May 1, 1926 - Efraín Ríos Montt
His sixteen months in power over Guatemala produced what historians and courts have documented as a systematic campaign of massacres against Indigenous Maya communities, carried out under the banner of counterinsurgency. A Guatemalan tribunal found him guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity in 2013 — the first such conviction of a former head of state by his own country's courts — before the verdict was overturned on procedural grounds. The scale of violence concentrated in his tenure, within an already brutal civil war, is what places him among the figures cataloged here.
From Wikipedia
José Efraín Ríos Montt (Spanish: [efɾaˈin ˈrios ˈmont]; 16 June 1926 – 1 April 2018) was a Guatemalan military officer who served as de facto President of Guatemala from 1982 to 1983. His brief tenure as chief executive was one of the bloodiest periods in the long-running Guatemalan Civil War. Ríos Montt's counter-insurgency strategies significantly weakened the Marxist guerrillas organized under the umbrella of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), while also leading to accusations of war crimes and acts of genocide perpetrated by the Guatemalan Army under his leadership.
Ríos Montt was a career army officer. He was director of the Guatemalan military academy and rose to the rank of brigadier general. He was briefly chief of staff of the Guatemalan army in 1973. However, he was soon forced out of the position over differences with the military high command. He ran for president in the 1974 general election, losing to the official candidate, General Kjell Laugerud, in an electoral process widely regarded as fraudulent.
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