Jacobo Árbenz

1913-09-14 - 1971-01-27 Contemporaries

Jacobo Arbenz was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who served as the 25th president of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954. He was Minister of National Defense from 1944 to 1950 and became the second democratically elected president of Guatemala. A major figure of the ten-year Guatemalan Revolution, he enacted a landmark program of agrarian reform that was influential across Latin America.