Alvaro Colom

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 video by a lawyer days before he was slain by gunmen Sunday.

Alvaro Colom, a center-left businessman, won Guatemala's presidential election Sunday in a vote that was in many ways a referendum on this country's fragile and besieged democracy. Colom, 56, defeated former army Gen. Otto Perez Molina, an officer during the bloody dictatorship and counterinsurgency warfare of the 1980s. With 97% of the vote tallied, Colom led Perez Molina by 52.8% to 47.2%. Nearly all of the uncounted votes were in Colom's provincial strongholds.

Alvaro Colom awoke Monday to the realization that an entire country of poor and desperate people was depending on him. Having won Guatemala's presidential election Sunday night, Colom will inherit a series of seemingly intractable problems when he takes office Jan. 14. Guatemala is one of the most troubled societies in Latin America. Thousands of its citizens migrate to the United States in search of work each year. Organized-crime groups have infiltrated many key government institutions.

A slain lawyer's videotaped and posthumously broadcast accusation that President Alvaro Colom ordered his slaying threw Guatemala into an uproar Tuesday and prompted the government to call for a United Nations agency and the FBI to investigate the killing. Colom vehemently denied the allegations made in a videotape left by lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg, who was shot to death Sunday by unidentified assailants while riding his bicycle.