Reporting from Mexico City — Accusations by a dead man have delivered Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom his most serious crisis since taking power a year and a half ago.
Protesters and political foes have urged Colom to step aside while investigators look into murder allegations lodged on videotape by a lawyer days before he was slain by gunmen Sunday.
In the tape, attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg stares into the camera and delivers a chilling declaration: "Sadly, if you are hearing or seeing this message now, it is because I was murdered by President Alvaro Colom, with the help of Gustavo Alejos," the president's secretary.
Colom vehemently denies any involvement and has asked a U.N.-sponsored investigative commission and the FBI to help find the killers.
Guatemala has been roiled since the 20-minute tape was released Monday by a journalist who helped Rosenberg record it. Hundreds of people, including many who support the president, have participated in peaceful demonstrations in Guatemala City, the capital. Business leaders have made public appeals for calm.
The case will test Colom, a center-left businessman elected in 2007, and Guatemala's fragile democracy, already beset by powerful drug-trafficking groups, rampant street killings and government institutions left weakened by past military rule and a 36-year civil war.
"With this event we have come to the tip of the iceberg of the escalating violence taking place in Guatemala," said Pedro Trujillo, a political analyst in Guatemala City.
He said the scandal could represent the worst crisis since the end of civil war in 1996.
"A murder accusation against the president is serious," said Helen Mack, founder of a human rights legal center in Guatemala City, who worried about the effect on public confidence in government. "In Guatemala, all the institutions are being questioned. . . . That is what is dangerous in all this."
Carlos Castresana, who heads the U.N. International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, said the panel would take up the investigation. He warned against presidential meddling, but did not ask that Colom step down during the probe.
U.S. Ambassador Stephen McFarland said that an FBI representative was in Guatemala and that officials were assessing what help to offer.
The Organization of American States offered Colom political backing. Its secretary-general, Jose Miguel Insulza, said the lawyer's killing was part of a "chain of events" tied to organized crime in Guatemala.
