Word: guatemala
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
President Carlos Castillo Armas and his wife were to dine alone one night last week in the block-long Presidential Palace in Guatemala City. Not even one of the wiry President's military aides was present as the couple strolled arm in arm down the long, wide hallway from their bedroom apartment to the dining room. Only the crack Presidential Guards stood duty in the series of archways that led to the courtyard gardens...
...product of a poor family, the country's military academy, and the U.S. Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., he cracked down relentlessly on Communism, which he had learned to hate as a career officer. He had seen Communism spreading in Guatemala for ten years. For a plot to head off the rigged election of Arbenz in 1950, he faced a firing squad; luckily hit only in the left leg, he returned to prison, helped dig a 38-ft. tunnel under the walls, and escaped to begin the plot that took Guatemala. With...
...Castillo steered the country sternly back from left to center, the U.S. sent $50 million to start a highway and building boom that has kept Guatemala prosperous. But graft, always present, kept pace with prosperity. The President alone dispensed $1,000,000 a year through the old and perfectly legal custom of confidenciales-a confidential fund that he could spend as he saw fit. With paternal pride, Castillo launched ambitious health-and-education programs, plastering the country with signs urging peasants to "Wash Your Hands Before Eating." To replace Arbenz' helter-skelter expropriation of rich plantations, he started...
Reserves were called up, army troops swarmed the city, road blocks were erected and a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew declared. But Guatemala-for the time, at least -remained calm. At the National Palace, where the dead President lay in state, military-academy cadets stood guard while a three-block line of mourners filed past. President Eisenhower, who received Castillo Armas in the hospital in Denver and renewed the acquaintance while visiting Panama, called the death "a great loss to his own nation and to the entire free world. President Castillo Armas was a personal friend of mine...
Died. Carlos Castillo Armas, 42, President of Guatemala since 1954; by an assassin's bullet; in Guatemala City (see THE HEMISPHERE...