Julio César Méndez Montenegro
Julio César Méndez Montenegro was president of Guatemala from 1966 to 1970, the law professor and dean whom the army allowed to take office after his party won the election of March 1966 on the condition, signed in a secret pact before the inauguration, that the army would run the war as it saw fit and the president would not interfere. He did not. The third government of the revolution, as his party called it, was the one in which the counter-insurgency of the eastern departments and the death squads were invented. He was born in Guatemala City, the brother of the founder of the Revolutionary Party who had been the party's candidate and was found shot in his home in October 1965, a suicide the family did not believe, after which the dean of the law faculty took the nomination and won, the only civilian to take the office between 1954 and 1986. The pact with the army was the reign. There was Colonel Arana Osorio's campaign in Zacapa and Izabal in 1966 and 1967 against the FAR guerrilla, which killed the guerrilla's few hundred fighters and several thousand peasants, with the American advisers and the Green Berets, the first napalm and the first disappearances. There were the White Hand and the other squads that the army's intelligence ran out of the police and that killed a lawyer who had been Miss Guatemala, and the guerrillas' sympathisers in the capital. There was the guerrillas' answer, the assassination of the American ambassador John Gordon Mein in August 1968, the first American ambassador killed in office, and of the German ambassador Karl von Spreti in April 1970, whom the government would not ransom. There was the president who signed the decrees and did not otherwise govern, whose own vice-president said that he had governed with his hands tied. The rest was the reform that was allowed. There were the social security widened, the income tax, the university's budget, and the election of 1970 that he held on time and that Arana, the colonel of Zacapa, won. He handed over in July 1970. He went back to the university. He died in Guatemala City in April 1996, at eighty, eight months before the peace accords. He was the civilian whose term is the proof the army offered that civilians could not govern, having made sure they could not.
- Lived: 1915 CE – 1996 CE
- Nationality: Guatemalan
- Roles: president, lawyer, academic
