urban rich and the rural and working class
voters who voted for Colom.
Guatemala's legislature on Monday received a
petition signed by over 35,000 citizens
seeking to lift the president's immunity,
the first step in a possible prosecution.
Roberto Alejos, head of Guatemala's
legislature, promised that he would call the
party leaders in the parliament to make the
petition known to them "the same day" and
that it would then go onto a plenary session
of the legislature.
According to the constitution, it is the
Supreme Court that can demand stripping a
president of immunity once sufficient
evidence is brought in, Alejos told media,
adding that this will then go to the
legislature for a so-called "political
judgment."
The major evidence implicating Colon is a
video in which Rosenberg, who was gunned
down on May 10 while riding his bike,
claimed he would soon be murdered because he
helped clients who had refused to cooperate
in the government corruption and
money-laundering scheme at development bank
Banrural.
Colom has ordered the International
Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, a
UN panel set up in 2007 to clean up
corruption, to investigate the matter.
On Sunday, the center of Guatemala City was
blockaded by rival demonstrations with
middle- and upper-class protestors dressed
in white demanding Colom leave and working
class and rural Guatemalans demonstrating to
support the president.
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