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Reds & Riches. Arévalo's role, as it turned out, was to usher into dictator-ridden Guatemala such innovations as free speech, a free press, political parties and trade unions—in effect, to consolidate the revolution. Fighting off 29 plots and counterrevolutions, suspending constitutional liberties 13 times, Arévalo barely managed to hang on through six years. He never had time or energy to do much about his pet political theory, "Spiritual Socialism," a kind of fuzzy, nonmaterialistic revision of Communism.
In his regime, for the first time, Communist propaganda began to circulate freely in Guatemala. Young Ladino intellectuals—notably such present-day government advisers as Josè Manuel Fortuny, Victor Manuel Gutierrez, Carlos Manuel Pellecer and Alfredo Guerra Borges—soaked up Marxian ideas. U.S.-educated Maria Arbenz became interested, and she and Fortuny guided Arbenz, no heavyweight thinker, to read some popularized explanations of Communist theory.
This exposure to anti-capitalist propaganda did not stop Arbenz from piling up capitalist wealth for himself. As Arèvalo's Defense Minister, he could borrow and invest money from state banks, acquire businesses, land, and homes. Soon he was rich enough to invite Costa Rica's leading Communist to dinner at a luxurious villa and well enough briefed to discuss Marxist ideas with his guest. If Arbenz had been a widely traveled or broadly educated man, he might have been more skeptical, but in Guatemala there were actually rigid social stratifications and reactionary landlords, just as the books said. At some point his tidy, army-trained mind closed around the rudimentary theory and snapped shut with an approving click. He made no attempt to delve deeper, but took to reading La Union Sovietica. He once showed a friend an illustration of a perfectly ordinary automatic bakery oven and exclaimed, "What wonders the Soviets have accomplished!" At the Bridge. By 1948 Arbenz had plenty of money, a smattering of political theory and a firm ambition to be Arevalo's successor. Squarely blocking him was his old revolutionary comrade, Colonel Arana, also a presidential candidate.
As Chief of the Armed Forces, Arana shared authority over the army with Defense Minister Arbenz. Feeling ran high; once the two men, both drunk, faced each other in Guatemala City's Palace Hotel bar with hot words and drawn .455, and only a friend's intervention prevented gunfire. Affable, conservative Arana stood well with the army, and was in the lead for the presidency, when in July 1949 he was decoyed into making an inspection trip that took his Mercury station wagon over a little arched bridge near Lake Ama-titlán. There he and his aide were ambushed and Tommy-gunned to death by four young officers. All were intimates of handsome Jacobo Arbenz. Arana's army friends rose in revolt, but Defense Minister Arbenz, after a scary 36 hours, crushed the rising at a cost of 200 lives. "No more than an incident in the revolutionary life," he commented when the dust settled.