How a Shootout on a Guatemalan Highway Opened Window to Corruption
How a Shootout on a Guatemalan Highway Opened Window to Corruption
by Joaquin Sapien
ProPublica, June 20, 2016, 8 a.m.
In 2013, ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella got a tip on an assassination attempt against Enrique Degenhart Asturias, a 44-year-old Guatemala native who had been working as a consultant to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. Rotella, a veteran Latin America correspondent, knew such violence was common in that part of the world, but this event felt distinctive.
For one thing, Degenhart was shot nine times, but he lived to tell the story. Second, Degenhart had recently been fired from a post in the countrys notoriously corrupt immigration service after trying to reform it. Third, the Guatemalan government had removed Degenharts security detail ten months before gunmen tried to take his life.
Rotella flew to Guatemala to investigate. Today he joins our podcast to tell us what he found:
You've been covering terrorism, crime, and various scandals in Latin America and throughout the world for much of your career. How did you come across this particular story?
Rotella: It really was just fortuitous, in that I knew a law enforcement official in Washington who had been at a presentation done by Enrique Degenhart ... a tactical presentation ... about being involved in a shootout, and how to survive what is the worst nightmare for law enforcement officials in Latin America, which is a car-to-car ambush. I've been covering, as you said, Latin America for a long time, and I've covered many cases of people who got killed or ambushed car-to-car, and things related to the mafias and law enforcement. In fact, I knew a police chief in Tijuana, a source of mine, who died that way.
When I heard this story this law enforcement official told me, I heard this incredible story. This guy got shot nine times, he had the presence of mind to survive, he was armed. Then he told me a bit about Degenhart's work, and his odyssey, and what had happened, and how he had come to the States and was in hiding and all that, so I got fascinated by it and said, "Boy, that would be a great story to tell."
More:
https://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/how-a-shootout-on-a-guatemalan-highway-opened-window-to-corruption