Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes
Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes was president of Guatemala from March 1958 to March 1963, the general of the old Ubico dictatorship whom the Americans had rejected as their candidate for the coup of 1954 and whom the country elected after Castillo Armas was shot. He lent the CIA the coffee plantation at Retalhuleu where the Bay of Pigs brigade trained. That was the beginning of the war he was removed for. He was born in Retalhuleu, a Ubico general, a governor of San Marcos and a minister of public works under the dictator. He was an ambassador in London under Arévalo, and the candidate of the right in 1950 who lost to Árbenz and was, he said, cheated. The CIA interviewed him in 1953 and chose Castillo Armas instead, and after Castillo Armas was murdered by a palace guard in July 1957, he won the election of January 1958, at the second attempt, as the conservative the officers would accept. The five years were the ones in which the civil war began. There was the officers' revolt of 13 November 1960 by the young lieutenants who objected to the Cuban exiles training on Guatemalan soil, put down with the exiles' own aircraft, whose leaders Yon Sosa and Turcios Lima went into the eastern hills and founded the guerrilla that the event of 1960 dates the war from. There was the Retalhuleu base itself, the brigade's training from 1960 and the airfield the invasion flew from in April 1961. There were the students' demonstrations of March and April 1962, shot down in the capital, and the Central American Common Market that he signed and the Belize claim he pressed. There was the corruption that the country called, with his lisp, ydigorismo. There was the election of 1963, in which the former president Arévalo, the reformer of 1945, came home to stand and would have won. Kennedy's government would not have that. The defence minister Peralta Azurdia prevented it by taking the palace on 30 March 1963 and putting the president on a plane to Nicaragua, with the embassy's knowledge. He lived in exile and then, from 1970, in Guatemala. He wrote a memoir called My War with Communism. He died in the capital in October 1982, at eighty-six. It was the year of the war's worst, which his coffee plantation had made possible.
- Lived: 1895 CE – 1982 CE
- Nationality: Guatemalan
- Roles: president, general, politician
