MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
We have an update now on a story that we first brought you last May, when a Guatemalan lawyer was killed. Shortly after his death, a video surfaced, and on the video, the lawyer said this.
Mr. RODRIGO ROSENBERG: (Foreign language spoken)
SIEGEL: If you are watching this video and hearing this message, it is because I was assassinated by President Alvaro Colom. At the time, the United Nations said it would investigate that charge. It did, and today it announced this dramatic finding. It says the lawyer arranged for his own murder.
Well, back in May, we spoke with Juan Carlos Llorca then, and he joins us again now. He's Guatemala correspondent for The Associated Press. Thanks for joining us once again.
Mr. JUAN CARLOS LLORCA (Guatemala Correspondent, Associated Press): Hello. How are you?
SIEGEL: Tell us a bit about this lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg. What did he claim in that video that was released after his death?
Mr. LLORCA: He claimed that he had discovered information that linked the government to the murder of one of his clients and his daughter. And then he said that if people were watching the video, it was because the president, his wife and other officials within the government had him murdered.
SIEGEL: These were the Musa's, his clients, whom he was talking about.
Mr. LLORCA: Yes, yes. It was a textile industrialist and his daughter.
SIEGEL: Khalil Musa and Marjorie Musa. Now, Rodrigo Rosenberg, as I recall from the story, was riding his bicycle when he was shot and murdered. And the conclusion of the investigation is that he, in effect, hired the hit men to kill him.
Mr. LLORCA: Yes. It turns out that he had been riding his bicycle and had sat on the sidewalk to wait for a hit man to murder him. He had previously called them to let them know where he was going to be so they could locate him and shoot him five times.
SIEGEL: Why would he do this?
Mr. LLORCA: That is what the U.N. commission cannot fully explain. They have a hypothesis, nevertheless. They say that he was very devastated because the recent death of his mother. He had just lost custody of his children - and they had gone to Mexico - and this woman, Marjorie Musa, she had been murdered a month earlier, and he had a long-standing relationship with her. And after her murder and the murder of her father, he started digging into what had just happened, and he received lots of information, no proof, says the U.N., but lots of information pointing to the government as the culprit of this crime.
So he became convinced - he convinced himself that the government was to blame. And since he was very frustrated that he thought that he could never bring the government to justice, the U.N. thinks that he thought the only way to create a change and to bring justice and to bring the government down was to record his message and then get people to kill him.
SIEGEL: Now, since May, when this posthumous accusation against the president became public, did it have political repercussions in Guatemala? Did it cause troubles for the president to be accused of this murder?
Mr. LLORCA: Yes. During the first six weeks maybe, there were marches calling for his resignation or at least his separation from office during the time the investigation was conducted.
SIEGEL: So what happens now that there's been this finding that indeed it wasn't the president's fault, it was the victim himself who arranged his own murder?
Mr. LLORCA: Well, there's at least 11 people in jail and some of them corroborated all the information that the U.N. had already gathered. And now they go to trial and there is just two persons that are at large who are his cousins, because he actually hired a hit man through his cousins. They just didn't know that it was Rosenberg who was to be murdered.
SIEGEL: Juan Carlos Llorca, Associated Press Guatemala correspondent, thanks for talking with us.
Mr. LLORCA: Thank you for having me.