FILE PHOTO: Former Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt smiles during his genocide trial, which is drawing to a conclusion, at Supreme Court of Justice in Guatemala City Thomson Reuters By Sofia Menchu

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Former Guatemalan military dictator Efrain Rios Montt, hounded by charges of genocide for decades, died on Sunday aged 91, leaving bitter memories of his bloody stewardship of the Central American nation during its civil war. Ríos Montt, who presided over one of the bloodiest periods of the country’s civil war as soldiers waged a scorched-earth campaign to root out Marxist guerrillas, 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. Addressing the packed courtroom, Judge Yasmin Barrios, who presided over the trial, said Rios Montt “had full knowledge of everything that was happening and did not stop it.”

However, 10 days later, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court threw out the conviction on a technicality. An evangelical Protestant, Rios Montt served in Congress for nearly two decades and stepped down in 2012, putting an end to the immunity he enjoyed by law as a public official. Born on June 16, 1926, in Guatemala’s rural western highland department of Huehuetenango, Rios Montt took part in the 1954 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency-backed military coup that ousted democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz, who was seen by the United States as a communist sympathizer. Rios Montt rose to the rank of general in 1972 and sought the presidency in 1974, losing to rival Kjell Eugenio Laugerud, the handpicked successor of the incumbent. Rios Montt, diagnosed with senile dementia in 2015, faced a new genocide trial in 2017 overseen by a Supreme Court tribunal that was ongoing at the time of his death.
The trial of Guatemalan ex-ruler Efraín Ríos Montt, accused of genocide during the civil war in the 1980s, ends abruptly with the defendant's death.