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 Árbenz, “Árbenz’s Resignation Speech” (1954)
Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala by Stephen Kinzer
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At medium difficulty in sniper elite five, if you're good at shooters, you can just run around like an idiot blasting Nazis and ignoring stealth and being a dork. If you've got Nazi Dark Souls mode on (other players invade your game as a sniper and try to hunt you down, while you try to get them before they get you) the "Shotgun Surgeon" methodology is very confusing and you'll occasionally get them because they're expecting you to do sneaky sniper stuff, not run around blasting every Klaus, Hans, and Kruber you meet with 00 buck from 3m away. One poor soul was freaking out up in a bunker because they knew I was somewhere near by but couldn't figure out which hillock I was going to dome them from. Unfortunately for them I was not on a hillock. I was right outside on top of the bunker and I tossed a frag grenade through the window and ended their carrier in the reichshootenguyyengruppenclubben. It's a very silly game and It's growing on me. Coop survival is also fun bc you get to blast waves and waves of Nazis with MG34s and so many mines while cosplaying as French Resistance folks.
You make it sound so fun but the best nazi killing game is Hell let Loose