A Guatemalan court convicted former dictator Efrain Rios Montt of genocide and crimes against humanity on Friday and sentenced him to 80 years in prison — making the 86-year-old ex-general the first Latin American leader ever found guilty on such charges. A panel of three judges handed down its verdict after a nearly three-month trial with testimony from dozens of victims about massacres of indigenous peoples during his rule from 1982 to 1983, at the height of the country's decades-long civil war. Rios Montt has maintained he knew nothing of the massacres while he was in power, but prosecutors said he must have known. That war between the government and leftist rebels ended in 1996 after killing 200,000 people.
