Word: jacobo
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...Other Colonel. In Guatemala City, that day, another colonel strode tight-lipped along the underground tunnel that leads from the executive mansion via an elevator to the presidential office on the second floor of the city's avocado-green National Palace. President Jacobo Arbenz, the stubborn, enigmatic career soldier who had started the trouble in the first place by flinging wide the palace doors and welcoming Communists into his government, had plenty to think about. But he may have taken a moment to recall that Castillo Armas had once been a school mate, a fellow graduate of the country...
...Smart Subaltern. Jacobo (pronounced Ha-coe-boe) Arbenz was born in Quezaltenango in 1913 of a Ladino mother and a moody Swiss immigrant druggist who failed in business, walked out on his family and later killed himself. Another Swiss in the town intervened with General Jorge Ubico, the country's all-powerful ruler, to get the blond youth a scholarship at the national military school. Quickwitted and lithely muscular, Arbenz played polo and boxed while pulling down the highest grades in the academy's history. But when school triumphs were over, he was just another impoverished subaltern with...
...July 1949 he was decoyed into making an inspection trip that took his Mercury station wagon over a little arched bridge near Lake Ama-titlán. There he and his aide were ambushed and Tommy-gunned to death by four young officers. All were intimates of handsome Jacobo Arbenz. Arana's army friends rose in revolt, but Defense Minister Arbenz, after a scary 36 hours, crushed the rising at a cost of 200 lives. "No more than an incident in the revolutionary life," he commented when the dust settled...
...council, the OAS Inter-American Peace Commission held itself in readiness to take up the Guatemalan question. But events in the narrow streets and bush trails of Guatemala could move faster than any commission ; the Arbenz regime could be shattered - or it could emerge victorious and cockier than ever. Jacobo Arbenz, stubborn as ever, clapped on a tougher form of martial law, tightened up on blackouts, authorized his cops to shoot motorists caught with headlights on during a night alert...
...years that followed, 18 dictators ruled Guatemala, beginning with the swineherd Rafael Carrera (1839-65) and reaching a savage climax under the megalomaniac General Jorge Ubico, who took power in 1931, held the Indians' wages as low as 3? a day, and was overthrown and exiled in 1944. Jacobo Arbenz is the country's second elected President since then...