That same day, Castresana met with Rosenberg’s son Eduardo. He looked like a younger, more dashing version of his father. He had graduated first in his class from law school, and since the killings he had become a partner at Rosenberg’s law firm, moving into his father’s old office. Castresana vowed to him, “I give you my word that, if we have to, we will bring down the President and impeach him.”

Back at his office at CICIG, Castresana gathered a dozen or so of his top investigators. He suspected that there was at least one mole inside CICIG, and worried about leaks; his office was swept each morning and night for bugs, and he used a white-noise machine when discussing delicate matters. He told his agents, “This is the most important case of this commission.”

A linguistic expert from the National Institute of Forensic Sciences, in Guatemala City, was asked to authenticate the Rosenberg video, analyzing every sound and slur. In a report, the expert said that she could not determine whether Rosenberg had made the video under external pressure (as President Colom had suggested). But the expert concluded that Rosenberg appeared “sincere” and “rational.”

A team of CICIG agents scoured the Rosenberg crime scene for clues. Curiously, Rosenberg’s body had fallen backward, onto the curb, and his bicycle had fallen away from him, onto the road. Near the body, in the dirt beside the road, was a series of deep gashes; they appeared to have been made by the tires of a car.

One day, while CICIG agents were canvassing the neighborhood, they detected an unmarked vehicle following their car; a passenger was taking photographs of them. Weeks later, agents were meeting with a potential witness, in the lobby of a hotel outside Guatemala City, when swarms of police officers suddenly descended, trying to seize the witness. Fearing that the witness might be tortured and “disappeared,” CICIG agents fled with him into one of the hotel’s rooms. As they prepared for a gun battle, a CICIG agent shouted to the police, “You will have to kill us all!” Meanwhile, Castresana phoned the head of the national police and Vice-President Espada, commanding them to order the police to back off. The police eventually withdrew, and CICIG was able to process the witness. After all that, the man had no reliable information—but somebody had clearly been terrified that he did.

Castresana and his team, still lacking a key witness, confiscated all the relevant security tapes from buildings near the crime scene. Images caught on multiple cameras revealed that the moment Rosenberg left on his bicycle, at 8:05 A.M., a coffin-black sports car with tinted windows and a racing spoiler began shadowing him. The fact that the hit men were in position from the start of the bicycle ride—an activity that was not a regular part of Rosenberg’s Sunday routine—suggested that a person with inside knowledge had tipped them off. The vehicle’s license plate was not visible, but the car was a Mazda 6, and there were only fifty such models registered in Guatemala. And the one at the crime scene, digital enhancements revealed, had, in addition to the spoiler, distinctive red-rimmed tires and a sticker on the lid of the gas tank. After an intensive three-week search, investigators identified the car as belonging to a thirty-three-year-old man named Willian Gilberto Santos Divas, who lived outside Guatemala City. Records showed that, on the morning Rosenberg was killed, Santos’s cell phone was making and receiving a flurry of calls—all in the area of the shooting. “He was there,” Castresana said.

One other detail in Santos’s file caught Castresana’s attention. Santos was a former member of the national police force. Castresana was certain that CICIG had found the first sign of a conspiracy.

In President Colom’s war room, Roberto Izurieta, the strategist, believed that he, too, had found threads of what one member of the government called a “finely woven conspiracy.” Izurieta had always thought that Colom could not be behind the murders of the Musas and Rosenberg, and that the killings had to be part of a plot to bring down the government. The idea was outlandish only to the innocent. As Don DeLillo has written, “A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.” Izurieta, who had lost ten pounds since the crisis began—and who had violated his ban on caffeine, which made him, by his own admission, “electric”—thought that the conspirators were finally being pulled from the shadows of Guatemalan politics.

The investigators had found, for example, someone who had admitted shooting the video of Rosenberg’s testimony. His name was Mario David García. A squat man with a crisp mustache, he was an ultra-right-wing journalist and a former Presidential candidate who was thought to have participated in multiple plots against the state. In the late eighties, the government accused him of being part of a cabal, known as the Officers of the Mountain, which orchestrated two failed coups. García understood the power of images: he had been the producer of a television show that had fanned the cabal’s rebellion. Another figure accused of orchestrating the coups was none other than Luis Mendizábal. Both men denied being part of the plots.

Izurieta wondered if it could be just a coincidence that García and Mendizábal—with their “impressive dossiers of conspiratorial services,” as one reporter put it—had been involved in the manufacturing and distribution of Rosenberg’s video. García was now the host of a political radio show, “Straight Talk,” and after Rosenberg’s death he repeatedly attacked the government, stoking the unrest. As for Mendizábal, Izurieta and other members of the government suspected that he had a vendetta against President Colom, who had hired him to be a security adviser in 2007, only to fire him. What’s more, according to CICIG Mendizábal had lost a bid for a lucrative government contract to produce national I.D. cards. Mendizábal denies having any such business interest, but Castresana told me that Mendizábal had a “motive for revenge.”

Could García and Mendizábal have manipulated and then killed Rosenberg in order to unleash his video and topple the government? After all, Mendizábal was not only a specialist in gathering information; he was also a master in the art of disinformation. In the late nineties, he had been a member of a clandestine intelligence unit called La Oficinita—The Little Office. (It was named for the space above Mendizábal’s clothing boutique.) Mendizábal insisted to me that La Oficinita helped solve kidnappings and murders. But, according to human-rights observers, government officials, and the press, its purpose was to deceive the public—using fake evidence and theatrical witnesses in order to cover up the military’s crimes.

Izurieta knew that intelligence operators had previously deployed disinformation to topple a democratically elected government in Guatemala. In 1954, C.I.A. operatives had teamed with the new “scientists” of advertising to overthrow President Jacobo Árbenz—Guatemala’s last left-wing leader until Colom—by creating the illusion of a domestic uprising. Operatives set up a radio station, the Voice of Liberation, which was supposedly broadcast from a rebel camp “deep in the jungle” but, in fact, was transmitted from Miami and often broadcast from the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. The station caused national hysteria by reporting fake news of the government poisoning the water supply and of phantom troops marching on the capital. One operative referred to the scheme as “the big lie.”

In May, 2009, Mendizábal and García, who were being pressed by the media, acknowledged their roles in producing the Rosenberg video. The Archdiocese’s Office of Human Rights, citing their histories, warned that there might be a sinister force at work. It noted that Rosenberg’s assassination had the hallmarks of “fictitious scenarios” from Guatemala’s past.

If there was a plot to topple the government, the next question was who was the main beneficiary—and hence the prime mover behind it. One person seemed to have the most to gain. It was Colom’s longtime political rival Otto Pérez Molina—the notorious former general and head of military intelligence who, after the video was distributed, had demanded that Colom resign. Pérez Molina, who appeared on García’s radio program to denounce Colom, had previously declared that he was running again for President.

Scattered dots seemed to form a picture, like a constellation in the sky. Then, less than a month after Rosenberg’s death, President Colom’s Minister of the Interior, who was a confidant of the First Lady, informed Castresana that he had found what amounted to a smoking gun—a witness who would reveal the entire conspiracy.

Castresana dispatched a team of investigators. At the Interior Minister’s suggestion, the investigators flew on the First Lady’s helicopter to a soccer field in San Luis, a town near the Mexican border, where the witness was waiting for them. According to a summary of his account, which he later provided to the newspaper El Quetzalteco, the witness stated that a street gang named Pythagoras had been hired to kill Rosenberg, at a price of a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. The witness, who expressed fear for his life, said that he was close to the gang’s ruthless leader. “I do not want to continue to kill people,” he said. Then he revealed a bombshell—or, as he put it, “This will explode, because there are politicians involved.”

The witness said that the gang received the first installment of its fee from Roxana Baldetti, a member of Congress who is running as Otto Pérez Molina’s Vice-Presidential candidate. The witness said that he had saved text messages that he had exchanged with a member of Pérez Molina’s party, who had offered him a car and money to remain silent. Castresana, speaking of the witness, recalled, “With this testimony, we could have arrested the leader of the political opposition and put him in jail.”

Castresana had asked President Colom’s Interior Minister to make sure that nobody from the media was at the stadium, fearing that the identities of CICIG agents might be exposed. (At one point, a clerk handling evidence in the Rosenberg case was gunned down in Guatemala City.) But a pack of reporters suddenly appeared, and the news soon broke around the country that Otto Pérez Molina and Roxana Baldetti were the alleged masterminds of Rosenberg’s murder. “PROOF DELIVERED,” the banner headline in one newspaper read.

But, when Castresana and members of CICIG tried to confirm elements of the witness’s story, they were stymied. They checked the security cameras in the hotel parking lot where the witness claimed that the payoff from Baldetti had taken place—nothing of the sort was on tape. Other evidence that the witness provided was fabricated. Even his name was an alias. The whole meeting was an elaborately staged act of misdirection. The witness later confessed, “I received a call from a member of the government saying, ‘I have a job for you,’ and he offered me money . . . to give false evidence.” The witness alleged that Colom’s spokesman and the First Lady were part of the scheme.

The government denied the allegations. But Castresana was furious. He believed that the government was also behind the unmarked cars following his agents and the attempt to seize the potential witness at the hotel. Perhaps members of the Colom Administration were trying to cover up their crimes. Or, perhaps, after so many years of judicial disarray, they thought that, if they were being framed, the only way out was to frame someone else.

Castresana sent a formal complaint to the Colom Administration, and forwarded copies to the U.N. It was only then, Castresana told me, that the government stopped meddling.

“B_otar un palo grande_,” the voice said. “Knock over a big stick.”

A Chilean agent of CICIG was sitting in a small, stuffy room, nearly three months after Rosenberg’s death, eavesdropping on Willian Santos, the owner of the black Mazda. The Rosenberg case marked the first time in the history of Guatemala that wiretapping was being conducted by a legal entity, rather than by secret military intelligence or some other unauthorized body.

For weeks, CICIG had been monitoring Santos’s conversations and tracking his movements. Castresana and his team had mapped out, with flowcharts and photographs, at least part of the criminal network to which Santos belonged. So far, investigators had identified ten members of the gang. Nearly all of them were current or former police officers; one was a veteran of the military. Their conversations confirmed that the men had become professional killers. The question was who had hired them to assassinate Rosenberg.

“If we’d gone South for the winter, we’d be back by now.” Facebook

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CICIG agents had intercepted more than ten thousand of the gang’s fugitive conversations. But, even in an age of listening devices and satellite surveillance and Wayback Machines, much of history remains beyond confirmation, out of earshot, buried with the corpses. One of the leaders of the gang was recorded saying that he wanted to hear “zero comments” about the Rosenberg “job,” because there were extremely powerful people who didn’t want anyone “running off their mouths.”