Efrain Rios Montt
Efraín Ríos Montt ruled Guatemala for seventeen months in 1982-83 and became the first former head of state convicted of genocide by a court in his own country. Born in Huehuetenango in 1926, he entered the army as a teenager, trained at the School of the Americas and at Fort Bragg, and rose to army chief of staff by 1970. He ran for president as a Christian Democrat in 1974 and is generally accepted to have won, only for the count to be reversed in favour of the official military candidate. He was sent abroad as a military attaché, and afterwards became an ordained minister of the evangelical Church of the Word. He took power in a coup by junior officers in March 1982, during a civil war between the army and leftist guerrillas that had run since 1960. He preached weekly televised sermons on morality while prosecuting the most intense phase of the conflict. His counterinsurgency doctrine treated the indigenous Maya population of the highlands as the guerrillas' base — beans and bullets, food for those who submitted and destruction for the rest. Army sweeps destroyed several hundred villages, killing inhabitants including women and children, and forced survivors into model villages and civil defence patrols. The UN-backed truth commission documented some 200,000 deaths across the war, over eighty per cent of them indigenous, and found that acts of genocide had been committed, the majority during his period. He was deposed in August 1983, later served in congress with immunity, and was tried in 2013. Convicted and sentenced to eighty years, he saw the verdict annulled on procedural grounds within days. He was ruled unfit for retrial and died in 2018.
- Lived: 1926 CE – 2018 CE
- Nationality: Guatemalan
- Roles: head_of_state, dictator, military_leader
