On the afternoon of May 10, 2013, in a packed courtroom in the Supreme Court building in Guatemala City, a three-judge panel of High Risk Court "A" found Efraín Ríos Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. He was 86. Thirty years earlier, as Guatemala's de facto head of state, he had presided over seventeen months of the country's civil war, and the court held him responsible as intellectual author of the killing of 1,771 Maya Ixil people in three towns of the Quiché highlands. It sentenced him to 50 years for genocide and 30 years for crimes against humanity, to be served one after the other, revoked his house arrest and ordered him taken to prison that evening. No national court anywhere had convicted a former head of state of genocide before.
The verdict lasted ten days. On May 20, 2013, Guatemala's Constitutional Court voted three to two to annul the final stage of the trial, the conviction and the sentence with it, and ordered the case wound back to where it had stood on April 19. Then came a long procedural descent: a retrial that collapsed on its first morning, a two-year fight over a 1986 amnesty, a finding that the old general had dementia and could not be sentenced even if convicted, a closed-door retrial that began, stopped and began again. When he died in Guatemala City on April 1, 2018, at 91, no court had reached a new verdict, and the case against him was closed. Legally he died unconvicted. The finding against him had been made once, by a court that heard nearly a hundred Ixil witnesses, and then erased.
José Efraín Ríos Montt was born on June 16, 1926, in Huehuetenango, in Guatemala's western highlands near the Mexican border. He began military training at 17, in 1943, and entered the Escuela Politécnica, the national military academy, as a cadet in 1946. He graduated in 1950 as an infantry officer and military engineer and went on to further training at Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone, site of the United States Army's School of the Americas.
In 1954 he took part in the coup, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency, that removed President Jacobo Árbenz. Through the 1950s he served as an instructor and company commander at the military academy and in Military Zone 20, the command covering Quiché, the department where the Ixil towns lie. From 1963 to 1967 he served in the Mariscal Zavala brigade, rising to command it. From 1967 to 1972 he headed the army's Operations Directorate, and in 1970 he became director of the Escuela Politécnica. In January 1973 he was promoted to brigadier general and made chief of the Army General Staff.
Three months after reaching the top of the army, he resigned his command to run for president. In the election of March 3, 1974, he stood as the candidate of the opposition National Opposition Front. The official count placed him second, roughly 70,000 votes behind General Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García. He alleged fraud and declared himself president-elect, but the claim changed nothing, and the Laugerud government sent him abroad as military attaché at the Guatemalan embassy in Madrid.
He spent about three years in Spain and returned to Guatemala in the late 1970s. In 1978 he left the Catholic Church and joined the Iglesia Verbo, an evangelical congregation linked to the Gospel Outreach mission, and became one of its elders.
On March 23, 1982, a coup removed the government of General Romeo Lucas García, and Ríos Montt, then retired, was named head of the governing junta. On June 9, 1982, he set the junta aside and became sole ruler, holding the presidency and command of the army with both executive and legislative powers. He suspended the constitution, imposed a state of siege and governed under a Fundamental Statute of Government that replaced it. On April 10, 1982, his government launched a National Security and Development Plan. A law on special tribunals allowed the death penalty for a broad list of offenses, and those courts sat with judges whose identities were withheld.
In the countryside the government organized Civil Defense Patrols, local units of village men that were officially recognized on April 14, 1983. The state of siege was lifted on March 23, 1983. Less than five months later, on August 8, 1983, his own defense minister, General Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores, removed him in a second coup.
The war in which those seventeen months fell had begun in 1960 and would run until peace accords were signed in 1996. A truth commission backed by the United Nations later found that some 200,000 people were killed or disappeared over the 36 years, and that more than 80 percent of them were of Maya descent. His period in power is widely regarded as one of the deadliest phases of that conflict.
The Ixil are a Maya people whose homeland, often called the Ixil Triangle, lies in the south of Quiché department around the towns of Santa María Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal and San Gaspar Chajul. The charges that reached trial three decades later concerned those three towns and the surrounding communities between March 1982 and August 1983.
The trial court's findings set out the case in the terms of the law. The court said it was "totally convinced" that the army had intended to destroy the Maya Ixil as a group, because it regarded them as the enemy for supporting the guerrillas, and that the killings followed a systematic plan rather than spontaneous acts. It found that racism was among the causes. It tied the targeting of the Ixil to army campaign plans known as Victoria 82, Firmeza 83 and Operación Sofía. The figures in the indictment and the findings were 1,771 Ixil people killed, some 29,000 forcibly displaced, and other serious abuses against the population. A statistician called as an expert witness told the court that 5.5 percent of the Ixil population had been killed, at roughly eight times the rate among the non-indigenous ladino population of the same area.
On responsibility, the court found that Ríos Montt had ordered the plans, had full knowledge of what was being done, and had the power to stop it and did not. It convicted him both as a participant who designed the strategy and under the doctrine of command responsibility.
After the coup that removed him, Ríos Montt built a second career in civilian politics, and for nearly two decades it protected him. The 1985 constitution, in its Article 186, barred anyone who had led a coup from the presidency and the vice presidency. In October 1990 his presidential candidacy was rejected by the electoral registry, the electoral tribunal and the Supreme Court. After that election the coalition he led became the Guatemalan Republican Front, the FRG.
In early legislative elections on August 14, 1994, the FRG won 33 of the 80 seats in Congress, and Ríos Montt took a seat that carried immunity from prosecution. On December 2, 1994, he was elected president of Congress and held the post until 1996. In 1995 the electoral tribunal disqualified him from the presidential race again, about four months before the vote of November 12, and Alfonso Portillo ran in his place. Portillo lost that contest. When he later won the presidency, Ríos Montt served again as president of Congress, from January 14, 2000, through 2004.
In 2003 he tried once more. The electoral registry rejected his candidacy on June 6, the electoral tribunal upheld the refusal on June 16, and the Supreme Court did the same on July 5. On July 14 the Constitutional Court ruled four to three in his favor and ordered him registered, and on July 30 it overrode a Supreme Court suspension of that order. On November 9, 2003, he finished third with 19.3 percent of the vote and was eliminated. He returned to Congress in the 2007 elections and took his seat on January 14, 2008. His term, and with it his immunity, ended on January 14, 2012.
The legal case against him began outside Guatemala. On December 2, 1999, the Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchú filed a complaint before Spain's National Court, the Audiencia Nacional, under Spanish universal jurisdiction law. The court accepted it in March 2000. On October 5, 2005, Spain's Constitutional Court ruled that Spanish courts could prosecute genocide and crimes against humanity committed abroad, and on July 7, 2006, a Spanish judge issued an international arrest order. Guatemala refused to extradite him and the others named in 2007, and on December 17, 2007, Guatemala's Constitutional Court annulled the effect of the Spanish proceedings. The Spanish case nonetheless produced testimony and military documents that were later used at home.
In Guatemala, the Center for Human Rights Legal Action, known by its Spanish initials CALDH, filed a complaint on June 6, 2001, on behalf of victims' associations, among them the Association for Justice and Reconciliation. Parliamentary immunity held the proceedings against him back for more than a decade.
Twelve days after his immunity lapsed, on January 26, 2012, he appeared at a preliminary hearing in the Supreme Court of Justice building in Guatemala City before the pretrial judge of a court for high-risk cases. Prosecutors presented evidence covering more than 100 incidents, at least 1,771 deaths and the displacement of nearly 30,000 people. He did not speak. The judge found the evidence sufficient to try him for genocide and crimes against humanity. Prosecutors asked that he be jailed as a flight risk. The judge found that he was not one, set bail at about $64,000 and placed him under house arrest under the watch of the National Civil Police.
In May 2012 the Attorney General's office brought a second case against him, charging him with aggravated homicide and crimes against humanity over the killing of more than 200 residents of Dos Erres, a community in La Libertad in the Petén department, in December 1982. The pretrial judge later changed the charge in that case to genocide, over the objections of both the prosecution and the civil parties.
From 2011 onward his defense filed recusal motions against the pretrial judge and sought to admit evidence after the deadline had passed. The judge excluded that evidence, and both sides appealed. Those disputes would follow the case into the courtroom.
The trial opened on March 19, 2013, before High Risk Court "A". Beside Ríos Montt sat his former head of military intelligence, charged with the same crimes. On the first day the court expelled the new defense lawyer he had hired, then reinstated him after the lawyer won a motion, and the lawyer went on to file further recusals that produced more appeals and delay. Parallel courts issued suspensions and injunctions. In April a pretrial judge sought to halt the trial and to set the whole process back to November 2011, before he had been charged. The presiding judge refused to stop.
Over roughly two months and more than 200 hours in court, nearly a hundred victims testified, many of them in Ixil, with interpreters and simultaneous translation through headsets in the public gallery. Expert witnesses gave evidence on the army's documents and on the scale of the deaths. Prosecutors asked for 75 years for each defendant.
On May 9, the day before the verdict, his lawyers asked that he be allowed to address the court. He said the country had been in serious condition before the coup of 1982, with inflation, poverty and a growing insurgency. As head of state, he said, he had been occupied with national affairs, and each commander had been responsible for his own territory. He denied ordering or authorizing any act against an ethnic or religious group and said he was innocent. In a brief second remark he said that justice was all he asked.
The panel delivered its decision on Friday, May 10, 2013. It found that the evidence proved the charges beyond a reasonable doubt and convicted him of genocide and crimes against humanity. It sentenced him to 50 years for genocide and 30 years for crimes against humanity, consecutively, a total of 80 years. It revoked his house arrest and, finding him a flight risk, ordered him taken directly to prison under police escort.
His co-defendant was acquitted of both charges. The court found that his responsibility and involvement had not been sufficiently established and that he did not hold command responsibility, with no evidence that he could order or stop the commanders in the field. The court directed prosecutors to continue investigating related crimes.
Ríos Montt showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read. Afterward he called it an international political show, said his conscience was clear and predicted that it would be overturned. His lawyer cited a dozen legal challenges still pending.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called the verdict historic and said that Guatemala had become the first country to convict a former head of state of genocide in its own national courts. On May 13 the court held a hearing on reparations, and it ordered symbolic measures, among them a public apology, memorials and changes to the school curriculum, but not the return of land. The full written judgment, 718 pages long, was released on May 17.
Three days later the Constitutional Court took the verdict away. Its five-judge panel ruled on May 20, 2013, by three votes to two, that the trial should have been halted on April 19, during the series of challenges brought by the defense lawyer the trial court had expelled on the first day. The majority held that the trial court had not followed earlier instructions, had suspended the trial on its own motion, and had not properly dealt with the lawyer's recusal motion. Everything that happened in the courtroom after April 19, the conviction and the sentence included, was declared void. Evidence heard before that date could stand; anything introduced or argued afterward would have to be presented again. The acquittal of the former intelligence chief was left in place.
The two dissenting judges held that the defense had suffered no harm, since it had already obtained the relief it sought, and that once a verdict had been reached the proper path was an appeal, not annulment. One of them wrote that the recusal issue had been manufactured to obstruct the trial.
Because the trial judges had already pronounced sentence, they could not hear the case again, and it had to pass to a new court. Almost every trial judge in the system had played some pretrial role in the case, which made a fresh panel difficult to form. No date was set for the trial to resume.
A week after the annulment, on May 29, 2013, the Constitutional Court heard a second line of defense: that he was covered by Decree 8-86, a blanket amnesty issued in 1986 under Mejía Víctores for crimes committed between March 23, 1982, and January 14, 1986. The lower courts had already rejected the claim, holding that no amnesty could bar prosecution for genocide or crimes against humanity. In October 2013 the Constitutional Court sent the question back, directing the appellate chamber to explain its 2012 ruling that the amnesty did not apply.
The answer took two years. Over that time more than 100 judges excused themselves from sitting on the three-judge panel needed to rule. On October 5, 2015, the first chamber of the court of appeals ruled unanimously that the 1986 decree could not apply to genocide or crimes against humanity, holding that they were neither political nor common crimes.
In October 2013 the case was transferred to High Risk Tribunal "B", which set a restart date of January 5, 2015. On that morning the defense moved for the recusal of the presiding judge. She rejected the motion, the other two judges voted in favor, and the proceedings collapsed before any evidence was heard.
His lawyers then argued that he was no longer mentally fit to stand trial, and the court sent him for psychiatric evaluation. On August 25, 2015, the tribunal ruled that the psychiatric experts agreed he had a mental illness, with periods of lucidity alternating with dementia, and that he could not appear in open court. Guatemalan law provided a special procedure for a defendant who had been competent at the time of the alleged crimes but no longer was. Under it he would not attend; a guardian would direct his defense; the hearings would be closed to the press and the public, though victims could attend; and if convicted he would face no criminal sanction, although measures such as psychiatric admission could be ordered. The court set the retrial for January 11, 2016.
It began instead on March 16, 2016, behind closed doors. He was absent. His co-defendant was present, and the press and public were removed. After about a dozen hearings the proceedings stopped again in May 2016, when the First Court of Appeals granted a protective motion brought by the civil parties, who argued that the victims were entitled to a public trial of the co-defendant. The appeals court found that the joint proceeding had violated the co-defendant's right to a public trial and Ríos Montt's right to a private one. The Constitutional Court upheld that finding and ruled that the two men must be tried separately.
The retrial resumed on October 13, 2017, as two proceedings before the same tribunal: his behind closed doors, his co-defendant's in open court. By then about 25 witnesses had testified. The Constitutional Court had ordered the tribunal to pick up where it had stopped in May 2016 rather than begin again. Ríos Montt was not present and was represented by counsel. On the first day the tribunal rejected defense motions challenging its competence and the impartiality of its judges as delaying tactics and removed two defense lawyers from the courtroom.
The Petén case moved on its own slower track. It had stalled for years and was revived in August 2016. On November 16, 2016, the pretrial judge of High Risk Court "A" found that he was mentally incapacitated but refused the defense's request to dismiss the charges, ruling that the legal requirements for ending the prosecution had not been met. On March 31, 2017, the same judge found sufficient evidence to send him to trial for genocide and crimes against humanity, under the special procedure, with hearings closed and no criminal sanction possible, and set a hearing on the evidence for May 18, 2017.
He died in Guatemala City on April 1, 2018. He was 91. The Ixil retrial was still under way, and he had maintained his innocence. The tribunal closed the case against him, and the proceedings against his former head of military intelligence went on alone.
On September 26, 2018, High Risk Tribunal "B" delivered its verdict in that case. All three judges found that the State of Guatemala, and specifically its army, had committed genocide and crimes against humanity against the Maya Ixil during the de facto government of Efraín Ríos Montt in 1982 and 1983. They found that the army had planned to exterminate the Ixil and had treated the group as one with the armed guerrilla organizations. By two votes to one, they acquitted the former intelligence chief, finding that it had not been proved that he gave the orders. It was his second acquittal on the same charges. The court heard about a hundred survivors and relatives of victims. The finding of genocide stood; no individual was held criminally responsible for it.
The charges against him rested on two articles of Guatemala's own Penal Code, Decree 17-73, which had been in force since 1973, years before the events. Article 376 defines genocide. It follows the 1948 Genocide Convention closely, with two differences: it does not require an intent to destroy the group "as such," and the offense of subjecting a group to conditions that could lead to its destruction does not require a specific intent. Article 378, despite its title of crimes against the duties of humanity, implements Guatemala's obligations under the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and carries 20 to 30 years. Because both provisions predated the war years at issue, the trial raised no question of retroactive law.
Two amnesties bore on the case. The 1996 National Reconciliation Law, passed as the peace accords ended the war, expressly excludes genocide and other international crimes from its limited amnesty. The older Decree 8-86 was a blanket amnesty for the years of his rule; the appellate ruling of October 5, 2015, held that it could not reach genocide or crimes against humanity. The 2001 complaint was filed within the twenty-year limitation period for genocide.
The special procedure that governed his retrial from August 2015 applies under Guatemalan law to a defendant judged competent at the time of the alleged offense but unable to stand trial now. It could produce a finding of guilt or innocence but not a sentence of imprisonment.
No final judgment of guilt stands against Efraín Ríos Montt. The conviction of May 10, 2013, was annulled on May 20 on procedural grounds, not on its merits. The annulment itself passed by a single vote, over a dissent that called the remedy wrong in law. He denied the charges from the first hearing to the end of his life, telling the trial court that he had never ordered or authorized acts against any ethnic or religious group and that field commanders answered for their own territory.
The 2018 verdict that the army committed genocide against the Ixil during his government was reached in a trial from which his case had already been closed. It does not amount to a judgment on him. The Petén case was sent to trial in 2017 under a procedure that could not have produced a sentence, and no verdict in it is on record. The war-wide death toll of about 200,000 comes from the truth commission, not from a court, and the court figures for the Ixil case, 1,771 killed and about 29,000 displaced, are the figures of the indictment and the 2013 findings.
June 16, 1926: Born in Huehuetenango, Guatemala.
1946: Enters the Escuela Politécnica as a cadet; graduates as an infantry officer in 1950.
1954: Takes part in the coup that removes President Jacobo Árbenz.
January 1973: Promoted to brigadier general and chief of the Army General Staff.
March 3, 1974: Runs for president as the opposition candidate; officially placed second.
1978: Joins the Iglesia Verbo.
March 23, 1982: Named head of the junta after the coup that removes Romeo Lucas García.
June 9, 1982: Becomes sole ruler with executive and legislative powers.
April 14, 1983: Civil Defense Patrols officially recognized.
August 8, 1983: Removed in a coup led by his defense minister, Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores.
October 1990: Presidential candidacy rejected under Article 186 of the constitution.
December 2, 1994: Elected president of Congress.
December 2, 1999: Complaint filed against him before Spain's National Court.
June 6, 2001: Complaint filed in Guatemala on behalf of victims' associations.
November 9, 2003: Finishes third in the presidential election.
July 7, 2006: Spanish judge issues an international arrest order.
January 14, 2012: His congressional term and immunity end.
January 26, 2012: Ordered to stand trial for genocide and crimes against humanity; placed under house arrest.
May 2012: Charged in a second case concerning Dos Erres, Petén.
March 19, 2013: Trial opens before High Risk Court "A".
May 10, 2013: Convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity; sentenced to 80 years.
May 20, 2013: Constitutional Court annuls the verdict, three votes to two.
January 5, 2015: Retrial collapses on its first day after a judge's recusal.
August 25, 2015: Tribunal orders a closed special procedure under which he cannot be sentenced.
October 5, 2015: Appeals court rules the 1986 amnesty cannot apply to genocide or crimes against humanity.
March 16, 2016: Closed-door retrial begins; suspended in May 2016.
March 31, 2017: Sent to trial in the Petén case under the special procedure.
October 13, 2017: Ixil retrial resumes in separate proceedings.
April 1, 2018: Dies in Guatemala City, aged 91; the case against him is closed.
September 26, 2018: Tribunal finds the army committed genocide against the Maya Ixil and acquits his co-defendant.