Jacobo Árbenz, born on this day in 1913, was a Guatemalan President who earned the ire of the United Fruit Company, the largest private landowner in the country, by instituting widespread land reforms. He was ousted in a U.S-backed coup in 1954.

Árbenz served as the Minister of National Defense from 1944 to 1951 and the second democratically elected President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954. He was a major figure in the ten-year Guatemalan Revolution, which represented some of the few years of representative democracy in Guatemalan history.

Árbenz instituted many popular reforms, including an expanded right to vote, the right of workers to organize, legitimizing political parties, and allowing public debate.

The centerpiece of Árbenz' policy was an agrarian reform law, under which uncultivated portions of large land-holdings were expropriated in return for compensation and redistributed to poverty-stricken agricultural laborers. Approximately 500,000 people benefited from the decree, the majority of them indigenous people whose forebears had been dispossessed after the Spanish invasion.

Opposition to these policies led the United Fruit Company to lobby the U.S. government to have him overthrown. The U.S. was also concerned by the presence of communists in the Guatemalan government, and Árbenz was ousted in a coup d'état engineered by the U.S. government on June 27th, 1954.

"Our only crime consisted of decreeing our own laws and applying them to all without exception. Our crime is having enacted an agrarian reform which effected the interests of the United Fruit Company. Our crime is wanting to have our own route to the Atlantic, our own electric power and our own docks and ports. Our crime is our patriotic wish to advance, to progress, to win economic independence to match our political independence. We are condemned because we have given our peasant population land and rights."

  • Jacobo Árbenz

Jacobo Arbenz, Spartacus

Jacobo Árbenz, “Árbenz’s Resignation Speech” (1954)

Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala by Stephen Kinzer

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  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I'm sorry I only managed to kill 76 Nazis and maim a few in this level of Sniper Elite. I did pee on the Obergruppenfuerher's desk though. I'll do better in the future.

    Apparently there are objectives or something in this game but I kinda just shoot Nazis until the game says "Hey you should leave now" and I'm like gee I guess okay.

    *slaps roof of mont saint michel* You can fit so many dead nazis in this weird little island. Seriously, it's a problem. We ran out of dead nazi storage and then filled up dead nazi overflow storage and now we're just like shoving them in manholes and under park benches. So fucking many dead nazis. There's definitely some kind of objective in this mission but fuck me if I can remember what it is. MG42 go BRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt

    spoiler

    Lol I just beaned a fascist in the head with a grenade. Heil this shithead.

    Oh I did much better in level 3. 175 dead fash and only one or two survivors.

    • Mokey [none/use name]
      ·
      1 year ago

      i shot a nazi in his penis and it hit a grenade or something that i assumed was on his waistbelt and he exploded

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        The 115lb malnourished french resistance fighter can one-hand unload an MG34 full auto, while lying on the ground severely injured, and gun down entire squads of Nazis before taping her own wounds closed and moving on. I aspire to that degree of anti-fascism but I don't think I'll ever achieve it.