Guatemala's Romeo Lucas Garcia

Romeo Lucas Garcia, 81, a former Guatemalan president whose rule was marked by a bloody police raid on the Spanish Embassy, died May 27 at a hospital in Puerto la Cruz, Venezuela. He reportedly had Alzheimer's disease and respiratory failure.

Gen. Lucas Garcia had lived in Venezuela since the 1980s, a former sister-in-law, Maria Nana Winter, told a Guatemalan radio station.

He served as president of Guatemala from July 1978 to March 1982, when he was overthrown by another army general, Efrain Rios Montt. Although Gen. Lucas Garcia's administration was accused of rights abuses, Rios Montt ushered in one of the bloodiest chapters in the country's 36-year civil war.

In the major crisis of Gen. Lucas Garcia's tenure, peasant, labor and student activists took over the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City in January 1980 to protest his rule. Police raided the building in an attack that left 37 dead, including Vicente Menchu, father of Rigoberta Menchu, the Indian rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

Gen. Lucas Garcia was briefly under house arrest at his home in Venezuela last year after a Spanish judge issued a warrant for his arrest for rights abuses committed during his administration.

Spain wanted to try him for his role in the police raid. But in June 2005, Venezuela's Supreme Court ruled that Spain did not provide enough evidence for his extradition and lifted the house arrest.

Eduardo de Leon, director of the Rigoberta Menchu Foundation -- which sought to make Gen. Lucas Garcia stand trial -- said he regretted that the former leader had died before facing justice.

"Death came and saved him from facing judgment," de Leon said. "Still, we hope that the trial could go forward and that he could be judged, even posthumously."

Survivors include his wife, Elsa Cirigliano, who belongs to a prominent family with business interests in Venezuela, and two children.