When General Efraín Ríos Montt assumed dictatorial control over Guatemala after a coup in March 1982, he was able to bolster his murderous rule by calling on a special group of friends, the leaders of the American religious right. Guatemala is a predominately Roman Catholic country, but Ríos Montt converted to evangelical Christianity in 1978, becoming an adherent of the Church of the Word, a California-based sect.
American evangelicals were naturally excited that so prominent a born-again believer was now in power. They hoped Ríos Montt would open up his country for their missionary zeal and allow them to spread their version of the gospel to the unwashed masses of Guatemala. Within a week of the coup, Pat Robertson, speaking on The 700 Club, the flagship television program of his Christian Broadcasting Network, made a fervent intercession with his deity: “God, we pray for Ríos Montt, your servant, Lord, that you would cover him.”
Robertson, the TV preacher and one-time presidential hopeful who died on Thursday, is most often remembered as a toxic cultural warrior who was instrumental in making the religious right a powerhouse in the Republican Party. He was notorious for blaming sundry disasters, ranging from hurricanes to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, on the sinfulness of fellow Americans. God, Robertson kept insisting, was punishing Americans for engaging in abortion, divorce, gay sex, and secular humanism—among other smite-worthy offenses to the Almighty.
Less attention is given to Robertson’s foreign policy views, although he always had a global vision. To gauge the full extent of Robertson’s ideology—the poisonous authoritarianism that he believed in with his full heart and soul—it’s necessary to understand what he wanted not just for the United States but also for nations such as South Africa, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Israel, and Guatemala.
In his initial prayer for Ríos Montt, Robertson said, “Lord, we thank that your spirit is moving in Guatemala.” If one wanted to use religious language, the truth would be that, far from displaying a divine spirit, Ríos Montt’s rule turned Guatemala into Hell on earth. As The New York Times noted in its obituary for the dictator, Ríos Montt was “determined to crush the Guatemalan insurgency” and
intensified the scorched-earth campaign that had been waged by his predecessor, Gen. Romeo Lucas García. In his first five months in power, according to Amnesty International, soldiers killed more than 10,000 peasants. Thousands more disappeared. Hundreds of thousands fled their homes, many seeking refuge across the border in Mexico. Nearly all victims were indigenous people of Mayan extraction.