San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ex-Guatemalan leader fought for Indigenous rights
CITY — Álvaro Colom, who as president of Guatemala from 2008 to 2012 put the country’s forgotten Indigenous communities at the center of his government but faced fierce opposition from the elites, died Monday at his home in Guatemala City. He was 71.
His death was confirmed by his niece Alejandra Colom, who said he had been treated for esophageal cancer.
Colom expanded access to education and health care in a country scarred by deep inequalities and decades of civil war. But his time in office was shadowed by a bizarre scandal in which he was accused of assassination and eventually exonerated by a United Nationsbacked anti-corruption commission.
He also faced the growing reach of Mexican drug cartels, particularly the Zetas, that had allied with local criminal gangs to traffic cocaine. He supported a crusading attorney general who worked with the anti-corruption commission to arrest some of the country’s most violent criminals.
But it was his commitment to giving a voice to Guatemala’s Indigenous peoples that set him apart from the country’s old-guard political power brokers. Colom had spent most of the 1990s heading a government fund set up to inMEXICO vest in villages that had been abandoned by the government during the 36-year civil war between military regimes and leftist guerrillas.
“I saw the faces of poverty, the faces of abandonment and the wealth of the Indigenous culture that we didn’t appreciate and that we didn’t value,” he told CNN in 2011.
Carlos Menocal, who served as interior minister in Colom’s government, said Colom was one of the few white Guatemalans who was considered an ally by the Mayan elders. He used the Mayan calendar in his daily life and as president flew a flag over the National Palace celebrating the country’s Indigenous peoples.
His bid for elective office was an effort to scale up the work he had done with the investment fund, the National Fund for Peace, his niece said. He ran for president three times before winning under the banner of the party he founded, National Unity for Hope, known by its Spanish initials UNE.
But 17 months into Colom’s presidency, a lawyer named Rodrigo Rosenberg was fatally shot while riding his bicycle. In a video released posthumously, Rosenberg said that if he were killed, it would be because the president had ordered his murder.
Conservative leaders seized on the case to demand Colom’s resignation. In response, he asked the U.N. panel, the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, known by the Spanish acronym CICIG, to investigate the Rosenberg killing.
The investigators’ conclusion, eight months later, could have been the plot of a film noir. The commission found that Rosenberg, suicidal over the murders of a woman with whom he had been having an affair and her father, had arranged for his own killing in a manner intended to inflict political damage on Colom.
Colom called the case the biggest challenge of his presidency. He argued that the calls to remove him had emanated from interests opposed to his policies. “I will be one of the presidents, if not the president, who is most independent of economic power,” he said in the CNN interview.
Álvaro Colom Caballeros was born June 15, 1951, in Guatemala City, the fourth of five children. His father, Antonio Colom Argueta, was a lawyer with a background in liberal politics. His mother, Yolanda Caballeros Ferraté, worked as a secretary before raising their children.