A Murder Foretold - The New Yorker

A Murder Foretold | The New Yorker 9/26/24, 2:36 PM
A Murder Foretold
By David Grann March 28, 2011
Rodrigo Rosenberg knew that he was about to die. It wasn’t because he was
approaching old age—he was only forty-eight. Nor had he been diagnosed
with a fatal illness; an avid bike rider, he was in perfect health. Rather,
Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, was certain
that he was going to be assassinated.
Before he began, in the spring of 2009, to prophesy his own murder, there
was little to suggest that he might meet a violent end. Rosenberg, who had
four children, was an affectionate father. The head of his own flourishing
practice, he had a reputation as an indefatigable and charismatic lawyer who
had a gift for leading other people where he wanted them to go. He was lithe
and handsome, though his shiny black hair had fallen out on top, leaving an
immaculate ring on the sides. Words were his way of ordering the jostle of
life. He spoke in eloquent bursts, using his voice like an instrument, his
hands and eyebrows rising and falling to accentuate each note. (It didn’t
matter if he was advocating the virtues of the Guatemalan constitution or of
his favorite band, Santana.) Ferociously intelligent, he had earned master’s
degrees in law from both Harvard University and Cambridge University.
Rosenberg had been born into Guatemala’s oligarchy—a term that still
applies to the semi-feudal Central American nation, where more than half of
its fourteen million people, many of them Mayan, live in severe poverty. His
mother had inherited a small fortune, and his father had acquired several
businesses, including a popular chain of cinemas. (As a boy, Rosenberg had
spent hours in the plush seats, entranced by the latest American films.)
Rosenberg was accustomed to privilege. A car enthusiast, he drove a
Mercedes and made an annual pilgrimage to Indianapolis to watch Formula 1
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races. He had been married twice but was now single, living in an elegant
high-rise overlooking Guatemala City.
Though his wealth allowed him a desultory life, he was “driven and motivated
by his goals,” as a relative put it. When he began his studies at Cambridge,
he had spoken almost no English, so Rosenberg informed his professors that
he had recently undergone surgery on his vocal cords, and could not yet talk
in class; in the meantime, he bought a television and watched it each night
with closed-captioning until, after three months, he spoke with confidence.
He was not a religious man, but he maintained a stark sense of good and
evil, castigating others, as well as himself, for transgressions. When he was a
child, his father had abandoned the family, a betrayal that Rosenberg had
never forgiven; he even refused to accept an inheritance that his father had
left him. One of Rosenberg’s closest friends noted that, if he thought you
had crossed him, he could be brutal: “He was always very honest—
sometimes, perhaps, too honest. He would say things that are true, but
sometimes things that are true that you shouldn’t mention.” Though
Guatemala’s judicial system was notoriously corrupt, Rosenberg was drawn
to the clarity of the law, to its unflinching judgment. He argued, successfully,
before the Constitutional Court, Guatemala’s equivalent of the U.S. Supreme
Court, and in 1998 he became the vice-dean of a prominent law school. At
the same time, he served as counsel for some of Guatemala’s most powerful
élites—its coffee barons and corporate executives and government officials.
And, according to Rosenberg, it was a case involving one of these clients,

Khalil Musa, that had placed his life in jeopardy. A Lebanese immigrant, Musa
had risen from poverty to great wealth, manufacturing textiles and producing
coffee. Stern, traditional, and hardworking, he liked to recite the inspirational
poetry of Khalil Gibran, and was admired as one of the few magnates in
Guatemala who refused to plunder the state or make payoffs for favorable
deals. At seventy-six, he suffered from vertigo, and he increasingly relied on

the younger of his two daughters, Marjorie, to help him manage his business.
Marjorie, who was forty-two, was married with two children, and she had an
easy ebullience that infused her simple features with beauty. She had
mastered the intricacies of finishing fabrics, and she had always been—as
her sister, Aziza, acknowledges, without rancor—their father’s favorite.
Musa lived in an affluent neighborhood of Guatemala City, and Marjorie often

drove him from their factory, on the outskirts of the capital, home for lunch.
On April 14, 2009, they had set out on such a routine trip. The rainy season
was a few weeks away, and so clouds had not obscured the steep volcanic
cones that tower over the city, periodically showering the streets with ash.
When Marjorie stopped at a red light, just outside the factory, a man got out
of a car behind her and approached the Musas’ vehicle from the passenger
side, as if to ask a question. He then aimed a 9-mm. pistol at Musa, and
opened fire—a blur of smoke and light. The gunman sprinted to a
motorcycle, where a driver was waiting for him, and hopped on the back
seat. They sped away. The stoplight in front of the Musas’ car turned green,
then red, and then green again, but the car remained in place, the engine still
rumbling. One of the tinted windows on the passenger side had shattered,
revealing father and daughter lying in one another’s blood. They had both
been shot in the chest. The police arrived within minutes, but by then they
were dead.
Rosenberg had frequently expressed despair over the violence that

consumed Guatemala. In 2007, a joint study by the United Nations and the
World Bank ranked it as the third most murderous country. Between 2000
and 2009, the number of killings rose steadily, ultimately reaching sixty-four
hundred. The murder rate was nearly four times higher than Mexico’s. In
2009, fewer civilians were reported killed in the war zone of Iraq than were
shot, stabbed, or beaten to death in Guatemala.
The violence can be traced to a civil war between the state and leftist rebels,
a three-decade struggle that, from 1960 to 1996, was the dirtiest of Latin
America’s dirty wars. More than two hundred thousand people were killed or
“disappeared.” According to a U.N.-sponsored commission, at least ninety
per cent of the killings were carried out by the state’s military forces or by
paramilitary death squads with names like Eye for an Eye. One witness said,
“What we have seen has been terrible: burned corpses; women impaled and
buried, as if they were animals ready for the spit, all doubled up; and children
massacred and carved up with machetes.” The state’s counter-insurgency
strategy, known as “drain the sea to kill the fish,” culminated in what the
commission deemed acts of genocide.
“Think of this as a ‘Be here now’ exercise.”
In 1996, the government reached a peace accord with the rebels, and it was
supposed to mark a new era of democracy and rule of law. But amnesty was
granted for even the worst crimes, leaving no one accountable. (Critics
called the policy “the piñata of self-forgiveness.”) In 1998, the Guatemalan
Archdiocese’s Office of Human Rights, led by Bishop Juan Gerardi, released
a four-volume report, “Guatemala: Never Again,” which documented
hundreds of crimes against humanity, identifying some perpetrators by
name. Two days later, Gerardi was bludgeoned to death, a murder that was
eventually revealed to be part of a conspiracy involving military officers.
After the peace accord, the state’s security apparatus—death squads,

intelligence units, police officers, military counter-insurgency forces—did not
disappear but, rather, mutated into criminal organizations. Amounting to a
parallel state, these illicit networks engage in arms trafficking, money
laundering, extortion, human smuggling, black-market adoptions, and
kidnapping for ransom. The networks also control an exploding drug trade.
Latin America’s cartels, squeezed by the governments of Colombia and
Mexico, have found an ideal sanctuary in Guatemala, and most of the

cocaine entering America now passes through the country. Criminal
networks have infiltrated virtually every government and law-enforcement
agency, and more than half the country is no longer believed to be under the
control of any government at all. Citizens, deprived of justice, often form
lynch mobs, or they resolve disputes, even trivial ones, by hiring assassins.
Some authorities have revived the darkest counter-insurgency tactics,

rounding up undesirables and executing them. Incredibly, the death rate in
Guatemala is now higher than it was for much of the civil war. And there is
almost absolute impunity: ninety-seven per cent of homicides remain
unsolved, the killers free to kill again. In 2007, a U.N. official declared,
“Guatemala is a good place to commit a murder, because you will almost
certainly get away with it.”
After Rosenberg heard that the Musas had been shot, he rushed to the
scene. Luis Mendizábal, a longtime friend and client of Rosenberg’s, told me,
“I asked him to come and pick me up, so we could go to the place together.
He said, ‘No, no, no. I’m not going to lose any time. I’m going directly.’ So he
went. He couldn’t believe it. Then he came back over here, and cried, easily,
for two hours.” His oldest son, Eduardo, who was twenty-four, told me that it
was only the second time he had seen his father break down, the first being
when Rosenberg revealed that he was separating from Eduardo’s mother. He
seemed “completely destroyed” by the Musas’ deaths, Eduardo recalled.
Though the crime was horrific, Rosenberg’s deeply emotional reaction was
surprising. Musa was not a big client or someone he knew that well. Then
Rosenberg told his son a secret: for more than a year, he and Marjorie had
been having an affair.
They had planned to marry, but had not wanted to disclose their relationship
until Marjorie got a divorce. Almost every day, they had exchanged text
messages. On March 3, 2009, five weeks before the shooting, Marjorie wrote
to Rosenberg, “I love you like I’ve never loved before. And, yes, I will marry
you.” A few days later, she said, “Good night my love, my prince, my whole
life. You don’t know how much I love you, how much I adore you, and how
much I need you. You are so tender with me. And you’re the sweetest man I
know.” She added, “I’m dying to live the rest of my life at your side.” He called
her “my Marjorie de Rosenberg” and told her that she gave him “the strength
to be a better man” and that they were “living an incredible love story.” Hours
before she was killed, he ended a message with the words “Your prince
forever.”
In tears, Rosenberg told his son, “They killed her! They killed her!” He told
Mendizábal the same thing, repeating the words over and over.
The shootings unnerved the most powerful members of Guatemalan society.

Khalil Musa knew Guatemala’s President, Álvaro Colom, who had also
worked in the textile industry; Marjorie was a good friend of Gustavo Alejos,
who was Colom’s private secretary, and whose brother was the head of
Congress. An adviser to President Colom told me, “If the Musas could be
killed, there was a sense that anyone could be.”
Thousands of people showed up for the Musas’ funeral, Alejos among them.
Rosenberg, concerned that his affair with Marjorie might cause a scandal,
stood outside the chapel, watching from a distance. A few days later,
Rosenberg received a call from a jeweller, who informed him that Marjorie
had ordered a gift for him before her death—a wedding ring. “This is the
message she sent me,” he told Mendizábal.
That week, business leaders held a press conference, declaring that the
assassinations were another sign of Guatemalans’ “helplessness” and
demanding that authorities fully investigate the crimes. Rosenberg, who had
the conservative outlook shared by most Guatemalan élites, had long
yearned for un estado de derecho—a state based on the rule of law. In 2005,
he had joined an effort to extradite from Mexico a former President of
Guatemala who was accused of embezzling millions of dollars while in office.
A close friend of Rosenberg’s said that the failures of Guatemala’s judicial
system “ate at Rosenberg’s guts.”
Rosenberg warned family and friends that the Musa murders would never be
properly investigated. The criminal networks would either block the
investigation or destroy the evidence, and if a probe somehow proceeded
they would frame a scapegoat; finally, if all else failed, the gangsters would
threaten to kill members of the judiciary system, who would bury the case.
The Musas’ deaths, he predicted, would become just another statistic.
Nevertheless, Rosenberg could not let the matter go: Why, he asked, had an
honorable man like Musa been “put down like a dog”? And what had
Marjorie, an exemplary daughter, done to deserve this?
Mendizábal, the longtime friend, says that after the funeral Rosenberg asked
him for help, vowing to “go all the way to find out who killed the Musas.”
Mendizábal was the one person Rosenberg knew who could help him take
on the parallel powers that dominated Guatemala. A genteel-looking
grandfather, with a silver mustache and birdlike eyes, he was known for
making business deals, sometimes with the government, and he owned a
clothing shop, in Guatemala City, that catered to a wealthy male clientele.
But Mendizábal was no mere entrepreneur. It was whispered that, as in a
John le Carré novel, the boutique also served as a meeting place for military-
intelligence officers, coup plotters, and death-squad leaders.
“I’ve been called ‘most probably a genius.’”
Mendizábal was Guatemala’s most notorious spy. Relying on an extensive

network of orejas, or “ears,” he regularly compiled intelligence dossiers,

vacuuming up even the most vaporous rumors and searching for patterns in
the chaos of information. A former high-ranking U.N. official, who spent
years investigating crimes in the country, told me, “Mendizábal has probably
records on everyone in Guatemala. He knows everything: who is the lover of
whom, who has money in the Cayman Islands, who has committed a murder.
Everything.” Such information placed Mendizábal in great demand, and he
had served as an adviser to several Guatemalan Presidents, including, for a
while, Colom. Mendizábal presented himself as a fanatical anti-Communist,
but his ideology, apparently, was flexible when it came to business:
according to the newspaper El Periódico, he had once been caught
smuggling weapons to Communist guerrillas in El Salvador. Mendizábal told
me that he had never played both sides of Central America’s civil conflicts,
but he seemed to embrace a Machiavellian persona: “The one who has the
knowledge has the power. That’s why some people are afraid of the stuff
that I do.”
Mendizábal agreed to help Rosenberg, and they began investigating the

case. Shortly after Marjorie’s funeral, Rosenberg obtained a copy of a
security video that documented the scene outside the Musas’ textile factory
on the day of the murders. Mendizábal, who watched it with him on a
computer at the clothing shop, said that Rosenberg played the video over
and over, searching for clues. Unlike the escapist movies that Rosenberg had
seen at his father’s cinemas, the grainy black-and-white images had the
blunt force of unscripted narrative. They showed a truck parked in front of
the Musas’ factory. The driver kept getting in and out of his vehicle, peering
down the road. Mendizábal told Rosenberg that the man was clearly acting
as a lookout.
Rosenberg stared helplessly at the implacable sequence that came next. A

silhouette appeared in the corner of the screen: Marjorie, getting into her car.
Rosenberg touched the television screen—she was there but not there. As
Marjorie drove onto the street, with her father at her side, the car with the
assassin raced up behind them, followed by the driver on the motorcycle.
(The hit men were obeying a new law banning two people from travelling on
a motorcycle—a law that was supposed to curb assassinations, since so
many were carried out by hit men riding on back seats.) Rosenberg braced
himself. After a flash, Marjorie vanished from the frame.
The hit squad had displayed military precision, raising the prospect that the
crime was carried out by the state’s security apparatus. The ballistics report
indicated that Khalil Musa was hardly a random victim. He had been shot
nine times. The bullet that killed Marjorie was a stray—it had apparently
passed through Musa’s body before piercing hers.
In Guatemala, impunity has created a bewildering swirl of competing stories

and rumors, allowing powerful interests not only to cloak history but also to
fabricate it. As Francisco Goldman describes in his incisive 2007 book, “The
Art of Political Murder,” about the assassination of Bishop Gerardi, the
military and its intelligence operators concocted evidence and witnesses to
generate endless hypotheses—it was a robbery, it was a crime of passion—in
order to conceal the simple truth that they had murdered him. “So much
would be made to seem to connect,” Goldman writes.
Guatemalans often cite the proverb “In a country of the blind, the one-eyed
man is king.” Fighting his way through the political fog, Rosenberg searched
for a motive, stubbornly insisting that, if two people were assassinated, then
somebody had a reason to kill them. In notes he kept about the case, he
reported that authorities had initially suggested the shootings stemmed from
a dispute over a fired factory worker. But, by all accounts, Musa had treated
his workers well. Were the police and authorities trying to cover something
up, spinning another web of disinformation?
Finally, a lead emerged. Mendizábal advised Rosenberg to look into the

murky business surrounding two government positions for which Khalil Musa
had been nominated in the months before his assassination. The
nominations were for seats on the boards of directors of two institutions with
strong ties to the state—most notably, the Rural Development Bank, known
as Banrural. President Colom has called Banrural “our Administration’s
financial arm,” and has relied on it to fund major social-welfare programs for
the poor. These programs were administered by Guatemala’s First Lady,
Sandra de Colom, a powerful politician who is often compared to Eva Perón,
and who aspires to succeed her husband.
Before Musa died, he had talked to Rosenberg about whether to accept the
positions. Rosenberg considered entering Guatemalan politics a folly. With
friends from law school, he had once started a conservative political party,
but he had quit after it joined forces with traditional corrupt hands.
Rosenberg told Musa, “Truthfully, I don’t think it’s a good idea.” Musa, hoping
to help the country, accepted the offers anyway.
But the nominations, mysteriously, had never gone through. Rosenberg

learned from Mendizábal that there had been a fierce struggle over control
of the two boards, which, together, manage enormous financial resources.
According to Mendizábal, Musa’s uncompromising ethics posed a threat to
parties with stakes in these institutions. Indeed, Marjorie’s sister, Aziza, told
Rosenberg that, after her father was offered the nominations, he had
attended a lunch where officials connected to the institutions discouraged
Musa from taking the posts, and even insulted him. Afterward, Aziza
recalled, her father sent letters to some of these officials, saying, “You won’t
tell me what to do.” Musa soon received threatening text messages and calls,
including one noting that the farm of a meddling government official had
been torched.
Rosenberg eventually ferreted out from Musa’s papers several documents

concerning the appointments. One was a copy of a letter Musa had sent to
the head of a group of small coffee growers that had a stake in the direction
of Banrural. Musa said that he would not tolerate messages embedded with
“double meanings,” adding, “I protect myself from my enemies.”
Aziza said of her father, “He always says the truth and I think that is why he
was murdered.”
As Rosenberg dug deeper into the subterranean world of Guatemalan

politics, he told friends that he had begun receiving threats himself. One day,
Mendizábal says, Rosenberg gave him a phone number to write down—it
was the number that showed up on his caller I.D. when he received the
threats.
Rosenberg told friends that his apartment was under surveillance, and that
he was being followed. “Whenever he got into the car, he was looking over
his shoulder,” his son Eduardo recalled. From his apartment window,
Rosenberg could look across the street and see an office where Gustavo
Alejos, President Colom’s private secretary, often worked. Rosenberg told
Mendizábal that Alejos had called him and warned him to stop investigating
the Musas’ murders, or else the same thing might happen to him. Speaking
to Musa’s business manager, Rosenberg said of the powerful people he was
investigating, “They are going to kill me.” He had a will drawn up.
Mendizábal says that on Friday, May 8, 2009, he advised Rosenberg to leave

the country. Rosenberg promised that he would, but not yet. He felt that he
was on the verge of identifying who had ordered the hit on the Musas, and
was collecting irrefutable proof, which he intended to present at the
International Criminal Court. On Saturday evening, Rosenberg called
Marjorie’s sister and told her that he planned to go for a bicycle ride the next
morning, to clear his mind. On Sunday, just after 8 A*.*{: .small}M., he

pedalled away from his apartment building, listening to his iPod. After a few
hundred yards, Rosenberg turned onto a service road. A gunman
approached quickly, running across a grassy median toward him. No one saw
the assassin as he pointed a 9-mm. pistol at Rosenberg’s head and
repeatedly pulled the trigger.
“Your kid throws up a lot.”
Not long afterward, Rosenberg’s chauffeur was on his way to Rosenberg’s

apartment when he saw his boss lying on the ground, surrounded by
paramedics and police officers. He phoned Eduardo Rosenberg. “He told me
I had to go near my dad’s house, about a block away,” Eduardo recalled. “He
didn’t want to say what had happened. He just told me that I had to go there.
So I hung up the phone. I started panicking, trying to get dressed. I picked
up the phone again and called the driver. And I demanded to know what had
happened. He still didn’t want to say. So I asked him, ‘Is my dad dead?’ He
said, ‘Yes.’ ”
On Monday morning, May 11th, President Colom went to work in his main
office, a secure, windowless room on the second floor of the Presidential
House. Underneath the building, a tunnel led to the National Palace. Both
buildings had been commissioned by Jorge Ubico, a caudillo who ruled the
country during the nineteen-thirties and early forties; he had seen himself as
the reincarnation of Napoleon, and the monumental stone architecture
reflected his megalomania. (A motif of five archways—a tribute to the five
letters of Ubico’s surname—ran throughout the building.) As Colom shuttled
between his office and the palace, he faced reminders of the country’s
violent history: the executive office where a President was ousted in a coup;
the dining room where a military dictator had been assassinated by a
security guard, who then turned the gun on himself.
Colom, who was fifty-seven, was unusually reticent for a politician. Tall and
severely thin, with bent shoulders, receding gray hair, and owlish glasses, he
looked like a seminarian, which he had studied to be before turning to
politics. A congenital lip deformity caused him to speak in a nasal, almost
unintelligible whisper. He had experienced a number of tragedies: his first
wife was killed in a car accident, and in 1979 his uncle, a popular progressive
politician, joined Guatemala’s pantheon of martyrs when the military, after
chasing him through the capital on motorcycles and in a helicopter,
assassinated him.
In 2007, Colom, representing a social-democratic coalition, won the

Presidency—the first time in five decades that a left-of-center leader had
ruled Guatemala. The election was one of the bloodiest in the country’s
history: more than fifty local candidates and party activists were murdered,
and Colom’s campaign manager was nearly killed by three grenades thrown
at his motorcade. Colom defeated Otto Pérez Molina, a conservative former
general who had once overseen military intelligence. In the eighties, he had
taught at the School of the Kaibiles, which produced an élite force of
commandos whose training included slaughtering animals and drinking their
blood, and whose motto was “A Kaibil is a killing machine.”
Colom declared that the country must not return to a “past of darkness,” and
he vowed to end the violence and the corruption. Yet, even if he was well
intentioned, he was too weak to control the parallel state. A former U.N.
official recalled asking Colom why he had given a ministry post to someone
who was widely known to be corrupt. Colom replied, “He was not my
choice.” Since Colom took power, two of his interior ministers have been
indicted for corruption (a third died in a mysterious helicopter crash), and
four consecutive heads of the national police have been dismissed, indicted,
or jailed for alleged malfeasance. At the same time, Colom has been subject
to a campaña negra—“black campaign”—conducted by many in the
conservative oligarchy and in the political opposition. One day, President

Colom and the First Lady discovered that the palace and their offices had
been infiltrated with spy cameras.
Earlier that Monday, Rosenberg’s funeral had been held, at the same
cemetery where Marjorie was buried. Colom was in a meeting when he was
interrupted by Gustavo Alejos, his private secretary. Alejos had received a
call from a friend alerting him that something surreal had just happened at
the funeral—something with implications for the entire government. Alejos
called his cousin, a government minister who had been one of Rosenberg’s
closest friends. The cousin, who had attended the ceremony, reported that
Eduardo Rosenberg had given a eulogy and played a recording of “El
Salvador Blues,” by Santana. Then Luis Mendizábal had stood up and
addressed the hundreds of mourners: “Everybody here loved Rodrigo
Rosenberg, and all of you are wondering why someone like Rodrigo, who
couldn’t hurt anyone, was killed.” He paused, then said, “Well, Rodrigo left
me with the answer.” He explained that Rosenberg had given him a video,
with instructions to release it only if he was murdered. Mendizábal offered a
CD to anyone who was interested.
Mendizábal, who says he looked at the video only after Rosenberg’s death,
knew that his actions would unleash “big trouble,” as he put it. But the
previous day, as rain fell, he had visited the site where Rosenberg was shot.
“I started thinking, What am I going to do? Keep silent?” Mendizábal recalled.
While praying, he had seen on the ground a discarded metal plate inscribed
with the word “ON.” “I realized then what I was supposed to do,” he said.
Alejos’s cousin had taken one of Mendizábal’s CDs, and Alejos told him to
come straight to the President’s office. By then, members of Colom’s inner
circle had heard about the video, and they, too, rushed to the President’s
office. Vice-President José Rafael Espada, who was a former cardiothoracic
surgeon, also joined them. The cousin arrived, and the group gathered
around Colom’s computer to watch the video.
Suddenly, Rodrigo Rosenberg was staring at them, sitting alone, with a

microphone, in front of a spare table. He was dressed in a navy-blue suit, a
starched white shirt, and a pale-blue tie—the kind of muted, formal
ensemble that he had worn ever since his father had deserted the family,
leaving him the head of the household. On his wedding finger was the ring
that Marjorie had ordered for him.
“Good afternoon,” Rosenberg said. “My name is Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano

and, alas, if you are hearing or seeing this message it means that I’ve been
murdered by President Álvaro Colom, with the help of Gustavo Alejos.”
Rosenberg went on, “The reason I’m dead, and you’re therefore watching
this message, is only and exclusively because during my final moments I was
the lawyer to Mr. Khalil Musa and his daughter Marjorie Musa, who, in
cowardly fashion, were assassinated by President Álvaro Colom, with the
consent of his wife, Sandra de Colom, and with the help of . . . Gustavo
Alejos.”
Rosenberg said that he had “direct knowledge” of a conspiracy. He alleged

that the President, the First Lady, members of the Colom Administration, and
their business cronies were using Banrural to embezzle and launder money.
(In a document summarizing his charges, which he had given to Mendizábal
along with the recording, Rosenberg wrote, “Musa did not suspect that
illegal, million-dollar business transactions were taking place daily in
Banrural. These transactions range from money laundering to the
channelling of public funds to nonexistent programs belonging to the
President’s wife, Sandra de Colom, as well as the funding of shell companies
used by drug traffickers.”) Because Musa would not have tolerated such
corruption, Rosenberg said, he became a threat when he was nominated to
Banrural’s board. At that point, Rosenberg said, the President, the First Lady,
Alejos, and others conspired to kill him.
“What if the meek don’t want it?”
Initially, Rosenberg spoke slowly and stiffly, but then his hands began to rise
and fall, along with his eyebrows, the power of his voice growing—a voice
from the grave. “I don’t have a hero complex,” he said. “I don’t have any
desire to die. I have four divine children, the best brother life could have
given me, marvellous friends.” He continued, “The last thing I wanted was to
deliver this message. . . . But I hope my death helps get the country started
down a new path.” He urged Vice-President Espada—whom he described as
“not a thief or an assassin”—to assume the Presidency and insure that the
guilty parties wound up in jail. “This is not about seeking revenge, which only
makes us like them,” Rosenberg said. “It is about justice.” He predicted that
the Guatemalan government would try to cover up the truth, by smearing the
Musas and inventing plots. “But the only reality that counts is this: if you saw
and heard this message, it is because I was killed by Álvaro Colom and
Sandra de Colom, with the help of Gustavo Alejos.” He concluded,
“Guatemalans, the time has come. Please—it is time. Good afternoon.”
The video, which lasted about eighteen minutes, appeared to have been
made cheaply. A blue sheet had been hung behind Rosenberg, to deflect
glare, and there was a dull hum in the background, perhaps from cars on a
nearby street. As with a hostage video, the eerie, amateurish quality of the
production lent authenticity to Rosenberg’s claim: he had been rubbed out.
When the video ended, President Colom and his staff were unable to speak.
One aide later told me that he felt as if they had been transported into
another world—a world of movie thrillers. Finally, Colom muttered that his
enemies were trying to destroy his Presidency. “They want us out of here,”
he said.
No one in the room asked the President or Alejos if the allegations were true.
An official who is close to Colom told me he could not believe that the
President had been involved in ordering a murder. But, given the history of
Guatemala, the official said, it was possible that others in the Administration
had done so: “You never know.”
The room was filled with unacknowledged tensions and questions: Why had
Rosenberg called for Vice-President Espada to take the reins of the country?
Was Espada involved with Rosenberg, trying to orchestrate a new kind of
coup? President Colom told me that the video “put the Vice-President in a
compromising position.” The palace was at war with itself.
According to a member of the government, Alejos acted as if he were “going

to be arrested.” He called his wife and told her that she and their son had to
leave the country. He then offered his resignation to the President, but
Colom told him, “We’ll get through this.”
The video was almost instantly uploaded to YouTube, and it was broadcast
on national television. The Presidential spokesman’s cell phone began
ringing: reporters were demanding a response from Colom. “Honestly, for a
few hours, we didn’t know what to say,” the spokesman told me. The
President, Alejos, and the aides frantically tried to come up with a statement.
Finally, they hashed out a few words. The President didn’t think that he
should deliver them himself—better to maintain a dignified distance. And so
two aides went out and stood before a pack of reporters, categorically
rejecting the accusations.
The brief statement only fuelled the uproar: Why wasn’t the President
himself responding? Why was he in hiding? In a panic, Colom’s chief of staff
called Roberto Izurieta, a political consultant in Washington, D.C. Izurieta
taught crisis management at George Washington University, but he was
better known as the James Carville of Latin America—a strategist who had
helped elect Presidents across the region, including Colom. Izurieta based
much of his tactical thinking on Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.”
The chief of staff e-mailed Izurieta a link to the video. Izurieta later wrote, in
an unpublished report, “After more than twenty years in politics, I can’t recall
anything that made such a powerful impression on me.” He called back
Colom’s chief of staff and said, “I’m catching the next flight to Guatemala.”
Early the next morning, several reporters discovered Guatemala’s Attorney

General—who was supposed to be heading up an impartial investigation into
Rosenberg’s assassination—slipping out of a meeting with Colom. A former
Presidential candidate said on the radio, “What justice is there going to be if
the Attorney General meets together in the private office of the President?”
Meanwhile, the Rosenberg video was entering the public consciousness,

multiplying and regenerating like a spirochete. Within days, hundreds of
thousands of people had watched it online—so many that servers crashed. A
political analyst remarked that Rosenberg’s testimony was being translated
into more languages than the works of Guatemala’s most famous poets and
novelists. The video, known by the simple tag YouTube Murder, created what
one of the country’s largest newspapers called “the greatest political crisis”
in the history of Guatemalan democracy.
By Tuesday morning, protesters were streaming into Guatemala City’s

Central Plaza, dressed in white, a symbol of political purity, and screaming
outside the National Palace, “Asesino! Asesino!”
Izurieta, the consultant, arrived at the airport that afternoon and headed to
the palace. As he approached, he could see the swarm of white-clad
protesters in the plaza—the tsunami blanco, as the press dubbed it. Izurieta
told his driver to stop the car, and got out. “I wanted to feel the protests, to
see the people’s faces, to get the sense of the intensity,” he recalled. He
knew that there was a moment when a political crisis became
unmanageable; at that point, he, too, would be merely a spectator to history.
In the palace, Izurieta set up a war room in the President’s office. Sun Tzu
warns that, to prevail, one has to “know thy self,” and if Izurieta was going to
help the President he had to learn all the palace secrets. Late in the day, he
found Colom secluded in a room with Guatemala’s Archbishop, murmuring
words that Izurieta could not make out, as if he were in confession. No one
dared to disturb the President, but Izurieta finally had to interrupt: Colom
was scheduled to give a live interview on CNN.
Colom spoke by satellite from the old executive office in the palace. He wore
a blue suit and tie, and sat in a large wooden chair, staring directly into the
camera—a pose that, to Izurieta’s dismay, mirrored Rosenberg delivering his
posthumous J’accuse. The President claimed that the video was part of a
“plot to destabilize the government.” Blinking nervously, he looked pale and
scared. An aide conceded to me, “Everyone thought he was lying.” Not long
afterward, the director of El Periódico wrote, “I can’t help but express the
repugnance I felt during the declarations of President Álvaro Colom. . . . The
only thing missing now is for the President and his henchmen to say that it
was Rodrigo himself who immolated himself, kamikaze style, in order to
discredit the government and that he himself paid the assassins to murder
him.”
The President’s chief political rival, the former general Otto Pérez Molina,
demanded that Colom step down. But the President insisted that he would
forsake his position only if “they kill me.” In an interview on Al Jazeera, Colom
warned Guatemalans to “be careful of crossing the line,” and added,
“Accusing a President of murder publicly could be sedition.”
A young Guatemalan, furious with the government, sent out a message on

Twitter that said, “The first concrete action should be to take cash out of
Banrural and bankrupt the bank of the corrupt.” Soon afterward, authorities,
fearing a run on the bank, stormed his apartment and detained him. Twitter
provided a stream of data from a new democratic class of informants and
orejas, creating a narrative of unpunctuated fragments from sources known
and unknown, verified and unverified. There was chatter that Mendizábal
feared for his life, and that the Musas’ house had been broken into.
“If there’s anything more we can do for you, don’t hesitate to fill out the proper forms.”
Each day, the demonstrations grew, mobilized by messages on Facebook

and Twitter. The place where Rosenberg was killed became a shrine, with a
large wooden cross and signs reading “You didn’t die in vain!” Protesters
erected a movie screen and broadcast Rosenberg’s final testimony, so that
his body and voice floated over the crowd. The video looped over and over,
in an eternal present tense. A columnist said that Rosenberg had become
“the voice of millions of Guatemalans.”
In the war room, Izurieta told President Colom, “We don’t have much time.”
Aides bused in Colom supporters to the Central Plaza and filmed them,
distributing the footage to television stations. (It was “pure propaganda,” the
spokesman said.) But Colom wasn’t just losing a media battle; the
government was on the verge of collapse.
The U.S. Ambassador, Stephen McFarland, paid an urgent visit to the palace.
During the Cold War, America had frequently supported Guatemala’s brutal
security apparatus. In the nineteen-fifties, the C.I.A. had contemplated an
assassination campaign against left-wing Guatemalan targets and
disseminated a treatise on the art of political murder: “The subject may be
stunned or drugged and then placed in the car, but this is only reliable when
the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation.” In
1999, President Bill Clinton, speaking of such policies, said that the U.S.
“must not repeat that mistake.”
McFarland stressed to President Colom that there was only one way out of
the crisis: to turn over the investigation of the Rosenberg case to a U.N.-
backed organization called the International Commission Against Impunity in
Guatemala, or CICIG. Created in the fall of 2007, CICIG is a pathbreaking
political experiment. Unlike many truth commissions or human-rights bodies,
it does not investigate war crimes of the past, or merely monitor abuses.
Rather, it aggressively fights against systemic violence and corruption,
acting like blasts of radiation on a cancerous organism. Composed of several
dozen judges, prosecutors, and law-enforcement officers from around the
world, CICIG works within Guatemala’s legal system to prosecute members
of organized crime and dismantle clandestine networks embedded in the
state. Rosenberg’s brother, Eduardo Rodas, told the press that CICIG was
“our only hope for achieving justice.”
On May 12th, two days after Rosenberg was murdered, President Colom
agreed to refer the case to CICIG. Not only did the fate of the Rosenberg
case and the Colom Presidency depend on this international team of
investigators, which was led by a former Spanish prosecutor and judge
named Carlos Castresana; so did the fate of Guatemala’s democracy. As The
Economist put it, “Whether or not Mr. Rosenberg’s killers are brought to
justice will show whether or not Guatemala is indeed a failed state.”
Judge Castresana felt like a prisoner in Guatemala. On May 12th, as the

country was erupting, the fifty-one-year-old investigator was isolated inside
CICIG’s compound—a walled-off villa, in the capital, that had once served as
a headquarters for the U.S. Marines. Owing to security concerns, Castresana
was not allowed to venture out alone for his habitual cigarette, or to explore
the neighboring streets, with their haunting names—Street of Purgatory,
Street of Sorrows, Street of Oblivion. He travelled in a caravan of armor-

plated vehicles, and was trailed by bodyguards who were recruited from
outside the country, in order to reduce the chance that they were sleeper
agents. When Castresana first arrived in Guatemala to head CICIG, leaving
behind his wife and two young children, he had rented an apartment
downtown, but his head of security, a veteran of Spain’s Guardia Civil,
warned Castresana that he had been targeted for assassination, and so he
moved into a room above his office. Castresana sometimes felt like a “fake”:
he was investigating the politics of a place that he had barely seen. He told
me, “I have no life.”
A bold and, at times, vainglorious man, Castresana treated boredom as if it

were a contagion. In 1998, he was working as a special prosecutor against
corruption in Madrid when, in a bout of restlessness, he drafted an
indictment against General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean strongman, for the
murder of thousands of his countrymen, which, to the astonishment of the
world, led to Pinochet’s arrest, in England. Though Pinochet was eventually
released, it marked the first time in history that a onetime head of state had
been detained on the principle of universal jurisdiction. In 2007, Castresana,
after serving in a U.N. mission investigating the unsolved murders of
hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, came to Guatemala—like a
“parachutist,” as he puts it. A letter to the editor in El Periódico said,
“Welcome, Mr. Castresana, your presence in the country is proof that our
institutions simply don’t work.”
Castresana, who had the look of an aging student radical, with wavy brown
hair and glasses with small round lenses, was not a typical diplomat. One of
his friends, with a mixture of admiration and despair, describes him as a
“loose cannon.” Castresana often compared the criminals he investigated to
characters from literature, and he seemed to conceive of himself as an
Arthurian knight swept up in one heroic battle after another. He spoke
incessantly about a “code of honor,” and often clashed with his counterparts
at the U.N. He told a former Guatemalan Foreign Minister, “I don’t plan to be
another U.N. bureaucrat.”
In 2008, in its first big case, CICIG charged a chief homicide prosecutor with
obstructing justice and tampering with evidence. “We thought, as proud
international investigators, we were very good at what we did,” Castresana
recalled. “But, when you come to a country with such extended levels of
corruption, it doesn’t matter if you have built a good case. So when we
brought the case against the prosecutor it was a complete failure. He came
triumphantly to the court and he was released.” Castresana realized that he
could not bring criminals to justice before he had removed at least some of
the most corrupt officials. As Castresana later told the press, “Guatemala’s
institutions must be purged from the inside—they need an exorcism.”
Castresana seized upon a rule in CICIG’S charter that permitted the

organization to petition local officials to punish unethical officials. Through
this process, his team began to remove more than fifteen hundred corrupt
police officers, including fifty police commissioners and the deputy director
of the national police. CICIG also “invited” nearly a dozen prominent
prosecutors to leave their posts, and had a magistrate in Guatemala City
banished to the hinterlands. “My team told me not to—that I would put
everyone in the judiciary against us,” Castresana recalled. “I said, ‘No, all the
judiciary is already against us. If the judges know that they can say no to
CICIG, then it is our death.’ ” In the summer of 2008, he even asked
President Colom to fire his Attorney General, whom CICIG accused of
impeding justice. Though Colom found Castresana “very demanding,”
according to a U.S. diplomatic cable obtained by Wikileaks, he granted the
request.
Part prosecutor, part politician, part lobbyist, Castresana also pushed
through Congress several laws strengthening the judicial system. They

included establishing a viable witness-protection program, setting up a
framework for legal wiretapping, and making it possible for prosecutors to
arrange plea bargains for suspects who provide evidence against a criminal
network.
“On your left, you’ll see the apartment where my ex-wife tore my heart out, stepped on it, and
flushed it down the toilet. Also a deli.”
A former deputy minister told me that Castresana had become like General
Douglas MacArthur in Japan, after the Second World War. A columnist later
said that Castresana was treated as “the voice of God.” Nevertheless, CICIG
had been fully operational for barely a year when Rosenberg was killed, and
the case threatened some of the country’s most untouchable figures. A
newspaper columnist observed, “The odds that the investigation will be
successful . . . are slim to none. Like the Battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon
was defeated, Castresana faces the prospect, in Guatemala, of the first great
failure of his international career.”
Castresana told a reporter that the Rosenberg case was “like a John Grisham
novel, but it’s real.” Before formally launching an investigation, he went to
visit President Colom. With his security detail, Castresana passed by the
protesters in the Central Plaza, and slipped through a side entrance into the
palace. Despite its grandeur, the building had a ghostly quality, with its dark,
musty rooms, creaking doors, and gossamer curtains that fluttered
aimlessly. Castresana found Colom in his office, his bony wrists and neck
poking out of his suit.
Castresana told the President, “To take the case, I need complete
independence.” Colom, who spoke so softly that Castresana had to lean
forward to hear him, promised not to interfere. But Castresana could not
know if he was sincere or if the First Lady, Sandra de Colom, would abide by
the President’s wishes. In the palace, the First Lady was nicknamed “the
bulldozer,” for the way that she flattened aides and even the President. A
leading human-rights official told the St. Petersburg Times that Sandra de
Colom was considered “malignant and malevolent,” and “the head of a
parallel power.” (To circumvent the Constitution, which bars the relatives of a
President from succeeding him, the Coloms recently filed for divorce, in the
hope that she can run in an election, in September.)
That same day, Castresana met with Rosenberg’s son Eduardo. He looked
like a younger, more dashing version of his father. He had graduated first in
his class from law school, and since the killings he had become a partner at
Rosenberg’s law firm, moving into his father’s old office. Castresana vowed
to him, “I give you my word that, if we have to, we will bring down the
President and impeach him.”
Back at his office at CICIG, Castresana gathered a dozen or so of his top

investigators. He suspected that there was at least one mole inside CICIG,
and worried about leaks; his office was swept each morning and night for
bugs, and he used a white-noise machine when discussing delicate matters.
He told his agents, “This is the most important case of this commission.”
A linguistic expert from the National Institute of Forensic Sciences, in

Guatemala City, was asked to authenticate the Rosenberg video, analyzing
every sound and slur. In a report, the expert said that she could not
determine whether Rosenberg had made the video under external pressure
(as President Colom had suggested). But the expert concluded that
Rosenberg appeared “sincere” and “rational.”
A team of CICIG agents scoured the Rosenberg crime scene for clues.
Curiously, Rosenberg’s body had fallen backward, onto the curb, and his
bicycle had fallen away from him, onto the road. Near the body, in the dirt
beside the road, was a series of deep gashes; they appeared to have been
made by the tires of a car.
One day, while CICIG agents were canvassing the neighborhood, they
detected an unmarked vehicle following their car; a passenger was taking
photographs of them. Weeks later, agents were meeting with a potential
witness, in the lobby of a hotel outside Guatemala City, when swarms of
police officers suddenly descended, trying to seize the witness. Fearing that
the witness might be tortured and “disappeared,” CICIG agents fled with him
into one of the hotel’s rooms. As they prepared for a gun battle, a CICIG
agent shouted to the police, “You will have to kill us all!” Meanwhile,
Castresana phoned the head of the national police and Vice-President
Espada, commanding them to order the police to back off. The police
eventually withdrew, and CICIG was able to process the witness. After all
that, the man had no reliable information—but somebody had clearly been
terrified that he did.
Castresana and his team, still lacking a key witness, confiscated all the
relevant security tapes from buildings near the crime scene. Images caught
on multiple cameras revealed that the moment Rosenberg left on his bicycle,
at 8:05 A.M., a coffin-black sports car with tinted windows and a racing
spoiler began shadowing him. The fact that the hit men were in position from
the start of the bicycle ride—an activity that was not a regular part of
Rosenberg’s Sunday routine—suggested that a person with inside
knowledge had tipped them off. The vehicle’s license plate was not visible,
but the car was a Mazda 6, and there were only fifty such models registered
in Guatemala. And the one at the crime scene, digital enhancements
revealed, had, in addition to the spoiler, distinctive red-rimmed tires and a
sticker on the lid of the gas tank. After an intensive three-week search,
investigators identified the car as belonging to a thirty-three-year-old man
named Willian Gilberto Santos Divas, who lived outside Guatemala City.
Records showed that, on the morning Rosenberg was killed, Santos’s cell
phone was making and receiving a flurry of calls—all in the area of the
shooting. “He was there,” Castresana said.
One other detail in Santos’s file caught Castresana’s attention. Santos was a
former member of the national police force. Castresana was certain that
CICIG had found the first sign of a conspiracy.
In President Colom’s war room, Roberto Izurieta, the strategist, believed that
he, too, had found threads of what one member of the government called a
“finely woven conspiracy.” Izurieta had always thought that Colom could not
be behind the murders of the Musas and Rosenberg, and that the killings
had to be part of a plot to bring down the government. The idea was
outlandish only to the innocent. As Don DeLillo has written, “A conspiracy is
everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure,
undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents,
trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a
logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story
of men who find coherence in some criminal act.” Izurieta, who had lost ten
pounds since the crisis began—and who had violated his ban on caffeine,
which made him, by his own admission, “electric”—thought that the
conspirators were finally being pulled from the shadows of Guatemalan
politics.
The investigators had found, for example, someone who had admitted
shooting the video of Rosenberg’s testimony. His name was Mario David
García. A squat man with a crisp mustache, he was an ultra-right-wing
journalist and a former Presidential candidate who was thought to have
participated in multiple plots against the state. In the late eighties, the
government accused him of being part of a cabal, known as the Officers of
the Mountain, which orchestrated two failed coups. García understood the
power of images: he had been the producer of a television show that had
fanned the cabal’s rebellion. Another figure accused of orchestrating the
coups was none other than Luis Mendizábal. Both men denied being part of
the plots.
Izurieta wondered if it could be just a coincidence that García and

Mendizábal—with their “impressive dossiers of conspiratorial services,” as
one reporter put it—had been involved in the manufacturing and distribution
of Rosenberg’s video. García was now the host of a political radio show,
“Straight Talk,” and after Rosenberg’s death he repeatedly attacked the
government, stoking the unrest. As for Mendizábal, Izurieta and other
members of the government suspected that he had a vendetta against
President Colom, who had hired him to be a security adviser in 2007, only to
fire him. What’s more, according to CICIG Mendizábal had lost a bid for a
lucrative government contract to produce national I.D. cards. Mendizábal
denies having any such business interest, but Castresana told me that
Mendizábal had a “motive for revenge.”
Could García and Mendizábal have manipulated and then killed Rosenberg in
order to unleash his video and topple the government? After all, Mendizábal
was not only a specialist in gathering information; he was also a master in the
art of disinformation. In the late nineties, he had been a member of a
clandestine intelligence unit called La Oficinita—The Little Office. (It was
named for the space above Mendizábal’s clothing boutique.) Mendizábal
insisted to me that La Oficinita helped solve kidnappings and murders. But,
according to human-rights observers, government officials, and the press,
its purpose was to deceive the public—using fake evidence and theatrical
witnesses in order to cover up the military’s crimes.
Izurieta knew that intelligence operators had previously deployed

disinformation to topple a democratically elected government in Guatemala.
In 1954, C.I.A. operatives had teamed with the new “scientists” of advertising
to overthrow President Jacobo Árbenz—Guatemala’s last left-wing leader
until Colom—by creating the illusion of a domestic uprising. Operatives set
up a radio station, the Voice of Liberation, which was supposedly broadcast
from a rebel camp “deep in the jungle” but, in fact, was transmitted from
Miami and often broadcast from the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. The
station caused national hysteria by reporting fake news of the government
poisoning the water supply and of phantom troops marching on the capital.
One operative referred to the scheme as “the big lie.”
In May, 2009, Mendizábal and García, who were being pressed by the media,
acknowledged their roles in producing the Rosenberg video. The
Archdiocese’s Office of Human Rights, citing their histories, warned that
there might be a sinister force at work. It noted that Rosenberg’s
assassination had the hallmarks of “fictitious scenarios” from Guatemala’s
past.
If there was a plot to topple the government, the next question was who was
the main beneficiary—and hence the prime mover behind it. One person
seemed to have the most to gain. It was Colom’s longtime political rival Otto
Pérez Molina—the notorious former general and head of military intelligence
who, after the video was distributed, had demanded that Colom resign.
Pérez Molina, who appeared on García’s radio program to denounce Colom,
had previously declared that he was running again for President.
Scattered dots seemed to form a picture, like a constellation in the sky. Then,
less than a month after Rosenberg’s death, President Colom’s Minister of the
Interior, who was a confidant of the First Lady, informed Castresana that he
had found what amounted to a smoking gun—a witness who would reveal
the entire conspiracy.
Castresana dispatched a team of investigators. At the Interior Minister’s

suggestion, the investigators flew on the First Lady’s helicopter to a soccer
field in San Luis, a town near the Mexican border, where the witness was
waiting for them. According to a summary of his account, which he later
provided to the newspaper El Quetzalteco, the witness stated that a street
gang named Pythagoras had been hired to kill Rosenberg, at a price of a
hundred and eighty thousand dollars. The witness, who expressed fear for
his life, said that he was close to the gang’s ruthless leader. “I do not want to
continue to kill people,” he said. Then he revealed a bombshell—or, as he put
it, “This will explode, because there are politicians involved.”
The witness said that the gang received the first installment of its fee from
Roxana Baldetti, a member of Congress who is running as Otto Pérez
Molina’s Vice-Presidential candidate. The witness said that he had saved
text messages that he had exchanged with a member of Pérez Molina’s
party, who had offered him a car and money to remain silent. Castresana,
speaking of the witness, recalled, “With this testimony, we could have
arrested the leader of the political opposition and put him in jail.”
Castresana had asked President Colom’s Interior Minister to make sure that
nobody from the media was at the stadium, fearing that the identities of
CICIG agents might be exposed. (At one point, a clerk handling evidence in
the Rosenberg case was gunned down in Guatemala City.) But a pack of
reporters suddenly appeared, and the news soon broke around the country
that Otto Pérez Molina and Roxana Baldetti were the alleged masterminds of
Rosenberg’s murder. “PROOF DELIVERED,” the banner headline in one
newspaper read.
But, when Castresana and members of CICIG tried to confirm elements of

the witness’s story, they were stymied. They checked the security cameras
in the hotel parking lot where the witness claimed that the payoff from
Baldetti had taken place—nothing of the sort was on tape. Other evidence
that the witness provided was fabricated. Even his name was an alias. The
whole meeting was an elaborately staged act of misdirection. The witness
later confessed, “I received a call from a member of the government saying,
‘I have a job for you,’ and he offered me money . . . to give false evidence.”
The witness alleged that Colom’s spokesman and the First Lady were part of
the scheme.
The government denied the allegations. But Castresana was furious. He

believed that the government was also behind the unmarked cars following
his agents and the attempt to seize the potential witness at the hotel.
Perhaps members of the Colom Administration were trying to cover up their
crimes. Or, perhaps, after so many years of judicial disarray, they thought
that, if they were being framed, the only way out was to frame someone else.
Castresana sent a formal complaint to the Colom Administration, and

forwarded copies to the U.N. It was only then, Castresana told me, that the
government stopped meddling.
“B_otar un palo grande_,” the voice said. “Knock over a big stick.”
A Chilean agent of CICIG was sitting in a small, stuffy room, nearly three
months after Rosenberg’s death, eavesdropping on Willian Santos, the
owner of the black Mazda. The Rosenberg case marked the first time in the
history of Guatemala that wiretapping was being conducted by a legal entity,
rather than by secret military intelligence or some other unauthorized body.
For weeks, CICIG had been monitoring Santos’s conversations and tracking
his movements. Castresana and his team had mapped out, with flowcharts
and photographs, at least part of the criminal network to which Santos
belonged. So far, investigators had identified ten members of the gang.
Nearly all of them were current or former police officers; one was a veteran
of the military. Their conversations confirmed that the men had become
professional killers. The question was who had hired them to assassinate
Rosenberg.
“If we’d gone South for the winter, we’d be back by now.”
CICIG agents had intercepted more than ten thousand of the gang’s fugitive
conversations. But, even in an age of listening devices and satellite
surveillance and Wayback Machines, much of history remains beyond
confirmation, out of earshot, buried with the corpses. One of the leaders of
the gang was recorded saying that he wanted to hear “zero comments”
about the Rosenberg “job,” because there were extremely powerful people
who didn’t want anyone “running off their mouths.”
As the Chilean agent listened to Santos, she wondered what he had meant
by “knock over a big stick.” The gang had developed its own coded
language: “greens” meant money; “to lift” was to kidnap a person; and
“shooting up a car” was an assassination. The more the Chilean agent
listened to the conversation, the more she realized that to knock over a big
stick was to kill someone important.
Though Castresana was careful not to blow CICIG’s undercover operation,

he interceded repeatedly to foil the gang’s plans. When he learned that the
gang was about to rob a bank, he made sure that extra police were stationed
out in front, and he tipped off a Korean businessman after discovering that
the gang had plans to “lift” him. By September, the gang had begun to
suspect it had a mole. As a hit man said on the wire, someone was “letting
out the soup.” The leaders assumed that the culprit was the military veteran,
since he didn’t come from their group of policemen.
On September 8th, CICIG picked up another conversation between two gang

leaders. “We have a problem,” one of them said of the military veteran. “He’s
going around talking about Rosenberg.” There was a long silence. “I’m not
going to freak out but I want to cut that son of a bitch down already.” The
man explained that he was just waiting for “the green light.”
Castresana felt that he could no longer wait. At dawn on September 11th,

four months after Rosenberg was assassinated, three hundred CICIG agents,
prosecutors, police, and soldiers swept into more than a dozen locations
across Guatemala, apprehending the ten suspected hit men. By inspecting
call logs from the suspects’ seized cell phones, CICIG identified an
intermediary who had been in contact with the gang on the day of
Rosenberg’s assassination. The intermediary, a man named Jesús Manuel
Cardona Medina, was brought in for questioning. As Castresana knew, every
secret is embedded with the possibility of betrayal, and after sustained
interrogation Cardona Medina turned on his co-conspirators, coöperating
with CICIG in exchange for a reduced sentence and placement in
Guatemala’s witness-protection program. Two other gang members also
flipped.
According to the hit men, the gang had been hired by Francisco and
Estuardo Valdés Paiz, two brothers who owned one of Guatemala’s largest
pharmaceutical companies. Surprisingly, the brothers were related to
Rosenberg—they were cousins of his first wife. The Valdés Paiz brothers had
contacted the gang and agreed to pay forty thousand dollars for the hit. The
target was described to the hit men simply as an “extortionist,” and Cardona
Medina was given a cell phone for communicating with a mysterious inside
man, who provided minute details about what the extortionist looked like.
The inside man also indicated the ideal place to shoot Rosenberg, which is
why there were tire marks at the scene of the crime: the previous night, the
hit men had marked the spot.
A hidden design was finally emerging. But why would the Valdés Paiz
brothers—who, by all accounts, loved Rosenberg—want him dead? What did

their actions have to do with Rosenberg’s video and his allegations? And who
was the inside man? Susanne Jonas, a scholar who spent years studying the
country, once wrote, “Guatemala mocks me: ‘Just as you think you
understand, we’ll show you that you understand nothing at all.’ ”
In addition to investigating the hit men, Castresana and his team

reconstructed Rosenberg’s final months as best they could, trying to
pinpoint who might want him dead. As CICIG agents were exploring the
question of motive, the investigation took, as Castresana put it, a series of
“stupefying turns.”
Investigators had obtained from Mendizábal the telephone number from

which Rosenberg had reported receiving threats. Phone records confirmed
that Rosenberg had answered a series of calls from this number. The calls,
which originated from a cell phone, began on May 5th and ended on May
10th, the day Rosenberg was killed. During that period, the calls were made
almost every day and were usually relatively short—just enough time, it
seemed, to convey a threat.
Records also indicated that this cell phone had communicated with only one
other telephone—the one that Cardona Medina had reported receiving from
the Valdés Paiz brothers. And so whoever had made the threats to
Rosenberg appeared to be the same mysterious inside man who had given
instructions to the killers. The inside man had communicated with Cardona
Medina for the last time at 8 A.M. on May 10th—to alert the executioners that
Rosenberg was on his way.
Castresana and his colleagues tried to trace the cell phone to its owner. It
had been bought with cash, in order to insure anonymity. But a sales-tax
form for the phone contained a faded signature—that of Rosenberg’s driver.
Castresana believed that they had found the inside man.
Investigators brought the driver in for questioning. He did not deny that he
had purchased the phone, but he swore that Rosenberg had instructed him
to buy it, along with another cell phone. The driver said that he was told to
pay in cash and not to identify himself in paperwork; he had accidently put
his name on the sales-tax form.
Castresana suspected that the driver was lying. But Rosenberg’s secretary
at the law firm confirmed that on the day the driver bought the phones he
had turned in a receipt for reimbursement. If he was a conspirator, it seemed
inconceivable that he would have done so.
The driver said that Rosenberg had kept one of the phones, and had
instructed him to deliver the second one to Francisco Valdés Paiz. Records
showed that this cell phone was the same one that Cardona Medina had
received. Suddenly, the disparate lines of the investigation were converging
toward one conclusion: Rosenberg had purchased the phones used by his
own killers. CICIG investigators then made an even more startling discovery.
Telecommunications experts determined that the purportedly threatening
phone calls had all originated from one place: inside Rosenberg’s own
apartment. Castresana thought, Rosenberg had been making threats to
himself.
Any lingering doubts about who was behind the killing dissolved once
Castresana and his team discovered that Rosenberg, just before his death,
had issued a check for forty thousand dollars—the amount owed to the hit
men—and had asked his secretary to deliver it to the Valdés Paiz brothers.
Rosenberg had drawn the money from the Panamanian account of a client, in
order to conceal his hand in the scheme. As inconceivable as it seemed,
Castresana and his team were now certain that Rosenberg—not the
President, not the First Lady, not Gustavo Alejos, or anyone else—was the
author of his own assassination.
“Recalculating . . . recalculating . . . ”
Castresana believed that Rosenberg would have pulled off “the perfect
crime”—his secret plot permanently lost to history—had the driver not signed
the sales-tax form. But, thanks to this mistake, CICIG unravelled the rest of
the mystery. Castresana and his agents determined that Rosenberg had
enlisted the Valdés Paiz brothers to help him find a band of hit men.
Rosenberg told the brothers only that the target was a man who had been
extorting and threatening him. Cardona Medina testified that, by the time he
went to collect the assassination fee, Francisco Valdés Paiz had learned the
truth, and was distraught, crying that the hit men had just killed his cousin.
Rosenberg had been careful in planting false clues that would confound
investigators. Not only had he repeatedly called his own home number from
the cell phone, creating the appearance of continuous threats; he had also
called the hit men on the morning of his death, informing them that the
target was leaving his house. This explained why a man purportedly
threatened with death had ventured out alone, on a bicycle, in one of the
most murderous cities in the world. It also explained why the inside man had
known exactly where the target would be—the day before the shooting. And
it explained why Rosenberg’s bicycle and his body were found in such
peculiar positions at the crime scene: as the hit man who pulled the trigger
confessed, Rosenberg had got off his bicycle at the designated spot and
was sitting on the curb, waiting for his assassin, when the hit man shot him
three times in the head, once in the neck, and once in the chest. Castresana
says of Rosenberg, “He set himself off like a suicide bomber.”
As Castresana looked deeper into Rosenberg’s life, he began to see a

tormented soul—“someone like Raskolnikov.” After the death of the woman
he loved, Rosenberg wrote to a friend that he felt as if he were

“disintegrating, little by little.” He initially tried to do what he had always
done: find justice through the law. Based on the intelligence he had gathered
—primarily from the legendary spy Mendizábal but also from other sources—
he was convinced that the government had killed Marjorie and her father.
But, as a lawyer, Rosenberg knew that this intelligence was not strong
enough to stand up in court. And Mendizábal warned Rosenberg that it
would be futile to fight the President, the First Lady, and Alejos. In a country
where crimes were virtually never punished, Castresana says, Rosenberg felt
powerless. In a meeting at his law firm, Rosenberg complained, “There is no
justice in Guatemala.” And so, Castresana theorized, Rosenberg had set his
plot in motion.
In hindsight, Rosenberg’s actions in his final days made it evident that he

was not trying to evade death but, rather, was preparing for it. He had his will
drawn up; he bought two adjoining plots in a cemetery, one for himself and
one for Marjorie; he gave away family heirlooms. He had then constructed a
counterfeit reality, believing, however perversely, that it was the only way
that the guilty parties would ever go to jail. And he employed the very
methods—hit men, misdirection, stagecraft—that, in the past, had been the
province of corrupt states and intelligence outfits. Rodrigo Rosenberg had
democratized the art of political murder.
After solving the mystery of Rosenberg’s assassination, Castresana was

overcome with panic, instead of relief. He thought that the plot was so
incredible—perhaps the most bizarre in the annals of political conspiracy—
that everyone would think that he was weaving yet another fraudulent
narrative, in order to protect the government. For days, he could not sleep,
and paced endlessly around the compound. “It will be my professional
grave,” he muttered to himself. “But we cannot change the reality.”
In December, CICIG issued arrest warrants for the Valdés Paiz brothers. They
went into hiding, and were not apprehended for several months. The ten
members of the hit squad were eventually convicted. The Valdés Paiz
brothers initially acknowledged their involvement in the plot, according to
authorities, but they now maintain their innocence. Their case is still
pending.
Castresana prepared to share his findings in a televised national address on

January 12, 2010. The day before the broadcast, he met with Rosenberg’s
son Eduardo. Many members of Rosenberg’s family could not accept what
had happened: the truth, for all its power, is merciless. But Eduardo seemed
ready to confront reality. He later told me that he had been forced to face “a
lot of dark truths.” In the meeting with Castresana, he made one request: if
Castresana believed that his father had been trying, even if mistakenly, to
help his country, then he should say so at the press conference.
During his address, Castresana, to the surprise of many viewers, said of

Rosenberg, “He was an honorable person.” He added, “He wanted to open
up a Pandora’s box that would change the country.”
In the palace, President Colom, the First Lady, Gustavo Alejos, and Roberto
Izurieta watched the address on television. Just before the broadcast,
Izurieta met with Colom to prepare an official response. Izurieta asked the
President, “So who did it?”
Colom said, “You’re not going to believe it, but I don’t know.”
As Castresana built toward his shocking conclusions—which he described as

“the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”—the President held
hands with the First Lady. Alejos, who told me that the investigation had
“cleared my name for my family and my children,” began to cry. Izurieta
whispered to himself, “Oh, my God.”
Though President Colom and others who had been in the war room trusted
Castresana’s conclusion that Rosenberg had plotted his own death, many of
them still privately believed that there remained another shrouded part of the
story—a conspiracy within a conspiracy. They felt that Rosenberg alone
could not have pulled off such an intricate deception, and that he must have
been abetted by García, the talk-show host, and Mendizábal, the spy, both of
whom had reasons for wanting to bring down the government.
Castresana told me he believed that García and Mendizábal had tried to

exploit the mysterious circumstances of Rosenberg’s death. “I don’t know if
they were aware of the intention of Rosenberg” to kill himself, he said. “But
they were preparing some kind of coup.” CICIG’s investigation eventually
found a witness who said that García had met with Rosenberg, and
encouraged him in his plans to commit suicide and release the video, saying,
“Do it for your country.” Castresana told me that García likely helped
“induce” Rosenberg’s suicidal act.
The conspiracy-within-a-conspiracy may have reached the highest levels of

the government. Mendizábal told me that, in the days leading up to
Rosenberg’s death, he had detected, in his intelligence dossiers, growing
divisions between President Colom and Vice-President Espada. “This is
where I say that my reports are helping me quite a lot,” Mendizábal
explained. “I’m beginning to see that the Vice-President and the President
are having a lot of friction, because the Vice-President would like to be
President.” A friend of Mendizábal’s told CICIG that, about a week before the
assassination, he had met with the Vice-President to inform him about
Rosenberg’s investigation into the Musa killings, which had the power to
topple Colom’s Presidency. Mendizábal told me that the friend had asked the
Vice-President, “ ‘Do you think you are in a position to take over?’ And his
answer was yes.”
Vice-President Espada has emphatically denied that such a meeting ever

occurred, saying that he had no “direct or indirect contact” with Rosenberg
or anyone close to him before the murder. García, for his part, has called
allegations that he was complicit in Rosenberg’s plot “absurd, baseless, and
reprehensible.” Mendizábal’s statements have been more calibrated. He told
a reporter, “I was not the instigator. I did what I had to do, and I have no
regrets.” He showed me the metal plate, inscribed with “ON,” that he had
found by the Rosenberg crime scene. He turned it upside down, so that it
said “NO.” “There are always two ways to interpret anything,” he said.
Mendizábal had already begun to construct a counter-scenario to subvert

CICIG’s theory of Rosenberg’s death. He said that Rosenberg had not set out
that morning to kill himself; rather, he was attempting to collect information
on who murdered the Musas—evidence that Rosenberg must have paid forty
thousand dollars to obtain. When the Musas’ killers learned of his plans, he
was double-crossed and killed. As Mendizábal spoke to me with conviction,
taking some of the verifiable facts and rearranging them, I began to picture
Rosenberg on his bicycle, innocently pedalling through the city, hoping to
obtain the final piece of his puzzle. The most effective counterfeit realities
are those which provide what only conspirators seem to have: a perfectly
coherent plot.
This time, though, the truth was more powerful than fiction. After
Castresana’s meticulous presentation, the director of El Periódico, who had
once written how absurd it would be to imagine that Rosenberg “immolated
himself, kamikaze style,” called CICIG’s research “masterly,” and said, “I can
only humbly surrender to the evidence.” U.S. Ambassador McFarland told me
that the CICIG probe helped preserve “Guatemala’s stability and democracy,”
and demonstrated that it was possible to “get to the bottom of things.”
People beseeched Castresana, who was hailed as Guatemala’s Eliot Ness, to
run for President.
Still, an essential part of the Rosenberg case remained a mystery: Who killed
the Musas? Castresana asked for the public to be patient. After Rosenberg’s
murder, CICIG had arrived on the crime scene immediately. But nearly a
month had elapsed before CICIG had taken on the Musa case—an eternity in
homicide investigations, especially in a country where evidence is not
properly collected. “We were lost,” Castresana said.
At one point, CICIG agents raided the offices of an organization connected

to Banrural. As they were carting away documents and hard drives, an
investigator overheard a local prosecutor on the phone, leaking what was
being taken. Castresana and his agents were still moving in a sea of
saboteurs.
If CICIG concluded that the President, the First Lady, and Alejos had, in fact,
killed Khalil and Marjorie Musa, then the government could collapse. Though
the most prevalent view was that the government was responsible, in the
absence of definitive evidence new theories multiplied. One hypothesis,
which was given quiet support by Gustavo Alejos and others in the Colom
Administration, was that Musa had objected to Marjorie’s getting a divorce
and marrying Rosenberg, and so Rosenberg had hired hit men to kill him.
After Marjorie was accidently murdered, Rosenberg had arranged his own
assassination, partly out of despair and partly to cover his own tracks.
While Castresana vowed to solve the case, the entrenched forces in

Guatemala launched an all-out effort to destroy CICIG. Military intelligence
had once maintained a “love office,” devoted to exposing its enemies’ private
lives. In the factory owned by the Valdés Paiz brothers, CICIG agents
discovered a document that hinted at a similar attack on Castresana, asking,
“Does he have a girlfriend?” Stories began to appear in the media reporting
that Castresana had been having affairs with several women, including his
assistant. García, who filmed the Rosenberg video, devoted his radio
programs to what he called Castresana’s “double life.”
Castresana denied the affairs, and said to me, of his assistant, “There were
elements in the lie that made it seem true—she was my assistant, she was a
beautiful young woman, and we were close.” Other reports in the
Guatemalan press suggested, falsely, that Castresana was under
investigation at the U.N. for ethical misconduct. Anita Isaacs, a political
scientist and an expert on Guatemala, who knows Castresana, told me that
the networks traditionally relied on three ways to remove an enemy: “The
first is to bribe you—but they could not bribe Castresana. The second is to
kill you—but they could not kill Castresana. Finally, if all else fails, they
destroy your reputation. And that is what they did to Castresana.”
Not all public criticisms of Castresana and CICIG were part of a campaña
negra. Some Guatemalans and U.N. officials thought that Castresana was
too authoritarian, and that he often pursued targets unfairly in the press.
Even some former CICIG agents criticized his methods.
As the attacks mounted against Castresana, he became increasingly

paranoid, and appeared to conflate legitimate critiques with dirty reprisals.
He accused a highly regarded Spanish CICIG agent of being a spy. And he
alleged that one of Guatemala’s most respected journalists was part of a
criminal network. “He was seeing conspiracies everywhere,” Francisco
Goldman, the author of “The Art of Political Murder,” told me. “I think he
started to go mad.”
Under duress, Castresana escalated his long-standing feuds with colleagues

at the U.N. “Basically, they are telling me I’m like Kurtz—some kind of crazy
man in the middle of the wilderness,” he said. During one confrontation, an
official reminded him that CICIG was not, technically, a U.N. body.
Castresana replied, “I am the soul of the U.N.”
In May, 2010, President Colom chose a new Attorney General, who,

according to CICIG, promptly fired honest prosecutors, seized control over
agents’ wiretap operations, and shelved sensitive cases. Castresana felt that
he no longer had the backing he needed from the Guatemalan government
or the U.N. On June 7th, after running the commission for two and a half
years, he abruptly resigned.
At a press conference announcing his decision, Castresana, in a final salvo,

denounced Colom’s new Attorney General for alleged ties to “parallel
powers,” including organized crime. Within a week, the Attorney General had
been ousted. A newspaper declared that Castresana, like Rosenberg, had
learned that, in Guatemala, the only way to fight impunity was to “blow
himself up.”
While CICIG has continued its operations under the command of

Castresana’s successor, Francisco Dall’Anese—a respected former Attorney
General from Costa Rica—Castresana returned to Spain, where he resumed
his job as a prosecutor. Even after his resignation, the attacks against him
and CICIG persisted. One day, four decapitated heads were placed at
prominent locations around Guatemala City, including in front of the
Congress; the Guatemala Times called it a clear warning from “the dark
forces” that “felt empowered after Dr. Castresana resigned.” Castresana told
me, “The wolves have smelled blood, and they will not stop until they get the
commission destroyed.”
Last November, Castresana passed through New York, and I met him at a
restaurant. He seemed diminished without his security retinue. He said of
the attacks on his reputation, “They have hurt my image forever.” He and his
wife were divorcing, and he had not been able to see his children. “I have
nothing,” he said. “I lost my family while in Guatemala. It almost took my life.”
Dall’Anese told me, “One day, Guatemala will recognize what he

accomplished.”
“Sorry to disturb you, Ma’am, but we’ve had some reports of a dog barking.”
Not long ago, Castresana contacted me again, and for the first time in a
while he sounded enthused. There had been a break in the Musa case. He
explained that, before he left CICIG, investigators had found partial
confirmation of what Rosenberg had alleged about improprieties at Banrural
and other institutions. “We discovered some evidence of money laundering,
fraud, and embezzlement,” he said. Moreover, as Rosenberg had believed,
there had been an intense fight over control of Banrural’s board of directors,
and an effort to block Musa’s appointment. But Rosenberg had overlooked a
key detail: after receiving threats, Musa had informed the government that
he was not taking the posts. By the time of his death, the hidden dispute
over Banrural had been resolved, and there appeared to be no motive for
killing him.
Castresana told me that CICIG, using surveillance tapes and wiretaps, had
recently identified the alleged hit men who killed Musa. After they were
interrogated, several of them confessed, and the baroque narrative took its
final twist. It turned out that Musa, despite his impeccable reputation, had
been buying contraband for his textile factory from a criminal network. When
Musa got into a dispute with the gang, and refused to pay for the
contraband, he was assassinated. The Musa family has refused to accept
the prospect that its patriarch was corrupt, and took out a full-page ad in a
newspaper denying the allegations. But twelve men have been arrested for
the murder of the Musas, and the trial is expected to begin later this year.
It seemed as if everyone had a secret. Musa concealed his dirty business

practices. Rosenberg and Marjorie hid their affair. Rosenberg misled the
world about his death. The Guatemalan government purportedly covered up
its own corruption. The proliferation of counterfeit realities underscored the

difficulty of ascertaining the truth in a country where there are so few
arbiters of it. Even Rosenberg—who, in the land of the blind, had seemed like
a one-eyed king—had been wrong about who killed the Musas, triggering a
series of tragic events that nearly rewrote a nation’s history, based on a lie.
The shrine that was set up at the street corner where Rodrigo Rosenberg
died is now deserted. Pilgrims no longer come to leave notes or flowers.
When I visited the shrine, the wooden cross was tilted and defaced. Beside
it, half buried in dirt, was a discarded banner. Scraping away the mud, I could
see the fragment of a story: “Rodrigo Rosenberg, National Hero.” ♦

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A Murder Foretold | The New Yorker 9/26/24, 2:36 PM

And, according to Rosenberg, it was a case involving one of these clients,

deals. At seventy-six, he suffered from vertigo, and he increasingly relied on

Musa lived in an affluent neighborhood of Guatemala City, and Marjorie often

Rosenberg had frequently expressed despair over the violence that

“Think of this as a ‘Be here now’ exercise.”

After the peace accord, the state’s security apparatus—death squads,

Mexico, have found an ideal sanctuary in Guatemala, and most of the

Some authorities have revived the darkest counter-insurgency tactics,

The shootings unnerved the most powerful members of Guatemalan society.

“I’ve been called ‘most probably a genius.’”

Mendizábal was Guatemala’s most notorious spy. Relying on an extensive

network of orejas, or “ears,” he regularly compiled intelligence dossiers,

Mendizábal agreed to help Rosenberg, and they began investigating the

Rosenberg stared helplessly at the implacable sequence that came next. A

In Guatemala, impunity has created a bewildering swirl of competing stories

Finally, a lead emerged. Mendizábal advised Rosenberg to look into the

But the nominations, mysteriously, had never gone through. Rosenberg

Rosenberg eventually ferreted out from Musa’s papers several documents

As Rosenberg dug deeper into the subterranean world of Guatemalan

Mendizábal says that on Friday, May 8, 2009, he advised Rosenberg to leave

morning, to clear his mind. On Sunday, just after 8 A*.*{: .small}M., he

“Your kid throws up a lot.”

Not long afterward, Rosenberg’s chauffeur was on his way to Rosenberg’s

In 2007, Colom, representing a social-democratic coalition, won the

conservative oligarchy and in the political opposition. One day, President

Suddenly, Rodrigo Rosenberg was staring at them, sitting alone, with a

“Good afternoon,” Rosenberg said. “My name is Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano

Rosenberg said that he had “direct knowledge” of a conspiracy. He alleged

“What if the meek don’t want it?”

According to a member of the government, Alejos acted as if he were “going

Early the next morning, several reporters discovered Guatemala’s Attorney

Meanwhile, the Rosenberg video was entering the public consciousness,

By Tuesday morning, protesters were streaming into Guatemala City’s

A young Guatemalan, furious with the government, sent out a message on

Each day, the demonstrations grew, mobilized by messages on Facebook

Judge Castresana felt like a prisoner in Guatemala. On May 12th, as the

Street of Sorrows, Street of Oblivion. He travelled in a caravan of armor-

A bold and, at times, vainglorious man, Castresana treated boredom as if it

Castresana seized upon a rule in CICIG’S charter that permitted the

Part prosecutor, part politician, part lobbyist, Castresana also pushed

through Congress several laws strengthening the judicial system. They

Back at his office at CICIG, Castresana gathered a dozen or so of his top

A linguistic expert from the National Institute of Forensic Sciences, in

Izurieta wondered if it could be just a coincidence that García and

Izurieta knew that intelligence operators had previously deployed

Castresana dispatched a team of investigators. At the Interior Minister’s

But, when Castresana and members of CICIG tried to confirm elements of

The government denied the allegations. But Castresana was furious. He

Castresana sent a formal complaint to the Colom Administration, and

Though Castresana was careful not to blow CICIG’s undercover operation,

On September 8th, CICIG picked up another conversation between two gang

Castresana felt that he could no longer wait. At dawn on September 11th,

brothers—who, by all accounts, loved Rosenberg—want him dead? What did

In addition to investigating the hit men, Castresana and his team

Investigators had obtained from Mendizábal the telephone number from

Castresana believed that they had found the inside man.

As Castresana looked deeper into Rosenberg’s life, he began to see a

he loved, Rosenberg wrote to a friend that he felt as if he were

morning, to clear his mind. On Sunday, just after 8 A.{: .small}M., he