Word: montt
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...draw crowds with such delicacies as imported stone crabs and tender churrasco steaks. But that façade of tranquillity conceals some unpleasant facts. According to Western diplomats, the average number of violent deaths each week has increased from 150 under former President Efraín Ríos Montt to 190. Daily newspapers display incongruously cheerful pictures of students and young professionals who have "disappeared." Earlier this month an engineering student known for his leftist sympathies was shot and wounded while at work. Kidnaped from a hospital emergency room by ten armed men, he was found four days later...
Despite the continuing violence, Mejía has won support because he has kept the promises he made after seizing power. The paunchy brigadier ended press censorship and abolished the secret tribunals that during Ríos Montt's 17-month rule sentenced 15 people to death for subversion and crimes against the state. He reduced value-added taxes from 10% to 7%, hoping to revive an economy plagued by 40% unemployment. Mejía has also won favor simply for being a Roman Catholic; most of his countrymen (90% of whom are Catholic) had grown uncomfortable with...
...mixed record has caused problems for the U.S. When an army patrol shot and killed a U.S.-employed linguist and three companions in February 1983, Ambassador Frederic L. Chapin asked Mejía, who was then Ríos Montt's Defense Minister, for an explanation. But none of Mejía's responses were satisfactory. Then in November two more linguists working on a U.S. AID program were found burned to death on a rural highway. The Guatemalan government called it a highway accident, but the U.S. embassy suspected that some members of government security forces...
Until June, the occasional coup attempt originated with two fringe groups: friends of the deposed Lucas Garcia or supporters of the right-wing politician Leonel Sisniega Otero. On June 28, however, senior military commanders met with Rios Montt and demanded that he fire his religious aides, disband an advisory group of young officers and set a date for early elections. The President pacified them by agreeing to fire the junior officers, but the effect was fleeting...
...virtually all of the commanders of the country's armed forces gathered at the Guatemala City barracks of the Guardia de Honor, an elite army garrison. There were impassioned arguments for and against ousting Rios Montt, but gradually the plotters won. The decisive factor: the news that Sisniega Otero was once again planning to move against Rios Montt. Explains a Guatemalan journalist: "The ghost of another coup from the extreme right provoked this coup...