1978 - Fernando Romeo Lucas García
The March 1978 election had proved as fraudulent as the process that had brought Laugerud to power four years previously. Though it was widely perceived that the 1978 presidential contest was won by the former chief of state, Peralta Azurdia, who ran as the candidate of the MLN, the winner was declared to be Brigadier General Fernando Romeo Lucas García, who ran under the banners of the PID and the PR but, more important, was the candidate favored by the Army High Command. Lucas García was overthrown three months before he was scheduled to step down, but the nearly four years that he ruled was riddled with incompetence, corruption. widespread murder conducted by government officials, rapid growth of the armed, guerrilla opposition, and the near disintegration of all bases of consensus among the military and civilian elite on how to rule.
The country's political crisis was fueled by the 1979 revolution in Nicaragua that brought the Sandinistas to power and by the subsequent insurgency in neighboring El Salvador. The Guatemalan insurgents, who in 1979 added a new group known as the Organization of People in Arms (Organización del Pueblo en Armas—ORPA) to their numbers, were buoyed by these events in its Central American neighbors. The government responded primarily by redoubling its violence against all perceived opposition. Lucas Garcia's moderate vice president, Villa grán Kramer, tried to moderate government policies for two years but in 1980 resigned and, fearing for his own life. fled to the United States. The once-buoyant economy suffered both from the near-political anarchy and from the recession of the early 1980s affecting the industrial countries that purchased the nation's agricultural exports. Tourism, a major source of foreign exchange, dried up in part as a result of the insurgency. The distribution of income remained heavily skewed in favor of the elite. as did the ownership of land. In the early 1980s economic conditions were poor and becoming worse.
The army also suffered the deprivations of the Lucas García regime. Junior and middle-ranking officers were increasingly, and publicly, blaming their failures against the growing insurgency on the corruption and lack of commitment of senior officers who occupied the National Palace. Several months of growing discontent among field commanders were followed by widespread charges that the presidential election of March 7, 1982, had been fraudulent. Public protests over the alleged fraud gave the junior officers the excuse to overthrow the regime, and on March 23 young officers ousted Lucas García and his elected successor and installed General José Efraín Ríos Montt, who had been denied electoral victory in 1974, in the National Palace.
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