Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán

Jacobo Árbenz

President of the Republic of Guatemala
In office
March 15, 1951 – June 27, 1954
Preceded by Juan José Arévalo
Succeeded by Carlos Enrique Díaz de León
Born September 14, 1913
Quetzaltenango
Died January 27, 1971
Mexico
Political party Revolutionary Action Party
Spouse(s) Maria Cristina Villanova

Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (Spanish pronunciation: [xaˈkoβo ˈarβenð ɣuðˈman]; September 14, 1913 – January 27, 1971) was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who served as Defense Minister of Guatemala from 1944–1951, and as President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954.

He was ousted in a coup d'état engineered by the United States government and CIA, and was replaced by a military junta, headed by Colonel Carlos Castillo.

He went into exile after the coup and died in Mexico in 1971.

Contents

Early life and military career

Born in 1913 Quetzaltenango, he was the son of a Swiss German pharmacist who immigrated to Guatemala in 1901. His family was relatively wealthy and upper-class; his childhood has been described as "comfortable".[1]

His father got addicted to morphine, and began to neglect the family business. It eventually went bankrupt, forcing the family to move to a rural estate which a wealthy friend had set aside for them "out of charity". Jacobo had originally desired to be an economist or an engineer, but since the family now had no money, he could not afford to go to the university. He didn't want to join the military, but there was a scholarship available through the Escuela Politécnica for military cadets. He applied and passed all of the entrance exams, and entered as a cadet in 1932. Two years later, his father committed suicide.[1]

Árbenz excelled in the academy, and was deemed "an exceptional student". He became "first sergeant", the highest honor bestowed upon cadets, that only 6 people received from 1924 to 1944. His abilities earned him an unusual level of respect amongst the officers at the school, including Major John Considine, the U.S. director of the school, and of other U.S. officers who served at the school. Árbenz graduated in 1935.[1]

After graduating, he served a stint as a junior officer at Fort San José in the capital, and later under "an illiterate Colonel" in a small garrison in the village of San Juan Sacatepéquez. While in San José, Árbenz had to lead squads of soldiers which were escorting chain gangs of prisoners (including political prisoners) to perform forced labor. The experience traumatized Árbenz, who said he felt like a capataz (i.e. an "overseer").[1]

In 1937, Árbenz was asked to fill a vacant teaching position at the academy. Árbenz taught a wide range of subjects, including from military subjects, history, and physics. In 1943, he was promoted to captain, and placed in charge of the entire corps of cadets. His position was the third highest in the academy, and was considered one of the most prestigious positions a young officer could hold.[1]

In 1938 he met his future wife María Vilanova, the daughter of a wealthy Salvadoran landowner. They were married a few months later. Árbenz stated that his wife had a great influence on him.[1] It was through María that Árbenz was exposed to Marxism. María had received a copy of The Communist Manifesto at a women's congress, and left a copy of it on the Jacobo's bedside table when she left for a vacation. Jacobo was "moved" by the Manifesto, and he and María discussed it with each other, and both felt that it explained many things they had been feeling. Afterwards, Jacobo began reading more work by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and by the late 1940s was regularly interacting with a group of Guatemalan communists.[2]

Presidency

Historical background

In the 1890s, the United States began to implement the Monroe Doctrine, pushing out European colonial powers and establishing U.S. hegemony over resources and labor in Latin American nations. The dictators that ruled Guatemala during the late 19th and early 20th century were generally very accommodating to U.S. business and political interests. So unlike other Latin American nations, such as Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba, the U.S. did not have to use overt military force to maintain dominance in Guatemala, and the Guatemalan military/police worked closely with the U.S. military and State Department to secure U.S. interests. The Guatemalan government exempted several U.S. corporations from paying taxes, privatized and sold off publicly owned utilities, and gave away huge swaths of public land.[3]

In 1930, the dictator General Jorge Ubico came to power, backed by the United States, and initiated one of the most brutally repressive governments in Central American history. He created a widespread network of spies and informants, and had large numbers of political opponents tortured and put to death. A wealthy aristocrat and a staunch anti-communist, he consistently sided with landowners and urban elites in disputes with peasants. He implemented a system of debt slavery and forced labor, and passed laws allowing landowners to execute workers as a "disciplinary" measure. Ubico was disdainful of the indigenous population, calling them "animal-like", and stated that to become "civilized" they needed mandatory military training, comparing it to "domesticating donkeys". He gave away hundreds of thousands of hectares to the United Fruit Company (UFCO) and exempted them from taxes, and allowed the U.S. military to establish bases in Guatemala.[4][5][6][7][8] Ubico considered himself to be "another Napolean". He was extremely wealthy (with an income of $215,000 per year), dressed ostentatiously, and surrounded himself with statues and paintings of the emperor, regularly commenting on the similarities between their appearances. He militarized numerous political and social institutions—including the post office, schools, and symphony orchestras—and placed military officers in charge of many government posts. He frequently travelled around the country performing "inspections", in dress uniform, followed by a military escort, a mobile radio station, an official biographer, and cabinet members.[9][10][4][11][12] He also openly identified as a fascist; he admired Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler, saying at one point: "I am like Hitler. I execute first and ask questions later."[13][14][15][16][17]

Ubico's repressive policies and arrogant demeanor eventually led to a widspread popular insurrection, led by middle-class intellectuals, professionals, and junior army officers. In July 1, 1944 Ubico resigned from office amidst a general strike and nationwide protests. Initially, he had planned to hand over power to the former director of police, General Roderico Anzueto, who he felt he could control. But his advisors noted that Anzueto's pro-Nazi sympathies had made him very unpopular, and that he would not be able to control the military. So Ubico instead chose to select a triumvariate of Major General Bueneventura Piñeda, Major General Eduardo Villagrán Ariza, and General Federico Ponce Vaides. The three generals promised to convene the national assembly to hold an election for a provisional president, but when the congress met on July 3, soldiers held everyone at gunpoint and forced them to vote for General Ponce, rather than the popular civilian candidate Dr. Ramón Calderón. Ponce, who had previously retired from military service due to alcoholism, took orders from Ubico and kept many of the officials who had worked in the Ubico administration. The repressive policies of the Ubico administration were continued.[18][4][19]

Opposition groups began organizing again, this time joined by many prominent political and military leaders, who deemed the Ponce regime unconstitutional. Among the military officers in the opposition were Jacobo Árbenz and Major Franciso Javier Araña. Ubico had fired Árbenz from his teaching post at the Escuela Politécnica, and since then Árbenz had been in El Salvador, organizing a band of revolutionary exiles. On October 19, 1944 a small group of soldiers and students, led by Árbenz and Arana, attacked the National Palace.[20]

By 1950, a handful of U.S. corporations controlled Guatemalas primary electrical utilities, the nation's only railroad, and the banana industry, which was Guatemalas chief agricultural export industry.[3] By the mid-1940s, Guatemalan banana plantations accounted for more than one quarter of all of United Fruit Company's production in Latin America.[21]

Election

In March 1951, Árbenz assumed the presidency after Guatemala's second-ever universal-suffrage election, marking the first peaceful transition of power in Guatemala's history. He campaigned as a reformer and garnered 60% of the vote by promising to make Guatemala an economically independent, Socialist state that would shed its colonial-era dependence on the U.S. His predecessor, Juan José Arévalo, had successfully begun a series of reforms to open the political process to all citizens. Arévalo's extension of voting and labor rights threatened the power of the traditional elite and led to more than twenty failed coup attempts to oust him.

Land reform

Arbenz set land reform as his central goal as only 2 % of the population owned 70 % of the land.

[22]

Árbenz continued Arévalo's reform agenda and, in June 1952, his government enacted an agrarian reform program. The agrarian reform law (decree 900) gave the government power to expropriate only uncultivated portions of large plantations. Estates of up to 670 acres (2.7 km2) were exempted if at least two thirds of the land was cultivated; also exempt were lands that had a slope of more than 30 degrees (a significant exemption in mountainous Guatemala). The land was then allocated to individual families. Owners of expropriated land were compensated according to the worth of the land claimed in May 1952 tax assessments. Land was paid for in twenty-five year bonds with a 3 percent interest rate.[23] Arbenz himself, a landowner through his wife, gave up 1,700 acres (7 km2) of his own land in the land reform program.[24]

While Árbenz's proposed agenda was welcomed by impoverished peasants who made up the majority of Guatemala's population, it provoked the ire of the upper landowning classes, powerful U.S. corporate interests, and factions of the military, who accused Árbenz of bowing to Communist influence. This tension resulted in noticeable unrest in the country. Carlos Castillo, an army officer, rebelled at the Aurora airport in the early 1950s, was defeated and shot, surviving his injuries. Castillo then spent some time in a Guatemalan prison before escaping and going into exile in 1951.

Coup

May 1975 CIA internal memo, released under the Freedom of Information Act, describing the CIA's role in the overthrow of Árbenz. (1 of 5)

Instability, combined with Árbenz's relative tolerance of Guatemalan Party of Labour (PGT) and other leftists influences, prompted the CIA to draw up a contingency plan entitled Operation PBFORTUNE in 1951. It outlined a method of ousting Árbenz if he were deemed a Communist threat in the hemisphere.

The United Fruit Company, a U.S.-based corporation, was also threatened by Árbenz's land reform initiative. United Fruit was Guatemala's largest landowner, with 85% of its holdings uncultivated, vulnerable to Árbenz's reform plans. In calculating its tax obligations, United Fruit had consistently (and drastically) undervalued the worth of its holdings. In its 1952 taxes, it claimed its land was only worth $3 per acre. When, in accordance with United Fruit's tax claims, the Árbenz government offered to compensate the company at the $3 rate, the company claimed the land's true value was $75/acre but refused to explain the precipitous jump in its own determination of the land's value.

In 1952, the Guatemalan Party of Labour was legalized; Communists subsequently gained considerable minority influence over important peasant organizations and labor unions, but not over the governing political party and won only four seats in the 58-seat governing body. The CIA, having drafted Operation PBFORTUNE, was already concerned about Árbenz's potential Communist ties. United Fruit had been lobbying the CIA to oust reform governments in Guatemala since Arévalo's time but it wasn't until the Eisenhower administration that it found an ear in the White House. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration was still flush with victory from its covert operation to topple the Mossadegh government in Iran the year before. On February 19, 1954, the CIA began Operation WASHTUB, a plan to plant a phony Soviet arms cache in Nicaragua to demonstrate Guatemalan ties to Moscow.[25][26]

In May 1954, Czechoslovak weaponry arrived in secret into Guatemala aboard the Swedish ship Alfhem. The ship's manifests had been falsified as to the nature of its cargo. The U.S. took this as final proof of Árbenz's Soviet links. The Czechoslovaks supplied, for cash down, obsolete and barely functional German WWII weaponry.[27]

"The direct contacts between the Soviet Union and the Árbenz Government consisted of one Soviet diplomat working out an exchange of bananas for agricultural machinery, which fell through because neither side had refrigerated ships. The only other evidence of contact the CIA found after the operation were two bills to the Guatemalan Communist Party from a Moscow bookstore, totalling $22.95."[27]

The Árbenz government was convinced a U.S.-sponsored invasion was imminent: it had previously released detailed accounts of the CIA's Operation PBFORTUNE (called the White Papers) and perceived US actions at the OAS convention in Caracas that year as a lead-up to intervention. The administration ordered the CIA to sponsor a coup d'état, code-named Operation PBSUCCESS that toppled the government. Árbenz resigned on June 27, 1954 and was forced to flee, seeking refuge in the Mexican Embassy.

After the coup, Frank Wisner organised an operation called PBHistory to secure Árbenz Government documents. PBHistory aimed to prove Soviet control of Guatemala and, in so doing, hopefully provide actionable intelligence with regard to other Soviet connections and personnel in Latin America. Wisner sent two teams who, with the help of the Army and Castillo Armas's junta, gathered 150,000 documents. Ronald M. Schneider, an extra-Agency researcher who later examined the PBHistory documents, found no traces of Soviet control and substantial evidence that Guatemalan Communists acted alone, without support or guidance from outside the country.[28]

Later life

He initially stayed in Mexico, and then he and his family moved to Switzerland. The Swiss government would not allow him to stay unless he gave up his Guatemalan citizenship. Refusing to do so, Árbenz moved to Paris, and then to Prague. Czechoslovak officials were uncomfortable with his stay, unsure if he would demand the government to repay him for the poor quality of arms that they had sold him in 1954. After only three months, he moved again, this time to Moscow. He tried several times to return to Latin America, and was finally allowed to move to Uruguay in 1957.

In 1960, after the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro asked Árbenz to come to Cuba, to which Arbenz readily agreed. In 1965, his eldest and favorite daughter, a fashion model named Arabella, committed suicide, shooting herself in front of her boyfriend, the Matador Jaime Bravo, in Bogotá, Colombia. Árbenz was devastated by her death. He was allowed to return to Mexico to bury his daughter and, eventually, was allowed to stay. On January 27, 1971, Árbenz died in his bathroom, either by drowning or scalding due to hot water. The circumstances under which Árbenz died are still suspicious.

Family

The son of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, Jacobo Arbenz Villanova, is a Guatemalan politician.

See also

References

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Gleijeses, 1992: pp.134-137
  2. ↑ Gleijeses, 1992: p.141
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Streeter, 2000: pp. 8-10
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Streeter, 2000: pp. 11-12
  5. ↑ Immerman, 1983: pp. 34-37
  6. ↑ Cullather, 2006: pp. 9-10
  7. ↑ Rabe, 1988: p. 43
  8. ↑ McCreery, 1994: pp. 316-317
  9. ↑ Immerman, 1983: p. 32
  10. ↑ Grandin, 2000: p. 195
  11. ↑ Benz, 1996: pp. 16-17
  12. ↑ Loveman and Davies, 1997: pp. 118-120
  13. ↑ Shillington, John (2002). Grappling with atrocity: Guatemalan theater in the 1990s. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. pp. 38–39. ISBN 9780838639306. http://books.google.com/books?id=KJyWMjI4pfgC&pg=PA38. 
  14. ↑ LaFeber, Walter (1993). Inevitable revolutions: the United States in Central America. W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 77–79. ISBN 9780393309645. http://books.google.com/books?id=RqMp5TsWCqkC&pg=PA77. 
  15. ↑ Forster, 2001: p. 81-82
  16. ↑ Friedman, Max Paul (2003). Nazis and good neighbors: the United States campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II. Cambridge University Press. pp. 82–83. ISBN 9780521822466. http://books.google.com/books?id=qYeYaDs1xR4C&pg=PA82. 
  17. ↑ Krehm, 1999: pp. 44-45
  18. ↑ Immerman, 1983: pp. 39-40
  19. ↑ Jonas, 1991: p. 22
  20. ↑ Immerman, 1983: pp. 41-43
  21. ↑ Striffler and Moberg, 2003: p. 192
  22. ↑ American Foreign Relations: A History, Volume 2: Since 1895 - Volume 2, by Thomas G. Paterson et al, Cengage Learning, 2009, ISBN 0547225695, pg 304
  23. ↑ Rabe, 1988:
  24. ↑ Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of US-Latin American Relations, Oxford University Press, 2000
  25. ↑ Ward, Matthew. "Washington Unmakes Guatemala, 1954 Appendix A: Timeline of Events". Council on Hemispheric Affairs. http://www.coha.org/NEW_PRESS_RELEASES/Matt%20Ward/MW_Appendix_A.htm. 
  26. ↑ Cullather, 2006: p. 57
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know (1997), p.178
  28. ↑ Cullather, 1997

Bibliography

  • Benz, Stephen Connely (1996). Guatemalan Journey. University of Texas Press. ISBN 9780292708402. 
  • Cullather, Nicholas (May 23, 1997); "CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents", National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 4, National Security Archive
  • Cullather, Nicholas (2006). Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala 1952-54 (2nd ed.). Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804754682. 
  • Forster, Cindy (2001). The time of freedom: campesino workers in Guatemala's October Revolution. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 9780822941620. 
  • Gleijeses, Piero (1992). Shattered hope: the Guatemalan revolution and the United States, 1944-1954. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691025568. 
  • Grandin, Greg (2000). The blood of Guatemala: a history of race and nation. Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822324959. 
  • Immerman, Richard H. (1983). The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. University of Texas Press. ISBN 9780292710832. 
  • Jonas, Susanne (1991). The battle for Guatemala: rebels, death squads, and U.S. power (5th ed.). Westview Press. ISBN 9780813306148. 
  • Krehm, William (1999). Democracies and Tyrannies of the Caribbean in the 1940's. COMER Publications. ISBN 9781896266817. 
  • Loveman, Brian; Davies, Thomas M. (1997). The Politics of antipolitics: the military in Latin America (3rd, revised ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780842026116. 
  • McCreery, David (1994). Rural Guatemala, 1760-1940. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804723183. 
  • Rabe, Stephen G. (1988). Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9780807842041. 
  • Streeter, Stephen M. (2000). Managing the counterrevolution: the United States and Guatemala, 1954-1961. Ohio University Press. ISBN 9780896802155. 
  • Striffler, Steve; Moberg, Mark (2003). Banana wars: power, production, and history in the Americas. Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822331964. 

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Preceded by
Juan José Arévalo		 President of Guatemala
1951–1954		 Succeeded by
Carlos Enrique Díaz de León
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