Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (Spanish pronunciation: [xaˈkoβo ˈarβenz ɣuzˈman]; 14 September 1913 – 27 January 1971) was a Guatemalan military officer and progressive politician who served as Defense Minister of Guatemala from 1944 to 1951, and as President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954.Árbenz was born in 1913 to a middle-class family, and graduated with high honors from a military academy in 1935. He served in the army corp until 1944, steadily rising through the ranks. During this period, he witnessed the United States backed dictator Jorge Ubico use the military to brutally suppress agrarian laborers. As an officer in the army, Árbenz himself was required to escort chain-gangs of prisoners. This process greatly radicalized him, and he began to form links to the labor movement. In 1938 he met and married his wife María Vilanova, who was also a great ideological influence on him. Another strong influence on him was José Manuel Fortuny, a well-known Guatemalan communist, who was one of his main advisers during his government.In 1944, Ubico's highly repressive policies resulted in a popular revolt against him, led by students which led to his resignation on July 1, 1944. He left general Federico Ponce Vaides in charge of the military junta heading an interim government. However, Ponce Vaides remained in power by force, and this led to a general revolt by several civilian groups and progressive military factions led by Árbenz on October 20, 1944. In the elections that followed, widely seen as free and fair, Juan José Arévalo was elected president with 85% of the vote. Árbenz was appointed Minister of Defense, and played a crucial role in putting down a military coup in 1949, a situation that resulted in the death of colonel Francisco Javier Arana, the other major military figure in the government. The Arévalo government began a highly popular program of social reform, aimed at ending Guatemala's feudalistic labor system, which had been in place since the government of Justo Rufino Barrios.After the death of Arana, Árbenz contested the presidential elections that were held in 1950 without any major opponent, and defeated Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, his nearest challenger, by a margin of over 50%. He took office on March 15, 1951, and continued the social reform policies of his predecessor, including the expansion of suffrage and educational access. The centerpiece of his policy was an agrarian reform law that granted cultivable land to poverty stricken peasants in an attempt to end the system of debt peonage.His popular policies ran afoul of the United Fruit Company (UFCO), which had major investments in Guatemala thanks to the generous concessions granted to it by the governments of Manuel Estrada Cabrera and Jorge Ubico. The UFCO lobbied to have him overthrown, and Árbenz was ousted in a coup d'état engineered by the United States Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency. It was led by the brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, both of whom had major interests in UFCO. Árbenz was replaced by a military junta which eventually handed power to Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. Árbenz went into a painful exile through several countries, where his family was gradually destroyed, his daughter committed suicide, and he descended more and more into alcoholism. He eventually died in Mexico in 1971.
Declassified CIA documents reveal that the U.S. supported his overthrow after he tried to redistribute lands owned by the United Fruit Company. The U.S. backed an "insurgency" by Guatemalan army vet Col. Castillo Armas, who siezed power in 1954 as Arbenz fled to Mexico. Armas would be assassinated in 1957.
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