Word: arbenz
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Early last week a group of them came to Arbenz' mahogany-paneled office, and their spokesman, Colonel Ruben Gonzalez Sigui, posed a quiet, pregnant question...
...Chief of the Armed Forces, Arana shared authority over the army with Defense Minister Arbenz. Feeling ran high; once the two men, both drunk, faced each other in Guatemala City's Palace Hotel bar with hot words and drawn .455, and only a friend's intervention prevented gunfire. Affable, conservative Arana stood well with the army, and was in the lead for the presidency, when in July 1949 he was decoyed into making an inspection trip that took his Mercury station wagon over a little arched bridge near Lake Ama-titlán. There he and his aide...
Inside Guatemala, tension rose to the boil. Labor and peasants presented with farms of their own under the land-reform program pledged loyalty to Arbenz and the Communists; the remote Indians, as ever, were mute and apart. But in the capital, which had elected an anti-Communist mayor in 1951, the government discovered "plot" after "plot"-and across the border in Honduras, Castillo Armas was almost ready...
...dozens, the regime's opponents fled to asylum in foreign embassies; the Salvadorans had barely put 18 such guests on a departing airliner when twelve more showed up. Arbenz clamped on a state of emergency, drastically censored the press and cables. Secret police in black berets drifted everywhere; cops with rifles slung over their backs patrolled the streets on bicycles. The jails filled up with prisoners...
Quiet Question. All Arbenz' Communist support might do him little good, in a showdown, if his army deserted him. How stood the army? Arbenz had fattened it with increased pay and had given his officers elegant clubs and low-price commissaries. He had trimmed out the despised "line" (i.e., up from the ranks) officers and replaced them with fellow military-school men. The officers were glad to get new equipment, even Red arms -but they had little use for Communism...