Arbenz, Jacobo (1913–1971)

Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who was elected president of Guatemala in 1951 and overthrown by a U.S.-organized coup in 1954, was born in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, on September 14, 1913. He attended the national military academy, where he also taught for a number of years, during which time he married Maria Cristina Vilanova, daughter of a Salvadorean landowner, whose socialist ideas and associations deeply influenced his own views and subsequent policies.

Arbenz became a secret opponent of the Guatemalan dictator, Jorge Ubico, who, during the 1930s, had supported the ambitions of the powerful U.S.-based United Fruit Company, Guatemala's largest landowner and state within a state. In 1944, Arbenz helped lead a coup against Ubico's successor, General Francisco Ponce, bringing to power a provisional junta that wrote a new, progressive constitution, ending censorship, outlawing racism, and legalizing unions. Democratic elections led to the presidency of Juan Jose Arevalo, a former university professor who returned to the country after years in exile, and a period of widespread reforms. In 1951, the popular Arbenz, who had served as Defense Minister in the Arevalo government, was elected president, with 65% of the vote.

On June 17, 1952, Arbenz announced a new agrarian reform program, to redress the country's terrible problem of land inequality. In the process, 200,000 acres of uncultivated land owned by the United Fruit Company were appropriated, triggering the company's aggressive propaganda campaign in Washington, D.C., to induce the Eisenhower administration to overthrow the Arbenz government on the grounds that it was under Soviet influence. Although Arbenz had close relations with leading members of the small Guatemalan Communist Party, he was not a member (he joined only in 1957, long after the coup), nor was there any evidence of Russian influence on his policies. However, the argument was appealing to many prominent political figures, who often had longstanding relations with the United Fruit Company. These included Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who characterized Guatemala as the scene of a communist type of terrorism.

The Central Intelligence Agency had actually started planning to bring down the Arbenz government through psychological warfare, political intervention, and, if need be, assassination, before the land reform program. That plan (named PBSuccess), [Page 188]which backed an ambitious army officer, Carlos Castillo Armas, culminated in a successful coup in mid-June 1954, which forced Arbenz into exile. In the subsequent months, political parties and peasant organizations were banned, and the land reform program was reversed. Under Armas, who was assassinated in 1957, and a succession of military dictators, Guatemala degenerated into one of the region's most repressive countries, where, for more than 30 years, an ongoing civil war claimed an estimated 100,000 lives, chiefly among Guatemala's indigenous (Mayan) communities. Arbenz eventually settled with his family in Cuba in 1960. Ten years later, he and his wife moved to Mexico City where, worn-out and depressed, not least by the suicide of his daughter several years earlier, he was found drowned in his bathtub on January 27, 1971. His remains were returned to Guatemala in 1995.