A "Reputed" Dictator?

In their In the Loop on the Hill column in today's Washington Post, Mary Ann Akers and Paul Kane note that Illinois Congressman Jerry Weller is in a heap of trouble over his undisclosed financial holdings in Nicaragua. The columnists note the Congressman's marriage to the daughter of the former "reputed" dictator of Guatemala, Efrain Rios Montt. "Reputed" dictator? Not even Rios Montt himself would dispute the charge. In fact, in an interview with me and then-New York Times reporter Lindsey Gruson in Guatemala City in 1989, Rios Montt emphatically declared with a manic gleam in his eye: "Yes, it's true, yes! I was a dictator!" But if you don't believe him, just ask some of those who managed to survive the scores of massacres unleashed by his troops in the early 1980s on Guatemala's Indians in the western highlands, some of the most horrific atrocities ever perpetrated against indigneous populations in the history of the Americas.