Word: arbenz
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...them was Francisco Fernandez, boss of the majority party in Congress, the Revolutionary Action Party (PAR), which elected President Jacobo Arbenz. PAR is moderately leftish, and "Paco" Fernandez is supposed to be no worse than a dilettantish fellow traveler...
Agrarian Reformers. Since then, the Reds have so wormed their way into the secondary ranks of government, and so identified themselves with the regime's revolutionary ideals, that anti-Communism is now officially regarded as subversive. Arbenz let the Reds form their own political party, in violation of the constitution, and took them into his government coalition; four Communists have been elected to Congress on the official ticket, and the anti-Communist opposition now holds only five of the 64 congressional seats. The President has given the Reds patronage and subsidies for their two newspapers. They run the government...
...Arbenz helped them take over the organized peasant movement, and they have repaid him with all-out support for his pet land-reform projects. When the Reds worked out a procedure for claiming United Fruit Co. property under the new agrarian law, he was delighted; in March the President formally upheld confiscation of 233,973 acres of the company's best reserve and fallow banana-growing lands. Now Red-led peasants are demanding 224,000 acres of the other big Unifruit plantation, and the company may eventually have to fold its $50 million Guatemalan operation...
International Schemers. Arbenz may not yet realize how much he has come to rely on his Communist advisers and policymakers. If the Reds are putting over the Cominform line in Guatemala, the wider meaning of this is lost on him. Neighboring Central American republics are at odds with Guatemala over the growing evidence that its comrades play the international Communist game, passing Red propaganda into Nicaragua and El Salvador and sending agitators to stir up Salvadorian and Honduran banana and coffee workers. Inside his own country, the split between left & right has widened until Arbenz himself says: "There...
...Communist army dissidents staged an abortive uprising, quelled by military police after 18 hours. A better-planned revolt, once launched, might draw thousands of anti-Communist recruits and throw the country into a bloody civil war whose probable outcome, no matter who won, would be a return to dictatorship. Arbenz' strategy apparently is to try to sit on the lid and turn over his office four years hence to a hand-picked army successor who will carry on with his policies, Communists and all. Few Guatemalans have much hope that the stubborn President will ever see the Reds...