Efraín Ríos Montt
From Conservapedia
Efraín Ríos Montt (born Huehuetenango, 1926) is a Guatemalan general, politician and evangelical minister. He ruled Guatemala as de facto dictator from 1982 to 1983. The seventeen months of his régime were the bloodiest of the country's 36-year civil war, 10,000s Mayans and political opponents were killed.
Ríos Montt received part of his military education at the School of the Americas and participated in the 1954 coup against social democratic president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. In 1974 he ran for presidency supported by a coalition led by the centrist Guatemalan Christian Democratic Party, but lost to the 'official' rightwing military candidate Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García, probably after the military rigged the election.
Ríos Montt left the Roman Catholic Church in 1978 and joined the Pentecostal Church of the Word, based in California, for which he became a minister. During a visit to the United States he befriended rightwing televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.
Ríos Montt rose to power in March 1982 after leading a coup against outgoing president Fernando Romeo Lucas García after another rigged election. Initially he ruled together with two other generals, but he quickly pushed them aside and became the sole ruler of Guatemala, with the fuctions of President, Secretary of Defense and Commander of the Armed forces. Ríos Montt became the first protestant ruler of any Latin American country.
Ríos Montt embarked on the most brutal counterinsurgency campaign in modern Latin American history. A stage of siege was declared and constitutional rights suspended. The Guatemalan army applied scorched earth tactics in its war against the guerrilla fighters of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). Mayan peasants were forced to join 'self defence batallions' and to kill other Mayans suspected of supporting the URNG. Dozens of villages were completely exterminated, Dos Erres and Plan de Sánchez being the most notorious examples. The Guatemalan Army was noted for its brutality: during their massacres they forced men into a large house which was then put on fire, women and girls were routinely raped before being shot and children were murdered by bashing their heads against rocks. Other Mayans were rounded up and forced to work in 'model villages', in reality concentration camps. The Historical Clarification Commission of the 1990's, supported by the United Nations and the Catholic Church, called Ríos Montts campaign a deliberate genocide against the Mayan population. Leftists, priests supporting the liberation theology and German landowners were also targetted. In 1983 the URNG was seriously weakened although the war would continue to rage on until 1996. The campaign had claimed 10,000 to 75,000 lives, hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans had fled to Mexico and millions were displaced inside the country.
As his army was ravaging the country Ríos Montt was often seen on television giving protestant sermons. In the first weeks of his rule Pat Robertson was invited to Guatemala, and Robertson also defended the Guatemalan dictator in his own television program. Ríos Montt often invoked his religious beliefs when justifying his terror campaign, comparing the 'four plagues of Guatemala', corruption, subversy, ignorance and hunger with the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and said that "true Christians should live with the Bible in one hand and a gun in the other". Guatemala under Ríos Montt was shunned by most countries, except the United States, Taiwan and El Salvador.
Ríos Montt grew increasingly unpopular amongst the country's traditional elite. He introduced Value Added Tax, something never seen before in Guatemala. He often promoted or awarded important posts to friends or fellow protestants, ignoring traditional hierarchies. After having survived two coup attempts he was finally ousted in October 1983 by general Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores, who claimed Guatemala under Ríos Montt had fallen into the hands of "religious fanatics".
Ríos Montt remained influential after his removal. In 1989 he founded the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) and was elected member of Congress for the FRG one year later. He was appointed president of Congress from 1994. As the constitution bans people who had participated from running for president he was not allowed to participate in the presidential elections, so Alfonso Portillo was FRG candidate for the presidency in the 1995 elections and again in the 1999 elections, which he won. Portillo was widely seen as a puppet of Ríos Montt, and his administration was characterized by its enormous corruption. In 2004, after the end of his presidency, Portillo fled to Mexico. He was extradited on corruption charges in 2008.
The Supreme Court again banned Ríos Montt for running for president in 2003, but after 'black tuesday', a day of severe rioting by FRG supporters in Guatemala City in which a journalist died, the Court decided that Ríos Montt could run for president. Ríos Montt ended up third in the election, after conservative Óscar Berger and center-left Álvaro Colom. In 2007 Ríos Montt was elected to Congress again.
In 2005 Spain ordered an international arrest warrant against Ríos Montt and several other military commanders for genocide and crimes against humanity.
Ríos Montt's daugher Zury Ríos Montt is currently the national leader of the FRG, and is married to US Republican politician Jerry Weller.
