Short answers, pulled from the story.
Efraín Ríos Montt was born on the 16th of June 1926 in Huehuetenango, a small city in the highlands of western Guatemala. He grew up into a large ladino family of the rural middle class whose members included his father who worked as a shopkeeper and his mother who worked as a seamstress.
In 1978, Efraín Ríos Montt left the Roman Catholic Church to join the Iglesia El Verbo, an evangelical Protestant church affiliated with the Gospel Outreach Church based in Eureka, California. This spiritual crisis marked a significant event in the ascendency of Protestantism within the traditionally Catholic nation of Guatemala.
On the 23rd of March 1982, a military coup culminated with the installation of a three-person junta presided by General Efraín Ríos Montt alongside General Horacio Maldonado Schaad and Colonel Luis Gordillo Martínez. The informal group known as oficiales jóvenes overthrew President Lucas and prevented General Ángel Aníbal Guevara from succeeding him as president.
Efraín Ríos Montt implemented a rural pacification strategy known as Fusiles y Frijoles or beans and bullets which included organizing Civil Defense Patrols composed primarily of indigenous villagers. Critics claim this strategy was a scorched earth campaign waged against the indigenous Maya population that resulted in the annihilation of nearly 600 villages according to the 1999 report by the UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission.
On the 10th of May 2013, Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted by the court of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 80 years imprisonment. The Constitutional Court of Guatemala overturned his conviction on the 20th of May 2013 because he had not been allowed an effective defense during some of the proceedings before the case closed following his death in April 2018.