The three congressmen were traveling to Guatemala City to attend the Central American Parliament, a regional legislative body. Their Land Cruiser was part of a four-car motorcade when it separated from the convoy and turned onto a remote road at El Jocotillo. The next day, their bodies and that of their driver were found inside the burned vehicle. Eduardo D'Aubuisson carried a name heavy with Salvadoran history: his father Roberto D'Aubuisson had founded the ARENA party and directed death squads during El Salvador's brutal 1979-1992 civil war. Whether the son's lineage had anything to do with his murder became one of many unanswered questions. Guatemala already had one of the highest murder rates in Latin America, a transit point for drug traffickers moving product from Colombia through Mexico to the United States. The killing of foreign legislators, though, was brazen even by those standards.

Police tracked the killers through a GPS system embedded in a police vehicle that had been at the crime scene. Four Guatemalan police detectives were arrested and charged on February 22. For their safety, they were secretly transferred to El Boqueron, a maximum-security prison 40 miles east of Guatemala City. It did not help. All four were killed in their cells. A prison riot followed; the warden and guards were taken hostage. The national police concluded the gunmen most likely came from inside the prison, since breaching three security perimeters - prison guards, police, and army - from outside would have been nearly impossible. Twenty men were arrested, including the warden and several guards. The chain of violence was far from finished. In April 2008, Victor Rivera, a Venezuelan national advising the Interior Ministry on the case, was shot dead while driving in Guatemala City. The prosecutor investigating Rivera's death, former Attorney General Alvaro Matus, was later accused of a cover-up. In July 2008, the state prosecutor who had charged 13 men in the prison killings, Juan Carlos Martinez, was himself shot dead in Guatemala City.

Erwin Sperisen, Guatemala's chief of national police, dismissed the conspiracy theories that multiplied after each successive killing. 'People don't want to believe that the reality is simpler, more ironic and more stupid,' he said. 'It wasn't a great conspiracy. It was a series of coincidental events. But the people don't want to believe. They want a soap opera, a spy drama, a James Bond movie.' Yet the theories Sperisen himself floated were hardly simple: that the police officers may have been tricked into thinking they were assassinating Colombian drug dealers posing as Salvadoran legislators; that political enemies in El Salvador may have arranged the hit; or that the deputies themselves may have been linked to the drug trade. In July 2008, a judge acquitted all 13 suspects in the prison killings. In May 2011, Austrian authorities arrested one suspect, Figueroa, but refused to extradite him to Guatemala, concluding he could not expect a fair trial there.

The twin sets of killings - the congressmen, then the suspects - exposed a Guatemalan security apparatus that could neither protect foreign legislators on its highways nor keep arrested suspects alive in its own prisons. On March 26, 2007, both Sperisen and Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann resigned. The Comision Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala - an international commission specifically created to address Guatemala's culture of impunity - became involved in the case's aftermath. But the case resisted resolution. Witnesses died. Prosecutors died. Suspects were acquitted. Evidence disappeared. The international community watched as Guatemala's institutions proved incapable of investigating a crime that kept consuming the people assigned to solve it. The murders of three Salvadoran congressmen and their driver remain, in essence, unsolved - a case where the pursuit of justice proved nearly as dangerous as the original crime.