Word: ubico
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Last week, another American neighbor turned on him. Guatemala refused to accept the ambassador proposed by Trujillo, formally broke relations with the Dominican Republic. Guatemalan President Juan José Arévalo, who never forgets that his country got rid of its own dictator, General Jorge Ubico, in 1944, pointed a democratic finger of scorn. Trujillo, he said, had corrupted "republican practices into monarchical practices." With rigged elections like last May's, he added, Dictator Trujillo could rule "for the next four centuries...
Died. General Jorge Ubico, 67, Guatemala's efficient, undersized, Napoleon-complexed dictator-President (1931-44), who balanced the budget and produced a little but not too much prosperity ("If the people have money they'll kick me out"), and was fond of showing his boxing prowess by beating up his Cabinet members (with armed guards present); after long illness; in New Orleans...
Central American politicos, from the days of William Walker to those of dollar diplomacy, had hatched new revolutions in the musty Vieux Carré. Nowadays Guatemala's ex-Dictator Jorge Ubico, moping in his St. Charles Avenue garden, is about the only political exile left, but Latin America still looks on convenient New Orleans as its cultural and economic beachhead...
Democratic Blowdowns. The war years changed the political climate. Democratic gusts blew down the Ubico dictatorship in Guatemala, today whistle ominously through the pinetops of Carías' Honduras. In the roaring times when it was never clear which went first, the U.S. flag or the U.S. dollar, to old banana hands such winds would have signaled hurricane warnings. For politically minded United Fruit was deeply involved in Dictators Ubico's and Carías' rise to power. But wily Sam Zemurray, United's big boss, radar-keen in detecting a gale, had fore-handedly trimmed...
Guatemala's Arévalo government also recently introduced a steep profits tax, despite a concession wangled from Ubico forbidding new taxation on United Fruit till 1981. Bargaining is tough. With huge new plantations in the Dominican Republic ready to sprout bananas by 1947, United Fruit can threaten to shut down in Guatemala, as it did in Colombia when disease and the government moved...