Ex-dictator trounced

last updated 8 January 2015

Guatemala City

Former military ruler Efrain Rios Montt failed miserably this week in his bid to be elected president of Guatemala. Former Guatemala City mayor Oscar Berger and businessman Alvaro Colom appeared headed for a December runoff. The former dictator has been accused of presiding over the worst massacres in the Central American country’s 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996. The constitution bars anyone who has seized power in a coup—as Rios Montt did in 1982—from the presidency, but a Supreme Court packed with the 77-year-old general’s supporters allowed him to run. Sociologist Miguel Angel Sandoval said the vote showed that the country had “a memory, and the desire to change.”