Word: ladino
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...urgent problems of a country where 64% of its 5,100,000 people are illiterate and most farm land is held by the rich. Perhaps the gravest problem of all is the continued existence of a caste system that separates the Indian majority (slightly over 50%) from the "Ladino" class, which consists of whites, mixed-bloods, and those Indians who have adopted the speech and manners of the Spanish ruling group. "In Guatemala, the Indian is only a part of the scenery, like the 33 volcanoes and Lake Atitlán," said a foreign observer in Guatemala City last week...
...Smart Subaltern. Jacobo (pronounced Ha-coe-boe) Arbenz was born in Quezaltenango in 1913 of a Ladino mother and a moody Swiss immigrant druggist who failed in business, walked out on his family and later killed himself. Another Swiss in the town intervened with General Jorge Ubico, the country's all-powerful ruler, to get the blond youth a scholarship at the national military school. Quickwitted and lithely muscular, Arbenz played polo and boxed while pulling down the highest grades in the academy's history. But when school triumphs were over, he was just another impoverished subaltern with...
...regime, for the first time, Communist propaganda began to circulate freely in Guatemala. Young Ladino intellectuals-notably such present-day government advisers as Josè Manuel Fortuny, Victor Manuel Gutierrez, Carlos Manuel Pellecer and Alfredo Guerra Borges-soaked up Marxian ideas. U.S.-educated Maria Arbenz became interested, and she and Fortuny guided Arbenz, no heavyweight thinker, to read some popularized explanations of Communist theory...
...unrest were some solid political, economic and social facts. Central America, whose tyranny was older than Spanish rule, had been unsettled like the rest of the world by World War II. Before 1939, politically and economically, most of Central America had not yet entered the 20th Century. German and Ladino landowners raised coffee in the highlands, paid their peons as low as 20? a day, shipped much produce to Europe. U.S. fruit companies dominated the coastal jungles, paid peons higher wages but took them away again at company stores...