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 Arbenz, Spartacus

Jacobo Árbenz, “Árbenz’s Resignation Speech” (1954)

Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala by Stephen Kinzer

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    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yup. Very literate, but dumb as a brick. Even while she was dying alone in poverty on a government pension she never recanted "I got mine fuck you" the religion. There's a running joke that the biggest failure of communism was giving Rand a university education. The Berlin Wall was actually erected to prevent another Rand incident and keep the Eastern Blocs shitty reactionary novelists in the Eastern Bloc where they'd be less likely to publish. not as some kind of propaganda effort or anything. It was just a humanitarian act of good will so no one would ever have to read an absolutely dogshit novel like Atlas Shrugged again.

      • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Big fan of this section on the "Objectivism" wikipedia page:

        Academic philosophers have generally paid little attention to or dismissed Rand's philosophy, although a smaller number of academics do support it. Nonetheless, Objectivism has been a persistent influence among right-libertarians and American conservatives. The Objectivist movement, which Rand founded, attempts to spread her ideas to the public and in academic settings.

        Also this one:

        One Rand biographer says most people who read Rand's works for the first time do it in their "formative years".

        Very polite way to say the only people who unironically support Rand are edgy teenagers.

        • TrashGoblin [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

          • John Rogers
        • ReadFanon [any, any]
          ·
          1 year ago

          The Objectivist movement, which Rand founded, attempts to spread her ideas to the public and in academic settings.

          I wonder how much they charge their audience for their events and their information.

          They wouldn't be doing it free of charge, with the intent that promoting objectivism would be of benefit to all society now, would they? 🤔🤔

          • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
            ·
            1 year ago

            I was wondering about that, if objectivism as an idea according to which society should work is contradictory with the idea itself, but I'm not sure if that's an actual argument or just a dumb gotcha like the "paradox of tolerance".

            • ReadFanon [any, any]
              ·
              1 year ago

              I think that the ideology itself is a dumb gotcha self-parody and so critiquing the actions of objectivists or the ideology using the internal logic is always going to come out as a dumb gotcha inherently.

              Is it a case of "Yet you participate in society. Curious!"? Of course it is.

              But at the same time if they believe that the unrestricted free market is the ultimate force for establishing the value of goods and services then it says something that they're giving away their stuff for free.

      • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        The delusion of denying one's own irrationality is something you'd think everyone would grow out of eventually.

        Dunno how well versed you are with the topic, am I understanding correctly that Rand believed that our perception of reality is objective? Was she denying that people perceive the world differently?

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          am I understanding correctly that Rand believed that our perception of reality is objective?

          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 libertarian-approaching 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.

          • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • Frank [he/him, he/him]
              ·
              1 year ago

              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.

      • Redcuban1959 [any]
        ·
        1 year ago

        The book sucks, but the title is really cool. It's a shame it was wasted on such a bad novel.

    • CDommunist [they/them, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Every (2) irl Rand libertarian I knew dropped all of that shit no hesitation and voted for Bernie to get their student loan debt erased