Word: castillo
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During its second week in power, the revolutionary regime of President Carlos Castillo Armas tinkered busily with the governmental machine it had undertaken to control. Last week the Colonel and his Cabinet...
...Kept police (and a new, irregular force made up of soldiers from Castillo Armas' liberation army) so busy arresting suspected Communists that the jails overflowed with 3.500 of them...
...Castillo Armas promised elections, first for an assembly to 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...
Hope for the Future. Though the previous regime apparently hijacked some $30 to $35 million out of the treasury, leaving Castillo Armas some immediate financial problems, the future is not dismaying. Guatemala is fourth among the world's coffee-producing nations, and grows a high-quality bean that commands a premium price, benefiting both the economy and the tax collectors...
...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...