Guatemala

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 was sworn in Monday as Guatemala's first leftist president in more than 50 years, promising to fight poverty in a nation where half the people live on less than $1 a day. Colom, who led Guatemala's efforts to coax thousands of war refugees back home after its civil war ended in 1996, took office in a ceremony attended by world leaders including Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, who recently clashed over a hostage-release mission.

Argentina's national soccer team, minus Barcelona wunderkind Lionel Messi, will be on display when it takes on Guatemala at the Coliseum tonight at 7:30. Messi, 20, is still not fully recovered from a left thigh injury. But his absence doesn't mean Argentina brought its "B" squad to face Guatemala -- even if it is primarily fielding the under-23 team that will participate this summer at the Bejing Olympics.

A crowd that took 29 policemen hostage released them Friday in exchange for talks with the government on legalizing their claims to land and possibly dropping charges against a jailed farm leader, a human rights official said. Hundreds of people surrounded the police station in the Caribbean coastal town of Livingston on Thursday, disarmed the police and took them in boats to their remote village.

Perched on less than an acre of land off an unpaved road in a hardscrabble rural area, farmer Gumercindo Ajanel would hardly seem like a Wal-Mart regular. But in fact, he's working for the American retail giant. On a recent morning, he proudly displayed fresh-picked cilantro and parsley he ships to the chain's local stores. A company agronomist taught him to grow greens that are hygienic and visually appealing. Best of all, he said, Wal-Mart buys frequently and pays promptly.

When Pomona Mayor Norma Torres returned to Guatemala in October, it was the first time she had been back to her native country since she was a child. But Torres got a hero's welcome. As she toured the country she barely remembered, people everywhere recognized her on the streets. "She's the mayor of Pomona," they said. Some brought magazines with her picture on the cover and asked for an autograph. They called her "the pride of Escuintla," her hometown, and "the hope of all migrants."

Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University. For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting "The Wealth of Nations" author Adam Smith -- he of the powdered wig and invisible hand -- flutter over the campus food court.

Robbers with machetes hacked a U.S. tourist to death and seriously wounded his wife aboard the couple's sailboat in northeastern Guatemala, the woman said Sunday. In a telephone interview from her hospital bed, Nancy Dryden, 67, said her husband, Daniel Perry Dryden, 66, was killed by four men who boarded their boat late Saturday while it was anchored in Lake Izabal.

BEFORE the torrential rain and the ankle-deep mud, before the quarter-sized blister and the mouse-sized cockroach, before all that, I climbed a 2,000-year-old Maya pyramid, watched the red orb of the sun sink into the jungle canopy and felt the thrill of being an anachronism. Modern society has no claim on this place. In every direction, unbroken jungle spread in green waves. Monkeys crashed through the trees below. Dragonflies patrolled the pyramid's summit in jerky circles.

Within the last two months, nearly 100 victims of a 2005 landslide have been unearthed in Guatemala, and Jose Suasnavar, deputy director of the independent Forensic Anthropology Foundation, believes at least 50 more will be uncovered by the end of March. Rains triggered by Hurricane Stan inundated Guatemala in October 2005, killing at least 800 people. The worst-hit area was around the small lakeside town of Panabaj, where at least 250 were buried by a landslide.