GENERAL Efrain Rios Montt, catapulted to power last spring through a coup, is a born-again Christian. The rightist leader worked as an evangelist before assuming his current duties and was affiliated with the Church of the Word, which has links to the Gospel Outreach group in Eureka, California.

According to President Reagan, who spent an hour with Rios Montt during last week's Latin American junket, the general is misunderstood. "I am convinced," said Reagan, "that he has been getting a bad deal" from the press and foreign policy liberals. "General Rios Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment," added the President. So the Administration plans to resume its military aid to Guatemala that was banned five years ago by then-President Carter.

But Rios Montt has been widely accused by human rights monitoring groups of continuing the campaign of murder and repression against leftist opponents begun by his predecessor. General Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia Amnesty International, for example, says the number of murders carried out by rightist death squads since Rios Montt took over tops 1000.

Representative Steven Solarz (D-N.Y.), a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee said a change in policy by the Administration would make "a mockery of our pretensions to support the cause of human rights in Central America when we provide military assistance to a government like the one in Guatemala, whose security forces are responsible for the massacre of literally thousands of their own people." Unfortunately, Reagan can restore aid without Congressional approval, However, the Administration would have to periodically report to Congress on human rights conditions in Guatemala, as it currently does for El Salvador.

The idiocy of sending guns to a country in total disarray has yet to strike Reagan. The President wants to avert a communist takeover--not necessarily a misconceived goal. But the best way to do that would be to pressure the current regime to negotiate with the leftists, not murder them. An oppressive government assures a prolonged, bloody civil war.

Oregon's Senator Mark Hatfield, one of the lone voices of sanity in the Republican party, admirably summed up the situation. "I think when you introduce instruments of violence--military weaponry--in an area that has such overwhelming social problems, where people are hungry, where people are illiterate...those are the causes of violence. That is the seed bed for war."

Hatfield understands what most of his GOP colleagues do not: that the Administration is getting a warped view of reality by looking at Guatemala--and for that matter the rest of Latin America--through an East-West prism. Most of Guatemala's problems have nothing to do with the U.S.-Soviet conflict, but are simply the result of decades of social, political and economic inequities. Of course the Soviets and their Cuban allies have taken advantage of the turmoil in Latin America, but only because the U.S. has made it easy for them to do so. By stopping the chaos, Washington could put a break on the Soviet advance. Increasing military and will have the opposite result.