The Rosenberg video: testimonio, theatricality and baroque politics in contemporary Guatemala

Abstract

This article focuses on the assassination of Guatemalan lawyer, Rodrigo Rosenberg, on 10 May 2009 and his videotaped accusation of the Colom administration, broadcast after his death. Rosenberg’s self-produced video testimony, and the ‘staging’ of his own death, opens up questions about the role of testimonio and theatricality as modes of political address. I argue that the spectacular politics of the Rosenberg video, while drawing from the testimonio genre and incorporating electronic media, mark a return to a baroque conception of politics.

Keywords:

• Rodrigo Rosenberg
• video
• theatricality
• testimonio
• Guatemala
• baroque

Notes

1. All unattributed translations are mine.

2. As Bradley Nelson argues in his work on baroque culture, an emblem is not only an icon or image but rather ‘a medium in which conflicting models of presence and aura are articulated and questioned’, therefore ‘emblematic structures are powerful tools for the creation of presence effects’ (2010, p. 3–4). It is precisely through such presence effects that Rosenberg’s video, as an emblem, theatricalises his testimonio.

3. Further examples include the collapse of Alberto Fujimori’s administration in Peru in September 2000 following the vladivideos scandal; the pivotal role of television in the failed coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in April 2002; and in Colombia the July 2008 recording and broadcasting of Ingrid Betancourt’s military rescue Operación Jaque (Calderón Bentin 2014, forthcoming).

4. For a historical perspective on repertoires and contentious performances see Taylor (2003) and Tilly (2008).

5. At the inception of the modern state in the Americas during Spanish colonial rule, baroque theatricality, in the form of public ceremonies, civic festivities and courtly balls were intrinsic to the work of government (see Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México 1983, López Cantos 1992, Curcio 2004, and Osorio 2008).

6. To access the video see Rosenberg (2009b).

7. Baroque theatricality functions as a political technique that, as José Antonio Maravall (2008) argues, ‘takes advantage of the astonished spectator to obtain the results of attraction, persuasion, and propaganda’ (p. 482).

8. Political killings remain relatively common in the post-civil war years in Guatemala. For a brief historical account of political violence in Guatemala see Smith and Offit (2010).

9. Here I follow Walter Benjamin (1969, p. 257) when he writes, ‘To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.’ I argue that Rosenberg’s death presents such a moment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sebastián Calderón Bentin

SEBASTIÁN CALDERÓN BENTIN is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University.