Guatemala's 36-year-long history of internal conflict (1960–1996). On 23 March 1982, army troops commanded by junior officers staged a coup d'état to prevent the assumption of power by Gen. Ángel Aníbal Guevara, the hand-picked successor of outgoing president Gen. Romeo Lucas García who had won a disputed election two weeks earlier. The coup leaders asked retired Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt to negotiate the departure of both Lucas and Guevara. Ríos Montt, who had been the candidate of the Christian Democracy Party in the 1974 presidential election and was widely regarded as having been denied his victory through fraud, accepted the appointment. He formed a three-member military junta that annulled the 1965 constitution dissolved Congress, and suspended all political parties. After a few months, he dismissed his junta colleagues and assumed the de facto title of President of the Republic; in his inaugural address, Ríos Montt – a lay pastor in the evangelical Protestant Church of the Word – stated that his presidency resulted from the will of God. The country's guerrilla forces and their leftist allies denounced Ríos Montt, who sought to defeat the guerrilla insurgency with a combination of military action and economic reforms; in his words, "beans and rifles" (frijoles y fusiles). An army officer was quoted in The New York Times of 18 July 1982 (the exact day of the Plan de Sánchez killings) as telling an audience of indigenous people in Cunén, in the department of El Quiché, that: "If you are with us, we'll feed you; if not, we'll kill you." The government began to form local "civilian self-defence patrols" (the paramilitary forces known as patrullas de autodefensa civil or PACs). Participation was, in theory, voluntary, but in practice, many campesinos, especially in the north-west, had no choice but to join either the PACs or the guerrillas. The country's conscript army, supported by the PACs, recaptured practically all the guerrilla-held territory – guerrilla activity lessened and was mostly limited to hit-and-run operations. However, this partial victory was won at an enormous cost in civilian deaths. Ríos Montt's brief presidency was probably the most violent period of the 36-year internal conflict, which resulted in about 200,000 deaths of mostly unarmed, mostly indigenous civilians. Although leftist guerrillas and right-wing death squads also engaged in summary executions, forced disappearances, and torture of non-combatants, the vast majority of human rights violations were carried out by the military and the