The assassination of attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg in Guatemala has pushed the government of President Alvaro Colom against the ropes. The news has been hitting the headlines for days around the world. Rosenberg, an honorable person, predicted it in a shocking video he made four days before being gunned down by hired killers who remain unknown: the president, the first lady and other important functionaries planned to kill him, he said, because he knew about a previous crime.

For his part, the president has denied any responsibility in the affair. Everyone will have to wait until some independent investigations determine his alleged culpability. Even politicians are innocent until proven guilty.

Apropos of this monstrosity, I have again read and heard a rather muddled assertion: ''Guatemala is a failed state.'' True, Guatemala has one of the highest measures of criminality in the world. But is it really a failed state?

It is fashionable nowadays to make such statements, but one has to ask: When does a country become a ''failed'' state? It is not a question of the level of poverty, education, sanitation or the impossibility of confronting natural calamities (as in Haiti). The matter is simpler: We are in a failed state when it is impossible to obtain justice or protection to exercise our right not to be killed, kidnapped or blackmailed without a reasonable expectation that the wrongdoer will pay for his crime. The state fails when the institutions of law turn bad.

In fact, by that definition, Guatemala, Mexico and other Latin American nations are failed states or on their way to failing. I do not believe, as the U.S. Defense Department believes, that Mexico is approaching a sudden collapse that can disintegrate them into rival factions that fight each other cruelly, as happens in Congo or Sudan.

But it is unquestionable that in several Latin American nations there is barely any security or protection for human life, crimes usually go unpunished, the forces of public order often are accomplices of the criminals or violate the laws themselves. And it is useless to turn to the courts, because either justice is very slow and very incompetent or the judges sell their rulings to whoever pays the right amount or to whoever promises not to kill them, because there is the unwritten rule of the two metals: silver or lead. Silver, if the judges rule in favor of the criminals; lead, if they stick to the law and punish them.

Police not the problem

Mexican President Felipe Calderón himself said it some weeks ago: Half of all the police forces have been corrupted by drug trafficking. He spoke about a universe of 450,000 people. If that figure is accurate, we're looking at a problem not of the police but of the Mexican society. Two hundred and twenty-five thousand people from all of the country's regions constitute a cross-section of the Mexican nation. In Guatemala, the same must be happening, albeit on a different scale. The obligatory question is, then, how did all that come to pass?

The answer, too, is quite obvious. For many decades, the politicians and public officials, in collusion with a large segment of society, eroded the rule of law until they weakened it to a dangerous degree. Each illegal transaction they made, big or small, publicly and shamelessly, or each bribe they demanded (or paid) without penal consequences of any kind, ended up configurating a cynical perception of the relationship between state and society. The laws were promulgated not to be observed but to put a price on the infractions.

Corruption tolerated

From that point on, everything became possible. Why shouldn't policemen steal if the politicians or appointed officials steal? Why shouldn't bullies engage in extortion if the judges and prosecutors do? It was absurd to expect that people with power or boldness would scrupulously select what laws to observe or what laws to break. Where corruption is tolerated and impunity reigns, it is reasonable to predict an unstoppable crescendo in the nature of crimes and the number of criminals who commit them.

An obligatory question remains: Is it possible to revert this ancient process of institutional putrefaction and reestablish the rule of law? Yes. But it all begins with the mea culpa and the regeneration of the ruling class, both in the public sector and the civil society. It is an infrequent but feasible ceremony. There's still hope.