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 Árbenz, “Árbenz’s Resignation Speech” (1954)
Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala by Stephen Kinzer
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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? 🤔🤔
Taking the opportunity to share this
Amazing!
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".
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.