Juan José Arévalo

On 27 March 1963 he returned to his country to announce his candidacy for the November presidential elections. Dictator Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, who, despite the firm opposition of the Kennedy administration, had pledged to oversee a free and open election in which Arévalo would participate, flew into exile to Nicaragua after he was deposed in a coup on 31 March 1963. Enrique Peralta Azurdia then seized power, and Arévalo fled the country again. He would later return to Guatemala in the mid-1970s, and later held a meeting with civilian Guatemala President Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo hours after he inaugurated on 14 January 1986. During the meeting, Arévalo praised the transition from military to civilian rule and even stated that "The October revolution is going to have a second chapter," though these hopes would soon be dashed by persistent human rights abuses, an ineffectual civilian administration and deep economic problems. On 7 October 1990, Arévalo died in Guatemala City.

He is the author of a scathing allegorical short story "The Shark and the Sardines," published in 1956. In 1963 he published a sequel entitled "Anti-Communism in Latin America".

Arévalo was succeeded by Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, who continued the agrarian reform approach of Arévalo's government. Arévalo freely yielded succession to his presidency in 1951 to Jacobo Árbenz in the second democratic election in Guatemala's republican history. Following Árbenz's expulsion in 1954, open democracy would not return to a destabilized Guatemala for three decades. Arévalo went into voluntary exile in Mexico as a university professor and writer. In 1956, he would write a notable book called "The Shark and the Sardines," which attacked the United States Government and powerful American companies for their treatment of Latin America. "The Shark and the Sardines" would be endorsed by American sociologist C. Wright Mills in his 1961 book Listen Yankee!

Arévalo served as president from 15 March 1945 to 15 March 1951. He was elected in 1944, in a contest which is generally reckoned as the first truly free election in the country's history. Arévalo won over 86 percent of the vote, garnering more than four times as many votes as the other candidates combined. It is still the largest margin of victory for a free election in the country's history.

The character of the 1944 revolution, envisioned by Arévalo, was based on the development of a modern social democratic society. A conversion from the remaining presence of feudalistic arrangements to a democratic socialist system was an aspiration of the revolutionary Guatemalan government. Arévalo's political philosophy stressed the importance of government intervention in the realm of economic and social interests as necessary to sustain the desires of the majority's free will. Deviating from Marxism, Arévalo valued property rights with the aim to subordinate them to benefit Guatemala as a whole if required. Overall, Arévalo sought to improve the social environment of the working majority through a reform of the capitalist mode of production. As a result, Arévalo was disliked by the Catholic church and the military, and faced at least 25 unsuccessful coup attempts during his presidency.

Juan José Arévalo Bermejo (10 September 1904 – 8 October 1990) was a Guatemalan professor of philosophy who became Guatemala's first democratically elected president in 1945. He was elected following a popular uprising against the United States-backed dictator Jorge Ubico that began the Guatemalan Revolution. He remained in office until 1951, surviving 25 coup attempts. He did not contest the election of 1951, instead choosing to hand over power to Jacobo Árbenz. As president, he enacted several social reform policies, including an increase in the minimum wage and a series of literacy programs. He also oversaw the drafting of a new constitution in 1945.