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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Anyone else feel like there is a legit social split between internet poisoned ppl and everyone else? Or do I just have anxiety issues? Idk.
I see people in public who I realize are like, my age and stuff, and I just feel like we live completely different incompatible lives. I have a group of IRL friends who I'm pretty close with, varying degrees of online, but besides them I don't really meet new people, and I go out to like a coffee shop or whatever and hear the workers/regulars talk and they like, go out places, live in a community where they run into people they recognize when they do so, date and have flings and stuff, and that is all mostly pretty alien to me. It feels like an anachronism, like closer to how pre-internet generations grew up, not completely atomized and shit.
Not that I don't go out, but when I do it's with the same group of people which rarely shifts or expands, and we don't really run into other people we'd recognize out in public. I thought that was normal tbh, in a city. And there are people in the group in LTRs/married but for the most part not a lot of dating going on, and when someone is its just from a dating app because how else do you meet people? I basically never meet people in anything beyond an acquaintance/passing capacity. But these people existing in basically the same environment, seem to live mostly offline lives and maintain normal social relationships and even meet new people just like, easily, when I find it nigh impossible in this environment. The two sides just don't seem to mix
I don't feel I've done the best job of explaining this but curious if anyone else has any other thoughts. Is it just me? do I just need to act more sociable or try being more attractive(lmao), or am I completely imagining this split
Earnestly in modern society, it takes a bunch of effort to meet people outside your job and professional networking. It also often costs money.
The only places where traditional community tends to happen are church and university (the latter of which many don't engage with, but if you do go join a club and attend regularly). You have a regular cast of people to chat to casually once a week or more, not to do anything but just to be social. It's a large enough group that you can't be close to everyone, but you have common reference points if you wanted to get closer to a particular person. There's a steady rotation of new members coming into the community you could get to know.
I think a lot of people in suburban society crave this, and the closest a lot of people can get is a regular hobby club, which costs money and is often very task-focused and a bit of a drive.
The folks I know who run into people in public are either congregants at a church or work in a small industry with a lot of turnover like preschool teaching or nonprofit direct service
I guess that service industry in this specific neighborhood might be small and insular and high turnover enough to foster that actually. a little anyhow. Idk. I'm trying to just get over it lol