In Guatemala, former U.S.-backed dictator Efraín Ríos Montt died Sunday at the age of 91. In 2013, Ríos Montt was convicted and sentenced to 80 years in prison on genocide charges, over a massacre in 1982 that killed 273 indigenous people, nearly half of them children. That same year, President Ronald Reagan praised Ríos Montt as a “man of great personal integrity and commitment.” This is Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchú, speaking on Democracy Now! just after Ríos Montt’s conviction on genocide charges nearly five years ago.

Rigoberta Menchú: “This verdict is historic. It’s monumental. The verdict against Ríos Montt is historic. We waited for 33 years for justice to prevail. It’s clear that there is no peace without justice. There is no peace without truth. We need justice for the victims for there to be real peace. This verdict is crucial. It complements a long process of investigation, of denouncing the abuses, and a process that the victims hope will heal and result in reparations.”

A Guatemalan court annulled Ríos Montt’s sentence less than two weeks after his conviction in 2013. But last year, a court opened a new genocide trial for Ríos Montt along with his former intelligence chief Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez. That trial was still underway at the time of Ríos Montt’s death. Declassified U.S. government documents show that between the 1960s and ’80s, the CIA trained the Guatemalan military in techniques including torture, kidnapping and the forced disappearance of dissidents. The repression left some 200,000 people dead, the vast majority of them at the hands of Guatemalan government forces.