Efrain Rios Montt dies at 91: lawyer
Former dictator of Guatemala
Former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, who seized power in a 1982 coup and presided over one of the bloodiest periods of Guatemala’s civil war as soldiers waged a scorched-earth campaign to root out Marxist guerrillas, died on Sunday, his lawyers said.
Lawyer Jaime Hernandez said the family told him the 91-year-old died of a heart attack. Another of his attorneys, Luis Rosales, said he “died in peace, surrounded by his family,” a striking contrast to the thousands of Guatemalans who died barbaric deaths during his rule and were often tossed into unmarked graves or whose bodies disappeared.
Echoing Rios Montt’s longstanding, angry denials, Rosales said, “Here (in Guatemala) there was no genocide.”
Rios Montt was convicted in 2013 of genocide and crimes against humanity for the massacre of 1,771 indigenous Ixil Mayans by security forces under his command.
But the ruling was swiftly set aside and a new trial ordered, dismaying human rights activists and victims who long sought to see him punished for atrocities during his 17-month regime.
In October, his trial on genocide charges resumed behind closed doors after being suspended for more than a year while his lawyers argued that he was too senile to participate, with no memory and unable to make decisions.
He is survived by his wife, two children and several grandchildren.
An ex-general known for inspiring fear and giving speeches at a near-shout, Rios Montt was later a longtime member of congress and one of the most influential figures in Guatemalan politics for more than three decades.
Born June 16, 1926, in the city of Huehuetenango, in western Guatemala’s highlands, Rios Montt grew up in a conservative Roman Catholic family.
He entered the army in 1946 as a cadet and, over a long career, held nearly every military post there was: troop assistant, platoon commander, instructor, defence secretary. He attended the U.S. School of the Americas in the 1950s, and became a brigadier general in 1972.
Rios Montt first ran for president in 1974 but lost amid allegations of electoral fraud and was sent to the Guatemalan Embassy in Spain as military attache.
In March 1982, he seized power in a military coup and promptly suspended the constitution, disbanded congress and set in motion a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign that resulted in thousands of deaths. According to a U.N. truth commission, the worst atrocities of the 1960-1996 Guatemalan Civil War took place during his rule.
Nonetheless he continued to receive the support of the United States, where President Ronald Reagan called him “a man of great personal integrity and commitment.”
Rios Montt’s government was known for faceless judges presiding over summary trials of suspected subversives, and for moralistic Sunday night TV messages from the strongman who had become a born-again evangelical Christian.
“A man who has two women is a pig; a woman who has two men is a hen,” he said in one, using slang that translates roughly as a woman of loose morals.
In power, Rios Montt alienated a broad spectrum of society, including the military, businesspeople and the Catholic Church, leading to his ouster by another putsch in August 1983 led by his own defence minister.
However he remained popular among many for his social welfare initiatives and for the relative peace his “iron fist” approach brought to some regions. In 1985, a clause was added to the constitution barring him and his progeny from seeking the presidency.