Juan José Arévalo

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Juan José Arévalo Bermejo (1904 – 1990) was the first of the reformist presidents of Guatemala. Preceded by military junta interregnum after a definitive pro-democracy revolt in 1944. Arévalo's 1944 election is considered by historians the first fair and democratic election in Guatemala's republican history; since independence from Spain, the country had seen a series of dictatorships.

Arévalo served as President from 15 March 1945 to 15 March 1951. Arévalo's administration was marked by unprecedented relatively free political life during his six year term. Arévalo, an educator and philosopher, understood the need for enlargement in individuals, communities, and nations of the concept and praxis of what is possible. Before his presidency, Arévalo had been an exiled university professor. He returned to Guatemala to help in the reconstructive efforts of the new post-Ubíco government, especially in the areas of social security and drafting of a new Constitution. His philosophy of "spiritual socialism," referred to as Arevalísmo, may be considered less an economic system than a movement toward the liberation of the imagination of oppressed Latin America. In the post-World War II period, internationalist players such as the United States regarded Arevalísmo socialism as Communism, and therefore cause for unease and alarm, which garnered support from neighboring satellite caudillos such as Anastazio Somoza.

In Guatemala's cities, newly enfranchised labor unions accompanied reformist labor law that greatly benefitted the urban lower and middle classes. Several parties and trade unions formed, and the enfranchisement of a large proportion of the population were significant legacies of his term. These benefits did not spread to the rural agrarian areas where hacendado traditions, termed latifundia, remained patrician, unyielding, and harsh. Whilst the government made some effort to improve campesino peasants' civil rights, rural conditions in Guatemala could not be improved without large scale agrarian reform, proposed as mediated and fairly compensated land redistribution. Failure in achieving this platform was a weakness for Arévalo's administration, which his successor attempted to confront and to remedy.

Agrarian reform met with the second officially orchestrated clandestine CIA-instigated coup d'etat chartered as Operation PBFORTUNE and Operation PBSUCCESS, championed by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whose brother Allen was a primary stakeholder in the United Fruit Company, which owned significant portions of the rural land subject to agrarian reforms.

Arévalo was succeeded by Jacobo Árbenz, who continued the agrarian reform approach of Arévalo's government. Arévalo yielded succession to his presidency openly in 1951 to Jacobo Arbenz in the second democratic election in Guatemala's republican history. Following Árbenz's expulsion in 1954, open democracy would not be allowed to return to a destabilized Guatemala for three decades despite considerable efforts to regain it.