Zury Ríos Montt
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Zury Mayté Ríos Montt Sosa de Weller (b. 1968) is a Guatemalan politician. She is currently serving her third term in Congress and is a top official in the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) political party.
As the daughter and staunch supporter of former military dictator and FRG founder Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt – who ordered numerous massacres of indigenous Guatemalans as the leader of the three-man junta that came to power by military coup in 1982, [1] and to whom the U.S. State Department attributes some 200,000 civilian deaths [2] – Zury Ríos is a controversial figure both at home and abroad.
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[edit] Name
She is sometimes referred to by a combination of her parents' surnames, Zury Ríos Sosa. In spite of the fact that her current husband, U.S. Congressman Jerry Weller, introduced her to the United States under this combined parental surname, she is nowadays best known in her home country as Zury Ríos Montt, using her father's double surname; on her personal web page she styles herself Ríos-Montt de Weller. [3] (For an explanation of the often complex naming conventions used in the Spanish-speaking world, see: Iberian naming customs.)
[edit] Family and education
Zury Ríos Montt was born in January 1968, the third child of Efraín Ríos Montt and María Teresa Sosa Ávila. Her brothers, Enrique and Homero, both followed their father's military footsteps and enlisted in the armed forces: Homero was killed in 1982 while aboard an army helicopter that was brought down by rebel weapons fire in El Petén; Enrique was chief of the Army General Staff before resigning his commission in September 2003 when charged with having embezzled Q30 million (€3.25m/US$3.75m). [4]
Zury Ríos studied at schools in Guatemala and Spain (where her father was assigned as military attaché after losing the 1974 presidential election) before graduating magna cum laude in political and social science from Francisco Marroquín University. Her first job (1988-1989) was as a lecturer in social and economic studies at the Escuela Cristiana Verbo in Guatemala City. [5] Prior to her current union, she was married on three occasions: to Jeovanny Chávez, deputy José García Bravatti, and businessman Roberto López Villatoro. [6] During her marriage to López Villatoro, she was also known as Ríos de López.
On 20 November 2004, at a ceremony held in General Ríos Montt's compound near Antigua Guatemala, and with the General presiding at the ceremony, she married U.S. Congressman Jerry Weller (R-Illinois). [7] This was Weller's second marriage and Ríos Montt's fourth. Following the wedding, she stated that although she planned to live in the United States with her husband, she would continue serving in the Guatemalan legislature; a lawyer for Weller told the U.S. House Ethics Committee that she did not plan on becoming a U.S. citizen. [8]
In March 2006 the Wellers announced that they were pregnant, [9] and a daughter, Marizú Catherine, was born on 17 August 2006 in a Guatemala City hospital. [10] Zury Ríos had previously been quoted in Prensa Libre newspaper as saying they had not yet decided if the child, her first, would be born in Guatemala or the United States. [11]
[edit] Political career
In 1989 Zury Ríos joined the public relations department of the then newly created Guatemalan Republican Front in preparation for the 1990 presidential election. In that election, the FRG won 10 seats in Congress but its presidential hopeful, founder Efraín Ríos Montt, was barred from running. Following the election, Zury Ríos worked as an administrative assistant to the FRG congressional bloc and as private secretary to the Speaker of Congress.
In 1996 she was elected to Congress as a national list deputy. In 1998 she was elected to the FRG's executive committee and political council. In 1999 she was re-elected to Congress, again from her party's national list. During that legislative session, she served as one of the two deputy speakers and on the congressional foreign relations committee. She was elected to a third term in 2003, serving as vice chair of the foreign relations committee and on the health, sport, social welfare, and ethics committees. Much of her congressional work has focused on reproductive health issues, the HIV-AIDS situation, and combating tobacco use.
In 2003, Zury Ríos Montt was accused of being one of the organizers of Guatemala's jueves negro ("Black Thursday"). [12] In mid-2003, the FRG was again trying to get General Ríos Montt on to the presidential ticket, arguing that applying the constitutional ban preventing former coup leaders from seeking the presidency should not apply to him in accordance with the principle of nonretroactive application of the law: his 1982 coup d'état preceded the enactment of the 1985 Constitution. After a series of court decisions ruling alternately that he could or could not run, culminating with a 21 July 2003 ruling by the Supreme Court suspending his candidacy, on Thursday, 24 July 2003 FRG officials and supporters led a mass demonstration in Guatemala City to protest his disqualification. The demonstration degenerated into a bloody riot that left one man dead (journalist Héctor Fernando Ramírez); it was, however, perceived as having been successful in getting General Ríos Montt's name on the presidential ballot when, a week later, the Constitutional Court overturned the Supreme Court's ban.
Although General Ríos Montt ultimately lost the November 2003 election, he enjoyed his daughter's full support. Zury Ríos accompanied her father on his campaign trail, generally introducing him, in highly favorable terms, before he addressed his rallies. She was quoted in the press as saying, "my father is my inspiration." [13]
