Word: ubico
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Hardly had TIME'S report on Guatemala's tyranny appeared last week than a popular movement to overthrow Guatemala's tyrant began. Striking students p raded the streets of Guatemala City, defied the martial law imposed by Dictator Jorge Ubico (TIME, June 26). Bystanders and women trailed along, trembling at first, then gaining courage. The tyrant's police and soldiers were ready. They routed the unarmed paraders with tear gas and bullets, killed an undisclosed number. The seething city settled down to whispering quiet...
...Ubico claims to protect the humble, peaceful Indians who form the bulk of the Guatemalan population (total: 3,284,269). Actually, he grants these subjects no rights at all, controls them by arbitrary vagrancy laws, makes them work three weeks a year for the State for nothing. Hundreds of these forced Indian laborers have died on a road which Ubico is pushing through the pestilential jungles of Peten...
...Ubico has no children, legitimate or otherwise. "I slave day and night," he complains to intimates, "and I haven't even a son to leave my fortune to." But he tries. At 65, he continually boasts of his virility...
...Germans, who grew much of Guatemala's coffee, had a big stake in its export trade, have been shipped to the U.S. for internment. German properties have been impounded for the duration. A special tax on enemy business eats up the profits. But most Guatemalans do not take Ubico's anti-German gestures too seriously, expect him to return the holdings to German ownership after...
...Ubico has heard the murmur. For years he planned "to leave the Presidency only for the cemetery." After El Salvador's revolt, he said: "A ruler should know in the seat of his pants when he ought to get out of his chair...