José Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan military leader who joined the army as a young man after training at the Escuela Politécnica military academy starting in 1946 for five years. He rose to become an officer by the time of the 1954 CIA-backed coup that deposed President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. Later in his career, he served as Army Chief of Staff and Director of Studies at the Inter-American Defense College. Ríos Montt underwent a religious conversion and became a Christian minister associated with the Verbo Church, which influenced his governance style during his dictatorship, emphasizing 'beans, tortillas, and bullets' counterinsurgency alongside evangelical rhetoric. In March 1982, he led a coup against President Romeo Lucas García, seizing power as head of a military junta and ruling as dictator for 17 months until ousted in a 1983 coup by Defense Minister Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores. His regime implemented scorched-earth policies that weakened leftist guerrillas but resulted in widespread atrocities, particularly massacres against Indigenous Mayan populations including the Ixil people. Convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity in 2013, the verdict was overturned on appeal due to procedural issues, with a retrial pending at the time of his death on April 1, 2018. After his ouster, he founded the Guatemalan Republican Front party and ran unsuccessfully for president in 1995 and 2003.