MUCH LATER, during his itinerant exile, when his memory would turn to the three and a half years—no more—that he’d been in power, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán would remember as the most important experience of his time in office those weeks in April and May of 1952 when he presented his draft of the Agrarian Reform to the cabinet before sending it to the Congress of the Republic. He was well aware how important—even essential—it was for the future of Guatemala, and before it was put into effect, he wanted it analyzed by supporters and adversaries alike in a public forum. The press reported on the proceedings in extraordinary detail. They were held in the National Palace, and people followed them on the radio in every corner of the country.
It was a subject that stirred friends and enemies alike, and him more than anyone—no doubt about it. It was the matter where he had concentrated the most energy, the one he had studied most, the one he struggled most to make a reality in—to use his words—“a rigorous law, without political bias, perfect, beyond debate.” How could he have imagined that law would lead to the fall of his government and the deaths of hundreds of Guatemalans, with others imprisoned or expelled from the country while he and his family lived hand-to-mouth in exile ever after!
There were three public debates, each lasting several hours, the third dragging on past midnight. The participants paused briefly at midday for a tortilla or a sandwich and something to drink—but no alcohol—before proceeding with the day’s agenda through to the end. Not only were his supporters there, but also many from the other side. The president had been emphatic: “Everyone should come. Starting with the lawyers from United Fruit, the directors of the AGA (the General Association of Agriculturalists), representatives of the landholders, and also, naturally, the National Federation of Farmworkers. Along with them, journalists from the press and the radio, including foreign correspondents.” Everyone. He made the same demands of his backers, some of whom—like Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez, secretary general of the Confederation of Workers’ and Farmers’ Unions—would have preferred to avoid so much controversy concerning the law, fearing the government’s enemies would use those debates to dynamite the proposal. Árbenz wouldn’t give, though: “We must listen to all opinions, those in favor and those against. Criticism will help us improve.”
He practiced self-criticism and rarely sought excuses for his mistakes; to the contrary, if they were pointed out to him, he was happy to rectify them. He was intent on acting in such a way that his own limitations wouldn’t affect his actions in the government, but with the benefit of hindsight, he admitted he had done many things wrong. Still, he was proud of his conduct in those debates, the way he defended each of the law’s proposals and responded to the various objections. The so-called specialists and technicians wanted to neuter the law, filling it with exceptions, exemptions, and compromises that would have left land ownership in Guatemala in the same state it had been in for centuries. But he didn’t allow it. His resolve, sadly, hadn’t accomplished much, and had likely exasperated his enemies.
Árbenz was sure the Agrarian Reform would change the very basis of the economic and social situation in Guatemala, building the foundations for a new society where capitalism and democracy would lead to justice and modernity. “This will bring opportunities to all Guatemalans, not simply to the insignificant minority who enjoy them now,” he repeated several times in the course of those discussions. His wife, María, was a severe critic of all he said and did, but even she congratulated him. With tears in her eyes, she clutched his arm and said to him, moved: “You did very well, Jacobo.” His ministers and his friends in Congress agreed with her unanimously: he’d never looked more eloquent than during those debates. But he didn’t convince his foes: afterward, the opposition of the property owners grew more rabid and determined.
As a young man, Árbenz hardly thought about the troubles in his country: the situation of the Indians, the scattering of rich people and the masses of the poor, the marginal, almost vegetative life led by three-fourths of the population, the light-years’ distance between indigenous groups and the well-off, the professionals, the farm and company owners, businessmen and merchants. It took him a long time to grasp that only a handful of his compatriots had access to the fruits of civilization and that the social root of the problem would have to be dealt with if the situation was to change, so that all Guatemalans could have a share in what up till then were the privileges of the minority. Agrarian Reform was the key.
He wasn’t ashamed to say that he had finally understood what country he was living in—a country very beautiful, with a rich history, but full of terrible injustices—thanks to María Vilanova, the woman whose beauty and elegance had made him fall in love with her the first time he saw her. He would fall even deeper when he found out how sensitive and intelligent the girl with the vivacious eyes, svelte figure, and slender nose really was. Despite coming from a well-off Salvadoran family, she was aware from a very young age of the backwardness of Central America, of the blindfold Árbenz and so many others wore when it came to the social problems of the countries there.
María Vilanova revealed to him, before he’d even made second lieutenant at the Military Academy, all the things he didn’t know, shut away as he was in a world of weapons, chants, strategies, codes, local heroes, battles—the same as his classmates, who were thoroughly ignorant of the racial prejudice afflicting their society, which not only ignored but actively despised the millions of Indians on whom civilization had turned its back.
María Vilanova had opened an unknown world to him, one of centuries-old injustices, bigotry, and indifference, but possessed of a hidden strength that could be awakened and mobilized to revolutionize Guatemala, El Salvador, and the whole of Central America. She told him about learning, when she studied in the United States, how far Latin America had been left behind, about the enormous inequalities that divided social classes in its countries, and the few—not to say nonexistent—opportunities the poor had there to escape their condition and receive the kind of education that could help them get ahead in life. That was the big difference between them and a modern democracy like the United States. Thanks to her, Árbenz was able to overcome the watertight prejudices that dictated social conduct and relationships in Guatemala, where whites—or those who thought themselves white—viewed the Indians as no better than animals. And since that time, when he and María were only dating, he tried to get past his ignorance and puncture these commonplaces, studying sociology, political theory, and economics, spending sleepless nights figuring out what could be done to pull his country—and all of Central America—from the depths it was mired in, transforming it so that one day it could be like the democracy of the United States, which had opened María Cristina’s eyes and cleansed her of her prejudices.
Already in those early years as an officer in the armed forces, Jacobo Árbenz, like María Cristina and the group of civilians he’d befriended thanks to her, had reached the conclusion that the key to change, the indispensable instrument for beginning the transformation of Guatemalan society, was land reform. They would have to change the feudal structures that reigned in the countryside, where the peasants—the immense majority of Guatemalans—worked for white and mestizo landowners for miserable wages, while the large estate holders lived like colonizers in the days of the encomiendas, enjoying all the benefits of modernity.
But what about United Fruit, La Frutera, the infamous Octopus? It was a gigantic company that had corrupted Guatemala’s governments—particularly its dictators—in exchange for exploitative contracts that no modern democracy would find acceptable. They were even exempted from paying tax. Unlike many of his extremist friends, Jacobo Árbenz was convinced the Octopus shouldn’t be expelled from Guatemala: to the contrary, La Frutera had to be brought under the yoke of the law, made to pay taxes, respect its workers, allow the formation of unions. They would need to make it into a model, so as to attract other American and European firms that would be essential for the development of the country’s industry.
Árbenz would always remember the endless arguments he had with the friends he had made thanks to María Vilanova. They would meet once a week, at least, and sometimes twice, usually on Saturdays at someone’s house or at the pension where Jacobo and María resided. They debated, listened to discussions, and commented on books or political news while they ate or had drinks. They were people from various professions—journalists, artists, professors, politicians—of a kind Árbenz had never encountered before. They revealed to him aspects of life in the country he had been ignorant of, social and political problems, the baleful consequences of civil war and dictatorship—the current one, Jorge Ubico Castañeda’s, among them—and the ideas of democracy, free elections, an independent, critical press, socialism. He argued with them hair, tooth, and nail, railing against communism and defending capitalist democracy. “Like in the United States,” he kept repeating. “That’s what we need here.”
María had a weakness for impecunious painters, musicians, and poets, people with bohemian tendencies. Árbenz didn’t care so much for them. They meant less to him than the journalists and university professors with whom he could discuss politics. Among them, Carlos Manuel Pellecer and José Manuel Fortuny, whom he came to consider friends, if it can be said that Jacobo Árbenz, with his habitual reserve and his obstinate silences, ever managed to have a close friend. He felt an affinity for Fortuny and Pellecer, shared their concerns, enjoyed their frankness, their indifference to material things, maybe even their nonchalance and the disorder they both lived in (Opposites do attract, he thought more than once). Árbenz never considered himself a socialist, and he always took an ironic view of Fortuny’s attempts to better himself intellectually by reading Marxist thinkers (whose books he could never find in Guatemala, ordering them instead from Mexico and spending on them the salary that barely permitted him to eat) and his commitment to one day founding a communist party in Guatemala. Despite their differences, the truth remained that Fortuny’s advice, ideas, and above all his superior grasp of politics were of great use to him when he took power.
He met Fortuny during the October Revolution of 1944. At twenty-five, he was, albeit only slightly, the younger of the two. At the time he was a reporter for Diario del Aire, a radio program overseen by the poet Miguel Ángel Asturias, and he had a reputation as a bohemian, intelligent, brave, full of nervous energy. It seems he had entered the Escuela Normal at twelve, but he gave up on the idea of becoming a teacher, and would likewise abandon his studies in the law school of San Carlos University in favor of journalism, which better accorded with his somewhat dissolute nature. He wrote for a number of newspapers and magazines, and his political activism against the Ubico dictatorship brought him problems with the regime, so that, for a time, he was forced to go into exile in neighboring San Salvador. There, he continued working as a journalist.
For his part, Pellecer had been a student of Árbenz at the Military Academy, and was later exiled in Mexico. On his return to Guatemala, he worked to form unions and cooperatives and collaborated intensely with Juan José Arévalo’s government, bringing cultural programs to the country’s hinterlands. He knew a great deal about the agrarian question and helped Árbenz to grasp it. (Years later, he would become a zealous anticommunist and would even put himself at the service of military dictatorships.)
Hearing these friends talk, Jacobo Árbenz discovered how much he didn’t know. Fortuny and Pellecer believed, like him, that land reform was the first, indispensable step to pulling Guatemala out of its morass and turning it into a democratic society. It would bring an end to discrimination and violence. It would fill the back country with schools. Indigenous boys and girls would learn to read, would grow up with running water, electric light, and roads. Thanks to dignified work with decent salaries, they would be better fed and clothed. Was it an impossible dream? No, he told himself at the start of his administration: with work, commitment, and will, it could certainly be done. Two years later, he would start asking himself if he hadn’t been overly optimistic.
What Árbenz appreciated in Fortuny was all the things he wasn’t: his heterodox, undisciplined spirit, his brilliance, his constant engagement with culture in all its forms, his fleeting enthusiasms for authors, thinkers, films, and singers, his good appetite, his relish as he downed drink after drink. He was like a different self, one not defined by the mania for order, promptness, discipline, and rigor. During their long discussions—particularly when they got heated—María would often intervene to calm them down. They frequently disagreed, especially when Fortuny turned to the subject of socialism and said, if he had to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union, he would prefer the latter. Jacobo and María stood up for the United States. With all its defects, they said, it remained a free, prosperous country, while the Soviet Union was a dictatorship, even if it did take the Allies’ side in the war against Hitler and Nazism.
When the October Revolution came and Ubico fell along with Federico Ponce Vaides, the general he had hoped would succeed him, Juan José Arévalo rose to power, and Árbenz became his minister of defense, interrupting his economics studies and with them his thinking about land reform. His post left no time for them. In essence, his responsibility was to keep politics from driving the army apart and to prevent incitement to conspiracy: the eternal story of Central America. He met with his colleagues in the military, visited the barracks, explained to the men the fundamental importance of President Arévalo’s measures and reforms, and removed from command any officers who showed signs of insubordination. Even in those years, Fortuny and Pellecer lent him a hand from Congress, where both had been elected as representatives. In private, though time was often short, they continued to exchange ideas. Beyond that, Fortuny wrote speeches for him and advised him on the leading issues of the day. He had assumed leadership of the two parties that supported Arévalo, the Popular Liberation Front and the National Renovation Party, when they decided to merge into the PAR.
That Fortuny was pragmatic and a realist despite his communist inclinations became clear to Árbenz during the fierce polemics unleashed by the Agrarian Reform. Fortuny brought the full weight of his intellect to bear on the matter, combating not only the rabid lawyers of the AGA but also the leftist extremists who intended to collectivize all the country’s estates, stripping them from the landowners by force and redistributing them as state-controlled farms as they had done in the Soviet Union. Fortuny agreed with Árbenz that this was insanity, and would provoke immense opposition inside and outside the country’s borders, especially in the United States. Nor was it certain to work. He had studied the land reform carried out by President Paz Estensoro in Bolivia, which Árbenz criticized fiercely for its focus on the state rather than on the peasants. More interesting, for Árbenz, was the solution Chiang Kai-shek’s government had arrived at in Taiwan, where they had distributed land in small plots, with the same respect for the capitalist system he hoped to spread among the campesinos of Guatemala.
Árbenz never spoke so much as he did in those public debates at the National Palace in April of 1952. Those who knew him intimately and were aware of his habitual reserve, his silences, were stunned to see him defending his project with such palpable vigor, proclaiming that only unproductive fields would be expropriated from the large landholders, with usage rights rather than ownership conveyed to the peasants, to prevent them from selling them back to their former proprietors. In addition to providing the campesinos with land, the state would offer them technical assistance and financing for the acquisition of machinery to increase agricultural output. Owners would be paid for their land in accordance with the value they themselves had assigned it on their tax returns.
Fortuny assisted him greatly in Congress during the debates surrounding the law, which was finally passed, with amendments, on June 17, 1952. That day, there were grand celebrations across the country, but despite his friends’ attempts to coax him into raising a glass, Árbenz didn’t break his promise not to drink a drop of alcohol so long as he was in power, instead observing the occasion with fruit juice and water.
A complication, unforeseen by Jacobo Árbenz, was the land seizures, the invasions of farms and fields, including properties the law had protected because their owners worked them responsibly. The press was largely in the hands of the opposition, and with La Hora and El Imparcial at the forefront, they denounced these invasions in scandal-ridden reports, exaggerating the violence they led to and accusing the government (following the North American line) of imitating the principles and even following the orders of the Soviet Union. The affected parties turned to the courts, which often ruled against the government, demanding that they remove the invaders by force and compensate the victims financially. In some cases, the trespasses led to injury and death. Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez, secretary general of the Confederation of Workers’ and Farmers’ Unions, gave his word to Árbenz that neither he nor anyone in the upper ranks of his organization had encouraged these invasions, but police reports and military intelligence confirmed that the leaders of the peasant syndicates were provoking the Indians into occupying the estates, principally in the most populous regions, where there was little fallow land but a multitude of poor, unemployed campesinos. They had provided them with clubs, spears, even firearms in some cases. The newspapers and radio stations were vociferous in their condemnation, magnifying the events and using them as unequivocal proof of the communist tenor of the Agrarian Reform law, which had already led to violence and could soon produce massacres of landowners and the abolition of private property. Árbenz spoke often on the radio and throughout the country, condemning the land seizures, which he decried as irresponsible and counterproductive; the reforms, he stressed, had to be carried out within the bounds of legality, without harming those who had shown respect for the law, and he affirmed that all who had participated in the incursions would be brought before the court and sentenced by a judge. But things didn’t always happen that way, and at times, the best intentions crashed up against more complex realities.
Árbenz would always remember his bewilderment in May 1951, when the opposition gathered a crowd of more than 80,000 to protest the government’s decision to replace the Sisters of Charity at the National Home for Orphans with social workers and teachers. Then there were the accusations that the government was imprisoning members of the opposition without a court order and beating and torturing prisoners. When he first heard this, he was outraged. He had given very specific instructions against abuses or any violence whatsoever toward inmates to Major Jaime Rosemberg, chief of the Judicial Police, and Rogelio Cruz Wer, head of the Civil Guard. And yet, eventually, they had occurred, and later, when the threat of an invasion by Castillo Armas with the United States’ backing appeared on the horizon, human rights, freedom of expression, and tolerance of criticism weighed less on his conscience than the more important question of his government’s survival.
One night, Jacobo and María Vilanova lay in bed, talking in the darkness. Out of nowhere, his wife said, “When a snowball falls from the top of a mountain, it can set off an avalanche.”
It was true. At last, the Indians had awakened, but they were impatient, and they wanted all the reforms to take place right now. But was it the Indians, really, the mass of peasants, or was it small groups of agitators from the city inciting the raids? Or was it possible the landowners themselves, in cahoots with La Frutera, were behind them, hoping to later malign the government as extremist?
His friends had congratulated him for the way he’d defended his project in the three public hearings. Even adversaries in the press had recognized his courage and seriousness in responding to his enemies. But El Imparcial, La Hora, and the rest of the papers went on declaring that the law would be the start of communist revolution in Guatemala.
Perhaps Árbenz’s greatest surprise came in those exhilarating days after Decree 900, as it was popularly known, went into force. It had passed through Congress with a few minor amendments. The foreign press attacked it, the United States especially, and accused his government of bowing to the Soviet Union, conspiring to create a communist fifth column in Central America that would threaten the Panama Canal, a strategic center for navigation and free commerce for the entire American continent.
In his shock, he had many unanswered questions: How was this possible? Did his country not have a free press? How could all of them agree in promoting this distortion, this caricature, of what his government was doing? Was American-style democracy not the model for what he was trying to put into practice? Did feudalism exist in the United States? Weren’t the spirits of free enterprise, of open competition and private property the very things his Agrarian Reform law wished to promote? He had naively believed the United States would be the greatest advocate for his policy of modernizing Guatemala and pulling it out of the Stone Age.
Convinced that there was nothing to be done, that dispelling the lies was having no effect, that his and his ministers’ declarations were pointless, and that the PR campaign launched against him had indelibly shaped reality, Árbenz became worried about a different problem: the army. All that propaganda was meant to help the enemies of the revolution inside the country’s borders to turn toward the army, undermining their loyalty to the government so that they would conspire to commit a coup d’état. Would that miserable Hatchet Face lead it? Impossible. No one in the military respected him, he had always been a gray figure, lacking in prestige, incapable of leadership, a crackpot whom the landowners and the Octopus used like a battering ram against his regime. Colonel Carlos Enrique Díaz, head of the armed forces and a trusted friend, assured him that the army remained loyal. But things began to change among his fellow soldiers when a new United States ambassador hit Guatemala like a cyclone, replacing the gentle, well-mannered Mr. Patterson and Rudolf E. Schoenfeld. His name was John Emil Peurifoy and he had come—he said so himself, without the least trace of embarrassment—to put an end to the communist menace that Jacobo Árbenz’s government represented for the Americas.