Guatemalan President. He served as the 26th President of Guatemala from March 23, 1982 to August 8, 1983. Born Jose Efrain Rios Montt, he joined the Guatemalan army in 1943 and rose through the ranks to brigadier general and army chief of staff. He later served as the head of the Inter-American Defense College in Washington D.C. In 1973, he returned to Guatemala and made an unsuccessful run for the presidency of the country under the National Opposition Front banner. He was then sent to Spain as a military attache. In 1978, he found himself attracted to the teachings of the California-based Christian Church of the Word, and when he returned back to Guatemala later that year, he renounced his Roman Catholic faith. He would become a lay preacher for his new church. On March 23, 1982, a military coup toppled the government of President Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, and he was asked to lead the new three-man junta as president. He accepted and later would oust the other members of the junta and assumed complete dictatorial powers. His rule was very unpopular among the citizenry because of his various policies and his evangelical Protestant religion in a heavily Roman Catholic country. He served as president until August of 1983, when he was ousted in a military coup by Gen. Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores. In 1994, he was elected to the Guatemalan Congress and later served as president of the legislative chamber from 1994 to 1996 and 2000 to 2003. He made an unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2003 and, a year later, was placed under house arrest in connection with the death of a journalist during a pro-Rios Montt riot. The charges were dropped in 2006, and in 2007, he was elected to Congress, where he served until retiring in 2012. In 2013, he was tried by a Guatemalan court on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, marking the first time that a former head of government was prosecuted for such crimes in a national, rather than international, court. His conviction and sentence of 80 years in prison were subsequently overturned by Guatemala's Constitutional Court. A retrial began in 2015 and continued throughout 2016 and 2017. He passed away from a heart attack.