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"Somewhere over the border" Castillo Armas this week proclaimed a "provisional government" and issued his first fiery statement. "The dawn of liberation illuminates our land," it said. "The glorious struggle has begun against tyranny, treason, deceit and shame . . . Assault the garrisons of the Communists and capture them. They are cowards!" A certain amount of hyperbole is doubtless permissible in a manifesto issued on such an emotional occasion; Castillo Armas probably knows quite well that some Communists are cowards and some are nothing of the sort. And while he may regard Fellow Traveler Arbenz as a tyrant or a traitor, he could scarcely consider him a coward. On the contrary, military attaches, diplomats and journalists who have met the Guatemalan President are in striking agreement that the mainspring of his character is dogged, stubborn, self-willed courage. If there is any kind of bravery he lacks, it is perhaps the higher degree of courage that could enable a man to look into his own heart and see what his reckless flirtation with Communism has done—and may yet do—to his country and his people.
The Smart Subaltern. Jacobo (pronounced Ha-coe-boe) Arbenz was born in Quezaltenango in 1913 of a Ladino mother and a moody Swiss immigrant druggist who failed in business, walked out on his family and later killed himself. Another Swiss in the town intervened with General Jorge Ubico, the country's all-powerful ruler, to get the blond youth a scholarship at the national military school. Quickwitted and lithely muscular, Arbenz played polo and boxed while pulling down the highest grades in the academy's history. But when school triumphs were over, he was just another impoverished subaltern with no special prospects.
In 1939 he met and married pretty Maria Cristina Vilanova, vacationing daughter of a wealthy El Salvador coffee-planting family that bitterly opposed her marriage to a foreign nobody. Arbenz brooded because his aristocratic young wife had to do her own housework and even tint photographs (at $1 each) to eke out his $60-a-month lieutenant's pay. He seethed at social injustices—especially his own—and whetted up a sharp hatred for Ubico, who despised most of his officers and carefully confined them to quarters whenever he left the capital. "You can't imagine what it is like to live under a dictatorship," recalls Arbenz, whose police last week were freely murdering and jailing his political opponents. In 1944, sick of Ubico, Arbenz resigned his captain's Commission, took to plotting in desultory fashion, and soon found it expedient to retire for a time to El Salvador. A nonviolent general strike finally eased Ubico out, but equally tyrannical General Federico Ponce replaced him.
"You Guatemalans have no spunk!" gibed Señora Arbenz. Four months later, by way of answer, Arbenz and 13 others shot down the commander of Guatemala City's Guardia de Honor fort, won over the garrison and began shelling the capital's other two forts. A lucky hit on a powder magazine won the day spectacularly for Arbenz & friends. He and Colonel Francisco Javier Arana got a democratic constitution written and ran off a free election. It was won handily by Juan José Arévalo, a Guatemalan intellectual just back from exile in Argentina.