Home > Efraín Ríos Montt
José Efraín Ríos Montt (born June 16, 1926 in Huehuetenango, Guatemala) is a former President of Guatemala and former president of the Congress of Guatemala. In 2003, as the candidate of the ruling right-wing Guatemalan Republican Front, he made a failed attempt to be elected president.Ríos Montt is best known for heading a military regime ( 1982– 1983) and presiding over some of the worst atrocities of Guatemala's 36-year civil war, which ended with a peace treaty in 1996. The civil war pitted MarxistMarxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. Marx drew on Hegel's philosophy, the political economy of Adam Smith, R rebelA rebel is a person active in insurgency, such as members of paramilitary forces who take up arms against an established government. It often also refers to a cultural attitude which rejects normal, conformist attitudes, often for no reasonable cause, rat groups against the armyAn army comprises all of a nation's land-based military forces or a specific large military force. Military land forces An army is a military organization. The word army can refer to any armed force, or more specifically a force primarily designed for lan, but with huge numbers of MayanThis article will mostly concern itself with the Maya civilization after the conquest by Spain. Their pre-Columbian culture is dealt with in the Maya civilization article. The Maya people are a native American people of southern Mexico and northern Centra campesinoCampesino means simple farmer in Spanish. While English has a possible equivalent, peasant this word has negative connotations that the Spanish word doesn't have. This is because in the Hispanic world, many people, referred to as campesinos still survives caught in the crossfire. Some 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during the conflict, making it Latin America's most violent war in modern history.
Human-rights groups say Ríos Montt, a staunch anti-Communist who has had ties to the United StatesThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in for over five decades (via the PentagonThis is an article about the geometrical shape. See The Pentagon for an article about the building near Washington, DC. See also: Pentagon (disambiguation). In geometry, a pentagon is any five-sided polygon. However, the term is commonly used to mean a re's School of the Americas, the CIA, presidential administrations, and the religious right), was among the bloodiest strongmen in Latin American history.
Ríos Montt, popularly known as "the general," remains one of the most controversial figures in Guatemalan history. Regarded by many as a genocidal neo- fascist, the former military ruler is seen by his supporters, mostly the ladino minority, as a strong leader capable of restoring order to this turbulent nation. The Mayan Indian population suffered greatly under his rule. It is not unlikely that his government deliberately targeted Mayans under the pretext of pursuing guerillas, a modern expression of deep-seated racism against the native population. Guatemala's highest court, which recently had several judges appointed from Ríos Montt's political party, approved his candidacy for president, ostensibly ignoring a constitutional ban against former dictators' running for president. Nonetheless, despite widespread intimidation, violence and fraud during the campaign, including the deaths of 30 political opponents, Ríos Montt lost the 2004 presidential election.
