GUATEMALA: The Indispensable Reds

If Guatemala's anemic anti-Communist opposition still nursed the faint hope that President Jacobo Arbenz might become fed up with his Red allies and disavow them, that hope was blacked out last week by the most forthright pro-Communist declaration the President has ever uttered. In a 2½ hour report to Congress on the state of the nation, Arbenz called the Communists "progressive democratic forces" and "the very wellspring of our regime." He said that to turn against the Reds and repress them, as "certain landowner groups and agents of foreign monopolies" have urged, "would be ... suicide for Guatemala's democratic...

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