Death of a Lawyer

Firstly, yes, the title is a play off of the play “Death of a Salesman.”

Secondly, it’s been quite some time since i wrote a politically related story. To be honest, i don’t think i would have heard of this story, if my mother hadn’t heard it on NPR today. Basically, this story illustrates the simple corruption, not only in Guatemala, and South America in general, but just how twisted the human mind really is.

To start off here are some links:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1898360,00.html
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_grann
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/03/rodrigo-rosenberg-murder-video.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/guatemala/7860474/Guatemalan-brothers-surrender-over-murder-of-lawyer.html

Ok, now that you’ve either read/watched the links, or decided to completely ignore them, i’ll first tell you guys the background. Guatemala is a notoriously corrupt country. A while back, a man name Musa and his daughter Marjorie were both shot dead at a stop light. A man had come up to their car as though he was going to ask for directions, but instead shot Musa 6 times in the chest. One of the bullets, however, missed and his daughter instead, killing her instantly. Musa’s lawyer, Rosenberg, was also deeply in love with Marjorie. After her death, he went on a quest to find out who it was that murdered him. Fearing for his own death, Rosenberg gave one of his close friends a tape, telling him that if he died, he was to immediately make copies and to distribute them. Only a few days later, Rosenberg was shot in the head in a drive-by shooting while riding his bike. At his funeral, when the tape was played, Rosenberg blamed the President, his wife, and other high level government officials of the country for assassinating him. He claimed that they had threatened him on several occasions for inquiring on the death of Musa. The president denied all allegations and claimed it was a ploy to kick him out of office by the opposing party. Within days, the country was on the verge of collapse (not that it hadn’t been before). An impartial UN official decided to investigate the situation. The results were startling. Rosenberg had been investigating his lover’s death, but unable to find out what had really happened, he decided to use his lover’s death to bring down the current Guatemalan regime! He told his driver to get 2 cellphones, but to make sure not to sign any papers and to pay only in cash. He then gave himself one of the phones, and used it to make the threatening calls to himself, and then gave the second to the hitman he was to hire. He then called his cousins, and told them that he was being blackmailed and needed a hitman. He then hired the hitman to kill himself [Rosenberg], and made a video telling everyone that he was being targeted by the President and other associates. He was then killed by the hitman, and the government was on the verge of toppling after the blame was placed on them. After a bit more investigating, the UN investigator discovered that Musa was actually involved in some very shady dealings, and that the Mafia had in fact killed him.

To me, this whole story is so messed up. Forget the shady dealings, or the lies and deceit. Simply the fact that a man is willing to HIRE someone to murder HIMSELF to blame a COMPLETELY innocent person is a disgusting and….perverted mind indeed. Hopefully, there aren’t too many other people in this world like this. The worst part though? The UN official said that NONE of this would have been discovered if 1. Rosenberg and Musa weren’t from oligarchical families 2. The driver didn’t sign any papers, but he did later sign a tax form, which was the ONLY mistake in the entire plan.

At any rate, i hope you guys enjoyed this twisted story! I’ll try to bring out some more interesting articles in the future! In the mean time, if you guys have any suggestions or genres, LET ME KNOW! THANKS~ 😀