Word: junta
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...series of legislative decrees replacing the 1945 constitution, the junta President 1) outlawed the Communist Party, making Guatemala the 18th Latin American republic to do so, and 2) dissolved the elaborate structure of political parties and social and economic front organizations through which the Reds had dominated the country. Castillo Armas then committed Guatemala to the U.S.-sponsored anti-Communist resolution which 17 of the American states approved but which the Arbenz regime fought bitterly at the Inter-American conference in Caracas last March...
Elements of the regular army, increasingly resentful of the Liberation Army, quickly seized on the mortification of the cadets as an excuse to rise against the Castillo Armas junta. Two days of swaying, shifting combat caused almost as much bloodshed (29 killed, 91 wounded) as the original revolution. But when it was over, President Castillo Armas seemed to emerge more decisively in command than ever...
...settlers had a fiesta. Castillo Armas, caught far off base at a friend's finca near Antigua, made it back to the capital tardily-and then only by leaving his car and skulking through ravines around an army roadblock. By dusk the army had forced him and the junta to agree to disband all irregular forces. Then the cadets and regular army soldiers marched the battered survivors of the anti-Communist Army of Liberation like P.W.s right through the capital's Sixth Avenue to a train that carried them back to their old headquarters near the Honduran border...
Base Surrender. But at that point the balance of power shifted again. A small group of high officers led by Colonel EIfego Monzón, the army's spokesman in the junta, felt that the regulars had gone too far. Dashing from barracks to bar racks, Monzón next day won pledges of loyalty to the junta from all except officers commanding one military base near the airfield. Castillo Armas also had an even stronger ally. For the first time, public opinion spoke out, revealing unexpectedly heavy support for Castillo Armas. Outraged by the brutal treatment...
That afternoon, sending Mustangs and Thunderbolts from its six-plane air force to strafe the holdouts, the junta forced the surrender of the rebellious base and arrested its top officers. The army fell obediently silent. The President ordered his irregulars rearmed. Then, as if finally confident that he, after all, is the man in charge, Castillo Armas restored constitutional liberties which his junta had suspended, and moved from the rented side-street house he had occupied since the June victory and installed himself in the presidential palace...