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Was Davido Arbenz Justified In The Making Of Guatemala

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In 1944, Guatemala’s authoritarian leader Jorge Ubico lost power in a revolt. Previously and under his rule, the country’s land was 42% owned by the United Fruit Company (or UFC, now called Chiquita Banana), a company owned and based in the United States. The company used Guatemala’s land to cultivate crops, namely bananas, because of the country’s rich soil. Ubico tolerated it because it meant he had valuable allies in the U.S. However, only 15% of that land was actually being used by the company. When the country’s first democratic election happened in 1945, Juan Jose Arévalo was elected president. Arévalo began to progress in the direction in favor of people’s rights, such as increasing minimum wage and. When Jacobo Arbenz was elected six …show more content…

He then confiscated a large chunk of UFC’s land and offered compensation based on the taxes the UFC had paid on the land. They declared it a gross misrepresentation and based on their own evaluation of Arbenz, labeled him a miscreant in the U.S., calling him a communist because of his redistribution of the land to the peasants and because of the state of the world under the Cold War between Soviet Russia and the United States. A legal representative of UFC, also the Secretary of State, John Dulles, and his brother, the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, who also owned shares of the UFC, decided to take things into their own hands and constructed a coup against Arbenz. On June 27, 1954, the CIA came in with a prepared substitute and overthrew Arbenz, arresting over 9,000 supporters of Arbenz in the process of doing so. Arbenz was later forced to make a speech as a farewell to his people, and then the CIA’s replacement, Carlos Castillo, stepped up to power. The next four decades were filled with citizen oppression, having over 500 trade unions outlawed, 1.5 million acres of land returned to the UFC, and regular government upheld terroristic actions were inflicted upon the

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