Efraín Ríos Montt

Efraín Ríos Montt (born June 16, 1926, Huehuetenango, Guatemala—died April 1, 2018, Guatemala City) was a Guatemalan army general and politician who ruled Guatemala as the leader of a military junta and as dictator (1982–83). In 2013 he was tried by a Guatemalan court on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, marking the first time that a former head of government was prosecuted for such crimes in a national, rather than international, court. His conviction and sentence of 80 years in prison were subsequently overturned by Guatemala’s Constitutional Court.

Military officer and lay preacher

Ríos Montt joined the Guatemalan army in 1943 and rose to the rank of brigadier general and army chief of staff. After serving as director of the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, D.C., in 1973, he returned to Guatemala and ran unsuccessfully for president as the candidate of the National Opposition Front (Frente Nacional de Oposición; FNO) in 1974. He was subsequently dispatched to Spain as a military attaché, which many observers interpreted as a form of forced, if paid, exile. In 1978 he found himself attracted to the evangelical teachings of the California-based Christian Church of the Word (Iglesia Cristiana del Verbo). Under Pres. Fernando Romeo Lucas García’s new government (1978–82), he was allowed to return home. Back in Guatemala, he renounced his Roman Catholic faith and became a lay preacher. The Bible had become his textbook, and Ríos Montt believed that trust in “God, my master and my lord,” alone would conquer the iniquities of political parties, which he came to regard as “sick” and “miserable” species.

Dictatorship

On March 23, 1982, a coup led by young officers overthrew Lucas García’s government, which they accused of corruption and vote rigging. Although Ríos Montt himself did not actively participate in the coup, he was persuaded to lead a three-man military junta with Gen. Horacio Maldonado Shaad and Col. Francisco Gordillo Martínez. In June, Ríos Montt ousted the two other members of the junta to assume complete dictatorial powers.

The U.S. government initially welcomed the change of regime. Following the coup, the Ronald Reagan administration praised Ríos Montt for dealing effectively with corruption and political instability. Claiming that the new government had improved the human rights situation in Guatemala and eager to support its fight against leftist guerrillas, the Reagan administration in 1983 lifted an arms embargo that had been imposed by the Carter administration because of human rights violations. Ríos Montt’s rule also received the moral and financial support of American evangelical Christians, including the televangelist Pat Robertson.

Ríos Montt’s initial promises of a return to “authentic” democracy proved empty. Corruption in the civil service was reduced, but violations of human rights continued relentlessly in the then two-decade-long civil war, which pitted the Guatemalan army against leftist guerrillas. The Ríos Montt administration established special military courts that had the power to impose the death penalty on alleged guerrillas and terrorists. The number of killings in the country escalated, and the campaign known as frijoles y fusiles (“beans and rifles”), initiated in an attempt to win over the large Indian population to army rule, resulted in widespread fear; many Indians fled over the border into southern Mexico. Already in 1982 humanitarian organizations were attempting to alert the outside world of massacres of thousands of Indian villagers and other atrocities by the Guatemalan army. Ríos Montt’s counterinsurgency strategy entailed indiscriminate attacks on the Indian communities that allegedly supported the guerrillas.

Ríos Montt soon became widely unpopular. He was disliked by many Catholics, who constituted the vast majority of Guatemala’s population, for his evangelical Protestant faith and for his refusal to grant clemency to six guerrillas during the visit of Pope John Paul II. The military was offended by his promotion of young officers in defiance of the army’s traditional hierarchy. Much of the middle class was alienated by his unsuccessful economic policy and his decision to introduce a value-added tax, never before levied in Guatemala. On August 8, 1983, Ríos Montt was deposed in a military coup led by Gen. Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores.

Later political career

In 1994 Ríos Montt was elected to the Guatemalan Congress in August and became the president of the legislative chamber in December (1994–96; 2000–03). In 2003 he ran unsuccessfully for the presidency after years of being legally prohibited from pursuing the office (the ban was lifted by the Constitutional Court). In 2004 a judge ordered him to be put under house arrest in connection with his alleged involvement in the death of a journalist during a pro-Ríos Montt riot, but the charges were dropped in 2006. He was once again elected to Congress in 2007, and he retired in 2012, having failed to win another term.

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Legal difficulties

Accused of genocide and crimes against humanity, Ríos Montt was put under house arrest in January 2012 and formally indicted in March 2012. After a trial of nearly two months, he was convicted in May 2013 of having orchestrated a counterinsurgency campaign that led to the deaths of nearly 1,800 Maya Ixil Indians and the forced displacement of tens of thousands of others and of having allowed other crimes such as torture and rape to be committed with impunity. Ten days later, however, the Constitutional Court annulled the conviction of Ríos Montt for genocide on the basis of procedural irregularities and ordered a retrial. In October 2013 the same court ruled that Ríos Montt’s actions were exonerated under a general amnesty covering events from March 1982 to January 1986 that had been declared in 1986 by Mejía Victores to cover crimes committed during his own administration and that of Ríos Montt, in which he had served as defense minister.

With a challenge to that decision pending, a new trial was scheduled for January 5, 2015. That retrial was then suspended when Ríos Montt’s counsel forced one of the members of the three-judge panel to recuse herself. Earlier in the January proceedings, the national forensic authority had determined that Ríos Montt was healthy enough to attend the trial after he had claimed that he was unfit to do so, and he was taken to the courtroom on a gurney. In July it was Ríos Montt’s mental health that was at issue as the national forensic authority concluded that the now 89-year-old’s cognitive faculties had deteriorated to the point that he was no longer able to understand the charges against him, raising the question of whether the trial, rescheduled for July 23, would be held. In August a panel of psychiatrists charged with evaluating Ríos Montt confirmed the earlier finding that he was suffering from dementia. After various delays and legal rulings, his retrial began in 2017. Because of his declining health, it was closed to the public, and he was not required to attend the proceedings. The trial was ongoing at the time of his death in 2018.