Efraín Ríos Montt

José Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan general and politician who ruled the country as de facto head of state from March 1982 to August 1983 after seizing power in a coup. Born on 16 June 1926 in Huehuetenango, he died on 1 April 2018 in Guatemala City at the age of 91.

A career officer trained at the Guatemalan military academy and at the U.S. School of the Americas, he ran for president in 1974 as the Christian Democrat candidate and was widely believed to have been cheated of victory. He later became a minister in an evangelical Pentecostal congregation, El Verbo, an affiliation that shaped his public rhetoric throughout his time in power.

On 23 March 1982 a group of junior officers overthrew General Romeo Lucas García and installed him at the head of a three-man junta. He soon assumed sole executive authority and intensified the army's counter-insurgency campaign in the western highlands against the leftist URNG guerrillas. The campaign included scorched-earth operations against Maya Ixil, K'iche', and other indigenous communities; United Nations and Guatemalan truth commissions later concluded that acts of genocide had been committed during this period.

He was deposed in August 1983 by his own defence minister, Óscar Mejía Víctores, and later returned to politics as a congressional deputy. In May 2013 a Guatemalan court convicted him of genocide and crimes against humanity, sentencing him to 80 years; the verdict was annulled days later on procedural grounds, and he died during a retrial.

The name Efraín is the Spanish form of Ephraim, from the Hebrew Efrayim meaning "fruitful". He carried it through one of the most contested chapters of twentieth-century Central American history.