A Premortem Call to Action in Guatemala

It's hard not to be struck by the weight and explosiveness of the accusation made by Rodrigo Rosenberg, a Guatemalan lawyer, in a video recorded before his death on May 10: "If you are at this moment hearing or watching this message, it is because I have been murdered by President Alvaro Colom." After all, the dead aren't supposed to lie.

Yet we hope that another section of the video will turn out to be the most potent. Ten minutes after issuing his accusation, Rosenberg pleads that his death not be in vain. In Guatemala, "everybody hopes that somebody else will do something, but, gentlemen, the time has come," he says. "The last thing I wanted is (to be) dead. Because my children are not going to be better because of it, but I hope that Guatemala will."

In that passage, Rosenberg speaks to the plague of impunity that threatens his nation. There, most killers face no consequences, most murders go unsolved and judicial institutions have no credibility.

Many, particularly Colom's political enemies, have chosen to focus on the first part of the video. They assumed the president is guilty and asked him to resign. But others are acting on the deeper message.

Since Rosenberg's murder, the Guatemalan Congress has resumed work on an important judicial reform bill. The bill would make the appointment of judges to the country's Supreme and Appeals Courts far more transparent than its current veiled nature. Prior to the murder, the bill had been "put aside," according to Mario Minera, the executive director of Guatemala's Center for Human Rights Legal Action.

The new law, if enacted, would be an important step toward true justice. Experts at the Washington-based Due Process of Law Foundation determined two years ago a strong correlation between the way judicial appointments are conducted and the presence of judicial corruption in Central America. This is especially true with the selection of Supreme Court justices, a process easily manipulated by powerful forces.

Naturally, corrupt politicians benefit from such a system. In countries with weak rules of law, former high-ranking officials implicated in corruption scandals -- including former presidents such as Guatemala's Alfonso Portillo -- often avoid prison.

While depoliticizing and demystifying the judicial selection process is necessary, Daniel Kaufmann, a corruption expert at the Brookings Institution and the former director of governance at the World Bank Institute, says these countries need more than mere nudges. When impunity is the norm, "it is very important to take shocking measures to change the psychological aspect," he says, and to make it completely clear that the system has changed. No more business as usual.

But who will apply the necessary shock therapy in Guatemala? Colom has pledged to take "exceptional actions" to combat crime and regain the public trust. Since his inauguration in January 2008 and up until Rosenberg's murder, however, he had accomplished little; now, he is a lame duck. Acting as a champion of law, particularly in terms of judicial reform, will be viewed as a desperate effort to retain power or to get immunity.

Guatemalan Foreign Minister Haroldo Rodas told me that Colom's administration wants Rosenberg's murder investigated to "its ultimate consequences." Colom has asked the FBI and the two-year-old, U.N.-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala to investigate. Such surrender to the international judicial system is welcome, but it does nothing to strengthen the system in Guatemala.

The country's options seem scarce. Still, Beatriz Casals, the president of a strategic communications firm that has worked on anti-corruption cases around the world (often with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development), has high hopes for what nongovernmental groups can do. Guatemala's civil society will have to step up again, as she says they did in 2008, to push for the passage of a freedom of information law that had been stalled for seven years.

Similar groups were crucial in reforming Peru. That country's judicial system -- which for the last decade had been bought by Alberto Fujimori's presidency -- just sentenced the former president to 25 years in prison.

But despite the presence of many good and active groups in Guatemala, Katya Salazar, the executive director of the Due Process of Law Foundation, fears such groups lack coordination and shared agendas. She recalls that in Peru, videos of Fujimori officials bribing politicians served to unite Peru's civil society.

While Rosenberg's video does not offer the incriminating evidence that those in Peru offered, Salazar hopes it will help galvanize Guatemalans around the urgently needed fight against corruption and impunity. The time has come.