Last year December, Belize and Guatemala signed a compromis (A Special Agreement), a document which agreed in principle for the two countries to take their territorial dispute to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, for a judicial resolution.
The agreement calls for the two countries to hold a referendum in order to get the green light from their citizens to proceed with the ICJ approach to settling the dispute.
But now it appears that the young democracy in Guatemala is under immense public pressure amidst allegations that the leader of the country, President Alvaro Colom, was involved in the slaying of a prominent Guatemalan lawyer.
The lawyer, Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, who was gunned down near his home in Guatemala City on Sunday, May 10, recorded an eighteen-minute video, in which he accused President Colom of plotting his murder.
The video opens with these words: “Unfortunately, if you are watching this message, it means that I, Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, have been assassinated by President Alvaro Colom.”
Those remarkable words were enough to send thousands of protesters into the streets demanding the resignation of the country’s first leftist president since the CIA engineered the removal of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. Colom was elected on a socialist platform in November 2007.
Colom’s election was the first break that Guatemala has had from right wing pro-military governments in half a century.
President Colom has insisted that he is innocent and has asked for the United States’ FBI to conduct an investigation into the allegation that he was involved in the plot to assassinate Marzano.
Marzano reportedly made the video in journalist Mario David Garcia’s office. The video says that a former client, Khalil Musa, and his daughter, were killed in March for refusing to go along with a development bank and a non-existent social program that is headed by the First Lady. Marzano predicted his death after he publicized his belief that President Colom and his associates were behind Musa and his daughter’s deaths.
If President Colom is swept out of office and he is replaced by a pro-military right wing president, it could signal an end to the ICJ initiative, putting the Belize/Guatemala dispute on the backburner for an indefinite period of time.
Belize Foreign Minister Wilfred Elrington told Amandala that President Colom had called in the ambassadors of various countries and was seeking international help in proving his innocence.
Asked if the situation in Guatemala could derail the ICJ efforts, Elrington said that the situation is very troubling.