José Efraín Ríos Montt (Spanish: [efɾaˈin ˈrios ˈmont]; 16 June 1926 – 1 April 2018) was a Guatemalan military officer, politician, and dictator who served as de facto President of Guatemala from 1982 to 1983.

In 1982, discontent with the rule of General Romeo Lucas García, the worsening security situation in Guatemala, and accusations of electoral fraud led to a coup d'état by a group of junior military officers who installed Ríos Montt as head of a government junta.

He returned to public life in 2007 as a member of Congress, thereby gaining legal immunity from long-running lawsuits alleging war crimes committed by him and some of his ministers and counselors during their term in the presidential palace in 1982–83.

However, he was removed from that post after three months and, much to his chagrin, dispatched to the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, D.C.[5] According to anthropologist David Stoll, writing in 1990, Ríos Montt was "at odds with the army's command structure since being sidelined by military president Gen. Carlos Arana Osorio in 1974.

[10] In the run-up to the election, United States officials characterized the candidate Ríos Montt as a "capable left-of-center military officer" who would shift Guatemala "perceptibly but not radically to the left.

[8] It was rumored that the military high command paid Ríos Montt several hundred thousand dollars in exchange for his departure from public life and that during his exile in Spain his unhappiness led him to excessive drinking.

By early 1982, the Marxist guerrilla groups belonging to the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) umbrella organization had made gains in the countryside and were seen as threatening an attack on the capital, Guatemala City.

Ríos Montt had not been directly involved in the planning of the coup and was chosen by the oficiales jóvenes because of the respect that he had acquired as director of the military academy and as the presidential candidate of the democratic opposition in 1974.

The government junta immediately declared martial law and suspended the constitution, shut down the legislature, and set up special tribunals (tribunales de fuero especial) to prosecute both common criminals and political dissidents.

[26] Critics have argued that, in practice, Ríos Montt's strategy amounted to a scorched earth campaign targeted against the indigenous Maya population, particularly in the departments of Quiché, Huehuetenango, and Baja Verapaz.

"[30] According to analysts Georges A. Fauriol and Eva Loser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "an important component in the 'normalization' of the Guatemalan environment was a marked decrease by late 1982 in the state of fear and violence, which allowed the repositioning of Guatemala's civilian urbanized leadership toward a more vital role in national affairs.

"[33] According to French sociologist Yvon Le Bot, writing in 1992, Ríos Montt won a decisive victory over a guerrilla force already weakened by the blows landed upon it by General Benedicto Lucas during the last months of his brother's government.

Since then, he is, more than the Lucas brothers, the bête noire of the revolutionaries who do not forgive him for having consummated their defeat by turning their own weapons against them and in particular by the appeal to the moral and religious sentiments so profoundly rooted among the Guatemalan Mayas.

[34]In a similar vein, historian Virginia Garrard-Burnett concluded in 2010 that General Ríos Montt's military's successes "were unprecedented in Guatemala’s modern history" and that "had the Cold War remained the primary lens of historical analysis, [he] might well be remembered as a visionary statesman instead of an author of crimes against humanity.

"[35] Even some of Ríos Montt's harshest critics have noted that, in his later political career during the 1990s and 2000s, he enjoyed firm and enduring electoral support in the departments of Quiché, Huehuetenango, and Baja Verapaz, which had seen the worst violence during the 1982–83 counter-insurgency campaign.

[48] The Reagan administration did continue the sale of helicopter parts to the Guatemalan military, even though 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.

[57] American journalist Vincent Bevins writes that by corralling indigenous populations from suspect communities into state-established "model villages" (aldeas modelos) that were "little more than deadly concentration camps," Ríos Montt waged genocide differently than his predecessors, although massacres continued apace.

The new government flatly refused to negotiate with the kidnappers, but the family of General Ríos Montt obtained the release of his sister Marta on 25 September, after 119 days in captivity, by procuring the publication of an FAR comuniqué in several international newspapers.

[5] According to anthropologist David Stoll Ríos Montt's popularity was difficult to comprehend for most scholars and journalists because they have been so deeply influenced by human rights and solidarity work [...] The most influential literature on Guatemala has been written by activists, the majority of whom are also academics.

In his youth, Portillo had been affiliated with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), one of the Marxist insurgent groups that later became part of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) and which Ríos Montt had combated during his term as president in 1982–83.

On 20 July, the Supreme Court suspended Ríos Montt's campaign and agreed to hear a complaint brought by two right-of-center parties that the retired General was constitutionally barred from running for president.

On 24 July, in an event that came to be known as jueves negro ("Black Thursday"), thousands of masked FRG supporters invaded the streets of Guatemala City, armed with machetes, clubs, and guns.

Since the victims of this violence had disproportionately belonged to the indigenous Mayan population of the country, the CEH report characterized the counterinsurgency campaign, significantly designed and advanced during Ríos Montt's presidency, as having included deliberate "acts of genocide.

Ríos Montt admitted that the Guatemalan army had committed crimes during his term as president and commander-in-chief, but he denied that he had planned or ordered those actions or that there had been any deliberate policy by his government to target the native population that could amount to genocide.

[70] On July 7, 2006, Pedraz issued an international arrest warrant against Efraín Ríos Montt[71] and former presidents Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores and Romeo Lucas García (the latter of whom had died in May 2006 in Venezuela).

Former minister of the interior Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz, who remained at large, and ex-chiefs of police Germán Chupina Barahona and Pedro García Arredondo were also named on the international arrest warrants.

[75][76] On March 1, 2012, a judge ruled the charges against Ríos Montt were not covered by the 1996 National Reconciliation Law, which had granted amnesty for political and common crimes committed in the course of the Guatemalan Civil War.

[77] On 28 January 2013, judge Miguel Angel Galves opened a pre-trial hearing against Ríos Montt and retired General José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez for genocide and crimes against humanity, in particular the killing of 1,771 Maya Ixil Indians, including children.

[86] Anthropologist David Stoll, though granting that large numbers of innocent civilians were killed by the army under Ríos Montt's presidency, questioned both the fairness of 2013 trial and the grounds for the charge of genocide.

[98][99][100] The University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation, funded by director Steven Spielberg, is undertaking an extensive analysis of the genocidal Guatemalan civil wars, documented by hundreds of filmed interviews with survivors.