“Horrendous,” was the reaction
from Americas Watch. “Lure of the
Iron Fist,” reported the Miami Herald.
“The 900-pound gorilla of Guatema-
lan politics is back,” headlined the
Village Voice. Efrain Rios Montt, the
evangelical general who seized power
in 1982 and moralized over the air-
waves while his army massacred peas-
ants, was running for president. Soli-
David Stoll is the author of Is Latin
America Turning Protestant? (Univer-
sity of Californa Press, 1990).
darity activists in the United States were
appalled, and so were most of Guate-
mala’s professional politicians. As the
November 11 vote drew near, it was
clear that the dreaded ex-dictator had
become the most popular candidate, as
much as twelve points ahead of his
nearest rival.
If the retired general had not been
knocked off the ballot by a constitu-
tional ban against past coup partici-
pants, he probably would have been
elected president. The constitutional
court upheld the ban a month before the
voting, to the relief of the political es-
tablishment but to the disappointment
of many Guatemalans. As Rfos fumed
on the sidelines telling supporters to
deface their ballots, they swung instead
to a dark-horse candidate, born-again
businessman Jorge Serrano Elias. Bol-
stered by the general’s downfall, Ser-
rano ran a close second and stands a
good chance of winning the January 6
runoff.
The Second Coming
Why the survivors of Rfos Montt’s
regime would want him back a second
time is a mystery to North Americans
schooled on human rights reports. “We
had huge fights all summer,” reports a
visitor to Quetzaltenango-fights with
Guatemalan friends who didn’t want to
hear of the human rights case against
their candidate.
Contrary to early assessments, Rios
Montt’s electoral support was not lim-
ited to evangelicals, the middle and
upper classes, or to Guatemala City.
From the start, the campaign was loaded
with contradictions. At headquarters in
Nebaj-one of the areas hit hardest by
Rios Montt’s scorched earth tactics
eight years ago-I was surprised to
find that, despite the general’s well-
known feelings about alcohol, his sup-
porters showed up slightly inebriated.
These were Catholic Ixil Indians. Never
mind that their candidate was a Protes-
tant general who was accused of perse-
cuting the Catholic Church, and whose
army had destroyed every rural settle-
ment in their part of El Quich6 depart-
ment. These Ixils had found something
to admire in Rios Montt which has so
far eluded his critics.
The men recalled how, a few months
before he took power in March 1982,
another general-army chief-of-staff
Benedicto Lucas Garcia-showed up
in a helicopter. He threatened to exter-
minate the town if it did not stop col-
laborating with the guerrillas, who at
that point seemed on the verge of tak-
ing over the western highlands. Be-
cause of his fundamentalist rhetoric,
Rios Montt ended up with a worse
international reputation than Benedicto
or the latter’s brother, military presi-
dent Romeo Lucas Garcia (1978-1982).
But for many Guatemalans, the born-
again general was an improvement.
4″A campesino seen was a campes-
ino dead,” Nebajefios say of the Lucas
Garcia brothers-in contrast to Rios
Montt, who they credit with saving
their lives. “Lies, lies!” a Nebaj teacher
shouted when I insisted that his beloved
general had covered up massacres. “If
it hadn’t been for Rios Montt, we all
would have disappeared! Before, there
were killers waiting on the corner; you
couldn’t even go out, because they
would kill you. But Rios Montt took
away all that.”
While foreigners focus on how the
general continued the previous regime’s
anti-guerrilla offensive, survivors are
more interested in the differences–
from the unpredictable, chaotic terror
of a floundering dictatorship to Rios
Montt’s more predictable textbook
campaign. Another Catholic campes-
ino in Nebaj remembers Rios Montt for
his “ley de amistad” (“law of friend-
ship”), actually the “leyde amnistia,”
or the amnesty Rios Montt gave to
refugees. The most obvious reason
Nebajefios like the former general is
that he offered them the chance to sur-
render without being killed.
There are two ways of looking at
Rios Montt, as reformer and as human
rights violator, but separating the two is
a mistake. In 1974, he was generally
thought to have won the presidential
election as the reform candidate for the
Christian Democrats, only to be de-
frauded by rivals in the army high
command. It was to protest another
electoral fraud, at the height of the
violence between the army and the
guerrillas in 1982, that junior officers
installed him in the national palace.
Unknown to the coup plotters, Rios
had become a born-again Christian, and
in office he proved to be an outspoken
one. Every Sunday over the airwaves,
he railed against corruption in Guate-
malan life. He suspended kidnappings
by security forces in the capital, and in
the countryside he replaced a few abu-
sive commanders. But as he wagged his
finger at adulterers and bribe-takers, he
also denied the army massacres which
continued under his administration,
crimes eventually admitted to by his
own evangelical advisors.
Apologists argue that Rios Montt’s
orders to respect lives were stymied by
the same colonels who overthrew him
after 16 months in office. However, for
victims of the stepped-up rural mas-
sacres that occurred early in his admini-
stration, Rios Montt’s vows to trans-
form Guatemala’s moral landscape were
a cruel propaganda hoax. The Catholic
Church and the Left denounced him as
a fanatical tyrant who was plunging the
country into a holy war. Internation-
ally, he became known as the born-
again butcher.
Since then, the Catholic hierarchy–
including the general’s own brother,
the bishop of Zacapa-has continued
to decry evangelical growth as a U.S.
political strategy. Everything about Rfos
Montt’s government dramatized the loss
of Catholic authority. His closest advi-
sors were elders from the congregation
he had joined, the California-based
Church of the Word. The evangelist
Luis Palau came to celebrate the Prot-
estant centenary in Guatemala and, with
Rios beside him, proclaimed that the
country could become the first “re-
formed” nation in Latin America.
Rios cannot be credited with the
evangelical boom, but his brief rule
drew attention to evangelicals and de-
fined them in new ways. What had
seemed an acquiescent mass of the poor
and the middle class, apolitical and oth-
erworldly, now appeared to have a he-
gemonic vision for Guatemala’s future.
Moreover, partially due to the repres-
sion against clergy and lay activists,
Catholics increasingly began to describe
Textbook counterinsurgency: In Nebaj, survivors of army massacres
remember Rios for the amnesty he offered refugees
VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER/JANUARY 1990/1991)
themselves in pietistic terms borrowed
from the Protestant movement.
These inroads made Guatemala the
most evangelical country in Latin
America. But as pietism conquers the
population, Guatemala’s public institu-
tions continue to suffer a discrepancy
between word and deed worthy of Sta-
linist Eastern Europe. Nothing works
the way it is supposed to; nothing is
what it seems. And the all-powerful
Praetorian army continues to define the
permissible for the civilian government
elected in 1985.
Seen as Outsider
Many Guatemalans are less worried
about the army than their dwindling
ability to buy food and medicine, and a
frightening rise in street violence. Their
burdens have not been eased by the
spectacle of the Christian Democrats.
Outgoing President Vinicio Cerezo and
his wing of the party leadership have
not defended Guatemala’s “democratic
opening” from the assaults of the army
and the extreme Right, nor have they
protected the poor from the cost of
economic stabilization policies. Instead,
they are widely seen as having enriched
themselves at the public’s expense,
confirming traditional Guatemalan
wisdom that politicians seek office only
to steal, and make campaign pledges
only to break them. Cerezo’s hand-In a corrupt political system unable to articulate popular demands, many view Rios Montt as a charismatic reformer
picked successor, Alfonso Cabrera, is
rumored to have links to drug traffick-
ers and won ony 17% of the vote.
In short, many thank the Christian
Democrats for making Rios more popu-
lar than he was in 1982-1983. Partly
due to army repression, political parties
in Guatemala tend to function only as
patronage rackets, unable to articulate
popular demands. Here the former head
*of state has impeccable credentials.
When he closed Congress in 1982, rul-
ing by decree through a Council of
State, he earned the undying enmity of
Guatemala’s political establishment.
That is why they see him as a wild card
threatening to rupture the fragile agree-
ments which returned the country to
civilian rule. But for ordinary Guate-
malans, Rios Montt’s hostility to the
parties makes him look like an outsider,
an alternative to the politics of oppor-
tunism.
Flocking td his campaign were po-
litical novices and two small, discred-
ited right-wing parties, but not the larger
conservative parties or the country’s
influential business lobbies, who re-
gard him as unpredictable and danger-
ous. The campaign had a populist effer-
vescence, organized around a charis-
matic figure with a simple message
about law and authority: “Guatemala is
not the police, the captain, the mayor,
or the congressman,” he told a crowd
in Nebaj. “Guatemala is you! The
mayor may think he is the authority.
The captain may think he is the author-
ity. The policeman may think he is the
authority. But authority is he who obeys
the law! Even if he has a pistol or a
machine gun, this is not authority!”
Human rights activists find it hard to
believe that the army uniform which
Rios Montt wore in campaign pictures
is, for many Guatemalans, an icon of
credible authority. The hopes invested
in the born-again general are older than
the country’s Protestant churches; the
figure he cut was instantly recogniz-
able as the old-fashioned caudillo, the
man on horseback who saves the na-
tion. In fact, the authoritarianism which
foreigners hold against Rios Montt
appeals to many Guatemalans who,
shaking their heads at the latest out-
rage, are willing to say: “We need a
strongman to control us.” Here is un
militar recto, they say-a just military
man-even as they fear and despise the
army for all the killing it has done.
This is not exactly the lure of the
iron fist. If it were, another retired
general running for president-Bene-
dicto Lucas Garcfa-would have at-
tracted votes instead of ridicule. Rios
preached that Guatemalans can save
themselves and their country through
moral exertion. “You know why I like
him?” a frustrated development or-
ganizer explained. “Because he used
to get on television, point his finger at
every Guatemalan, and say: ‘The prob-
lem is you!’ That’s the only way this
country is ever going to change.” For
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASpeople disgusted with the day-to-day
toll of chronic corruption, he was the
moral crusader who promised to fire
teachers who don’t show up for school,
prosecute civil servants who demand
bribes, and stop tortured bodies from
being dumped in the streets.
Evangelical religion is providing a
new language for talking about the
problem of authority in Guatemala. A
social scientist tells the story of a
preacher who, in his testimony to juve-
nile offenders, describes the murders
and rapes he committed before becom-
ing a Christian-for which, no small
surprise, he has never been brought to
justice. In this double identity as sinner
and saint, common in evangelical testi-
mony, there is an echo of the double
identity of the Guatemalan state. De
facto, the army is the country’s most
destructive institution, responsible for
the murder of tens of thousands of citi-
zens. De jure, it maintains peace and
stability. And Rios Montt, a general
responsible for carnage, paradoxically
became a symbol of national redemp-
tion. The uniform in his campaign pic-
ture held out the hope, however illu-
sory, that he could overpower the most
flagrant abusers of authority.
What was most interesting about the
general’s campaign was his attempt to
translate the military values so abhorred
by foreigners-obedience, discipline,
devotion to authority-into a new cul-
ture of civic responsibility. In an inter-
view with the Village Voice, not all of
which is this reassuring, he said: “I
don’t propose an economic program,
but rather an ethical and moral one. Our
problem is disorder. We have to put
order into our lives. We need law, or-
der, and discipline. Not Fascism or
Nazism, just order and discipline. Re-
storing order is not a question of admin-
istrative measures. It’s a matter of set-
ting a moral example. What’s impor-
tant is that the people understand that
we know what the law is and that we
will apply it. Democracy isn’t letting
people do whatever they want. Democ-
racy means fulfilling your duties.”
Ironically, this law-and-order can-
didate had to violate the constitution in
order to run. While remaining unre-
pentant about his own human rights
record, he complained that the courts
ruling against him were violating his
human rights, and threatened to appeal
to the World Court at the Hague. When
the courts enforced the constitutional
ban against his candidacy, some sup-
porters threatened to take the battle into
the streets. But that would have alien-
ated many evangelicals and other law-
abiding supporters, and it did not mate-
rialize during what proved to be an
orderly election.
There was also fear of the same kind
of military “reform coup” which put
the general in office the first time. But
there has been no sign of such a move
from the army’s all-important base
commanders. Despite some sympathy
for Rfos, especially in the junior ranks,
he has usually been at odds with the
army’s command structure since being
sidelined by military president Gen.
Carlos Arana Osorio in 1974.
Some of the people most uneasy
about Rios Montt’s presidential bid were
evangelical leaders. His preemptory
ways offended them in 1982-1983; the
military chain of command he envi-
sioned from God through himself to the
nation did not sit well with the mutual
deference which characterizes inde-
pendent church leaders.
Disenchanted Electorate
Instead of following Rfos Montt’s
advice to deface ballots, many of his
supporters shifted to another candidate
preaching moral reform–a civilian with
a’cleaner record. Enter Jorge Serrano
Elias, an evangelical businessman who
placed a distant third in the 1985 elec-
tions and has since stayed in the public
eye through his role in semi-official
meetings with guerrilla leaders. Al-
though Serrano served as president of
Rios Montt’s advisory council in 1982-
1983, he is no surrogate for the general;
the two have become bitter rivals. Ser-
rano ran low in opinion polls until Rios
was thrown off the ballot, then he surged
ahead of several other candidates to
close the gap with frontrunning news-
paper publisher Jorge Carpio, whose
most obvious qualification is that he
spent a fortune advertising himself. Each
received about 25% of the vote.
The bloc of voters which turned
from Rios to Serrano has revived per-
ennial talk of religious strife. Some
Catholics continue to fear that evan-
gelicals will join the army in another
wave of persecution against them, as
A dual identity as sinner and saint
VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER/JANUARY 1990/1991)
occurred in certain cases in the early
1980s. But many of the voters who
switched from the born-again general
to the born-again businessman are
Catholics themselves. (Five years ago,
many evangelicals voted for the Chris-
tian Democrats.) And Serrano himself
is a conciliatory personality, a contrast
to Rfos Montt’s aura of fanaticism.
Neither Serrano nor Carpio are likely
to have much to offer most Guatema-
lans. Both candidates for the January
runoff claim to represent the “stabiliz-
ing Center” or “modernizing Right”
(although Carpio’s running mate hails
from the far-right National Liberation
Movement). Both talk about restoring
faith in government, and they each offer
the free market as the solution to pov-
erty. Neither is likely to challenge the
army, although as conservatives they
would probably face fewer coup at-
tempts than the Christian Democrats.
Neither has a solid social base, nor
much of a mandate; abstention was the
most popular option during the No-
vember voting.
Solidarity activists and Guatemalan
politicians are all breathing easier with
the general out of the picture. But in the
countryside, stories still circulate about
Rios Montt traveling around the coun-
try in disguise, meting out justice to
corrupt officials, like a king in a medie-
val folk tale.
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