Word: guatemala
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Comic Opera. In Guatemala, the 1½-year-old revolutionary government of Juan José Arévalo had fresh proof that implanting a democracy on inhospitable soil was far more complicated than toppling a dictator. Planters and merchants who resented middle-of-the-fence Arévalo's sops to labor had tried to buy up the army for a counterrevolution. The plot failed; 27 went to jail...
Hondurans got the tipoff last month when Oppositionist Edmundo Pinto Mejia was arrested, then savagely beaten with the classic verga de toro (bull's pizzle). Newsmen hustling into Guatemala for safety last week reported a new "wave of terror"; Dictator Carías' jails were filling fast...
...disease, called onchocercosis, is apparently of African origin. First found in Guatemala, it spread into Chiapas with migrations of coffee pickers; a smaller outbreak in Oaxaca was attributed to pilgrims who had visited a Guatemalan shrine. The Inter-American highway is now opening the remote region for the first time, and epidemiologists fear that the disease will spread into the rest of Mexico. One fact which comforts Mexican researchers: though the disease has spread through the coffee-growing regions, where peons are mostly undernourished, it seldom attacks healthy, well-fed people...
Died. General Jorge Ubico, 67, Guatemala's efficient, undersized, Napoleon-complexed dictator-President (1931-44), who balanced the budget and produced a little but not too much prosperity ("If the people have money they'll kick me out"), and was fond of showing his boxing prowess by beating up his Cabinet members (with armed guards present); after long illness; in New Orleans...
Temple Paradise. In Guatemala last week, an expedition financed by the United Fruit Co. was restoring the Mayan city of Zaculeu, near Huehuetenango. Zaculeu's spectacular pyramid temple is surrounded by a diggers' paradise of lesser temples and altars. (Near by is a court for the breakneck religious ball game which Central Americans believe to be the ancestor of basket ball.) Guatemala is dotted with dead stone cities, and United Fruit has promised a five-year program to put them back in shape...