Foes petition to strip Guatemala leader's immunity

Government opponents submitted 35,000 signatures Monday to demand that Congress start procedures to strip Guatemala's president of immunity from prosecution over allegations that he ordered a lawyer killed. Alvaro Colom, Guatemala's first leftist president in more than 50 years, has faced mounting calls for his resignation since a recording distributed at Rodrigo Rosenberg's funeral last week showed the attorney blaming his killing on the president. Colom denies the accusations and has asked the FBI and a U.N. panel to investigate. The process for stripping presidential immunity starts with the attorney general, who decides whether there is enough evidence to open an investigation. Then he must ask Congress to lift the president's immunity. The petition asks Congress to pressure Attorney General Amilcar Velasquez to start that process. The petitioners decided to go through Congress because they did not trust Velasquez - a Colom appointee - to act on his own, said Luis Pedro Alvarez, one of the lawyers who submitted the petition. Colom allies hold enough legislative seats to block Congress from sending the petition to the attorney general, however. Alvarez warned that petition organizers would call for a national strike if Congress does not act within eight days. In the video, Rosenberg said officials might want to kill him because he represented businessman Khalil Musa, who was slain in March along with his daughter. The lawyer said Musa, who had been named to the board of Guatemala's Rural Development Bank, was killed for refusing to get involved in purported illicit transactions at the bank. The video was shot in the office of journalist Mario David Garcia, who says he tried to persuade Rosenberg to denounce what he knew on the air but ran out of time. In response to Colom's request, an FBI agent arrived in Guatemala last week to coordinate with local prosecutors and with the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, a U.N. panel set up in 2007 to clean up corruption. Colom's 2007 election victory gave Guatemala its first leftist leader since Jacobo Arbenz was thrown out of office in 1954 by a CIA-orchestrated coup.