Carlos Castillo Armas
Carlos Castillo Armas (November 4, 1914 – July 26, 1957) was a Guatemalan military officer and politician. He was the 28th president of Guatemala, serving from 1954 to 1957 after taking power in a coup d’état. A member of the right-wing National Liberation Movement party, his authoritarian government was closely allied with the United States. His reversal of the reforms of his predecessors sparked a series of leftist insurgencies in the country after his death.
About Carlos Castillo Armas in brief
Carlos Castillo Armas (November 4, 1914 – July 26, 1957) was a Guatemalan military officer and politician. He was the 28th president of Guatemala, serving from 1954 to 1957 after taking power in a coup d’état. A member of the right-wing National Liberation Movement party, his authoritarian government was closely allied with the United States. He cracked down on unions and peasant organizations, arresting and killing thousands. His reversal of the reforms of his predecessors sparked a series of leftist insurgencies in the country after his death, culminating in the Guatemalan Civil War of 1960 to 1996. His assassination was blamed on a presidential guard with leftist sympathies, but he was never charged with any crime. He is one of the few Guatemalan leaders to have been assassinated by a military guard, and the only one to be killed by a president of a leftist party. He died of a heart attack in a hospital in Guatemala City, where he was being treated for a heart condition that had caused him to lose a lot of blood in the previous year. He had been a protégé of Colonel Francisco Javier Arana, the leader of the 1944 uprising against President Federico Ponce Vaides. His time at the academy overlapped with that of Jacobo Árbenz, who would later become President of Guatemala. In 1936 he graduated from the Guatemala military academy. He became director of the military academy until early 1949, at which point he was made the military commander at Mazatenango, a remote military garrison.
He received training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1945 and 1946. In 1950 he launched a failed assault on Guatemala City,. before escaping back to Honduras. In 1952 the US government of President Harry Truman authorized Operation PBFortune, a plot to overthrow Arévalo’s leftist successor, President JacoboÁr benz. The plan was abandoned before being revived in a new form by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. In June 1954, Castillo Armas led 480 CIA-trained soldiers into Guatemala, backed by US-supplied aircraft. Despite initial setbacks to the rebel forces, US support for the rebels made the Guatemala army reluctant to fight, and ÁRbenz resigned on June 27. A series of military juntas briefly held power during negotiations that ended with Castillo Armas assuming the presidency on July 7. In the election that followed, Juan José Arévino was elected president, and CastilloArmas was a strong supporter and proté of Arana. He would later say that he was “modest, sincere, and that he had with great bravery” during the coup, which he had fought with with with “great bravery’. In 1957 he was assassinated by the presidential guard of the National Revolutionary Party (PRN), which was led by a former army general. He left office as president of the PRN.
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