Word: arbenz
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...first days in office it was clear that Castillo Armas planned no abrupt swing to the right. His coup came to Guatemala in the midst of a ten-year-old social revolution against a series of dictatorships that had ruled for 105 years before. The rebel, who sided with Arbenz in the 1944 overthrow of Dictator Jorge Ubico, has no nostalgia for the old days. Last week he promised to consolidate all "social reforms benefiting the working class" and to "continue the public works begun by our enemies." Land redistribution, which has been slowly getting some of the country...
...write a new constitution, and later for the presidency. Running the risk of uniformed criticism, he deprived the country's illiterates of the vote. Trucking unlettered Indians to the polls and showing them where to put the cross has long been the favorite way of Guatemalan Presidents, including Arbenz and his dictatorial predecessors, of getting into office or staying there. In refusing ballots to citizens who cannot read or write, Castillo Armas freely surrendered a traditional weapon for keeping power...
Never in Latin American history had the tradition of diplomatic asylum been so heavily used or so flagrantly abused. With the collapse of Jacobo Arbenz' Communist-manned government, about 900 people fled to nine embassies, taking the time-honored escape route after losing a revolution. Some of the refugees were top officials of the old regime, notably Arbenz himself, most of his Cabinet and a quorum of Congress. Others were panicky henchmen, fearful that they might be held responsible for the last month of Red terror, beatings and killings. In bad conscience, many thought it prudent to take with...
Ambassador Villa Michel chivalrously gave his own bedroom to Arbenz, who fell off the wagon and went on a thundering three-day bender, after which a doctor straightened him out with glucose injections. Former Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello visited the ex-President from time to time, but most of the other inmates never saw him. Jose Manuel Fortuny, No. I Communist and longtime Arbenz adviser, had an urgent personal problem: his wife was at the point of giving birth. The former Health Minister, also in asylum, delivered the baby, a boy, whom Fortuny gratefully saddled with the name Cuauht...
Castillo Armas also announced that his "determination in general is not to allow the departure of any refugee guilty of common crimes," and said he thought he could show that Arbenz was the "author of a common crime." But to deny safe-conducts, at least for the important refugees, would be to defy both the generous interpretation of the right of asylum that Guatemala has traditionally held, and the government of Mexico. Guatemala's traditional friend. Worse, seizing Arbenz might enable him to pose as a martyr...