Jacobo Árbenz
Jacobo Árbenz was the army officer elected president of Guatemala in 1950 who gave a hundred thousand peasant families land taken from the United Fruit Company at the value the company had declared for tax, and was overthrown in June 1954 by a CIA operation with a few hundred men and a radio station; his resignation speech named the fruit company and the State Department, and the thirty-six years of army rule and civil war that followed killed two hundred thousand people. He was born in 1913 in Quetzaltenango, the son of a Swiss pharmacist who killed himself, went to the military academy and graduated first, and in October 1944 was one of the officers who overthrew the dictatorship of Ubico's successor and opened the ten years of spring. He was defence minister under Arévalo and, after the murder of his rival Arana in 1949, the candidate the reformers backed, elected in 1950 with sixty-five per cent. His programme was a capitalist Guatemala that its landlords did not want. There was a highway to the Atlantic to break the fruit company's railway, a port to break its port, a hydroelectric dam to break the American power company, and Decree 900 of June 1952, which took uncultivated land from estates over six hundred acres, with compensation in bonds at the declared tax value. United Fruit had declared its four hundred thousand idle acres at a fraction of their worth and now claimed the difference, and its lawyers included the Dulles brothers' old firm. Eisenhower approved the operation in August 1953; the arms Árbenz bought from Czechoslovakia in May 1954, because nobody else would sell, were the pretext. Castillo Armas crossed from Honduras on 18 June with a few hundred men, the CIA's aircraft bombed the capital and its radio reported an army that did not exist, and the Guatemalan officers, told by the American ambassador what would happen if they fought, refused to. Árbenz resigned on 27 June, was stripped to his underwear at the airport in front of photographers, and went into an exile that took him through Mexico, Switzerland, Prague, Moscow, Uruguay and Cuba, where his daughter killed herself. He drowned in his bath in Mexico City in January 1971. Guatemala apologised to his family in 2011.
- Lived: 1913 CE – 1971 CE
- Nationality: Guatemalan
- Roles: president, army_officer
