Carlos Castillo Armas (November 4, 1914 – July 26, 1957) was a military officer and the 28th president of Guatemala. He came to power in a 1954 coup d'état backed by the US Central Intelligence Agency that overthrew the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, and consolidated his position in an October 1954 election in which he was the only candidate. A member of the right-wing National Liberation Movement party, he was also the first of a series of authoritarian rulers in Guatemala who were close allies of the United States. Under Castillo Armas, the reforms of the Guatemalan Revolution were largely undone. Land was confiscated from small farmers and returned to large landowners, and thousands of people were arrested, tortured, or killed under suspicion of being communists. In 1957 Castillo Armas was assassinated by a presidential guard. His policies sparked a series of leftist insurgencies culminating in the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castillo_Armas
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1887:
L. L. Zamenhof published Unua Libro, the first publication to describe Esperanto, a constructed international language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unua_Libro
1953:
The Battle of the Samichon River, the last engagement of the Korean War, ended only a few hours before the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Samichon_River
1968:
After coming second to Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in a rigged presidential election in 1967, Trương Đình Dzu was jailed by a South Vietnamese military court for illicit currency transactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C6%B0%C6%A1ng_%C4%90%C3%ACnh_Dzu
2016:
In one of the deadliest crimes in modern Japanese history, a former employee carried out a mass stabbing at a care home for disabled people in Sagamihara, killing 19 people and wounding 26 others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagamihara_stabbings
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
lexicography: 1. The art or craft of compiling, writing, and editing dictionaries. 2. (linguistics) The scholarly discipline of analysing and describing the semantic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships within the lexicon (vocabulary) of a language and developing theories of dictionary components and structures linking the data in dictionaries. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lexicography
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
A platform is something a candidate stands for and the voters fall for. … I’m having my platform run up by a movie set designer, so it will be very impressive from the front, but not too permanent. After all, there’s no sense putting a lot of time and thought into something you’ll have no use for after you’re elected. --Gracie Allen https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gracie_Allen