Word: valo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...slatternly Mexican border town of Tapachula had spruced up for the occasion. At the airport, under a brassy sun, Mexico's President Manuel Avila Camacho and Guatemalan President Juan José Arévalo slapped each other's broad backs in warm Latin embrace. Their wives embraced also (see cut). Never before had Mexico's relations with its southern neighbor been so cordial...
Amidst the flowery courtesies bandied over the luncheon table at the Hotel Continental, Arévalo hailed Mexico's 1938 expropriation of foreign oil companies as a "continental guide" for the assertion of national sovereignty. To some Mexicans Arévalo's brave words may have sounded like mention of rope in the house of the hanged; Mexico today is pondering how to attract foreign capital to help reorganize her hopelessly inefficient oil industry. But Arevalo had a purpose. He was talking at the United Fruit Co., whose north coast plantations had been paralyzed for four weeks...
Nobody in his senses believed that Guatemala seriously contemplated expropriating the United Fruit's immense, highly mechanized plantations. With a bark fiercer than his bite, Arévalo in his 20 months of rule had not even got around to using his constitutional power to revise the company's 50-year exemption from new taxation. But his bold speechifying had an immediate effect: next day the strike was suspended; United Fruit agreed to rehire hundreds of discharged workers and ordered its ships to resume their calls at the Caribbean port of Puerto Barrios...
Comic Opera. In Guatemala, the 1½-year-old revolutionary government of Juan José Arévalo had fresh proof that implanting a democracy on inhospitable soil was far more complicated than toppling a dictator. Planters and merchants who resented middle-of-the-fence Arévalo's sops to labor had tried to buy up the army for a counterrevolution. The plot failed; 27 went to jail...
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...