Jacobo Árbenz, born on this day in 1913, was a Guatemalan President who earned the ire of the United Fruit Company, the largest private landowner in the country, by instituting widespread land reforms. He was ousted in a U.S-backed coup in 1954.
Árbenz served as the Minister of National Defense from 1944 to 1951 and the second democratically elected President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954. He was a major figure in the ten-year Guatemalan Revolution, which represented some of the few years of representative democracy in Guatemalan history.
Árbenz instituted many popular reforms, including an expanded right to vote, the right of workers to organize, legitimizing political parties, and allowing public debate.
The centerpiece of Árbenz' policy was an agrarian reform law, under which uncultivated portions of large land-holdings were expropriated in return for compensation and redistributed to poverty-stricken agricultural laborers. Approximately 500,000 people benefited from the decree, the majority of them indigenous people whose forebears had been dispossessed after the Spanish invasion.
Opposition to these policies led the United Fruit Company to lobby the U.S. government to have him overthrown. The U.S. was also concerned by the presence of communists in the Guatemalan government, and Árbenz was ousted in a coup d'état engineered by the U.S. government on June 27th, 1954.
"Our only crime consisted of decreeing our own laws and applying them to all without exception. Our crime is having enacted an agrarian reform which effected the interests of the United Fruit Company. Our crime is wanting to have our own route to the Atlantic, our own electric power and our own docks and ports. Our crime is our patriotic wish to advance, to progress, to win economic independence to match our political independence. We are condemned because we have given our peasant population land and rights."
- Jacobo Árbenz
Jacobo Árbenz, “Árbenz’s Resignation Speech” (1954)
Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala by Stephen Kinzer
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now all fediverse discussion will be considered a current struggle session discussion and all comment about it are subject to be removed and even banning from the comm.
have all of you a good day/night 
I think she was just a selfish idiot. Her thought isn't worth analyzing. It's basically just "Being a selfish prick is a moral virtue". It's only worth worrying about if you're trying to understand why
in the US are the way they are. Like it's a historical curiosity because it influenced so many extremely shitty people who don't understand economics, but aside from that skip it.
Yeah, that's exactly why I'm interested in it. I wanna know and understand what "the other side" thinks, how they rationalize their beliefs and why they think what they think. Similar reason I still follow the crypto sphere.
I have to tell you that many before you have walked that path and come away really disappointed bc the other side is just really aggressively mean and shitty and there isn't really any depth or complexity to their "thought". They're just assholes, and they like the shitty book that tells them being an asshole is cool.