Efraín Ríos Montt

• 1. Introduction

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  Efraín Ríos Montt died of a heart attack at his home in Guatemala City on the 1st of April 2018, at the age of 91, without ever completing a criminal trial. In 2013, a court had found him guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity, sentenced him to 80 years in prison, and then watched that sentence collapse within days. The questions his life raises are not simple ones. How does a man born into a shopkeeper's family in the highlands of western Guatemala rise to command one of the bloodiest periods in a brutal civil war? How does a onetime presidential candidate, admired for his honesty, become the subject of international arrest warrants? And how does he hold on to genuine popular support in the very communities his army devastated? The answers run through military academies and evangelical churches, through fraudulent elections and scorched earth campaigns, and through courtrooms in Guatemala City and Madrid.

• 2. A Career in Uniform

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  Efraín Ríos Montt was born on the 16th of June 1926 into a large ladino family of the rural middle class in Huehuetenango, a small city in the highlands of western Guatemala. His father was a shopkeeper and his mother a seamstress. When he applied to the Polytechnic School, Guatemala's national military academy, he was rejected because of his astigmatism. Rather than give up, he enlisted as a private and served alongside troops composed almost exclusively of full-blooded Mayas until 1946, when he was finally admitted. He graduated in 1950 at the top of his class.

  His subsequent training took him far beyond Guatemala. He received specialized instruction at the U.S.-run officer training institute that would later be known as the School of the Americas, then at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and later at the Italian War College. From the outset of his career, he acquired a reputation as a devoutly religious man and as a stern disciplinarian. He served as director of the Polytechnic School from 1970 to 1972 and was promoted to brigadier general in 1972 under the administration of General Carlos Arana Osorio. In 1973 he became the Army's Chief of Staff, only to be removed from the post after three months and dispatched to the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, D.C. Anthropologist David Stoll, writing in 1990, characterized Ríos Montt as having been "at odds with the army's command structure since being sidelined by military president Gen. Carlos Arana Osorio in 1974."

• 3. The Stolen Election of 1974

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  While stationed in the United States, Ríos Montt received an invitation from leaders of the Guatemalan Christian Democracy to stand for president at the head of a coalition of parties opposed to the incumbent regime. He ran in the March 1974 presidential elections as the National Opposition Front (FNO) candidate, with Alberto Fuentes Mohr, a respected economist and social democrat, as his running mate. U.S. officials characterized him as a "capable left-of-center military officer" who would shift Guatemala "perceptibly but not radically to the left."

  The official candidate was General Kjell Laugerud, whose running mate was Mario Sandoval Alarcón of the far-right National Liberation Movement. Most observers believed that Ríos Montt's FNO won the popular vote by an ample majority. When early returns made that trend unmistakable, the government halted the count. The manipulated results showed Laugerud finishing 71,000 votes ahead of Ríos Montt. Because Laugerud lacked an outright majority, the government-controlled National Congress decided the election, choosing him by a vote of 38 to 2, with 15 opposition deputies abstaining.

  According to independent journalist Carlos Rafael Soto Rosales, Ríos Montt and the FNO leadership knew the result was fraudulent but acquiesced because they feared a popular uprising "would result in disorder that would provoke worse government repression." Ríos Montt then left Guatemala to serve as military attaché at the Guatemalan embassy in Madrid, remaining there until 1977. It was rumored that the military high command paid him several hundred thousand dollars in exchange for his departure from public life.

• 4. Evangelical Conversion

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  In 1977, Ríos Montt retired from the army and returned to Guatemala. In 1978, a spiritual crisis led him to leave the Roman Catholic Church and join the Iglesia El Verbo, an evangelical Protestant church affiliated with the Gospel Outreach Church, which was based in Eureka, California. He became very active in the congregation and taught religion at a school affiliated with it. His younger brother Mario Enrique was, at the time, serving as the Catholic prelate of Escuintla.

  His conversion has been interpreted as a significant event in the rise of Protestantism within the traditionally Catholic nation of Guatemala. He later befriended prominent U.S. evangelists including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. This new religious identity would shape both the style and the substance of his rule when he later came to power, and it would ultimately become one of the justifications offered by those who overthrew him.

• 5. The 1982 Coup and the Junta

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  By early 1982, the security situation in Guatemala had deteriorated sharply under General Romeo Lucas García. Marxist guerrilla groups belonging to the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) had made gains in the countryside and were seen as threatening the capital. On the 7th of March 1982, the official candidate General Ángel Aníbal Guevara was declared the winner of the presidential election, a result denounced as fraudulent by all opposition parties. An informal group of oficiales jóvenes, or "young officers," then staged a coup.

  On the 23rd of March, a three-person military junta was installed, presided by Ríos Montt and composed also of General Horacio Maldonado Schaad and Colonel Luis Gordillo Martínez. Ríos Montt had not been involved in planning the coup; the young officers chose him because of the respect he had earned as director of the military academy and as the democratic opposition's presidential candidate in 1974. The coup was initially welcomed by many Guatemalans, given the repeated vote-rigging and blatant corruption of the previous government. U.S. Ambassador Frederic L. Chapin declared in April 1982 that thanks to the coup, "the Guatemalan government has come out of the darkness and into the light." Chapin subsequently reported, however, that Ríos Montt was "naïve and not concerned with practical realities."

  On the 9th of June, Ríos Montt forced the other two junta members to resign, making himself sole head of state, commander of the armed forces, and minister of defense. On the 17th of August 1982, he established a Consejo de Estado as an advisory body. This Council of State incorporated several representatives of Guatemala's indigenous population, a first in the history of the central Guatemalan government. As its president he appointed Jorge Serrano Elías, another evangelical with ties to the Guatemalan Christian Democracy.

• 6. Fusiles y Frijoles

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  Under the motto No robo, no miento, no abuso, meaning "I don't steal, I don't lie, I don't abuse," Ríos Montt launched a campaign against corruption while broadcasting regular Sunday television addresses known as the discursos de domingo. Historian Virginia Garrard-Burnett wrote that in those Sunday sermons Ríos Montt diagnosed Guatemala's crisis as rooted in three fundamental problems: a national lack of responsibility and respect for authority, an absolute lack of morality, and an inchoate sense of national identity. His moralizing earned him the derisive nickname "Dios Montt." In 1990, anthropologist David Stoll quoted a development organizer who said she liked him "because he used to get on television, point his finger at every Guatemalan, and say: 'The problem is you!'"

  The counter-insurgency itself operated under a plan called Fusiles y Frijoles, rendered in English as "beans and bullets." The "bullets" side involved the Civil Defense Patrols (Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil, PAC), composed primarily of indigenous villagers who patrolled in groups of twelve and were usually armed with a single M1 rifle, and sometimes not armed at all. The "beans" side involved programs meant to improve infrastructure and resources in Mayan villages, creating a link in the minds of indigenous communities between government cooperation and access to resources.

  In June 1982, the government announced an amnesty for insurgents willing to lay down their arms. A month later came a state of siege, which curtailed the activities of political parties and labor unions under threat of death by firing squad for subversion. Violence escalated. The 1999 report by the UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) found that the counter-insurgency resulted in the annihilation of nearly 600 villages. One instance was the Plan de Sánchez massacre in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, in July 1982, in which over 250 people were killed. An Amnesty International report from 1982 estimated that over 10,000 indigenous Guatemalans and peasant farmers were killed from March to July of that year, and that 100,000 rural villagers were forced to flee their homes. At the height of the bloodshed, reports put disappearances and killings at more than 3,000 per month. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, in its 1999 book State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996, concluded that Ríos Montt's government presided over "the most indiscriminate period of state terror."

  The picture was contested. United Nations special rapporteur Lord Colville of Culross wrote in 1984 that the lot of the rural population had improved under Ríos Montt, and that extrajudicial "killings and kidnappings virtually ceased" under his regime. Sociologist Carlos Sabino, writing in 2007, noted that the army's counter-insurgency in the highlands had begun at the end of 1981, before the coup, and that reported massacres peaked in May 1982 before dropping off rapidly. According to Sabino, the PACs organized by Ríos Montt grew to involve 900,000 men and "completely took away the guerrilla's capacity for political action." Historian Virginia Garrard-Burnett concluded in 2010 that the military's successes "were unprecedented in Guatemala's modern history."

  In 1982, Ríos Montt told ABC News that his success was due to the fact that "our soldiers were trained by Israelis." Israel had been supplying arms to Guatemala since 1974, and under Ríos Montt its cooperation extended to intelligence and operational training carried out in both countries. The United States, under the Reagan administration, had authorized the sale of $4 million in helicopter spare parts and $6.3 million in additional military supplies to the Guatemalan military in 1981. President Ronald Reagan met with Ríos Montt in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on the 4th of December 1982. Reagan declared: "President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment." A then-secret 1983 CIA cable noted a rise in "suspect right-wing violence" and an increasing number of bodies "appearing in ditches and gullies."

• 7. The Second Coup and Its Aftermath

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  By the end of 1982, Ríos Montt had alienated broad segments of Guatemalan society. The outspoken evangelicalism of his Sunday broadcasts embarrassed many. The military brass resented his promotion of young officers in defiance of the Army's traditional hierarchy. Middle-class citizens objected to the value-added tax announced on the 1st of August 1983. Shortly before Pope John Paul II visited Guatemala in March 1983, Ríos Montt had refused the Pope's appeal for clemency for six guerrillas sentenced to death by the regime's special tribunals.

  Having survived three attempted coups, Ríos Montt declared a state of emergency on the 29th of June 1983 and announced elections for July 1984. One week after the value-added tax announcement, on the 8th of August 1983, his own Minister of Defense, General Óscar Mejía Victores, overthrew the regime in a coup during which seven people were killed. The soldier who escorted Ríos Montt out of the National Palace reportedly told him: "A government that doesn't abuse doesn't govern."

  Political violence in Guatemala continued after his removal. American journalist Vincent Bevins wrote that by corralling indigenous populations into state-established "model villages" that were "little more than deadly concentration camps," Ríos Montt waged genocide differently from his predecessors. It has been estimated that as many as one and a half million Maya peasants were uprooted from their homes. On the 26th of June 1983, Ríos Montt's sister Marta Elena Ríos de Rivas, five months pregnant, was kidnapped in Guatemala City by members of the leftist Rebel Armed Forces. The family secured her release on the 25th of September, after 119 days in captivity, by arranging publication of an FAR communiqué in several international newspapers.

• 8. Courts, Immunity, and the Genocide Verdict

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  In 1989 Ríos Montt founded the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) and spent the 1990s accumulating political power. He served as president of the National Congress in 1995-1996 and again from 2000 to 2004, a position that granted him immunity from prosecution. A constitutional provision barred anyone who had come to power by coup from running for president, but in July 2003 the Constitutional Court, which had several judges appointed by the FRG government, approved his presidential candidacy.

  On the 24th of July 2003, in an event known as jueves negro, or "Black Thursday," thousands of masked FRG supporters bussed in from around the country invaded the streets of Guatemala City armed with machetes, clubs, and guns. They blocked traffic, marched on the courts, attacked opposition headquarters and newspapers, torched buildings, and shot out windows. A television journalist, Héctor Fernando Ramírez, died of a heart attack while fleeing a mob. The rioting ceased when an audio recording of Ríos Montt called his followers home. In the presidential election of the 9th of November 2003, Ríos Montt received 19.3% of the vote, finishing third.

  His legislative immunity expired on the 14th of January 2012. On the 26th of January 2012, he was formally indicted by Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz for genocide and crimes against humanity. The trial that began on the 19th of March 2013 was the first time a former Latin American head of state was tried for genocide in his own country. The charges listed the killing of 1,771 Maya Ixil Indians. On the 10th of May 2013, Judge Iris Yassmin Barrios Aguilar convicted Ríos Montt and sentenced him to 80 years imprisonment. The judge declared: "The defendant is responsible for masterminding the crime of genocide." The court found that 5.5% of the Ixil people had been wiped out by the army.

  Ten days later, on the 20th of May 2013, the Constitutional Court overturned the conviction on the grounds that he had not been allowed an effective defense during some of the proceedings. Ríos Montt's co-defendant, former chief of military intelligence José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, was acquitted in September 2018, though the court found that the counter-insurgency strategy itself had amounted to genocide. The Guatemalan forensic authority had ruled that Ríos Montt could not defend himself effectively due to dementia. The retrial had not been completed when he died on the 1st of April 2018, and the court closed the case. Pamela Yates's 1983 documentary When the Mountains Tremble, which had captured footage of the war between the Guatemalan military and the Mayan population, was used as forensic evidence in those same proceedings.