Álvaro Colom
Álvaro Colom was president of Guatemala from 2008 to 2012, the first of the centre-left since Árbenz in 1954, an industrial engineer and a Maya priest by ordination, whose uncle, the mayor of the capital, had been machine-gunned in the street in 1979 by the army's death squads. He was elected at the third attempt in November 2007 against the general Otto Pérez Molina, whose slogan was the iron fist. The programme was the social one. There were the conditional cash transfers called My Family Progresses, which reached eight hundred thousand families and which the opposition said were run by his wife as a campaign machine, the free schooling and the school meals, and the open-air markets. The country was the other thing. There were the murder rate of forty-six a hundred thousand, the Zetas moving in from Mexico and massacring twenty-seven farm labourers in Petén in May 2011, and the state of siege in Alta Verapaz. The presidency's strangest hour was May 2009, when a lawyer called Rodrigo Rosenberg was shot dead on his bicycle and a video appeared in which he said that if he were dead, Colom had killed him. The capital's middle class filled the streets for a month demanding the president's resignation. Then the UN commission, the CICIG, established that Rosenberg had arranged his own murder to bring the government down. The end was his wife Sandra Torres, who divorced him in 2011 so that she could stand to succeed him, the constitution barring the president's relatives, and the courts barred her anyway. He was born in Guatemala City, ran the peace fund that resettled the returning refugees after 1996. He lost the elections of 1999 and 2003, and founded the National Unity of Hope in 2002. After leaving office he was arrested in 2018 with most of his cabinet over the buses bought for the capital's transit system. The case was unresolved when he died of cancer in January 2023.
- Lived: 1951 CE – 2023 CE
- Nationality: Guatemalan
- Roles: president, engineer, politician
