About Efraín Ríos Montt
José Efraín Ríos Montt (Spanish: [efɾaˈin ˈrios ˈmont]; 16 June 1926 – 1 April 2018) was a Guatemalan military officer who served as de facto President of Guatemala from 1982 to 1983. His brief tenure as chief executive was one of the bloodiest periods in the long-running Guatemalan Civil War. Ríos Montt's counter-insurgency strategies significantly weakened the Marxist guerrillas organized under the umbrella of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), while also leading to accusations of war crimes and acts of genocide perpetrated by the Guatemalan Army under his leadership. Ríos Montt was a career army officer. He was director of the Guatemalan military academy and rose to the rank of brigadier general. He was briefly chief of staff of the Guatemalan army in 1973. However, he was soon forced out of the position over differences with the military high command. He ran for president in the 1974 general election, losing to the official candidate, General Kjell Laugerud, in an electoral process widely regarded as fraudulent. In 1978, Ríos Montt left the Catholic Church and joined an Evangelical Christian group affiliated with the Gospel Outreach Church. In 1982, discontent with the rule of General Romeo Lucas García, the worsening security situation in Guatemala, and accusations of electoral fraud led to a coup d'état by a group of junior military officers who installed Ríos Montt as head of a government junta. Ríos Montt ruled as a military dictator for less than seventeen months before his defense minister, General Óscar Mejía Victores overthrew him in another coup. In 1989, Ríos Montt returned to the Guatemalan political scene as leader of a new political party, the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG). He was elected many times to the Congress of Guatemala, serving as president of the Congress in 1995–1996 and 2000–2004. A constitutional provision prevented him from registering as a presidential candidate due to his involvement in the military coup of 1982. However, the FRG obtained the presidency and a congressional majority in the 1999 general election. Authorized by the Constitutional Court to run in the 2003 presidential elections, Ríos Montt came in third and withdrew from politics. He returned to public life in 2007 as a member of Congress, thereby gaining legal immunity from long-running lawsuits alleging war crimes committed by him and some of his ministers and counselors during their term in the presidential palace in 1982–83. His immunity ended on 14 January 2012, when his legislative term of office expired. In 2013, a court sentenced Ríos Montt to 80 years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity, but the Constitutional Court quashed that sentence, and his retrial was not completed before he died of a heart attack in April 2018. His younger brother Mario Enrique Ríos Montt became a Catholic priest and would serve as prelate of Escuintla and later as auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Guatemala. In 1972, in the presidential administration of General Carlos Arana Osorio, Ríos Montt was promoted to brigadier general and in 1973 he became the Army's Chief of Staff (Jefe del Estado Mayor General del Ejército). Pro-government posters warned "voters not to fall into a communist trap by supporting Ríos," but Ríos Montt proved to be an effective campaigner, and most observers believe that his FNO won the popular vote by an ample majority.
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