Efraín Ríos Montt
José Efraín Ríos Montt 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, 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. He was elected many times to the Congress of Guatemala, serving as president of the Congress in 1995–96 and 2000–04. 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.
Early life and career
Efraín Ríos Montt was born on 16 June 1926 into a large ladino family of the rural middle class, in Huehuetenango, a small city in the highlands of western Guatemala. His father was a shopkeeper and his mother a seamstress. The family also owned a small farm. 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.Intent on making a career in the army, the young Efraín applied to the Polytechnic School but was rejected because of his astigmatism. He then volunteered for the Guatemalan Army as a private, joining troops composed almost exclusively of full-blooded Mayas, until in 1946, he was able to enter the Polytechnic School. Ríos Montt graduated in 1950 at the top of his class. He taught at the Polytechnic School and received further specialized training, first at the U.S.-run officer training institute that would later be known as the School of the Americas, and later at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and the Italian War College. From the start of his career, Ríos Montt acquired a reputation as a devoutly religious man and as a stern disciplinarian.
Ríos Montt did not play any significant role in the successful CIA-sponsored coup of 1954 against President Jacobo Arbenz. He rose through the ranks of the Guatemalan army and, in 1970–72, served as director of the Polytechnic School. 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. However, he was removed from that post after three months and, much to his chagrin, dispatched to the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, D.C. According to anthropologist David Stoll, writing in 1990, Ríos Montt was "at odds with the army's command structure since being sidelined by military president Gen. Carlos Arana Osorio in 1974."
Early political involvement
While in the US, the leaders of the Guatemalan Christian Democracy approached Ríos Montt with an invitation to run for president at the head of a coalition of parties opposed to the incumbent regime. Ríos Montt participated in the March 1974 presidential elections as the National Opposition Front presidential candidate. His running mate was Alberto Fuentes Mohr, a respected economist and social democrat. At the time, Ríos Montt was generally regarded as an honest and competent military man who could combat the rampant corruption in the Guatemalan government and armed forces. In the run-up to the election, United States officials characterized the candidate Ríos Montt as a "capable left-of-center military officer" who would shift Guatemala "perceptibly but not radically to the left."1974 presidential elections
The official presidential candidate for the 1974 Guatemalan general election was General Kjell Laugerud, whose running mate was Mario Sandoval Alarcón of the far-right National Liberation Movement. 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.When early returns showed an unmistakable trend in favor of Ríos Montt, the government halted the count and manipulated the results to make it appear that Laugerud finished 71,000 votes ahead of Ríos Montt. Since Laugerud did not have an outright majority of the popular vote, the government-controlled National Congress decided the election, which chose Laugerud by a vote of 38 to 2, with 15 opposition deputies abstaining.
According to independent journalist Carlos Rafael Soto Rosales, Ríos Montt and the FNO leadership knew the election was fraudulent, but acquiesced in Laugerud's "election" because they feared that a popular uprising "would result in disorder that would provoke worse government repression and that a challenge would lead to a confrontation between military leaders." General Ríos Montt then left the country to take up an appointment as military attaché at the Guatemalan embassy in Madrid, where he remained until 1977. It was rumored that the military high command paid Ríos Montt several hundred thousand dollars in exchange for his departure from public life and that during his exile in Spain his unhappiness led him to excessive drinking.
Religious conversion
In 1977, Ríos Montt retired from the army and returned to Guatemala. In 1978, a spiritual crisis caused him to leave the Roman Catholic Church and join the Iglesia El Verbo, an evangelical Protestant church affiliated with the Gospel Outreach Church and based in Eureka, California. Ríos Montt became very active in his new church and he also taught religion in a school which was affiliated with it. At the time, his younger brother Mario Enrique was the Catholic prelate of Escuintla.Efraín Ríos Montt's conversion has been interpreted as a significant event in the ascendency of Protestantism within the traditionally Catholic nation of Guatemala. Ríos Montt later befriended prominent evangelists in the US, including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
''De facto'' presidency
1982 military coup
The security situation in Guatemala had deteriorated under the government of General Romeo Lucas García. By early 1982, the Marxist guerrilla groups belonging to the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity umbrella organization had made gains in the countryside and were seen as threatening an attack on the capital, Guatemala City. On March 7, 1982, General Ángel Aníbal Guevara, the official party's candidate, was declared the winner of the presidential election, a result denounced as fraudulent by all opposition parties. An informal group described as oficiales jóvenes then staged a military coup that overthrew Lucas and prevented Guevara from succeeding him as president.On March 23, the coup culminated with the installation of a three-person military junta, presided by General Efraín Ríos Montt and composed also of General Horacio Maldonado Schaad and Colonel Luis Gordillo Martínez. Ríos Montt had not been directly involved in the planning of the coup and was chosen by the oficiales jóvenes because of the respect that he had acquired as director of the military academy and as the presidential candidate of the democratic opposition in 1974. The events of March 1982 took the U.S. authorities by surprise.
Because of repeated vote-rigging and the blatant corruption of the military establishment, the 1982 coup was initially welcomed by many Guatemalans. Ríos Montt's reputation for honesty, his leadership of the opposition in the 1974 election, and his vision of "education, nationalism, an end to want and hunger, and a sense of civic pride" were widely appealing. In April 1982, U.S. Ambassador Frederic L. Chapin declared that thanks to the coup of Ríos Montt, "the Guatemalan government has come out of the darkness and into the light." However, Chapin soon afterward reported that Ríos Montt was "naïve and not concerned with practical realities." Drawing on his Pentecostal beliefs, Ríos Montt compared the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to the four modern evils of hunger, misery, ignorance, and subversion. He also pledged to fight corruption and what he described as the depredations of the rich.