Word: arbenz
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Doublecross. At the beginning of last week. President Jacobo Arbenz,* who had persisted in typical Communist butchery in his last days in office (see below), had stepped down in favor of Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz, chief of the armed forces. But Castillo Armas, convinced that Diaz was just a front for Arbenz, had said as much by going on with his war, notably by bombing Guatemala City's Matamoros Fort. Peurifoy agreed heartily with Castillo Armas' action. The ambassador had learned that under a cover of vocal antiCommunism, the doublecrossing Diaz was letting Arbenz' Red advisers...
...months ago, Ambassador Peurifoy, asked about the Arbenz regime's prospects, had quipped: "We are making out our Fourth of July reception invitations, and we are not including any of the present administration...
...Asylum. The Arbenz crowd meanwhile, had scuttled to asylum. Many of them found the Mexican embassy, right across the street, the handiest. There went most of the Guatemalan Congress. There went the major Communists: Presidential Adviser Jose Manuel Fortuny, Labor Leader Victor Manuel Gutierrez, Peasant Boss Leonardo Castillo Flores, Editor Alfredo Guerra Borges. There went ex-Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello...
...wearing blue armbands with the white dagger and cross of the "Liberation Movement." They fingered black burp guns and seemed to have plenty of ammunition. The officers were upper-crust Guatemalan exiles-lawyers, engineers, coffee planters driven out for their politics or stripped of some of their land under Arbenz' Communist-administered agrarian reform program. Castillo Armas himself turned out to be a slender, sallow, diffident man in a checked shirt and leather jacket, with a .45 automatic jammed into the belt of his khaki pants...
...different sort of fear blanketed the countryside-fear of the peasant bands and Communist partisans whom the government had called out to patrol roads, to search houses and arrest anti-Communists and other "traitors." Many of these barefoot supporters of the Arbenz regime obviously knew as little of Marx as they did of Hart & Schaffner, but many of them had got land under the agrarian program, and they could be counted on to defend it ferociously. Men like that who get weapons in their hands do not turn them back meekly; Guatemala would probably hear of them again...