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>
Show replies by date