Legacy MattersLooks like the Guatemalan lawyer I wrote about last year in Lawyer Forsees His Murder, Makes YouTube Video, conned everyone.
Rodrigo Rosenberg became a household name in Guatemala after he posthumously accused the President and First Lady of ordering his Mother's Day murder last year. His words, left behind in a video taped days before he was shot to death on a tree-lined boulevard, sent tens of thousands of protesters into the streets and sparked youth-led reform movements. But the case that once seemed powerful enough to topple a presidency came to a bizarre end on Jan. 12 as investigators concluded that Rosenberg, distraught over the murder of his girlfriend and her father, ordered his own death.
An eight-month investigation found that Rosenberg asked two cousins of his ex-wife to arrange the killing of a man who was extorting and threatening him. The extortionist was fictitious, though, and Rosenberg was actually planning his own assassination. Unaware that the target was Rosenberg, the cousins contracted 11 hit men, more than half of whom are former or current military or police officers, to carry out the killing, investigators said.
The investigation cleared President Alvaro Colom and his accused accomplices of any involvement. "This was the most serious crisis of my political career," Colom tells TIME. "Fortunately, I'm patient. My government has emerged strengthened."