Word: os
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...os Montt discomfits guerrillas but postpones elections...
...point, the speech was the kind of bizarre and rambling homily that Guatemalans have come to expect from their born-again military President, Brigadier General José Efrain Ríos Montt, 56. As he has almost every Sunday evening since he assumed power in a March 1982 coup, the silver-mustached member of the California-based Christian Church of the Word last week appeared on Guatemalan television to deliver a sermon on patriotism, morality, local politics and the revelations of divine wisdom. He advised citizens against the use of drugs to combat high blood pressure because, he said...
Then Ríos Montt delivered a minor bombshell. Guatemala, he said, was "not prepared" for democratic elections that he had been vaguely promising for six months. More time was needed, he said, to restore the country's voter rolls, some of which were falsified by Guatemala's previous military rulers. Ríos Montt also said that the country's suspended political parties must be reformed, "to coincide with the equitable interests of a majority and with pressures of a minority." Translation: Ríos Montt does not intend to schedule elections until he has created...
...general's remarks came as a surprise to a high-level Guatemalan delegation that was visiting the U.S. Jorge Serrano, president of Ríos Montt's advisory Council of State, had assured a U.S. audience that an election date would be announced no later than March 1984 and that voting would probably take place the following June. Ríos Montt's reversal was "incomprehensible," said a member of the visiting delegation. "I don't know what the President had in mind...
...remark echoed the confusion of many Guatemalans. Since he took over-at God's direction, as he put it-Ríos Montt has made far-reaching changes in the brutal and corrupt government that he inherited from his predecessor, General Fernando Romeo Lucas García. The country is now flooded with blue-and-white posters bearing a favorite Ríos Montt slogan, I DO NOT ROB, I DO NOT LIE, I DO NOT ABUSE. Under the President's moralizing eye, corruption has all but dried up. Government-sanctioned death squads that used to roam...