The presidency of Arevalo

In December 1944, the Guatemalan educator Juan José Arévalo was elected president with the support of the National Renewal party and People’s Liberation Front, a new Constitution was promulgated in March and were put into domestic social reforms.

In September 1945 Guatemala renewed their claims on the British Honduras (now Belize), a matter pending since the formation of the republic. A negotiated agreement with Britain in 1859 had defined the southern border between the two countries, Guatemala restarted the dispute in recent years of the 1930s, claiming that Britain had not fulfilled all the terms of the agreement. In January 1946, Britain proposed that the border dispute be referred to the discretion of the tribunal in The Hague. The conflict worsened in 1948 when units of the British Navy were sent to the port of Belize City to prevent an alleged invasion of Guatemala. Guatemala issued a protest to the United Nations (UN), the Pan American Union and all countries of Latin America and Canada. Subsequently the Republic of Guatemala closed its border with British Honduras.

Small right-wing uprisings occurred during the first half of 1949, but the main political event of the year was the support the government provided to employees of the United Fruit in their claims, to which the U.S. company had to divest.

Transition to the left

Although Arevalo suffered more than twenty attempts to overthrow, he was able to run their entire presidential term. In November 1950 general elections were held, supported by a coalition of leftist parties, the presidential candidate Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, defense minister in the cabinet of Arevalo, got the victory. The new administration took power in March 1951 and continued in that year Arbenz in a general way with the moderate social policy of his predecessor.

Arbenz’s government began to implement a decisive role in shaping policies more progressive. In June of that year, Congress passed a law on land reform, inspired by Mexican, which established the division of farms not cultivated over 91,000 hectares to landless workers, which affected the United Fruit Company, which owned about 200,000 uncultivated; also carried out a program of building roads and railways that broke the monopoly in this sector were subsidiaries of U.S. companies. The land reform program affecting more than 121,460 had to private properties, they received as compensation bonds issued by the government not negotiable, while 162,000 hectares of land belonging to the government distributed to landless workers.

In 1954 the opposition to the regime of Arbenz increased both inside and outside the country, to the point that was described as communist. In the X Inter-American Conference (see Panamericanism), which took place in March of that year, the U.S. won the approval of a resolution implicitly condemning the government of Guatemala. In April, the Catholic Archbishop of Guatemala, in a pastoral letter called for an uprising against communism. Citing the discovery of a conspiracy, whose aim was to overthrow it (an attempt had been made in 1953), the government began to arrest the May 31 to opposition leaders on June 8 and suspended civil rights.

Government anticommunist

On June 18, 1954, a so-called ‘liberation army’, composed of political exiles trained and supported in a clandestine manner by the United States and led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, invaded Guatemala from Honduras. The rebels quickly seized the nerve centers of the country to the symbolic resistance of the army and bombed the capital and other cities. Arbenz resigned on June 27 and two days later he dissolved Congress, was arrested the top leaders who had supported him and freed about 600 political prisoners from other parties.

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