Word: guatemala
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Nowhere else outside the Iron Curtain was there such a May Day as Guatemala celebrated last week. There, in a nation just four hours by plane from the Panama Canal, 20,000 government supporters paraded with floats and banners attacking the U.S. and praising Russia and Communist China. President Jacobo Arbenz proclaimed "our decision to move forward against native reactionaries and privileged foreign countries [and] forge a Guatemala which cannot be soiled by a foreign hand." The President shouted: "The accusation that we encourage Communism is false!" Then he turned and embraced Communist Labor Chief Victor Manuel Gutierrez...
...social upheaval. Today those forces are being adroitly exploited by a handful of clever Reds who took part in the revolution. They have no mass support worthy of the name, and get their only real power from a working alliance with the nationalist revolution's most fanatical spokesman: Guatemala's army boss, strong man and elected President, Colonel Arbenz...
Backroom Advisers. Guatemala's Reds are native products; not one is a Moscow-polished, internationally seasoned operator, and most of them turned Communist only after the 1944 revolution. They got a foothold under professorial Juan José Arevalo, President from 1945 to 1951, who let them organize the country's first trade unions but had enough political sophistication to hold them in rein. Their growth in behind-the-scenes power came under Arbenz, Arevalo's chosen successor, whom they helped elect...
...took office with relatively little political experience and a few burning obsessions: ardent nationalism, a conviction that the country's worst problems can be solved by drastic land reforms, a deep-seated hatred of "foreign monopolies," i.e., United Fruit Co. and other U.S.-owned firms operating in Guatemala. No Communist himself, he nevertheless accepted the Communists around him at their face value, as old revolutionary friends ready to help carry out his nationalist aims...
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...