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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  • Mokey [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Whining about failure and family shit

    spoiler

    I talked with my uncle's wife last night because she said it was good to open up. The mistake I made was to not overstep the bounds of the topic of my grandmother. The talk was for her to complain how awful the lady was. Not for me to express any feelings or trauma myself. Im so fucking stupid I should have known better.

    Rule #1 in any situation where youre dealing with white lady). Do not make white lady uncomfortable.

    She kept minimizing my problems and started telling me how good my achievements were without really trying to understand why I was upset. She wasn't interested. I have a master's but it's in music and I literally failed upwards, I was so behind in music because my shitty hometown and my parents are clueless and don't give a shit. Like I'm still behind and there's no way I can explain this shit to her because there's 0% Chance she will understand. Even people HERE think the arts is a talent/no talent binary, no its how much time and the quality of time you put in. Rich kids always win and poor generally lose.

    Like yes its an achievement i got through it all despite that, in my opinion anything I do at all is an achievement considering what my background is and what all my friends were doing. But also, I paid nearly 6 figures for a worthless education. To learn all the shit I should have under my belt as a kid, but not even because no one wanted to teach someone so behind. The whole thing is an empty win and maybe if i didnt have everything around me fucked up and i wasnt in survival mode i would have been a lawyer like their kid. Or a dipshit stay at home mom who married rich.

    She told me to go back to school as if I didnt just pay off 85K student loans, you out of touch bitch. She also blamed me for something I felt like I got scammed by. This is not how you make friends, fuck this frigid spoiled removed and her shitty kids.

    They want me to go visit their daughter, rich husband and kids and I'm not going to. You dont get to ignore me when it seems you think I'm white trash and then come out when its safe/turns out my SO and I are interesting people. I don't want anything with these people.

    Like they never visited us as kids, I didn't really know them at all. But they visited her side of the family every summer. I can't help but feel there was a reason for it and that it was my mom being crazy and my dad is stupid chud.

    Iunno fuck these people, i always wanted them to like me but i never considered for a moment that they wouldnt get me and I wouldnt like them. Like i straight up hate white people and i never really considered that my own family could be like that. Its always been my first gen immigrant grandma and my weirdo dumbass parents who are on different sections of the whiteness spectrum.

    spoiler
    • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      At least you know where you stand now. You can just ghost them all for the rest of your life with no guilt if you want.