Romeo Lucas García

Romeo Lucas García was president of Guatemala from July 1978 to March 1982, the general under whom the civil war became the genocide, the scorched-earth campaign in the Maya highlands begun in 1981 that Ríos Montt, who deposed him, finished. His four years killed, by the truth commission's count, more people than any other period of the war except the one that followed. He was born in San Juan Chamelco, in Alta Verapaz, a Kekchí-speaking landowner's son. He had studied at the Politécnica and in Italy, commanded the Franja Transversal del Norte military zone, where he and his family acquired the estates the officers gave themselves. He was Laugerud's defence minister. He was elected in 1978 by a count that gave him forty-two per cent on a turnout of a third, with his brother Benedicto as chief of staff. The war in the capital was the first two years. There was the Spanish embassy burned by the police on 31 January 1980 with thirty-seven people inside, Kiché peasants who had occupied it to protest the army's killings in Uspantán, after which Spain broke relations. There were the leaders of the social democrats Alberto Fuentes Mohr and Manuel Colom Argueta shot in the street in January and March 1979. There were the university's rector, the union leaders, the twenty-seven CNT unionists taken from their headquarters in June 1980 and never seen. There were the priests and catechists of the Kiché diocese, so that the bishop closed it in 1980. The Americans' arms were cut off by Carter in 1977 and replaced by Israel's and Argentina's. The war in the highlands was the last year. The guerrilla of the EGP and ORPA had the Maya villages by 1980. The army's answer from 1981, under the chief of staff Benedicto Lucas, was the campaign in the Kiché, the Ixil triangle and the Verapaces, the villages burned, the men shot, the survivors driven into the mountains or the model villages, which Ríos Montt's junta took over in March 1982 and made systematic. The commission of 1999 counted the dead of the two governments at perhaps a hundred thousand and called it genocide. The young officers deposed him on 23 March 1982, sixteen days after an election his candidate Guevara had been declared to have won, on the grounds of the corruption and the war's failure. He went to Venezuela, where he lived in Puerto La Cruz until he died in May 2006, at eighty-one, with a Spanish extradition request for the embassy burning outstanding and never served. His brother Benedicto was convicted in Guatemala in 2018 of crimes against humanity and then acquitted.

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