General Romeo Lucas García

In the long league table of Guatemalan military villains, General Romeo Lucas García, who has died of respiratory failure aged 81, was outdone in infamy only by Efraín Ríos Montt, the retired general who replaced him as the country's dictator after a coup in March 1982.

"Elected" president in 1978, in a typically fraudulent poll, Lucas was allegedly responsible for an average of 200 murders and "disappearances" a month during the four years he held power.

He obliterated the urban political opposition with a policy of selective assassination, which included the murder of prominent social democrats Manuel Colom Argueta and Alberto Fuentes Mohr. Trade unionists met the same fate: 27 leaders of the National Workers' Confederation (CNT) were kidnapped not far from the presidential palace in June 1980. They were never seen again.

Lucas also sought to wipe out the rural base of the country's leftist guerrilla organisations by slaughtering the mainly indigenous Mayan peasantry, a policy Ríos enthusiastically maintained and extended.

Between January 1980 and Lucas's overthrow two years later, human rights groups listed no fewer than 344 massacres. Few were reported internationally: the gruesome war against civilians was largely ignored by the outside world, while neighbouring El Salvador and Nicaragua grabbed the headlines largely because of heavy United States involvement in their internal conflicts.

But the apparently deliberate burning down in 1980 of the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City, with diplomats and protesters inside, was an exception. A quarter-century later, this atrocity would help persuade a Spanish court to issue an arrest warrant for the ex-dictator, who by that stage was terminally ill and living in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela.

Such was the atmosphere of terror instilled by the Lucas dictatorship that when Mayan villagers from the province of Quiché came to the capital in late 1979 to protest against the repression, no newspaper would report it.

Aided by university students, the protesters - who included the father of future Nobel peace prizewinner Rigoberta Menchú - eventually opted to occupy the Spanish embassy to publicise their plight.

Lucas ordered them removed, "by whatever means necessary", and the police "SWAT" team, ignoring the ambassador's plea for negotiations, is alleged to have set fire to the building, trapping them inside. The government always insisted it was the protesters who started the fire.

Three Spanish diplomats perished; another four Spaniards - priests who were victims of the repression - are also mentioned in the arrest order issued by the Audiencia Nacional. Ambassador Máximo Cajal, though burned, survived. The Spanish government broke off diplomatic relations with Guatemala. The only survivor among the protesters was later snatched from a clinic, tortured and executed, and his body dumped at the university. Two students died when the funeral cortege came under fire.

Lucas had graduated from the military academy, a toytown fort in Guatemala City called the Escuela Politécnica Militar, in 1949. Five years later, a US-backed invasion put an end to the reformist civilian government of Jacobo Arbenz, installing a military dictatorship that was to last nearly 40 years.

From 1966 to 1968 Lucas served in the Zacapa region as chief of staff to Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio, known as the "Jackal of Zacapa" for his brutal counter-insurgency campaign, estimated to have killed 8,000 in six months. Arana, who held the presidency from 1970 to 1974, remained an important ally, and his party - the CAO - was among Lucas's backers in the presidential campaign of 1978, along with the cotton and coffee oligarchs and two other military parties.

Lucas's military career had culminated with his appointment in 1975 by the then dictator, Kjell Laugerud, as defence minister and head of the army general staff. During his own presidency, the latter post was held by his brother, the equally bloodthirsty Benedicto Lucas García, who had been trained at the French military academy of St Cyr.

In May 2000, Guatemala's Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR) sought the prosecution of both men, along with interior minister Donaldo Alvarez, for war crimes and genocide. They cited 11 massacres in which more than 900 people were killed, others tortured and thousands forced to flee their homes. Painstaking forensic anthropology at the massacre sites since Guatemala's return to civilian government in 1986 had provided abundant evidence for the prosecution.

Lucas's chosen successor, General Aníbal Guevara, "won" the 1982 election, but a coup just before the scheduled handover of power brought in a junta, headed by Ríos Montt. None the less, the Lucas brothers were able to retire without hindrance to their large estates in northern Guatemala, whence Benedicto, at least, continued to dabble in politics until civilian rule began gradually to increase the risk of prosecution.

Benedicto Lucas even launched a presidential campaign in 1990. Romeo prudently withdrew to Venezuela, the birthplace of his wife, although according to some versions he was at first a regular visitor to his property in Guatemala. Belated attempts to bring him to justice foundered on the inescapable fact that by then he was not only terminally ill but suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

He is survived by his wife, Elsa Cirigliano, and their only daughter, María Fernanda.

· Fernando Romeo Lucas García, soldier and dictator, born July 4 1924; died May 27 2006

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