Word: valos
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...government newspaper in Guatemala City had set off the incident that excited the British Admiralty. Jeering at Guatemala's army, the paper had asked why it did not "occupy Belize and show that Guatemalan soldiers were useful for more than parades." Though President Juan José Arévalo promptly closed the paper for this insult to the army, the incident gave the British a fair reason for a show of strength. Argentina and Chile, which had been needling Britain in Antarctica (TIME, March 1), could be expected to take notice...
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...
...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...