September 14, 1913 – January 27, 1971

In 1951 Col. Jacobo Arbenz Guzman became president of Guatemala. Early on, he launched a massive agrarian reform program which redistributed massive plots of land from a number of Guatemalan landowners – including land owned by President Arbenz himself – but also expropriated a substantial portion of the Guatemalan land owned by the massive North American corporation United Fruit.

Arbenz’s activities brought him into direct conflict with both United Fruit and the U.S. government under Dwight Eisenhower. With the open support of the United States, in 1954 Col. Carlos Castillo Armas led a CIA-directed rebellion. This CIA-directed coup also had the direct support of of Anastasio Somoza, who was the dictator in neighboring Nicaragua. The Arbenz government was overthrown by these U.S. puppets in Central America.

The decades that followed this coup had Guatemala under the control of military men, and all Arbenz reforms were undone. When indigenous and campesino organizations took up arms against the military dictatorship, right-wing “death squads” were trained (again with the direct support of the U.S. government) and deployed to operate throughout the country. Tens of thousands of Guatemalans, most of them civilians, were filled during this period of right-wing political violence. In the early 1980s, in an attempt to undermine support for the guerrillas, more than 1 million Indigenous people were displaced and forced into army-run camps. Guatemala has never recovered from his terrible period of violence.

Although Arbenz was not a revolutionary, we remember his presidency as the closest thing to a people’s government that Guatemala has had in its contemporary history.