Juan Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who served as the 25th president of Guatemala. He was Minister of National Defense from 1944 to 1950, before he became 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. The landmark program of agrarian reform Árbenz enacted as president was very influential across Latin America.
Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) is a liberal American political organization advocating progressive policies. ADA views itself as supporting social and economic justice through lobbying, grassroots organizing, research, and supporting progressive candidates.
Carlos Castillo Armas was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who was the 28th president of Guatemala, serving from 1954 to 1957 after taking power in a coup d'état. A member of the right-wing National Liberation Movement (MLN) party, his authoritarian government was closely allied with the United States.
Stephen Kinzer is an American author, journalist, and academic. A former New York Times correspondent, he has published several books and writes for several newspapers and news agencies.
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état deposed the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and marked the end of the Guatemalan Revolution. The coup installed the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas, the first in a series of U.S.-backed authoritarian rulers in Guatemala. The coup was largely the result of a CIA covert operation code-named PBSuccess.
Carlos Enrique Díaz de León was the provisional President of Guatemala from 27 June to 29 June 1954. He was replaced by a military junta led by Elfego Monzón. Carlos Enrique Díaz was previously Chief of the Guatemalan Armed Forces under President Jacobo Árbenz.
Elfego Hernán Monzón Aguirre was a Guatemalan army officer who was President of Guatemala and leader of a military junta from 29 June 1954 to 8 July 1954, during the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a specialist in American history, much of Schlesinger's work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson II. Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian" to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy administration, from the 1960 presidential campaign to the president's state funeral, titled A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Operation PBFortune, also known as Operation Fortune, was a covert United States operation to overthrow the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in 1952. The operation was authorized by U.S. President Harry Truman and planned by the Central Intelligence Agency. The United Fruit Company had lobbied intensively for the overthrow because land reform initiated by Árbenz threatened its economic interests. The US also feared that the government of Árbenz was being influenced by communists.
Sullivan & Cromwell LLP is an American multinational law firm headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1879 by Algernon Sydney Sullivan and William Nelson Cromwell, the firm advised on the creation of Edison General Electric and the formation of U.S. Steel, pioneered modern reorganization efforts for insolvent companies, and influenced key financial and regulatory practices.
Decree 900, also known as the Agrarian Reform Law, was a Guatemalan land-reform law passed on June 17, 1952, during the Guatemalan Revolution. The law was introduced by President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán and passed by the Guatemalan Congress. It redistributed unused land greater than 90 hectares in area to local peasants, compensating landowners with government bonds. Land from at most 1,700 estates was redistributed to about 500,000 individuals—one-sixth of the country's population. The goal of the legislation was to move Guatemala's economy from pseudo-feudalism into capitalism. Although in force for only eighteen months, the law had a major effect on the Guatemalan land-reform movement.
Freedom – No Compromise is the third solo studio album by Little Steven, released in May 1987 by EMI.
The National Committee of Defense Against Communism was a committee formed on 19 July 1954 in Guatemala by president Carlos Castillo at the request of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The Committee's primary goal was to fight alleged threats to the government of Guatemala by persons the Committee named as Communist subversives.
Operation PBHistory was a covert operation carried out in Guatemala by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It followed Operation PBSuccess, which led to the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in June 1954 and ended the Guatemalan Revolution. PBHistory attempted to use documents left behind by Árbenz's government and by organizations related to the communist Guatemalan Party of Labor to demonstrate that the Guatemalan government had been under the influence of the Soviet Union, and to use those documents to obtain further intelligence that would be useful to US intelligence agencies. It was an effort to justify the overthrow of the elected Guatemalan government in response to the negative international reactions to PBSuccess. The CIA also hoped to improve its intelligence resources about communist parties in Latin America, a subject on which it had little information.
Parliamentary elections were held in Guatemala for half the seats in Congress between 16 and 18 January 1953. The Revolutionary Action Party won a plurality of seats.
The Revolutionary Action Party was a leftist political party in Guatemala during the ten-year Guatemalan Revolution. Formed in 1945, the party went through a series of mergers and fractures before dissolving in 1954 after the United States-backed coup d'état.
The period in the history of Guatemala between the coups against Jorge Ubico in 1944 and Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 is known locally as the Revolution. It has also been called the Ten Years of Spring, highlighting the peak years of representative democracy in Guatemala from 1944 until the end of the civil war in 1996. It saw the implementation of social, political, and especially agrarian reforms that were influential across Latin America.
Huberto Alvarado Arellano (1927–1974) was a Guatemalan poet, essayist, and communist political figure. He was born in 1927 and died in 1974 at the hands of paramilitary death squads. His interest in politics stemmed from his experiences in the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944-1945, which were marked by his immersion in leftist politics. He was soon named Secretary General of the Guatemalan Alliance of Democratic Youth.
José Manuel Fortuny Arana was an important communist leader in Latin America. He became well known for his friendship with Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, and was one of the main advisers in his government, which lasted from 1951–54. Árbenz was overthrown by a coup engineered by the United States in 1954, an event which drove Fortuny into exile, along with many of his comrades.
Colonel Carlos Aldana Sandoval was a Guatemalan military officer who was a significant figure in the popular uprising against the government of Federico Ponce Vaides in October 1944. At the time of the uprising, Sandoval held the rank of Major in the Guardia de Honor, a powerful unit of the military. Sandoval, one of the leaders of the plot among the military, was among those who felt that the plot should remain among the military: however, Árbenz insisted on including civilians in the process. Sandoval was able to persuade Francisco Javier Arana to join the coup in its final stages, but did not participate in the actual coup. Historian Piero Gleijeses stated that Sandoval was among the plotters who lost his nerve at the last minute.
