Ríos Montt, the Evangelist
Part of a roundtable reflecting on the death and legacy of dictator Ríos Montt. Read the rest here.

April 24, 2018

Rachel Nolan
Like many other Latin American dictators, Efraín Ríos Montt counted on the training and support of the United States. In 1951, he attended the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. (In 2001, the school changed its name to try to escape its reputation as finishing school for dictators and death squad leaders.) But Ríos Montt’s most profound connection to the United States was through evangelical Christianity.

After a destructive earthquake struck Guatemala in 1976, two-dozen missionaries from a Eureka, California-based Pentecostal group traveled to Guatemala to spread the gospel and build houses. They converted a prominent general named Ríos Montt, who seemed to have won the presidency in 1974 only to have it stolen through electoral manipulation by his rival. Ríos Montt converted from Catholicism to become a preacher for the U.S.-based church and dropped out of politics for several years. He preached the gospel.

In 1982, Ríos Montt’s staged a political comeback and seized power in a coup. Jim Durkin, the leader of the Pentecostal church, traveled to Guatemala and said the dictator’s ascension was a “miracle” aided by God. As Virginia Garrard-Burnett chronicled in her book, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit, during his dictatorship Ríos Montt appeared on television each Sunday to give “Sunday sermons” on morality, even as he directed scorched earth campaigns in the highlands. In just one year, at least 10,000 people were murdered, most of them indigenous. More than 400 towns were wiped off the map. In 2013, a trial against Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity revealed he had ordered the massacres.