\n A Guatemalan court Tuesday ordered ex-dictator Efrain Rios Montt, charged with genocide during the country's brutal civil war, to undergo psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he is fit for trial.\n<\/p>\n
\n The 89-year-old former general, who ruled the Central American country from 1982 to 1983, is accused of ordering the army to massacre Ixil Maya indigenous people in northern Guatemala.\n<\/p>\n
\n More than 1,700 Indians were killed in 15 massacres, as the government sought to stamp out rural support for leftist guerrilla groups.\n<\/p>\n
\n But a medical examiner's report last month found Rios Montt mentally incompetent to stand trial, saying he cannot understand the charges against him.\n<\/p>\n
\n After prosecutors challenged the report, the court ordered Rios Montt be taken immediately for 11 days of tests at a private psychiatric facility.\n<\/p>\n
\n It was a small victory for the former dictator's lawyers, who fought his transfer to a public hospital on grounds that it lacked adequate security.\n<\/p>\n
\n The court will reconvene on August 18 to examine the results of the evaluation, said presiding judge Maria Eugenia Castellanos.\n<\/p>\n
\n The case comes after Guatemala's Constitutional Court threw out Rios Montt's 2013 conviction for genocide and war crimes in the massacres on procedural grounds, ordering a retrial.\n<\/p>\n
\n He was sentenced to 80 years in prison in the original trial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Guatemalan court Tuesday ordered ex-dictator Efrain Rios Montt, charged with genocide during the country's brutal civil war, to undergo psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he is fit for trial. The 89-year-old former general, who ruled the Central American country from 1982 to 1983, is accused of ordering the army to massacre Ixil Maya indigenous […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-1481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n