Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954

By Piero Gleijeses

The most thorough account yet available of a revolution that saw the first true agrarian reform in Central America, this book is also a penetrating analysis of the tragic destruction of that revolution. In no other Central American country was U.S. intervention so decisive and so ruinous, charges Piero Gleijeses. Yet he shows that the intervention can be blamed on no single "convenient villain." "Extensively researched and written with conviction and passion, this study analyzes the history and downfall of what seems in retrospect to have been Guatemala's best government, the short-lived regime of Jacobo Arbenz, overthrown in 1954, by a CIA-orchestrated coup."--Foreign Affairs "Piero Gleijeses offers a historical road map that may serve as a guide for future generations. . . . [Readers] will come away with an understanding of the foundation of a great historical tragedy."--Saul Landau, The Progressive "[Gleijeses's] academic rigor does not prevent him from creating an accessible, lucid, almost journalistic account of an episode whose tragic consequences still reverberate."--Paul Kantz, Commonweal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781400843497

Piero Gleijeses

Piero Gleijeses is professor of American foreign policy at the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954.

Book preview

Shattered Hope

Captain Jacobo Arbenz, October 1944. Arbenz was, the CIA later wrote, "brilliant . . . cultured.’’

Shattered Hope

THE GUATEMALAN REVOLUTION AND

THE UNITED STATES, 1944-1954

Piero Gleijeses

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1991 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gleijeses, Piero.

Shattered hope : the Guatemalan revolution and the United States, 1944-1954 / Piero Gleijeses.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

1. United States—Foreign relations—Guatemala. 2. Guatemala—Foreign relations—United States. 3. United States—Foreign relations—1945-1953. 4. Guatemala—Politics and government—1945-1985. 1. Title.

EI83.8.G9S48 1991 327.7307281'09044—dc20 90—8901

ISBN 0-691-07817-3

ISBN 0-691-02556-8 (pbk.)

eISBN 978-1-40084-349-7 (ebook)

The author gratefully acknowledges permission from the following publications in which portions of chapters 1, 3, 5, and 8 previously appeared:

Mesoamerica. "La aldea de Ubico: Guatemala, 1931-1944/' June 1989 (chapter 1);

Journal of Latin American Studies. The Death of Arana, October 1990 (chapter 3);

Journal of Latin American Studies. Juan José Arévalo and the Caribbean Legion. February 1989 (chapter 5);

Journal of Latin American Studies. The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz, October 1989 (chapter 8).

The photographs appearing in this book were graciously provided from private collections.

R0

To Setsuko Ono and Letterina Gleijeses

Contents

List of Illustrations  ix

List of Figures  xi

Acknowledgments  xiii

A Note on Documentation  xv

Abbreviations  xvii

PROLOGUE

Witnesses  3

CHAPTER 1

The Era of Ubico  8

CHAPTER 2

The Presidency of Juan José Arévaĺo  30

CHAPTER 3

The Death of Francisco Arana  50

CHAPTER 4

The Election of Jacobo Arbenz  72

CHAPTER 5

The United States and Arévalo: Arévalo’s Sins  85

CHAPTER 6

The United States and Arévalo: The U.S. Response  117

CHAPTER 7

The World of Jacobo Arbenz  134

CHAPTER 8

The Agrarian Reform  149

CHAPTER 9

The Revolutionary Forces  171

CHAPTER 10

The Christian Opposition  208

CHAPTER 11

The International Conspiracy against Guatemala  223

CHAPTER 12

The Caracas Conference  267

CHAPTER 13

The Agony of the Regime  279

CHAPTER 14

The Fall of Arbenz  319

CHAPTER 15

Conclusion  361

EPILOGUE

The Fate of the Defeated  388

Bibliography  395

Index  423

Illustrations

Frontispiece. Captain Jacobo Arbenz, October 1944

Following page 148

Jacobo Arbenz and his wife María, shortly after their marriage in 1939

Jacobo and María, September 1945

Jorge Toriello flanked by Francisco Arana and Jacobo Arbenz

Guatemalan soldiers being greeted by Jorge Toriello, October 22, 1944

Juan José Arévalo returned to become the first president of the Guatemalan revolution

Francisco Arana, chief of the armed forces under Arévalo

Arévalo had the physique of a very big man

Arana courted U.S. officials

Arana and Arévalo

Carlos Paz Tejada and Arévalo

President Arbenz on his inauguration day

María de Arbenz on inauguration day

Arbenz in exile, painted by his wife in 1965

Arbenz in Havana, 1962

Figures

Map of Central America and the Caribbean

Map of Puente de la Gloria, where Arana was killed

Moscow Samba

Guatemala Hotspots: A Map of the Invasion

Acknowledgments

IT IS a pleasant task to thank those who have supported me during the writing of this volume. My wife, Setsuko Ono, stood by me at the inception; suffered through the first, most painful drafts; offered sensitive, intelligent, and frank criticism; and saved the manuscript at a decisive stage when I had worked myself into a dead end.

I received financial assistance from the Central American and Caribbean Center of Johns Hopkins University and from the Plumsock Foundation, whose director, Christopher Lutz, also shared his deep knowledge of Guatemalan history.

Dona María de Arbenz, Major Carlos Paz Tejada, and Robert Woodward, three of the protagonists of this story, graciously read the entire manuscript. Three U.S. officers who served in Guatemala in the early 1950s—Colonel Aloysius McCormick, Colonel Thomas Hanford, and Major Manuel Chavez— read those sections that dealt with the Guatemalan army. To them, and to all those Guatemalans, Americans, and others who agreed to be interviewed, my sincere thanks.

I talked late into many nights with my two closest Guatemalan friends. Their deep knowledge and love of their country inspired me. It is indicative of the culture of fear in Guatemala today that they have asked me not to mention them by name.

I was fortunate to benefit from the assistance and advice of friends and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University, four above all—Bonnie Tenneriello, Thomas Thornton, Marta Velazquez, Bernard Wolfson. My task was made easier by two outstanding librarians, Linda Carlson and Barbara Prophet. After several barren years, I was finally able to count on the assistance of an excellent secretary, Paula Smith; when she left, I was taken under the wing of Florence Rotz, by general acclaim the best secretary to have graced these halls in a great many years.

My intellectual debt to Nancy Mitchell is truly deep. Her analytical skills, her great literary talent, her probing, irreverent questions, and her own deep knowledge of U.S. policy in the region gave new life to the manuscript. First as my research assistant, then as a colleague, we began an intellectual collaboration that I hope will last through many books—hers and mine.

Washington, D.C.

September 1990

A Note on Documentation

DOCUMENTS from the National Archives (NA) are always from Record Group (RG) 59.

Intelligence documents from the State Department (OSS, OIR) located in the NA do not have file numbers. They are in RG59, Research and Analysis File. They are identified only with NA.

The file number of the embassy’s Joint Weeka (JW) is always 714.00(W). Prior to January 1954, the JW was divided into two sections, political (I) and economic (II). When citing JW, I and II refer to these sections, not to volume numbers.

The origin of all documents is either Washington, D.C., or Guatemala City, unless otherwise indicated.

Prior to June 1944, the NA gave each document in its Decimal Files a unique identifying number following its decimal number; after June 1944, only the date of the document is repeated after the decimal number. Whereas I cite the former, I do not cite the latter except in those rare instances when it differs from the actual date of the document.

Documents received through the Freedom of Information Act frequently have no file numbers and have not yet been filed. These documents are cited with no archival information.

Document numbers are given whenever they exist. Informal correspondence carries no document numbers, nor do memos of conversations; whenever the former has a title, it is included; for the latter, either the participants in the conversation or the title of the conversation, whichever is shorter, is included.

Whenever a document appears in its entirety in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), I use the FRUS citation. When, however, the FRUS version is incomplete, I cite the original.

For articles from the press that are not cited in full in the notes, see the Bibliography. The place of publication is the United States or Guatemala, unless otherwise indicated.

Abbreviations

Map of Central America and the Caribbean. (From Dana Munro, The United States and the Caribbean Republics, 1921-1933

Shattered Hope

PROLOGUE

Witnesses

IT WASN’T a great conspiracy, and it wasn’t a child’s game. We were just a group of young men searching for our destiny. So said Alfredo Guerra Borges one evening in January eighteen years ago. He had been a leader of the Communist Party of Guatemala (PGT) in the early 1950s. Ours was not a formal interview. I was curious about the Guatemalan revolution; he was eager to relive a past of which he was still proud.

He spoke of Jacobo Arbenz—the Red Jacobo. He spoke of himself and of his friends, of what they accomplished, and of what they failed to achieve. He spoke of Moscow and of Alejandro, the Cuban communist who sat in on the councils of the PGT. He spoke of Washington and of Ambassador John Peurifoy, whom he had ridiculed in the columns of the PGT’s Tribuna Popular. And he spoke, as in wonder, of the fall of Arbenz.

The CIA engineered the coup against Arbenz that ended the Guatemalan revolution—a revolution that had seen the PGT bask in the president’s favor while communists were pariahs elsewhere in Latin America; a revolution that had seen the first true agrarian reform of Central America: half a million people (one-sixth of Guatemala’s population) received the land they desperately needed.

Jacobo Arbenz and Juan José Arévalo presided over Guatemala during those ten years of spring in the land of eternal tyranny.¹ Arévalo—eloquent and charismatic—was a prominent intellectual; Arbenz—introverted and, even by CIA accounts, brilliant²—was an unusual young colonel who cared passionately about social reform. The virus of communism had infected both of them, especially Arbenz, or so said American observers. A few months before the coup, the New York Times delivered its indictment: Arbenz was a prisoner of the embrace he so long ago gave the Communists.³

Thirty-six years have passed. It is no longer fashionable to disparage Arévalo: he was, we are told, a Rooseveltian, a democrat whom Washington had misunderstood. But Arbenz is still controversial. Many believe that he too was misjudged and that the CIA plotted his overthrow because he had expropriated the land of the United Fruit Company. Others disagree. The former general secretary of the PGT, Arbenz’s closest friend, observes dryly, "They would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas.’’⁴

Since I first spoke with Alfredo Guerra Borges in January 1973, several excellent studies have appeared that examine U.S. policy toward the Guatemalan revolution, but the contours of the revolution itself—the Guatemalan side of the story—remain hazy.⁵ This is the story that I have sought to uncover.

My search led me to the Guatemalan and American press of the period; to the Guatemalan Transcripts (ninety-four boxes of documents seized by the CIA after the fall of Arbenz); to presidential libraries, the National Archives of the United States and of Guatemala, and to other public and private libraries.

But the mysteries of the revolution remained unsolved. Who killed Francisco Arana, the man who had hoped to be Arévalo’s successor? Why did Arbenz import weapons from Czechoslovakia? How close was he to the Communist party? Why did the army turn against him? Why did he resign? The written record does not answer these questions. Much that transpired was not recorded at the time, and the protagonists have remained silent through the years. Even the loquacious Arévalo, who has written voluminous memoirs, has not written about his own presidency.

And so I pursued the survivors—in Guatemala, in Mexico, in the United States, in Cuba, in the Dominican Republic, in Nicaragua, in Costa Rica. I began in 1978, and my last interview was in 1990. Some people spoke for one hour, others for many hours, in interviews that spanned twelve years. This allowed me to check and cross-check their stories and to probe more deeply as I learned more.

Let me give, as an example, the case of Arbenz’s widow, María. I first tried to interview her in August 1978, when I arrived at her house in San Salvador with a warm letter of introduction from a mutual friend, only to be told, La señora is away. We don’t know when she will be back.’’ I persisted during the following years, as she moved to San José, Costa Rica. At last, in February 1982, I was invited to her sister-in-law’s house for lunch. Come,’’ I was told. Doña María will be here.’’ I arrived—with two Guatemalan friends who knew her and who had helped arrange the encounter—like a prospective bridegroom, surrounded by matchmakers. Doña María did not appear. She couldn’t make it,’’ her sister-in-law explained. But, please, stay for lunch. Let’s talk. I stayed. We talked through the afternoon and into the evening. As I was leaving, my hostess made a phone call. She then handed me a slip of paper. Call this number tomorrow morning at nine.

At nine, I made my call, nervous, half-expecting to be told, La señora is away. But Doña María came to the phone, and that same afternoon I went to her house. It was February 9, 1982. To my knowledge, I am the only person to whom she has granted an interview since the fall of Arbenz.

For three days she did not allow me to take notes, whereas she taped our conversations for her records. There was not a word about the Communist party; we were fencing. Gradually, she began to tell me her story. I interviewed her for three weeks in 1982, for ten days in 1984, and more briefly on later occasions when I was in San José. Most interviews lasted for three or four hours. But one, the one during which we discussed the fall of Arbenz, began, as always, at three-thirty in the afternoon and ended well past midnight.

By the time I met Doña María, I had been working on the book for several years. I could engage her in discussion rather than merely take notes. As the days and weeks passed, María’s story unfolded. It corroborated what José Manuel Fortuny, the general secretary of the PGT, had already told me.

Of course, memory is treacherous and men lie. Are María de Arbenz and Fortuny entirely reliable? No, of course not. Do they have their own agendas? Yes, of course. But there are safeguards: (1) They were interviewed repeatedly, and always separately. Doña María did not see the notes of my interviews with Fortuny, and Fortuny did not see the notes of my interviews with Doña María. And yet their testimonies are strikingly similar. (2) Cui bono? María de Arbenz and Fortuny have no common agenda: María de Arbenz is no longer a communist and lives a quiet bourgeois life in Costa Rica; Fortuny is still a communist and lives in Mexico. They are not friends; they have not seen each other since the death of Jacobo Arbenz in 1971. While it might be in Fortuny’s interest to stress Arbenz’s communist past (although it could be used to justify the U.S. intervention),⁶ it is certainly not in Doña María’s interest. Yet their accounts concur both in broad outline and in most details. (3) There are very few points for which I rely exclusively on the testimonies of María de Arbenz and Fortuny. Even when addressing Arbenz’s motivations for the agrarian reform program, an issue that is not discussed in the written record, the testimonies of Fortuny and María de Arbenz were weighed against those of Guerra Borges (who left the party in the mid-1960s and is no friend of Fortuny), Alejandro (who has seen neither María nor Fortuny since the mid-1960s), Augusto Charnaud MacDonald (a noncommunist), and Guillermo Noriega Morales (the only surviving noncommunist who had helped to prepare the first draft of the agrarian reform program).

María de Arbenz is a key witness, but so are Guatemala’s army officers, for the army held the balance of power in Arbenz’s time. Most of the military officers of the period are still in Guatemala, and they are garrulous. Most had never been interviewed before. They arrived with a prepared script, but, to a man, they departed from it. Colonel Enrique Parinello, the army chief of staff under Arbenz, initially insisted that he had been loyal to the president, but as the interview progressed, he admitted that he had known that the army was going to betray Arbenz and that he had said nothing because the situation had seemed so hopeless—the United States had decided that Arbenz had to go. Colonel Rubén González Siguí began by regaling me with the standard army version of the fall of Arbenz. As he droned on, I put down my pen. I had delayed my flight from Guatemala in order to see him. It was September 1982, during Guatemala’s dirty war, and I was uneasy, coming as I was from Mexico, where I had interviewed Guatemalan exiles. Look, I told him. What you’re telling me makes no sense. I itemized the inconsistencies of this well rehearsed account. I can leave now, if you want. Or we can talk. I won’t quote you without your permission. We talked. With bitter pride, González Siguí recollected how Arbenz had stood up to the United States, and how the army had not.

There is a man in Guatemala City who has in his desk drawer a gun and a handkerchief stained with blood. When I first went to interview him, before bidding me welcome he opened the drawer and flourished the gun. I flinched. It was August 1978. Violence was increasing in the capital, and my host was a man of the far right, a fervent supporter of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, which had a long history of political assassinations. He wanted to impress upon me that in Guatemala one must live by the gun, that in Guatemala one must kill or be killed. The handkerchief, he explained, was stained with the blood of Carlos Castillo Armas, the man who had overthrown Arbenz and who was himself mysteriously assassinated three years later. And so I met Guayo Taracena de la Cerda, an enthusiastic supporter of Castillo Armas and a dedicated foe of Arbenz. Taracena is an idealist who has killed but not stolen, a man who fought for a cause, not for personal gain. I spent many hours with him through the summer of 1978 and again in 1982.

It is not only the Guatemalans who have a story to tell. So too do the Americans, from embassy officials who witnessed the unfolding of the revolution to CIA agents who plotted its demise. They were interviewed for this book, several on repeated occasions. They were, for the most part, professional and dispassionate. Richard Bissell, who participated in the CIA plot against Arbenz, spent six hours analyzing the weaknesses of the operation—weaknesses, he concluded, that were many and glaring. Ambassador Peurifoy’s deputy, Bill Krieg, remarked that the communist leaders "were very honest, very committed. This was the tragedy: the only people who were committed to hard work were those who were, by definition, our worst enemies.’’⁷

Unlike the Guatemalan participants, most of the Americans had been interviewed by other researchers, but an understanding of the Guatemalan revolution casts new light on their accounts. My analysis of the Guatemalan side of the story has convinced me that the accuracy and subtlety of U.S. intelligence on Guatemala improved from Truman to Eisenhower and that in the course of the revolution, the influence of the communists in shaping Guatemalan policy increased, while the influence of the United Fruit Company in shaping American policy decreased. There is no convenient villain of the piece, but rather a complex interplay of imperial hubris, security concerns, and economic interests. It is against this constellation of forces that the story of the Guatemalan revolution was played out to its tragic end. The record—Guatemalan and American, oral and written—shows that Fortuny was right: "They would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas.’’

¹ Cardoza y Aragón, La Revolución Guatemalteca, p. 9.

² CIA, Guatemala, SR-46, July 27, 1950, p. 39, Truman Papers, President’s Secretary’s File, Intelligence File, Box 261, TL.

³ Guatemala Reds Increase Powers, NYT, Nov. 6, 1953, p. 3.

⁴ Interview with Fortuny.

⁵ In the early 1980s several books were published that made good use of newly declassified documents to shed light on U.S. policy toward Guatemala: Immerman, CIA in Guatemala; Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, Cook, Declassified Eisenhower, pp. 217-92. While these books overshadow everything that had been written previously on the subject, three earlier works deserve to be remembered: Jonas and Tobis, Guatemala, and Blasier, Hovering Giant, for their intelligent analyses; and Wise and Ross, Invisible Government, pp. 177-96, for its investigative skill. More recent works that rely on this new scholarship include Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, pp. 42-63, and Wood, Dismantling, pp. 152-90.

⁶ Indeed, the man who gave me the letter of introduction for Doña María in 1978 told me that he did not think it was wise to write about Arbenz’s political sympathies. "It would play right into the CIA’s hands.’’

⁷ Interview with Krieg.

CHAPTER 1

The Era of Ubico

ON JANUARY 22, 1932, a peasant revolt erupted in El Salvador. The uprising was quickly suppressed, as the government slaughtered from ten to thirty thousand peasants. The young Communist Party of El Salvador, which had participated in the revolt, was branded by the Salvadoran authorities as its sole organizer and the source of its every atrocity.¹

Neighboring Guatemala shuddered. Fear spread through its upper class: a similar upheaval could take place at home. But President Jorge Ubico had already acted: on January 29, the Guatemalan government announced that a Bolshevik revolt had been narrowly averted in one of the most efficient and beneficial operations executed in the Americas since the arrival of the conquistadores. The communists, it explained, had gained control of the trade unions and had been agitating in the countryside; their leader, the carpenter Antonio Obando Sánchez, had been appointed High Commissar and Great Teacher of the Steppes in the Soviet of Guatemala by the Kremlin.²

And so hundreds were arrested, as the upper class quaked. There was a house, the police disclosed,

in which the cook, the chauffeur, a maid and a gardener had joined the communists; they were ready to betray their masters—raping, murdering and robbing on the day of the uprising. In another household, a black servant was found carrying the tools needed to break into the bedroom of two of our most beautiful high society girls. In another house, the police confiscated ropes which were going to be used to hang a rich man and his family who lived in the heart of our capital city.³

The demonic nature of the communist leaders was exposed. Obando Sánchez, it was stated, preaches slaughter first, and then the complete redistribution of private property, including—like pieces of furniture or slaves (and only to satisfy the biological needs of the species)—all the women of the defeated bourgeoisie from age eight to thirty, sentencing those who are older to death by fire. Juan Pablo Wainwright, a young upper-class Honduran who had joined the party a few months earlier, was just as bloodthirsty: His only interest is burning, destroying, breaking, raping, cutting in two, in four, beating and redistributing private property.⁴

There had been no plot: the Guatemalan Communist Party was far weaker than its Salvadoran counterpart. In 1932, the communists were thinking not of revolution but of survival.⁵ Yet the Guatemalan upper class believed the government’s propaganda. Then, as now, its acumen was warped by its fear of losing any of its privileges, by its proclivity to brand all suggestions of reform as communist subversion, and by its tendency to believe anything that might confirm its deformed view of reality.⁶

The upper class, the press, and the Church warmly praised the government’s activism and vigor against international communism. They warned, however, that there must be no slackening of the vigilance and the repression needed to prevent further outbursts.⁷

They had no reason to fret. Ubico, himself a prominent landowner, crushed both the fledgling labor movement and the tiny Communist party. Most leading party members fell into the hands of the police and were tortured. Not one begged for mercy; not one repented. Among them was Wainwright, who is remembered for an act of courage unique in the thirteen years of Ubico’s rule. Cruelly tortured, relates an inveterate anticommunist writer,

Wainwright sent a note to General Ubico offering him sensational revelations. Ubico arrived at the penitentiary and entered the gloom of cell number 13.

What do you have to tell me? asked the dictator.

I sent for you, replied Wainwright, to tell you that you are a miserable murderer and an animal. He spat in Ubico’s face. The dictator whipped him mercilessly. He was almost dead when a bullet ended his suffering. Wainwright lived and died with honor.⁸

Several communists were executed a few days later. The party had been destroyed. It was the second year of the era of Ubico.

Lacking gold, sugar, and spices, Guatemala had been an impoverished and neglected colony throughout the three centuries of Spanish rule. Even after independence it remained an impoverished backwater. Coffee was to change this.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the rising demand for coffee wrenched Guatemala into the world economy. Great coffee estates were created, and, to bring the coffee to the sea, railroads were built. Agrarian reforms that dispossessed the Indians of their land and labor codes that legalized forced labor ensured that the Indian would supply the workforce.⁹

While the Indian tilled the land, the foreigner built the railroad. By 1912, the American-owned International Railways of Central America controlled Guatemala’s railroads. Over the next two decades, the United Fruit Company acquired immense tracts of state land, offering in return paltry sums of money and perfunctory thanks. The State looked on, untroubled by the mergers and the acquisitions that tightened foreign control of the economy.

In 1920, Guatemala entered a period of limited political democracy. The Congress and the press were relatively free. Repression remained, but less than in the past, at least in the cities. The urban population demanded economic concessions and dared to stage strikes. Often the police intervened and arrested people, but wages did increase and several labor unions were legalized.¹⁰ In 1922, thirteen Ladino artisans and a Salvadoran law student created the Communist Party of Guatemala. It was illegal, persecuted, and penniless. (We were ignorant; we didn’t know anything about Marxist theory; we didn’t even own any Marxist books, recalls one of the party’s founders.)¹¹ But due to the skill of its leaders, the party acquired influence in the labor movement out of proportion to its meager numbers. It had, however, no contacts in the rural areas. There, no unions were allowed, and democracy meant herding the Indians to the polls on election day.

With the crash of 1929, the coffee market collapsed, the Guatemalan economy went bankrupt, and unemployment spread through the land. There is a great deal of unrest among the working classes, reported the U.S. embassy in April 1930.¹² Fearing the gathering of red storm clouds,¹³ the Guatemalan elite knew that the times demanded a strong leader. That man was Jorge Ubico. As a governor, he had gained a reputation for efficiency and cruelty. The U.S. embassy gave him its hearty endorsement.¹⁴ In February 1931, he triumphed in a presidential election in which he was the sole candidate.

During his thirteen-year dictatorship, Ubico built a number of roads using largely unpaid Indian labor provided in lieu of a road tax; this age-old practice he enforced with particular vigor. He also erected several public buildings. Again, much of the labor was unpaid, supplied by convicts whose ranks were swelled by periodic police raids on Saturday evenings in poor sections of the capital and other towns to arrest drunken laborers and others who might have become drunk had they had the time. This, too, was an old practice, which had fallen into disuse during the more permissive twenties.¹⁵

By 1934, Ubico had balanced the national budget by slashing government expenditures. He had also reduced graft, which had been rampant in the twenties. For many members of the Guatemalan middle class, this austerity meant dismissal from the bureaucracy. For others, Ubico’s rule meant a sharp reduction in salaries and pensions. Blue collar workers fared worse. When the workers of Novella & Company, the largest cement factory of Central America, went on strike in March 1931 to protest a wage cut, the newly inaugurated Ubico ordered the arrest of the ringleaders.¹⁶ Then came the great wave of repression that accompanied the discovery of the 1932 communist plot; the urban labor movement was destroyed. Thereafter, notes a labor lawyer, began the long night of Guatemalan labor. The words trade union, strike, labor rights, petitions were proscribed, and those who dared use them were automatically branded as ‘communists.’ ¹⁷

Ubico watched carefully that no naive soul spoiled the Guatemalan workers. He intervened in 1942, when the U.S. army (which was building military bases in the country) sought to pay its laborers more than the prevailing wage of twenty-five cents per day.¹⁸ Wages failed to increase even when the Second World War brought sharp inflation to Guatemala.¹⁹ His rule did, however, bring the workers one improvement: disgusted by the subversive connotation of the word, Ubico decreed that there would no longer be obreros in Guatemala; they all became empleados.²⁰

However important politically, cities and towns were only specks in the immense finca that was Guatemala. In 1940, about 90 percent of the approximately 2.25 million Guatemalans lived in communities of fewer than ten thousand inhabitants. Two-thirds of these Guatemalans were Indians, the descendants of the vanquished Maya.²¹ Above the Indians were the Ladinos, an ambiguous category that encompassed all those who were not officially classed as Indians, blacks, or Chinese; it ranged from upper-class whites who boasted of their European lineage to landless Indians who had renounced the culture of their people.

Rare was the Ladino, whatever his status, who felt no contempt for the Indian. Contempt and fear. One day the Indians might rise in blind, destructive fury. No one could divine what lurked behind their subservient smiles, their tame demeanor, their silence. The aboriginal race was cowardly, sad, fanatical, and cruel. ... [It was] closer to beast than to man, lamented a young Guatemalan intellectual in 1927. For the Indians there is only one law—the lash.²²

On this beast rested the prosperity of Guatemala. The Indian, the U.S. embassy noted, illiterate, unshod, diseased, is the Guatemalan laborer.²³ Until 1934, he was bound to his master by debt peonage. After 1934, he was bound to the State by Ubico’s vagrancy laws: all those Indians who owned no land or less than a prescribed amount were ordered to hire themselves out to landowners for at least one hundred days a year.²⁴ Theoretically, the Indians could choose their employers and negotiate their contracts according to the laws of supply and demand. But in a world ruled by the masters’ violence, these laws hardly applied. When there was any trouble, the landowners banded together. Thus, in the department of Quezaltenango, they joined forces to create a trust. . . which would maintain a wage level of 15 centavos per day. . . . Penalties were agreed upon for anyone who broke this rule.²⁵

Only exceptionally were such steps necessary. The Indian laborers could not read the contracts to which they apposed their thumbs; they could not verify whether the written words matched the patron's oral promises. Moreover, all Indian men between eighteen and sixty years of age had to prove that they had hired themselves out for the prescribed number of days. To this end, they were required to carry cards on which their employers noted the days they had worked, and "it was the common occurrence that the patron would keep a laborer on simply by refusing to sign the books."²⁶ If a dispute arose, the authorities sided with the landowners. But disputes were usually settled within the closed world of the fincas: whips and stocks were a standard part of the landowner’s equipment.

Ubico, sympathetic to the landowners’ concerns, legalized murder: Decree 1816 of April 1932 exempted landowners from the consequences of any action taken to protect their goods and lands.²⁷ From this to the cold-blooded murder of a stubborn Indian was a moot step. Yet, one wonders why this decree was necessary. Civilized Guatemalans had always understood the occasional need to kill an Indian.

By replacing debt peonage with the vagrancy laws, Ubico sought to improve Guatemala’s image abroad. He also satisfied the requests of many landowners who had argued since the 1920s that debt peonage was ineffective and uneconomic.²⁸ The vagrancy laws increased the influence of the central government, which was given the responsibility of allocating Indians among competing landowners. This was part of Ubico’s effort to shift the locus of power that had generally rested locally and regionally in the hands of the local upper class, and as such it paralleled the 1935 Municipal Law, which replaced the country’s elected mayors with intendentes appointed by the central government.²⁹ Just as the intendente system was not introduced to improve the lot of the lower classes, so the vagrancy laws were not concerned with the welfare of the Indians.

This is not to say that Ubico was unpopular with the Indians. The daily oppression they endured—an oppression that seemed as eternal as the land and the sky—came from their immediate masters: the landowners, the local authorities, and their Ladino neighbors. The president of the republic was a remote figure, nearly as remote as the concept of a country called Guatemala. Ubico, who traveled extensively through the country, may even have appeared as a benevolent figure who came from afar and spoke words that, though stem, lingered as an echo of hope after the great man had departed.³⁰ These are impressions; no one, save a few foreign anthropologists who eschewed political analysis, attempted to penetrate the world of the Indian.³¹ For the Ladinos, the Indians were inferior beings, a featureless mass that understood only force.

The instruments of control were at hand. This was a militarized society. Every governor of Guatemala’s twenty-two departments was a general. The National Radio and the Department of Roads were staffed by military officers; officers led convicts and Indians to perform forced labor in the cities and the countryside. Secondary education was placed under military control: school principals were senior army officers; lieutenants and captains were in charge of discipline; students were required to undergo reserve training.³² With the militarization of these minor civil officials, the U.S. naval attaché explained, President Ubico further extends his military control over the everyday life and every thought and action of the people of Guatemala.³³

Not only did these measures enforce military discipline in the bureaucracy, they also employed some of the eighty generals who infested the Guatemalan army in the early 1940s. (Those who had no specific duties congregated every morning in the dictator’s anteroom to await his pleasure.) Hated by their own officers, Ubico’s generals were notorious for their ignorance, incompetence, and cruelty. Their sole qualification was their mindless obedience to Ubico’s orders.

The Guatemalan army, noted a 1944 U.S. intelligence report, was a dismal affair, 798 officers and 5,528 enlisted men who were poorly trained and poorly equipped. (It is doubtful, the report pointed out, whether many of the soldiers have ever fired their rifles.)³⁴ The officers were Ladinos; nearly all the soldiers were Indian conscripts drafted by force. Military service, Ubico explained, was enlightening for the Indians: They arrive rude and brutish, but when they leave they are no longer like donkeys, they have good manners and are better equipped to face life.³⁵ Life in the barracks was similar, however, to life on the patrones" estates: despised and paid miserably, they slept on the floor, ate terrible food, donned ragged and dirty uniforms, and were whipped mercilessly at the least infraction. In the words of a Guatemalan officer who served under Ubico and who is not given to sentimentality, Their treatment was atrocious; they were, observes another officer, inept, ill-prepared, illiterate and whipped into stupidity.³⁶

Ubico’s notorious parsimony was also evident in the treatment of his officers, at least until they reached the rank of colonel. Their salaries were mediocre, and they endured an oppressive discipline. Their role was to inspire fear on behalf of the dictator, but they, too, lived in a world of fear, where the slightest hint of dissatisfaction could prove fatal.³⁷ To avoid contamination, officers were not sent to study abroad. They were jailers, forbidden to wander outside the prison walls. The merciless system worked. The officers were automata, ready to obey all orders, refraining from all initiative: We were always scared; the military code was draconian, prescribing the death penalty for virtually every offense. Spies were everywhere.³⁸

For added security, Ubico relied on an elite unit that served as his presidential guard. The Guardia de Honor received the bulk of the weapons given to Guatemala by the United States during the Second World War, including the only twelve tanks in the country. Its soldiers slept on cots, not on the floor . . . and were somewhat better dressed and better fed. ³⁹ The officers received higher pay; in return, they were expected to be particularly loyal to Ubico.

Special loyalty was also expected from the officers de linea. These were generally lower-middle-class Ladinos who rose through the ranks. For them, the life of an officer represented both an attractive station and one of the very few avenues of upward mobility in Guatemala. By contrast, the officers de escuela—those who had graduated from the military academy—were generally of middle-class extraction. Had it not been for the economic crisis of the 1930s, many would have attended the university; a military career offered them neither social nor economic advancement, particularly toward the end of the era, when the plethora of generals and colonels stifled the possibility of promotion.

However pitiful as a professional military force, the Guatemalan army was more than adequate to control the unarmed populace; indeed, it was impressive compared to the other ragtag armies of Central America. Moreover, it was supplemented by the police which, drawn almost exclusively from poor Ladinos, had "the reputation of being one of the most efficient and secretive in Latin America.’’⁴⁰ Together, the army and the police formed a formidable barrier to domestic unrest, and they faced no difficult challenges. After the destruction of the 1932 "communist plot,’’ Ubico crushed a true conspiracy in 1934. There were no other plots of any significance, and there were no disturbances, until 1944.⁴¹

Nor was there much crime, at least not in the usual sense: common criminals were swiftly and ruthlessly punished. Accounts abound of how safe Guatemala became under Ubico’s rule. It was not safe, however, for the victims of the dictator’s whims, for subversive’’ Indians, or for poor Ladinos. We had to endure not only the all-encompassing will of the dictator,’’ recalls a former official, "but also the numerous ‘Little Ubicos’ who imitated him while doing his bidding: the chief of police, the governors of the departments, the local police chiefs and hundreds more. ... In the early days of the dictatorship I became aware of murders perpetrated by the rural police. They had to set an example, their chiefs said, in order to escape the Man’s wrath.’’⁴²

Communists and criminals (insofar as he distinguished between them) were two of Ubico’s phobias. The third was intellectuals, for whom he "felt an Olympian contempt.’’⁴³ His disdain was tinged with mistrust; people who read might fall prey to subversive ideas, that is, to communism. Thus he made sure that no subversive books entered Guatemala, and that no subversive ideas perturbed the Guatemalan youth. "We were political illiterates,’’ recalls a student leader.⁴⁴

Arrogant and suspicious, Ubico was loath to delegate authority. As a loyal minister stated, His overestimation of himself led him to take care of everything without seeking advice.’’ He had developed, noted the FBI, a clever system of checking up on his ministers’’: he appointed their enemies as their deputies. ‘ ‘In this way they keep a check on each other and report to the President.’’⁴⁵ A U.S. official had seen this side of Ubico as early as 1923:

During the hour and a half that I spent with the General, I was impressed with . . . the almost Anglo-Saxon frankness of the man. He is what is known here as the white type, untainted by mixed blood. . . . The accession of General Ubico as President would be, however, the accession of a dictator. He has the suggestion complex, imagining that he is Napoleon, whom he does strongly resemble. This physiological [sic] state of mind is immediately apparent when one enters his drawing room. In conspicuous places are busts of Napoleon. . . . Above these statues is a large photograph of General Ubico.⁴⁶

Ubico may have had delusions of grandeur, but his world was narrow; "he lacked the statesman’s vision.’’⁴⁷ His was the Guatemala of the past, and he was suspicious of all change. He opposed industrial development because factories spawned a proletariat from which the communists would emerge; when Bata, a leading shoe manufacturer, sought to establish itself in Guatemala in the early 1940s, Ubico categorically rejected the proposal.⁴⁸

Ubico’s bravery was legendary, as was his bravado: I have no friends, but only domesticated enemies. ... Be careful! I am a tiger, you are monkeys.⁴⁹ Considering Guatemala to be his personal domain, Ubico ruled the country as if it were his hamlet. He controlled everything. It is true that there was less theft under Ubico. The only man with the freedom to steal was Ubico himself.⁵⁰ A 1944 U.S. intelligence report noted that after taking office, Ubico became the greatest private landowner in Guatemala, despite his much-publicized campaign for honesty in government. He bought many properties at a price fixed by himself. He also made sure that his salary and perquisites were generously increased while he slashed the bureaucrats’ salaries, and he graciously accepted, in 1940, a gift of $200,000 from a servile Congress. This spontaneous token of gratitude aroused resentment, but the begrudgers were swiftly silenced: The Legation has heard, the U.S. minister reported, that some ninety persons in Guatemala have been put in jail for speaking out of turn regarding this gift.⁵¹

Those who offended the dictator were harshly punished. The secret police has earned for itself the odious title of the Guatemalan Gestapo, a U.S. official noted.⁵² The spy network was organized wisely and carefully. There were informers in all social classes. . . . The servant was a spy, and so was his master; the lady was a spy, and so was the whore; the priest was a spy, and so was the teacher.⁵³ As a result, recalls the son of a senior official, In my friends’ homes—and even in my home—in the streets, everyone spoke in hushed tones. . . . Suspicion was rife.⁵⁴ The immense majority of the elite submitted to the dictator’s will, participated in his personality cult, and turned against those whom he branded as his enemies—even when they were friends or relatives. In return, they were allowed to live the lives of petty feudal lords.

Cold and contemptuous toward the Guatemalan upper class, Ubico was gentle with the United States. To be sure, the men he admired were not Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, but Franco and Mussolini. Admiration, however, did not stand in the way of common sense; the Caribbean belonged to the United States. Moreover, Ubico saw the Americans as a valuable shield against Mexico, a neighbor that in the nineteenth century had annexed vast regions claimed by Guatemala and had become—or so Ubico and his class believed—a breeding ground for communist infection.⁵⁵ The United States, by contrast, was relatively healthy, even though Ubico at times doubted Roosevelt’s steadfastness. He was worried, he told a U.S. diplomat in 1941, about communistic activities and so many strikes in the United States. The American Communist Party may have been small, but the smallest rat left unmolested in a mansion would in time do considerable boring. Whether in Guatemala or the United States, he stressed, the communists should be given a dose of lead, not freedom of speech.⁵⁶

Only about communism did Ubico dare to offer advice to the United States. Otherwise, his attitude was that of the obsequious pupil. He diligently courted American officials, diplomats, and businessmen, exhibited preference for Yankee investors, and showed considerable imagination in discovering ways to demonstrate his support.⁵⁷ For example, he appointed a U.S. officer as director of the Escuela Politécnica, an unprecedented gesture. Except for a few months in 1943, U.S. officers occupied that prestigious post throughout Ubico’s thirteen years; other U.S. officers were among the academy’s professors.⁵⁸

After hostilities broke out in Europe, Ubico asserted that Guatemala "was with the United States in any needed capacity ‘all of the way.’ ’ ’⁵⁹ He declared war on Japan on December 8, one day after Pearl Harbor; on Italy and Germany on December 11, the day they declared war on the United States. ‘ ‘General Ubico,’’ the U.S. military attaché reported, has always been quick to follow the lead of the United States in the war measures dictated by that country. He has given many unheard of concessions to the U.S. Army.’’ American troops were stationed in Guatemala, and Ubico cooperated in the maintenance of harmonious relations with United States military personnel.’’⁶⁰

At Washington’s behest, Ubico moved against the German community in Guatemala—five to six thousand individuals, mainly Guatemalans of German origin. This small but economically influential group had supported the dictator loyally, and there is no indication that he considered them a threat to his rule. The Americans wanted action, and he complied. Following Guatemala’s declaration of war on Germany, Ubico allowed the FBI to deport several hundred German citizens and Guatemalans of German origin to the United States. Others faced discriminatory measures that culminated, in June 1944, in the expropriation of all the coffee estates belonging to the German community.⁶¹

In the late 1930s, occasional articles in the U.S. press had castigated Ubico as sympathetic to the Axis powers. His behavior during the war allayed such fears. As a result, between 1940 and mid-1944, the American press displayed warm appreciation for Jorge Ubico, an exotic strongman who built roads, maintained stability and exhibited a touching admiration for the United States and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Ubico, John Gunther told his many readers, "is the biggest man in Central America. Given local conditions, he has done a lot. . . . Relations between the United States and Guatemala are in every way excellent, better than they have ever been before.’’⁶²

Ubico’s treatment of American companies was exemplary. Not only did he respect their immense privileges, but he was forthcoming in the one case in which, for a less supple man, confrontation would have been inevitable. The matter involved a 1930 contract with the United Fruit Company (UFCO): in return for a grant of two hundred thousand hectares at Tiquisate on the Pacific coast, the company pledged to build a Pacific port within seven years.⁶³ For the landed elite, this had one significant benefit: cheaper transportation costs. The coffee grown on the Western Piedmont would no longer have to be carried by rail all the way to Puerto Barrios on the Atlantic, an economic absurdity from which the International Railways of Central America (IRCA) extracted a hefty profit.

Had UFCO honored the agreement, IRCA’s losses would have been substantial. But the two American companies reached a friendly understanding, which was formalized in a September 1936 contract. UFCO, which already owned 17 percent of IRCA’s stock, bought additional shares, bringing its total participation to 42.68 percent. It also pledged not to build a port on the Pacific. Thus the bananas from Tiquisate would have to be transported, like the coffee, all the way to Puerto Barrios—but IRCA would charge UFCO less than half its usual freight rate. It was a deal that promised to benefit both companies.⁶⁴

Without Ubico’s gentle forbearance, the agreement would not have been possible. In March 1936, Guatemala had freed UFCO of its obligation to build the port because of the prevailing economic crisis’’ (which was less severe than in 1930, when the original contract had been signed). UFCO paid $50,000 and retained the land it had received for agreeing to build the port. The negotiations, UFCO’s local manager told the American chargé, had been carried on most amicably . . . [and the company] had not been subjected to any particular pressure."⁶⁵

Once again, as so often in its empire-building in the Caribbean basin, UFCO reaped the benefits of dictatorial rule. Whereas the 1930 contract had been preceded by long and acrimonious debates in the Guatemalan Congress and the press, the 1936 agreement was approved swiftly and without debate.

There is no indication that U.S. officials intervened to help the company. Nor was such help requested by UFCO. Having just reelected himself in violation of the constitution, Ubico was particularly eager for American goodwill; he was also aware that in the early 1920s the State Department had applied massive pressure when the Guatemalan government had failed to satisfy the demands of American companies.⁶⁶ Moreover, UFCO and IRCA were powerful enough in their own right to elicit sympathetic treatment.

During his presidency, Ubico proved himself worthy of the Americans’ favor, and the United States was not ungrateful. U.S. officials had welcomed Ubico’s accession to the presidency in 1931, praising him in extravagant terms as the man who could best maintain pro-American stability in Guatemala during the world recession.⁶⁷ Their approval was steadfast until the last months of the dictator’s rule.

Even useful dictators can become expendable. Throughout Latin America, the Depression had spawned strongmen; by the mid-1940s the economic crisis had waned, and the Allied victory over Hitler was spreading antidictatorial feelings among even the upper class. In the Caribbean arc, through the mid-1940s, dictators faltered and fell: Anastasio Somoza’s control of Nicaragua was seriously threatened; Rafael Trujillo experienced difficulties in the Dominican Republic; in Cuba, Fulgencio Batista accepted defeat at the polls; while Isaias Medina Angarita was toppled in Venezuela.

At the University of San Carlos, Guatemala’s only center of higher education, some students began to shake off the torpor that had becalmed the country. The creation of the Law Students’ Association in October 1942 and of a Federation of University Students thirteen months later were tentative steps along a narrow path. The students appeared to eschew political issues and to seek only minimal academic freedom, but below the surface, tensions were rising.⁶⁸ U.S. officials reported that Ubico’s decision to continue for a third term (from March 1943 to March 1949) created considerable public tension’’ and latent opposition.’’⁶⁹ Ubico’s police chief pointed to the Atlantic Charter as "the cause of political unrest. ... He advised that the people [had] read Allied propaganda posters about the Four Freedoms and their ensuing thoughts on the matter led them to feel discontented under the present Guatemalan government.’’⁷⁰ In fact, the middle class hated Ubico, and even the upper class was turning against him. It no longer needed the arrogant strongman.

Ubico’s departure was preceded by that of his Salvadoran colleague, General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. After crushing a military revolt in April 1944, Martínez faced a mounting wave of urban strikes. Students and blue collar workers led the unrest, the army wavered, and the U.S. embassy, seeking an orderly transition, urged the beleaguered dictator to leave. On May 11, Martínez sought refuge in Guatemala.⁷¹

The fall of a neighboring dictator unnerved Ubico and inspired his restive subjects. Guatemala’s university students were the first to react. Until late June their demands were confined to academic issues, but their assertiveness itself was a political challenge. The authorities responded with surprising irresolution, combining hesitant concessions with light punishments. A few students were detained briefly, and others lost their jobs as schoolteachers. The overall impression was one of weakness. The students were emboldened, and the grip of fear over the population began to loosen.

In mid-June the ferment spread to the capital’s teachers. The preparations for Teachers’ Day (June 30) provided the spark: "As in every year, the teachers’ martyrdom had begun. Without regard for age or sex, they had to assemble every afternoon at the Instituto Nacional Central de Varones. There they practiced marching for two hours without a break. Led by army officers, they would have to parade on Teachers’ Day in perfect order, carrying heavy flags under the blazing sun."⁷² In growing numbers, the teachers boycotted the exercises. Soon other professionals, especially young lawyers, began to express their support for the students and to present demands of their own. But no one dared, as yet, to call for the dictator’s resignation.

Ubico responded on June 22 by suspending constitutional guarantees. While no such guarantees had existed during his rule, their formal suspension indicated that a showdown was imminent. In the words of a student leader, Everyone held their breath that day and the next. Beneath the anxiety, a new spirit was rising, nurtured by the bravery of the students and the whole-hearted support of the teachers.⁷³ On Saturday, June 24, two brave souls brought a petition signed by 311 prominent Guatemalans to the presidential palace. In a respectful but firm tone, the document called for the reestablishment of constitutional guarantees. It was an act of audacity that Ubico viewed as painful betrayal. That same day, for the first time in the Ubico era, crowds gathered in the capital to demonstrate against the government. Also for the first time, voices were heard—a few at first, then a swelling chorus—demanding the dictator’s resignation. The poor joined the students, teachers, and other professionals in the streets. The first organized demonstration of the day, reported U.S. Ambassador Boaz Long, took place around noon when students marched quietly through the streets, cheering the United States and President Roosevelt as they passed the American Consulate General and the office occupied by the Military and Naval Attachés.⁷⁴ Throughout the day there was little violence. During the night, the police sent thugs to loot and riot in some areas of the capital. Several people were killed. The authorities blamed the demonstrators.⁷⁵

By the next morning, Sunday, June 25, tension throughout the city had mounted with almost incredible rapidity, Long observed. Large crowds gathered. The police and the army intervened, wounding many. To any person who has been familiar with the thirteen years of iron-bound discipline maintained by the Ubico administration, noted Long, it was difficult to believe that an incident at first confined to a small group comprised of University students should so swiftly have spread as to involve the entire city in a serious situation marked by public disorder and general civic disobedience.⁷⁶ In the afternoon, a thirty-one-year-old schoolteacher, María Chinchilla, was killed by a soldier. On Monday, June 26, all stores and business houses, gasoline stations and newspaper offices closed.⁷⁷ Guatemala City was challenging Ubico.

The confrontation would be brief and bloodless. For the next few days the police and the army were the unchallenged masters of the streets of the capital, but most offices and shops remained closed. Then, on June 30, the news spread: Ubico, it was said, had resigned.

And resign he did, on July 1. He abandoned a struggle he had not yet lost and might eventually have won. The capital was defiant, but the rest of the country was quiet, and the army had shown no sign of rebellion.⁷⁸ Nor had the Americans asked Ubico to step down. They did not, however, intervene to prop him up. Throughout June they were noncommittal. The State Department had told the embassy to limit its good offices, which had been requested by Ubico, exclusively to the transmission of messages between the contending factions.⁷⁹ U.S. officials were beginning to see the dictator as an anachronism, they considered his handling of the crisis ineffectual, and they were confident that should Ubico be replaced, his successors would be friendly to Washington.

American aloofness struck Ubico as a sharp rebuff, but it brought little comfort to his foes. A leader of the opposition contrasted the attitude of Ambassador Long to that of the Mexican ambassador after meeting them both in late June: Long was tight-lipped; he neither said nor did anything that could give us the least comfort. But the Mexican Ambassador emphatically expressed his sympathy—and that of his government—for the Guatemalan people and the triumph of democracy in our country.⁸⁰ Mexican sympathy was welcome, but it was the attitude of the United States that could be decisive. Washington had not turned against the dictator. The army was still loyal. Ubico had a good chance to ride out the storm.

Why then did he step down? Was he convinced that his position had become hopeless? Was he moved by bitter disappointment, having swallowed his sycophants’ assurances that the people loved him? Ubico, reported Long on the morning of June 30, was deeply disillusioned and hurt with the realization that the majority of the country was against him. He was particularly embittered, Long added, by the petitions for his resignation submitted over the preceding days by a long list of prominent Guatemalans, including many whom he had considered absolutely loyal.⁸¹

Perhaps Ubico’s decision was also influenced by his poor health, or even by the hope that soon he would be begged to return by a repentant people. No definitive answer has been offered by friend, foe, or even by Ubico himself; he left the presidential palace on the morning of July 1 with neither words nor overt emotion. He did not seek the safety of an embassy but went to his private residence in the capital—hardly the behavior of a cowed tyrant.

What is certain, however, is that he selected his successor in a most bizarre fashion. After signing his resignation decree on the morning of July 1, he ordered an aide, General Roderico Anzueto, to choose three generals to take over the presidency. Anzueto decided to select men he thought he would be able to control. Stepping out of the president’s office, he performed his task: to their great surprise, three undistinguished generals—Federico Ponce Vaides, Eduardo Villagran Ariza, and Buenaventura Pineda—learned that henceforth they would constitute a three-man military junta and take the place of Ubico. When another general started to ask Ubico to stay, the dictator cut him short: ‘Shut up!’ he exclaimed. And he left. The first act of the new rulers, recalls the war minister, was to get drunk.⁸²

On July 4, the most ambitious member