title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The Bennettitales bore remarkably flower-like organs, protected by whorls of bracts which may have played a similar role to the petals and sepals of true flowers; however, these flower-like structures evolved independently, as the Bennettitales are more closely related to cycads and ginkgos than to the angiosperms.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: However, no true flowers are found in any groups save those extant today. Most morphological and molecular analyses place "Amborella", the nymphaeales and Austrobaileyaceae in a basal clade called "ANA". This clade appear to have diverged in the early Cretaceous, around  – around the same time as the earliest fossil angiosperm, and just after the first angiosperm-like pollen, 136 million years ago.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The magnoliids diverged soon after, and a rapid radiation had produced eudicots and monocots by . By the end of the Cretaceous , over 50% of today's angiosperm orders had evolved, and the clade accounted for 70% of global species.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The features of the basal "ANA" groups suggest that angiosperms originated in dark, damp, frequently disturbed areas. It appears that the angiosperms remained constrained to such habitats throughout the Cretaceous – occupying the niche of small herbs early in the successional series. This may have restricted their initial significance, but given them the flexibility that accounted for the rapidity of their later diversifications in other habitats.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Some propose that the Angiosperms arose from an unknown Seed Fern, Pteridophyte, and view Cycads as living Seed Ferns with both Seed-Bearing and sterile leaves (Cycas revoluta)


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: In August 2017, scientists presented a detailed description and 3D reconstruction of possibly the first flower that lived about 140 million years ago.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The family Amborellaceae is regarded as being the sister clade to all other living flowering plants. A draft genome of "Amborella trichopoda" was published in December, 2013. By comparing its genome with those of all other living flowering plants, it will be possible to work out the most likely characteristics of the ancestor of "A. trichopoda" and all other flowering plants, i.e. the ancestral flowering plant.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: It seems that on the level of the organ, the leaf may be the ancestor of the flower, or at least some floral organs. When some crucial genes involved in flower development are mutated, clusters of leaf-like structures arise in place of flowers. Thus, sometime in history, the developmental program leading to formation of a leaf must have been altered to generate a flower. There probably also exists an overall robust framework within which the floral diversity has been generated. An example of that is a gene called "LEAFY (LFY)", which is involved in flower development in "Arabidopsis thaliana". The homologs of this gene are found in angiosperms as diverse as tomato, snapdragon, pea, maize and even gymnosperms. Expression of "Arabidopsis thaliana" LFY in distant plants like poplar and citrus also results in flower-production in these plants. The "LFY" gene regulates the expression of some genes belonging to the MADS-box family. These genes, in turn, act as direct controllers of flower development.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The members of the MADS-box family of transcription factors play a very important and evolutionarily conserved role in flower development. According to the ABC Model of flower development, three zones — A, B and C — are generated within the developing flower primordium, by the action of some transcription factors, that are members of the MADS-box family. Among these, the functions of the B and C domain genes have been evolutionarily more conserved than the A domain gene. Many of these genes have arisen through gene duplications of ancestral members of this family. Quite a few of them show redundant functions.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The evolution of the MADS-box family has been extensively studied. These genes are present even in pteridophytes, but the spread and diversity is many times higher in angiosperms. There appears to be quite a bit of pattern into how this family has evolved. Consider the evolution of the C-region gene "AGAMOUS (AG)". It is expressed in today's flowers in the stamens, and the carpel, which are reproductive organs. Its ancestor in gymnosperms also has the same expression pattern. Here, it is expressed in the strobili, an organ that produces pollen or ovules. Similarly, the B-genes' "(AP3 and PI)" ancestors are expressed only in the male organs in gymnosperms. Their descendants in the modern angiosperms also are expressed only in the stamens, the male reproductive organ. Thus, the same, then-existing components were used by the plants in a novel manner to generate the first flower. This is a recurring pattern in evolution.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: There is enormous variation in floral structure in plants, typically due to changes in the MADS-box genes and their expression pattern. For example, grasses possess unique floral structures. The carpels and stamens are surrounded by scale-like lodicules and two bracts, the lemma and the palea, but genetic evidence and morphology suggest that lodicules are homologous to eudicot petals. The palea and lemma may be homologous to sepals in other groups, or may be unique grass structures.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Another example is that of "Linaria vulgaris", which has two kinds of flower symmetries-radial and bilateral. These symmetries are due to epigenetic changes in just one gene called "CYCLOIDEA".


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: "Arabidopsis thaliana" has a gene called "AGAMOUS" that plays an important role in defining how many petals and sepals and other organs are generated. Mutations in this gene give rise to the floral meristem obtaining an indeterminate fate, and proliferation of floral organs in double-flowered forms of roses, carnations and morning glory. These phenotypes have been selected by horticulturists for their increased number of petals. Several studies on diverse plants like petunia, tomato, Impatiens, maize, etc. have suggested that the enormous diversity of flowers is a result of small changes in genes controlling their development.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The Floral Genome Project confirmed that the ABC Model of flower development is not conserved across all angiosperms. Sometimes expression domains change, as in the case of many monocots, and also in some basal angiosperms like "Amborella". Different models of flower development like the "Fading boundaries model", or the "Overlapping-boundaries model" which propose non-rigid domains of expression, may explain these architectures. There is a possibility that from the basal to the modern angiosperms, the domains of floral architecture have become more and more fixed through evolution.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Another floral feature that has been a subject of natural selection is flowering time. Some plants flower early in their life cycle, others require a period of vernalization before flowering. This outcome is based on factors like temperature, light intensity, presence of pollinators and other environmental signals: genes like "CONSTANS (CO)", "Flowering Locus C" ("FLC") and "FRIGIDA" regulate integration of environmental signals into the pathway for flower development. Variations in these loci have been associated with flowering time variations between plants. For example, "Arabidopsis thaliana" ecotypes that grow in the cold, temperate regions require prolonged vernalization before they flower, while the tropical varieties, and the most common lab strains, don't. This variation is due to mutations in the "FLC" and "FRIGIDA" genes, rendering them non-functional.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Many of the genes involved in this process are conserved across all the plants studied. Sometimes though, despite genetic conservation, the mechanism of action turns out to be different. For example, rice is a short-day plant, while "Arabidopsis thaliana" is a long-day plant. Both plants have the proteins "CO" and "FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT)", but, in "Arabidopsis thaliana", "CO" enhances "FT" production, while in rice, the "CO" homolog represses "FT" production, resulting in completely opposite downstream effects.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The Anthophyte theory was based on the observation that a gymnospermic group Gnetales has a flower-like ovule. It has partially developed vessels as found in the angiosperms, and the megasporangium is covered by three envelopes, like the ovary structure of angiosperm flowers. However, many other lines of evidence show that Gnetales is not related to angiosperms.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The "Mostly Male theory" has a more genetic basis. Proponents of this theory point out that the gymnosperms have two very similar copies of the gene "LFY", while angiosperms just have one. Molecular clock analysis has shown that the other "LFY" paralog was lost in angiosperms around the same time as flower fossils become abundant, suggesting that this event might have led to floral evolution. According to this theory, loss of one of the "LFY" paralog led to flowers that were more male, with the ovules being expressed ectopically. These ovules initially performed the function of attracting pollinators, but sometime later, may have been integrated into the core flower.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: While environmental factors are significantly responsible for evolutionary change, they act merely as agents for natural selection. Change is inherently brought about via phenomena at the genetic level: mutations, chromosomal rearrangements, and epigenetic changes. While the general types of mutations hold true across the living world, in plants, some other mechanisms have been implicated as highly significant.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Genome doubling is a relatively common occurrence in plant evolution and results in polyploidy, which is consequently a common feature in plants. It is estimated that at least half (and probably all) plants have seen genome doubling in their history. Genome doubling entails gene duplication, thus generating functional redundancy in most genes. The duplicated genes may attain new function, either by changes in expression pattern or changes in activity. Polyploidy and gene duplication are believed to be among the most powerful forces in evolution of plant form; though it is not known why genome doubling is such a frequent process in plants. One probable reason is the production of large amounts of secondary metabolites in plant cells. Some of them might interfere in the normal process of chromosomal segregation, causing genome duplication.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: In recent times, plants have been shown to possess significant microRNA families, which are conserved across many plant lineages. In comparison to animals, while the number of plant miRNA families are lesser than animals, the size of each family is much larger. The miRNA genes are also much more spread out in the genome than those in animals, where they are more clustered. It has been proposed that these miRNA families have expanded by duplications of chromosomal regions. Many miRNA genes involved in regulation of plant development have been found to be quite conserved between plants studied.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Domestication of plants like maize, rice, barley, wheat etc. has also been a significant driving force in their evolution. Research concerning the origin of maize has found that it is a domesticated derivative of a wild plant from Mexico called teosinte. Teosinte belongs to the genus "Zea", just as maize, but bears very small inflorescence, 5–10 hard cobs and a highly branched and spread out stem.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Crosses between a particular teosinte variety and maize yields fertile offspring that are intermediate in phenotype between maize and teosinte. QTL analysis has also revealed some loci that, when mutated in maize, yield a teosinte-like stem or teosinte-like cobs. Molecular clock analysis of these genes estimates their origins to some 9,000 years ago, well in accordance with other records of maize domestication. It is believed that a small group of farmers must have selected some maize-like natural mutant of teosinte some 9,000 years ago in Mexico, and subjected it to continuous selection to yield the familiar maize plant of today.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The edible cauliflower is a domesticated version of the wild plant "Brassica oleracea", which does not possess the dense undifferentiated inflorescence, called the curd, that cauliflower possesses.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Cauliflower possesses a single mutation in a gene called "CAL", controlling meristem differentiation into inflorescence. This causes the cells at the floral meristem to gain an undifferentiated identity and, instead of growing into a flower, they grow into a dense mass of inflorescence meristem cells in arrested development. This mutation has been selected through domestication since at least the time of the Greek empire.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The C metabolic pathway is a valuable recent evolutionary innovation in plants, involving a complex set of adaptive changes to physiology and gene expression patterns.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Photosynthesis is a complex chemical pathway facilitated by a range of enzymes and co-enzymes. The enzyme RuBisCO is responsible for "fixing"  – that is, it attaches it to a carbon-based molecule to form a sugar, which can be used by the plant, releasing an oxygen molecule. However, the enzyme is notoriously inefficient, and, as ambient temperature rises, will increasingly fix oxygen instead of in a process called photorespiration. This is energetically costly as the plant has to use energy to turn the products of photorespiration back into a form that can react with .


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: C plants evolved carbon concentrating mechanisms that work by increasing the concentration of around RuBisCO, and excluding oxygen, thereby increasing the efficiency of photosynthesis by decreasing photorespiration. The process of concentrating around RuBisCO requires more energy than allowing gases to diffuse, but under certain conditions – i.e. warm temperatures (>25 °C), low concentrations, or high oxygen concentrations – pays off in terms of the decreased loss of sugars through photorespiration.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: One type of C metabolism employs a so-called Kranz anatomy. This transports through an outer mesophyll layer, via a range of organic molecules, to the central bundle sheath cells, where the is released. In this way, is concentrated near the site of RuBisCO operation. Because RuBisCO is operating in an environment with much more than it otherwise would be, it performs more efficiently.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: A second mechanism, CAM photosynthesis, temporally separates photosynthesis from the action of RuBisCO. RuBisCO only operates during the day, when stomata are sealed and is provided by the breakdown of the chemical malate. More is then harvested from the atmosphere when stomata open, during the cool, moist nights, reducing water loss.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: These two pathways, with the same effect on RuBisCO, evolved a number of times independently – indeed, C alone arose 62 times in 18 different plant families. A number of 'pre-adaptations' seem to have paved the way for , leading to its clustering in certain clades: it has most frequently been innovated in plants that already had features such as extensive vascular bundle sheath tissue. Many potential evolutionary pathways resulting in the phenotype are possible and have been characterised using Bayesian inference, confirming that non-photosynthetic adaptations often provide evolutionary stepping stones for the further evolution of .


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The C construction is used by a subset of grasses, while CAM is employed by many succulents and cacti. The C trait appears to have emerged during the Oligocene, around ; however, they did not become ecologically significant until the Miocene, . Remarkably, some charcoalified fossils preserve tissue organised into the Kranz anatomy, with intact bundle sheath cells, allowing the presence C metabolism to be identified. Isotopic markers are used to deduce their distribution and significance.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: C plants preferentially use the lighter of two isotopes of carbon in the atmosphere, C, which is more readily involved in the chemical pathways involved in its fixation. Because C metabolism involves a further chemical step, this effect is accentuated. Plant material can be analysed to deduce the ratio of the heavier C to C. This ratio is denoted . C plants are on average around 14‰ (parts per thousand) lighter than the atmospheric ratio, while C plants are about 28‰ lighter. The of CAM plants depends on the percentage of carbon fixed at night relative to what is fixed in the day, being closer to C plants if they fix most carbon in the day and closer to C plants if they fix all their carbon at night.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Original fossil material in sufficient quantity to analyse the grass itself is scarce, but horses provide a good proxy. They were globally widespread in the period of interest, and browsed almost exclusively on grasses. There's an old phrase in isotope paleontology, "you are what you eat (plus a little bit)" – this refers to the fact that organisms reflect the isotopic composition of whatever they eat, plus a small adjustment factor. There is a good record of horse teeth throughout the globe, and their record shows a sharp negative inflection around , during the Messinian that is interpreted as resulting from the rise of C plants on a global scale.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: While C enhances the efficiency of RuBisCO, the concentration of carbon is highly energy intensive. This means that C plants only have an advantage over C organisms in certain conditions: namely, high temperatures and low rainfall. C plants also need high levels of sunlight to thrive. Models suggest that, without wildfires removing shade-casting trees and shrubs, there would be no space for C plants. But, wildfires have occurred for 400 million years – why did C take so long to arise, and then appear independently so many times? The Carboniferous (~) had notoriously high oxygen levels – almost enough to allow spontaneous combustion – and very low , but there is no C isotopic signature to be found. And there doesn't seem to be a sudden trigger for the Miocene rise.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: During the Miocene, the atmosphere and climate were relatively stable. If anything, increased gradually from before settling down to concentrations similar to the Holocene. This suggests that it did not have a key role in invoking C evolution. Grasses themselves (the group which would give rise to the most occurrences of C) had probably been around for 60 million years or more, so had had plenty of time to evolve C, which, in any case, is present in a diverse range of groups and thus evolved independently. There is a strong signal of climate change in South Asia; increasing aridity – hence increasing fire frequency and intensity – may have led to an increase in the importance of grasslands. However, this is difficult to reconcile with the North American record. It is possible that the signal is entirely biological, forced by the fire- (and elephant?)- driven acceleration of grass evolution – which, both by increasing weathering and incorporating more carbon into sediments, reduced atmospheric levels. Finally, there is evidence that the onset of C from is a biased signal, which only holds true for North America, from where most samples originate; emerging evidence suggests that grasslands evolved to a dominant state at least 15Ma earlier in South America.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Transcription factors and transcriptional regulatory networks play key roles in plant development and stress responses, as well as their evolution. During plant landing, many novel transcription factor families emerged and are preferentially wired into the networks of multicellular development, reproduction, and organ development, contributing to more complex morphogenesis of land plants.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Secondary metabolites are essentially low molecular weight compounds, sometimes having complex structures, that are not essential for the normal processes of growth, development, or reproduction. They function in processes as diverse as immunity, anti-herbivory, pollinator attraction, communication between plants, maintaining symbiotic associations with soil flora, or enhancing the rate of fertilization, and hence are significant from the evo-devo perspective. Secondary metabolites are structurally and functionally diverse, and it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of enzymes might be involved in the process of producing them, with about 15–25% of the genome coding for these enzymes, and every species having its unique arsenal of secondary metabolites. Many of these metabolites, such as salicylic acid are of medical significance to humans.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The purpose of producing so many secondary metabolites, with a significant proportion of the metabolome devoted to this activity is unclear. It is postulated that most of these chemicals help in generating immunity and, in consequence, the diversity of these metabolites is a result of a constant arms race between plants and their parasites. Some evidence supports this case. A central question involves the reproductive cost to maintaining such a large inventory of genes devoted to producing secondary metabolites. Various models have been suggested that probe into this aspect of the question, but a consensus on the extent of the cost has yet to be established; as it is still difficult to predict whether a plant with more secondary metabolites increases its survival or reproductive success compared to other plants in its vicinity.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Secondary metabolite production seems to have arisen quite early during evolution. In plants, they seem to have spread out using mechanisms including gene duplications or the evolution of novel genes. Furthermore, research has shown that diversity in some of these compounds may be positively selected for. Although the role of novel gene evolution in the evolution of secondary metabolism is clear, there are several examples where new metabolites have been formed by small changes in the reaction. For example, cyanogen glycosides have been proposed to have evolved multiple times in different plant lineages. There are several such instances of convergent evolution. For example, enzymes for synthesis of limonene – a terpene – are more similar between angiosperms and gymnosperms than to their own terpene synthesis enzymes. This suggests independent evolution of the limonene biosynthetic pathway in these two lineages.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: The origin of microbes on Earth, tracing back to the beginning of life more than 3.5 billion years ago, indicates that microbe-microbe interactions have continuously evolved and diversified over time, long before plants started to colonize land 450 million years ago. Therefore, it is likely that both intra- and inter-kingdom intermicrobial interactions represent strong drivers of the establishment of plant-associated microbial consortia at the soil-root interface. Nonetheless, it remains unclear to what extent these interactions in the rhizosphere/phyllosphere and in endophytic plant compartments (i.e., within the host) shape microbial assemblages in nature and whether microbial adaptation to plant habitats drive habitat-specific microbe-microbe interaction strategies that impact plant fitness. Furthermore, the contribution of competitive and cooperative microbe-microbe interactions to the overall community structure remains difficult to evaluate in nature due to the strong environmental noise.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: An additional contributing factor in some plants leading to evolutionary change is the force due to coevolution with fungal parasites. In an environment with a fungal parasite, which is common in nature, the plants must make adaptation in an attempt to evade the harmful effects of the parasite.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Whenever a parasitic fungus is siphoning limited resources away from a plant, there is selective pressure for a phenotype that is better able to prevent parasitic attack from fungi. At the same time, fungi that are better equipped to evade the defenses of the plant will have greater fitness level. The combination of these two factors leads to an endless cycle of evolutionary change in the host-pathogen system.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Because each species in the relationship is influenced by a constantly changing symbiont, evolutionary change usually occurs at a faster pace than if the other species was not present. This is true of most instances of coevolution. This makes the ability of a population to quickly evolve vital to its survival. Also, if the pathogenic species is too successful and threatens the survival and reproductive success of the host plants, the pathogenic fungi risk losing their nutrient source for future generations. These factors create a dynamic that shapes the evolutionary changes in both species generation after generation.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Genes that code for defense mechanisms in plants must keep changing to keep up with the parasite that constantly works to evade the defenses. Genes that code for attachment mechanisms are the most dynamic and are directly related to the evading ability of the fungi. The greater the changes in these genes, the more change in the attachment mechanism. After selective forces on the resulting phenotypes, evolutionary change that promotes evasion of host defenses occurs.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Fungi not only evolve to avoid the defenses of the plants, but they also attempt to prevent the plant from enacting the mechanisms to improve its defenses. Anything the fungi can do to slow the evolution process of the host plants will improve the fitness of future generations because the plant will not be able to keep up with the evolutionary changes of the parasite. One of the main processes by which plants quickly evolve in response to the environment is sexual reproduction. Without sexual reproduction, advantageous traits could not be spread through the plant population as quickly allowing the fungi to gain a competitive advantage. For this reason, the sexual reproductive organs of plants are targets for attacks by fungi. Studies have shown that many different current types of obligate parasitic plant fungi have developed mechanisms to disable or otherwise affect the sexual reproduction of the plants. If successful, the sexual reproduction process slows for the plant, thus slowing down evolutionary change or in extreme cases, the fungi can render the plant sterile creating an advantage for the pathogens. It is unknown exactly how this adaptive trait developed in fungi, but it is clear that the relationship to the plant forced the development of the process.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Some researchers are also studying how a range of factors affect the rate of evolutionary change and the outcomes of change in different environments. For example, as with most evolution, increases in heritability in a population allow for a greater evolutionary response in the presence of selective pressure. For traits specific to the plant-fungi coevolution, researchers have studied how the virulence of the invading pathogen affects the coevolution. Studies involving "Mycosphaerella graminicola" have consistently showed that virulence of a pathogen does not have a significant impact on the evolutionary track of the host plant.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: There can be other factors in that can affect the process of coevolution. For example, in small populations, selection is a relatively weaker force on the population due to genetic drift. Genetic drift increases the likelihood of having fixed alleles which decreases the genetic variance in the population. Therefore, if there is only a small population of plants in an area with the ability to reproduce together, genetic drift may counteract the effects of selection putting the plant in a disadvantageous position to fungi which can evolve at a normal rate. The variance in both the host and pathogen population is a major determinant of evolutionary success compared to the other species. The greater the genetic variance, the faster the species can evolve to counteract the other organism's avoidance or defensive mechanisms.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Due to the process of pollination for plants, the effective population size is normally larger than for fungi because pollinators can link isolated populations in a way that the fungus is not able. This means positive traits that evolve in non-adjacent but close areas can be passed to nearby areas. Fungi must individually evolve to evade host defenses in each area. This is obviously a clear competitive advantage for the host plants. Sexual reproduction with a broad, high variance population leads to fast evolutionary change and higher reproductive success of offspring.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Environment and climate patterns also play a role in evolutionary outcomes. Studies with oak trees and an obligate fungal parasite at different altitudes clearly show this distinction. For the same species, different altitudinal positions had drastically different rates of evolution and changes in the response to the pathogens due to the organism also in a selective environment due to their surroundings.


title: Evolutionary history of plants

text: Coevolution is a process that is related to the red queen hypothesis. Both the host plant and parasitic fungi have to continue to survive to stay in their ecological niche. If one of the two species in the relationship evolves at a significantly faster rate than the other, the slower species will be at a competitive disadvantage and risk the loss of nutrients. Because the two species in the system are so closely linked, they respond to external environment factors together and each species affects the evolutionary outcome of the other. In other words, each species exerts selective pressure on the other. Population size is also a major factor in the outcome because differences in gene flow and genetic drift could cause evolutionary changes that do not match the direction of selection expected by forces due to the other organism. Coevolution is an important phenomenon necessary for understanding the vital relationship between plants and their fungal parasites.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Juan Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (; 14 September 191327 January 1971) was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who served as the 25th President of Guatemala. He was Minister of National Defense from 1944 to 1950, and the second democratically elected President of Guatemala, from 1951 to 1954. He was a major figure in the ten-year Guatemalan Revolution, which represented some of the few years of representative democracy in Guatemalan history. The landmark program of agrarian reform Árbenz enacted as president was very influential across Latin America.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Árbenz was born in 1913 to a wealthy family, son of a Swiss German father and a Guatemalan mother. He graduated with high honors from a military academy in 1935, and served in the army until 1944, quickly rising through the ranks. During this period, he witnessed the violent repression of agrarian laborers by the United States-backed dictator Jorge Ubico, and was personally required to escort chain-gangs of prisoners, an experience that contributed to his progressive views. In 1938 he met and married María Vilanova, who was a great ideological influence on him, as was José Manuel Fortuny, a Guatemalan communist. In October 1944 several civilian groups and progressive military factions led by Árbenz and Francisco Arana rebelled against Ubico's repressive policies. In the elections that followed, Juan José Arévalo was elected president, and began a highly popular program of social reform. Árbenz was appointed Minister of Defense, and played a crucial role in putting down a military coup in 1949.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: After the death of Arana, Árbenz contested the presidential elections that were held in 1950 and without significant opposition defeated Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, his nearest challenger, by a margin of over 50%. He took office on 15 March 1951, and continued the social reform policies of his predecessor. These reforms included an expanded right to vote, the ability of workers to organize, legitimizing political parties, and allowing public debate. The centerpiece of his policy was an agrarian reform law under which uncultivated portions of large land-holdings were expropriated in return for compensation and redistributed to poverty-stricken agricultural laborers. Approximately 500,000 people benefited from the decree. The majority of them were indigenous people, whose forebears had been dispossessed after the Spanish invasion.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: His policies ran afoul of the United Fruit Company, which lobbied the United States government to have him overthrown. The US was also concerned by the presence of communists in the Guatemalan government, and Árbenz was ousted in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état engineered by the government of US president Dwight Eisenhower through the US Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency. Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas replaced him as president. Árbenz went into exile through several countries, where his family gradually fell apart, and his daughter committed suicide. He died in Mexico in 1971. In October 2011, the Guatemalan government issued an apology for Árbenz's overthrow.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Árbenz was born in Quetzaltenango, the second-largest city in Guatemala, in 1913. He was the son of a Swiss German pharmacist, Hans Jakob Arbenz Gröbli, who immigrated to Guatemala in 1901. His mother, Octavia Guzmán Caballeros, was a Ladino woman from a middle-class family who worked as a primary school teacher. His family was relatively wealthy and upper-class; his childhood has been described as "comfortable". At some point during his childhood, his father became addicted to morphine and began to neglect the family business. He eventually went bankrupt, forcing the family to move to a rural estate that a wealthy friend had set aside for them "out of charity". Jacobo had originally desired to be an economist or an engineer, but since the family was now impoverished, he could not afford to go to a university. He initially did not want to join the military, but there was a scholarship available through the Escuela Politécnica for military cadets. He applied, passed all of the entrance exams, and entered as a cadet in 1932. His father committed suicide two years after Árbenz entered the academy.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Árbenz excelled in the academy, and was deemed "an exceptional student". He became "first sergeant", the highest honor bestowed upon cadets; only six people received the honor from 1924 to 1944. His abilities earned him an unusual level of respect among the officers at the school, including Major John Considine, the US director of the school, and of other US officers who served at the school. A fellow officer later said that "his abilities were such that the officers treated him with a respect that was rarely granted to a cadet." Árbenz graduated in 1935.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: After graduating, he served a stint as a junior officer at Fort San José in Guatemala City and later another under "an illiterate Colonel" in a small garrison in the village of San Juan Sacatepéquez. While at San José, Árbenz had to lead squads of soldiers who were escorting chain gangs of prisoners (including political prisoners) to perform forced labor. The experience traumatized Árbenz, who said he felt like a "capataz" (i.e., a "foreman"). During this period he first met Francisco Arana.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Árbenz was asked to fill a vacant teaching position at the academy in 1937. Árbenz taught a wide range of subjects, including military matters, history, and physics. He was promoted to captain six years later, and placed in charge of the entire corps of cadets. His position was the third highest in the academy and was considered one of the most prestigious positions a young officer could hold.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: In 1938 he met his future wife María Vilanova, the daughter of a wealthy Salvadoran landowner and a Guatemalan mother from a wealthy family. They were married a few months later, without the approval of María's parents, who felt she should not marry an army lieutenant who was not wealthy. María was 24 at the time of the wedding, and Jacobo was 26. María later wrote that, while the two were very different in many ways, their desire for political change drew them together. Árbenz stated that his wife had a great influence on him. It was through her that Árbenz was exposed to Marxism. María had received a copy of "The Communist Manifesto" at a women's congress and left a copy of it on Jacobo's bedside table when she left for a vacation. Jacobo was "moved" by the "Manifesto", and he and María discussed it with each other. Both felt that it explained many things they had been feeling. Afterwards, Jacobo began reading more works by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin and by the late 1940s was regularly interacting with a group of Guatemalan communists.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: In 1871 the government of Justo Rufino Barrios passed laws confiscating the lands of the native Mayan people and compelling them to work in coffee plantations for minimal compensation. Several United States-based companies, including the United Fruit Company, received this public land, and were exempted from paying taxes. In 1929 the Great Depression led to the collapse of the economy and a rise in unemployment, leading to unrest among workers and laborers. Fearing the possibility of a revolution, the landed elite lent their support to Jorge Ubico, who won the election that followed in 1931, an election in which he was the only candidate. With the support of the United States, Ubico soon became one of Latin America's most brutal dictators. Ubico abolished the system of debt peonage introduced by Barrios and replaced it with a vagrancy law, which required all men of working age who did not own land to perform a minimum of 100 days of hard labor. In addition, the state made use of unpaid Indian labor to work on public infrastructure such as roads and railroads. Ubico also froze wages at very low levels, and passed a law allowing landowners complete immunity from prosecution for any action they took to defend their property, including allowing them to execute workers as a "disciplinary" measure. The result of these laws was a tremendous resentment against him among agricultural laborers. Ubico was highly contemptuous of the country's indigenous people, once stating that they resembled donkeys. He gave away of public land to the United Fruit Company, and allowed the US military to establish bases in Guatemala.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: In May 1944 a series of protests against Ubico broke out at the university in Guatemala City. Ubico responded by suspending the constitution on 22 June 1944. The protests, which by this point included many middle-class members and junior army officers in addition to students and workers, gained momentum, eventually forcing Ubico's resignation at the end of June. Ubico appointed a three-person junta led by General Federico Ponce Vaides to succeed him. Although Ponce Vaides initially promised to hold free elections, when the congress met on 3 July soldiers held everyone at gunpoint and forced them to appoint Ponce Vaides interim president. The repressive policies of the Ubico administration were continued. Opposition groups began organizing again, this time joined by many prominent political and military leaders, who deemed the Ponce regime unconstitutional. Árbenz had been one of the few officers in the military to protest the actions of Ponce Vaides. Ubico had fired Árbenz from his teaching post at the "Escuela Politécnica", and since then Árbenz had been living in ElSalvador, organizing a band of revolutionary exiles. Árbenz was one of the leaders of the plot within the army, along with Major Aldana Sandoval. Árbenz insisted that civilians also be included in the coup, over the protests of the other military men involved. Sandoval later said that all contact with the civilians during the coup was through Árbenz.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: On 19 October 1944, a small group of soldiers and students led by Árbenz and Francisco Javier Arana attacked the National Palace in what later became known as the "October Revolution". Arana had not initially been a party to the coup, but his position of authority within the army meant that he was key to its success. They were joined the next day by other factions of the army and the civilian population. Initially, the battle went against the revolutionaries, but after an appeal for support their ranks were swelled by unionists and students, and they eventually subdued the police and army factions loyal to Ponce Vaides. On 20 October, the next day, Ponce Vaides surrendered unconditionally. Árbenz and Arana both fought with distinction during the revolt, and despite the idealistic rhetoric of the revolution, both were also offered material rewards: Árbenz was promoted from captain to lieutenant colonel, and Arana from major to full colonel. The junta promised free and open elections to the presidency and the congress, as well as for a constituent assembly. The resignation of Ponce Vaides and the creation of the junta has been considered by scholars to be the beginning of the Guatemalan Revolution. However, the revolutionary junta did not immediately threaten the interests of the landed elite. Two days after Ponce Vaides' resignation, a violent protest erupted at Patzicía, a small Indian hamlet. The junta responded with swift brutality, silencing the protest. The dead civilians included women and children.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Elections subsequently took place in December 1944. Although only literate men were allowed to vote, the elections were broadly considered free and fair. Unlike in similar historical situations, none of the junta members stood for election. The winner of the 1944 elections was a teacher named Juan José Arévalo, who ran under a coalition of leftist parties known as the "Partido Acción Revolucionaria'" ("Revolutionary Action Party", PAR), and won 85% of the vote. Arana did not wish to turn over power to a civilian administration. He initially tried to persuade Árbenz and Toriello to postpone the election, and after Arévalo was elected, he asked them to declare the results invalid. Árbenz and Toriello insisted that Arévalo be allowed to take power, which Arana reluctantly agreed to, on the condition that Arana's position as the commander of the military be unchallenged. Arévalo had no choice but to agree to this, and so the new Guatemalan constitution, adopted in 1945, created a new position of "Commander of the Armed Forces", a position that was more powerful than that of the defense minister. He could only be removed by Congress, and even then only if he was found to have broken the law. When Arévalo was inaugurated as president, Arana stepped into this new position, and Árbenz was sworn in as defense minister.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Arévalo described his ideology as "spiritual socialism". He was anti-communism and believed in a capitalist society regulated to ensure that its benefits went to the entire population. Arévalo's ideology was reflected in the new constitution that was ratified by the Guatemalan assembly soon after his inauguration, which was one of the most progressive in Latin America. It mandated suffrage for all but illiterate women, a decentralization of power, and provisions for a multiparty system. Communist parties were forbidden. Once in office, Arévalo implemented these and other reforms, including minimum wage laws, increased educational funding, and labor reforms. The benefits of these reforms were largely restricted to the upper-middle classes and did little for the peasant agricultural laborers who made up the majority of the population. Although his reforms were based on liberalism and capitalism, he was viewed with suspicion by the United States government, which would later portray him as a communist.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: When Árbenz was sworn in as defense minister under President Arévalo, he became the first to hold the portfolio, since it had previously been known as the "Ministry of War". In the fall of 1947, Árbenz, as defense minister, objected to the deportation of several workers after they had been accused of being communists. Well-known communist José Manuel Fortuny was intrigued by this action and decided to visit him, and found Árbenz to be different from the stereotypical Central American military officer. That first meeting was followed by others until Árbenz invited Fortuny to his house for discussions that usually extended for hours. Like Árbenz, Fortuny was inspired by a fierce nationalism and a burning desire to improve the conditions of the Guatemalan people, and, like Árbenz, he sought answers in Marxist theory. This relationship would strongly influence Árbenz in the future.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: On 16 December 1945, Arévalo was incapacitated for a while after a car accident. The leaders of the Revolutionary Action Party (PAR), which was the party that supported the government, were afraid that Arana would take the opportunity to launch a coup and so struck a deal with him, which later came to be known as the "Pacto del Barranco" (Pact of the Ravine). Under the terms of this pact, Arana agreed to refrain from seizing power with the military; in return, the PAR agreed to support Arana's candidacy in the next presidential election, scheduled for November 1950. Arévalo himself recovered swiftly, but was forced to support the agreement. However, by 1949 the National Renovation Party and the PAR were both openly hostile to Arana due to his lack of support for labor rights. The leftist parties decided to back Árbenz instead, as they believed that only a military officer could defeat Arana. In 1947 Arana had demanded that certain labor leaders be expelled from the country; Árbenz vocally disagreed with Arana, and the former's intervention limited the number of deportees.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: The land reforms brought about by the Arévalo administration threatened the interests of the landed elite, who sought a candidate who would be more amenable to their terms. They began to prop up Arana as a figure of resistance to Arévalo's reforms. The summer of 1949 saw intense political conflict in the councils of the Guatemalan military between supporters of Arana and those of Árbenz, over the choice of Arana's successor. On 16 July 1949, Arana delivered an ultimatum to Arévalo, demanding the expulsion of all of Árbenz's supporters from the cabinet and the military; he threatened a coup if his demands were not met. Arévalo informed Árbenz and other progressive leaders of the ultimatum; all agreed that Arana should be exiled. Two days later, Arévalo and Arana had another meeting; on the way back, Arana's convoy was intercepted by a small force led by Árbenz. A shootout ensued, killing three men, including Arana. Historian Piero Gleijeses stated that Árbenz probably had orders to capture, rather than to kill, Arana. Arana's supporters in the military rose up in revolt, but they were leaderless, and by the next day the rebels asked for negotiations. The coup attempt left approximately 150 dead and 200 wounded. Árbenz and a few other ministers suggested that the entire truth be made public; however, they were overruled by the majority of the cabinet, and Arévalo made a speech suggesting that Arana had been killed for refusing to lead a coup against the government. Árbenz kept his silence over the death of Arana until 1968, refusing to speak out without first obtaining Arévalo's consent. He tried to persuade Arévalo to tell the entire story when the two met in Montevideo in the 1950s, during their exile: however, Arévalo was unwilling, and Árbenz did not press his case.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Árbenz's role as defense minister had already made him a strong candidate for the presidency, and his firm support of the government during the 1949 uprising further increased his prestige. In 1950 the economically moderate Partido de Integridad Nacional (PIN) announced that Árbenz would be its presidential candidate in the upcoming election. The announcement was quickly followed by endorsements from most parties on the left, including the influential PAR, as well as from labor unions. Árbenz carefully chose the PIN as the party to nominate him. Based on the advice of his friends and colleagues, he believed it would make his candidacy appear more moderate. Árbenz himself resigned his position as Defense Minister on 20 February and declared his candidacy for the presidency. Arévalo wrote him an enthusiastic personal letter in response but publicly only reluctantly endorsed him, preferring, it is thought, his friend Víctor Manuel Giordani, who was then Health Minister. It was only the support Árbenz had, and the impossibility of Giordani being elected, that led to Arévalo deciding to support Árbenz.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Prior to his death, Arana had planned to run in the 1950 presidential elections. His death left Árbenz without any serious opposition in the elections (leading some, including the CIA and US military intelligence, to speculate that Árbenz personally had him eliminated for this reason). Árbenz had only a couple of significant challengers in the election, in a field of ten candidates. One of these was Jorge García Granados, supported by some members of the upper-middle class who felt the revolution had gone too far. Another was Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, who had been a general under Ubico and had the support of the hardline opponents of the revolution. During his campaign, Árbenz promised to continue and expand the reforms begun under Arévalo. Árbenz was expected to win the election comfortably because he had the support of both major political parties of the country, as well as that of the labor unions, which campaigned heavily on his behalf. In addition to political support, Árbenz had great personal appeal. He was described as having "an engaging personality and a vibrant voice". Árbenz's wife María also campaigned with him; despite her wealthy upbringing she had made an effort to speak for the interests of the Mayan peasantry and had become a national figure in her own right. Árbenz's two daughters also occasionally made public appearances with him.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: The election was held on 15 November 1950, with Árbenz winning more than 60% of the vote, in elections that were largely free and fair with the exception of the disenfranchisement of illiterate female voters. Árbenz got more than three times as many votes as the runner-up, Ydígoras Fuentes. Fuentes claimed electoral fraud had benefited Árbenz, but scholars have pointed out that while fraud may possibly have given Árbenz some of his votes, it was not the reason that he won the election. Árbenz's promise of land reform played a large role in ensuring his victory. The election of Árbenz alarmed US State Department officials, who stated that Arana "has always represented the only positive conservative element in the Arévalo administration" and that his death would "strengthen materially", and that "developments forecast sharp leftist trend within the government." Árbenz was inaugurated as president on 15 March 1951.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: In his inaugural address, Árbenz promised to convert Guatemala from "a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state". He declared that he intended to reduce dependency on foreign markets and dampen the influence of foreign corporations over Guatemalan politics. He said that he would modernize Guatemala's infrastructure without the aid of foreign capital. Based on advice from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, he set out to build more houses, ports, and roads. Árbenz also set out to reform Guatemala's economic institutions; he planned to construct factories, increase mining, expand transportation infrastructure, and expand the banking system. Land reform was the centerpiece of Árbenz's election campaign. The revolutionary organizations that had helped put Árbenz in power kept constant pressure on him to live up to his campaign promises regarding land reform. Agrarian reform was one of the areas of policy which the Arévalo administration had not ventured into; when Árbenz took office, only 2% of the population owned 70% of the land.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Historian Jim Handy described Árbenz's economic and political ideals as "decidedly pragmatic and capitalist in temper". According to historian Stephen Schlesinger, while Árbenz did have a few communists in lower-level positions in his administration, he "was not a dictator, he was not a crypto-communist". Schlesinger described him as a democratic socialist. Nevertheless, some of his policies, particularly those involving agrarian reform, would be branded as "communist" by the Guatemalan upper class and the United Fruit Company. Historian Piero Gleijeses has argued that although Árbenz's policies were intentionally capitalist in nature, his personal views gradually shifted towards communism. His goal was to increase Guatemala's economic and political independence, and he believed that to do this Guatemala needed to build a strong domestic economy. He made an effort to reach out to the indigenous Mayan people, and sent government representatives to confer with them. From this effort he learned that the Maya held strongly to their ideals of dignity and self-determination; inspired in part by this, he stated in 1951 that "If the independence and prosperity of our people were incompatible, which for certain they are not, I am sure that the great majority of Guatemalans would prefer to be a poor nation, but free, and not a rich colony, but enslaved."


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Although the policies of the Árbenz government were based on a moderate form of capitalism, the communist movement did grow stronger during his presidency, partly because Arévalo released its imprisoned leaders in 1944, and also through the strength of its teachers' union. Although the Communist party was banned for much of the Guatemalan Revolution, the Guatemalan government welcomed large numbers of communist and socialist refugees fleeing the dictatorial governments of neighboring countries, and this influx strengthened the domestic movement. In addition, Árbenz had personal ties to some members of the communist Guatemalan Party of Labour, which was legalized during his government. The most prominent of these was José Manuel Fortuny. Fortuny played the role of friend and adviser to Árbenz through the three years of his government, from 1951 to 1954. Fortuny wrote several speeches for Árbenz, and in his role as agricultural secretary helped craft the landmark agrarian reform bill. Despite his position in Árbenz's government, however, Fortuny never became a popular figure in Guatemala, and did not have a large popular following like some other communist leaders. The communist party remained numerically weak, without any representation in Árbenz's cabinet of ministers. A handful of communists were appointed to lower-level positions in the government. Árbenz read and admired the works of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin (before Khrushchev's report); officials in his government eulogized Stalin as a "great statesman and leader ... whose passing is mourned by all progressive men". The Guatemalan Congress paid tribute to Joseph Stalin with a "minute of silence" when Stalin died in 1953, a fact that was remarked upon by later observers. Árbenz had several supporters among the communist members of the legislature, but they were only a small part of the government coalition.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: The biggest component of Árbenz's project of modernization was his agrarian reform bill. Árbenz drafted the bill himself with the help of advisers that included some leaders of the communist party as well as non-communist economists. He also sought advice from numerous economists from across Latin America. The bill was passed by the National Assembly on 17 June 1952, and the program went into effect immediately. It transferred uncultivated land from large landowners to their poverty-stricken laborers, who would then be able to begin a viable farm of their own. Árbenz was also motivated to pass the bill because he needed to generate capital for his public infrastructure projects within the country. At the behest of the United States, the World Bank had refused to grant Guatemala a loan in 1951, which made the shortage of capital more acute.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: The official title of the agrarian reform bill was Decree 900. It expropriated all uncultivated land from landholdings that were larger than . If the estates were between and in size, uncultivated land was expropriated only if less than two-thirds of it was in use. The owners were compensated with government bonds, the value of which was equal to that of the land expropriated. The value of the land itself was the value that the owners had declared in their tax returns in 1952. The redistribution was organized by local committees that included representatives from the landowners, the laborers, and the government. Of the nearly 350,000 private land-holdings, only 1,710 were affected by expropriation. The law itself was cast in a moderate capitalist framework; however, it was implemented with great speed, which resulted in occasional arbitrary land seizures. There was also some violence, directed at landowners as well as at peasants who had minor landholdings of their own. Árbenz himself, a landowner through his wife, gave up of his own land in the land reform program.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: By June 1954, 1.4 million acres of land had been expropriated and distributed. Approximately 500,000 individuals, or one-sixth of the population, had received land by this point. The decree also included provision of financial credit to the people who received the land. The National Agrarian Bank ("Banco Nacional Agrario", or BNA) was created on 7 July 1953, and by June 1951 it had disbursed more than $9million in small loans. 53,829 applicants received an average of 225US dollars, which was twice as much as the Guatemalan per capita income. The BNA developed a reputation for being a highly efficient government bureaucracy, and the United States government, Árbenz's biggest detractor, did not have anything negative to say about it. The loans had a high repayment rate, and of the $3,371,185 handed out between March and November 1953, $3,049,092 had been repaid by June 1954. The law also included provisions for nationalization of roads that passed through redistributed land, which greatly increased the connectivity of rural communities.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Contrary to the predictions made by detractors of the government, the law resulted in a slight increase in Guatemalan agricultural productivity, and to an increase in cultivated area. Purchases of farm machinery also increased. Overall, the law resulted in a significant improvement in living standards for many thousands of peasant families, the majority of whom were indigenous people. Gleijeses stated that the injustices corrected by the law were far greater than the injustice of the relatively few arbitrary land seizures. Historian Greg Grandin stated that the law was flawed in many respects; among other things, it was too cautious and deferential to the planters, and it created communal divisions among peasants. Nonetheless, it represented a fundamental power shift in favor of those that had been marginalized before then. In 1953 the reform was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but the Guatemalan Congress later impeached four judges associated with the ruling.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: The relationship between Árbenz and the United Fruit Company has been described by historians as a "critical turning point in US dominance in the hemisphere". The United Fruit Company, formed in 1899, had major holdings of land and railroads across Central America, which it used to support its business of exporting bananas. By 1930, it had been the largest landowner and employer in Guatemala for several years. In return for the company's support, Ubico signed a contract with it that included a 99-year lease to massive tracts of land, and exemptions from virtually all taxes. Ubico asked the company to pay its workers only 50 cents a day, to prevent other workers from demanding higher wages. The company also virtually owned Puerto Barrios, Guatemala's only port to the Atlantic Ocean. By 1950, the company's annual profits were 65million USdollars, twice the revenue of the Guatemalan government.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: As a result, the company was seen as an impediment to progress by the revolutionary movement after 1944. Thanks to its position as the country's largest landowner and employer, the reforms of Arévalo's government affected the UFC more than other companies, which led to a perception by the company that it was being specifically targeted by the reforms. The company's labor troubles were compounded in 1952 when Árbenz passed Decree900, the agrarian reform law. Of the that the company owned, 15% were being cultivated; the rest of the land, which was idle, came under the scope of the agrarian reform law. Additionally, Árbenz supported a strike of UFC workers in 1951, which eventually compelled the company to rehire a number of laid-off workers.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: The United Fruit Company responded with an intensive lobbying campaign against Árbenz in the United States. The Guatemalan government reacted by saying that the company was the main obstacle to progress in the country. American historians observed that "to the Guatemalans it appeared that their country was being mercilessly exploited by foreign interests which took huge profits without making any contributions to the nation's welfare." In 1953 of uncultivated land was expropriated under Árbenz's agrarian reform law, and the company was offered compensation at the rate of 2.99 USdollars to the acre, twice what it had paid when buying the property. This resulted in further lobbying in Washington, particularly through Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had close ties to the company. The company had begun a public relations campaign to discredit the Guatemalan government; overall, the company spent over a half-million dollars to influence both lawmakers and members of the public in the US that the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Árbenz needed to be overthrown.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Several factors besides the lobbying campaign of the United Fruit Company led the United States to launch the coup that toppled Árbenz in 1954. The US government had grown more suspicious of the Guatemalan Revolution as the Cold War developed and the Guatemalan government clashed with US corporations on an increasing number of issues. The US was also concerned that it had been infiltrated by communists although historian Richard H. Immerman argued that during the early part of the Cold War, the US and the CIA were predisposed to see the revolutionary government as communist, despite Arévalo's ban of the communist party during his 1945–1951 presidency. Additionally, the US government was concerned that the success of Árbenz's reforms would inspire similar movements elsewhere. Until the end of its term, the Truman administration relied on purely diplomatic and economic means to attempt to reduce communist influences.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Árbenz's enactment of Decree 900 in 1952 provoked Truman to authorize Operation PBFortune, a covert operation to overthrow Árbenz. The plan had originally been suggested by the US-backed dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza García, who said that if he were given weapons, he could overthrow the Guatemalan government. The operation was to be led by Carlos Castillo Armas. However, the US state department discovered the conspiracy, and secretary of state Dean Acheson persuaded Truman to abort the plan. After being elected president of the US in November 1952, Dwight Eisenhower was more willing than Truman to use military tactics to remove regimes he disliked. Several figures in his administration, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother and CIA director Allen Dulles, had close ties to the United Fruit Company. John Foster Dulles had previously represented United Fruit Company as a lawyer, and his brother, then-CIA director Allen Dulles was on the company's board of directors. Thomas Dudley Cabot, a former CEO of United Fruit, held the position of director of International Security Affairs in the State Department. Undersecretary of State Bedell Smith later became a director of the UFC, while the wife of the UFC public relations director was Eisenhower's personal assistant. These connections made the Eisenhower administration more willing to overthrow the Guatemalan government.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: The CIA operation to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz, code-named Operation PBSuccess, was authorized by Eisenhower in August 1953. Carlos Castillo Armas, once Arana's lieutenant, who had been exiled following the failed coup in 1949, was chosen to lead the coup. Castillo Armas recruited a force of approximately 150 mercenaries from among Guatemalan exiles and the populations of nearby countries. In January 1954, information about these preparations were leaked to the Guatemalan government, which issued statements implicating a "Government of the North" in a plot to overthrow Árbenz. The US government denied the allegations, and the US media uniformly took the side of the government; both argued that Árbenz had succumbed to communist propaganda. The US stopped selling arms to Guatemala in 1951, and soon after blocked arms purchases from Canada, Germany, and Rhodesia. By 1954, Árbenz had become desperate for weapons, and decided to acquire them secretly from Czechoslovakia, an action seen as establishing a communist beachhead in the Americas. The shipment of these weapons was portrayed by the CIA as Soviet interference in the United States' backyard, and acted as the final spur for the CIA to launch its coup.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Árbenz had intended the shipment of weapons from the "Alfhem" to be used to bolster peasant militia, in the event of army disloyalty, but the US informed the Guatemalan army chiefs of the shipment, forcing Árbenz to hand them over to the military, and deepening the rift between him and the chiefs of his army. Castillo Armas' forces invaded Guatemala on 18 June 1954. The invasion was accompanied by an intense campaign of psychological warfare presenting Castillo Armas' victory as a "fait accompli", with the intent of forcing Árbenz to resign. The most wide-reaching psychological weapon was the radio station known as the "Voice of Liberation", whose transmissions broadcast news of rebel troops converging on the capital, and contributed to massive demoralization among both the army and the civilian population. Árbenz was confident that Castillo Armas could be defeated militarily, but he worried that a defeat for Castillo Armas would provoke a US invasion. Árbenz ordered Carlos Enrique Díaz, the chief of the army, to select officers to lead a counter-attack. Díaz chose a corps of officers who were all known to be men of personal integrity, and who were loyal to Árbenz.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: By 21 June, Guatemalan soldiers had gathered at Zacapa under the command of Colonel Víctor M. León, who was believed to be loyal to Árbenz. The leaders of the communist party also began to have their suspicions, and sent a member to investigate. He returned on 25 June, reporting that the army was highly demoralized, and would not fight. PGT Secretary General Alvarado Monzón informed Árbenz, who quickly sent another investigator of his own, who brought back a message asking Árbenz to resign. The officers believed that given US support for the rebels, defeat was inevitable, and Árbenz was to blame for it. The message stated that if Árbenz did not resign, the army was likely to strike a deal with Castillo Armas. On 25 June, Árbenz announced that the army had abandoned the government, and that civilians needed to be armed in order to defend the country; however, only a few hundred individuals volunteered. Seeing this, Díaz reneged on his support of the president, and began plotting to overthrow Árbenz with the assistance of other senior army officers. They informed US ambassador John Peurifoy of this plan, asking him to stop the hostilities in return for Árbenz's resignation. Peurifoy promised to arrange a truce, and the plotters went to Árbenz and informed him of their decision. Árbenz, utterly exhausted and seeking to preserve at least a measure of the democratic reforms that he had brought, agreed. After informing his cabinet of his decision, he left the presidential palace at 8 pm on 27 June 1954, having taped a resignation speech that was broadcast an hour later. In it, he stated that he was resigning in order to eliminate the "pretext for the invasion," and that he wished to preserve the gains of the October Revolution. He walked to the nearby Mexican Embassy, seeking political asylum.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: After Árbenz's resignation, his family remained for 73 days at the Mexican embassy in Guatemala City, which was crowded with almost 300 exiles. During this period, the CIA initiated a new set of operations against Árbenz, intended to discredit the former president and damage his reputation. The CIA obtained some of Árbenz's personal papers, and released parts of them after doctoring the documents. The CIA also promoted the notion that individuals in exile, such as Árbenz, should be prosecuted in Guatemala. When they were finally allowed to leave the country, Árbenz was publicly humiliated at the airport when the authorities made the former president strip before the cameras, claiming that he was carrying jewelry he had bought for his wife, María Cristina Vilanova, at Tiffany's in New York City, using funds from the presidency; no jewelry was found but the interrogation lasted for an hour. Through this entire period, coverage of Árbenz in the Guatemalan press was very negative, influenced largely by the CIA's campaign.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: The family then initiated a long journey in exile that would take them first to Mexico, then to Canada, where they went to pick up Arabella (the Árbenzs' oldest daughter), and then to Switzerland via the Netherlands and Paris. They hoped to obtain citizenship in Switzerland based on Árbenz's Swiss heritage. However, the former president did not wish to renounce his Guatemalan nationality, as he felt that such a gesture would have marked the end of his political career. Árbenz and his family were the victims of a CIA-orchestrated and intense defamation campaign that lasted from 1954 to 1960. A close friend of Árbenz, Carlos Manuel Pellecer, turned out to be a spy working for the CIA.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: After being unable to obtain citizenship in Switzerland, the Árbenz family moved to Paris, where the French government gave them permission to live for a year, on the condition that they did not participate in any political activity, then to Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia. After only three months, he moved to Moscow, which came as a relief to him from the harsh treatment he received in Czechoslovakia. While traveling in the Soviet Union and its vassal states, he was constantly criticized in the press in Guatemala and the US, on the grounds that he was showing his true communist colors by going there. After a brief stay in Moscow, Árbenz returned to Prague and then to Paris. From there he separated from his wife: María traveled to ElSalvador to take care of family affairs. The separation made life increasingly difficult for Árbenz, and he slipped into depression and took to drinking excessively. He tried several times to return to Latin America, and was finally allowed in 1957 to move to Uruguay. The CIA made several attempts to prevent Árbenz from receiving a Uruguayan visa, but these were unsuccessful, and the Uruguayan government allowed Árbenz to travel there as a political refugee. Árbenz arrived in Montevideo on 13 May 1957, where he was met by a hostile "reception committee" organized by the CIA. However, he was still a figure of some note in leftist circles in the city, which partially explained the CIA's hostility.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: While Árbenz was living in Montevideo, his wife came to join him. He was also visited by Arévalo a year after his own arrival there. Although the relationship between Arévalo and the Árbenz family was initially friendly, it soon deteriorated due to differences between the two men. Arévalo himself was not under surveillance in Uruguay and was occasionally able to express himself through articles in the popular press. He left for Venezuela a year after his arrival to take up a position as a teacher. During his stay in Uruguay, Árbenz was initially required to report to the police on a daily basis; eventually, however, this requirement was relaxed somewhat to once every eight days. María Árbenz later stated that the couple was pleased by the hospitality they received in Uruguay, and would have stayed there indefinitely had they received permission to do so.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, a representative of the Fidel Castro government asked Árbenz to come to Cuba, to which he readily agreed, sensing an opportunity to live with fewer restrictions on himself. He flew to Havana in July 1960, and, caught up in the spirit of the recent revolution, began to participate in public events. His presence so close to Guatemala once again increased the negative coverage he received in the Guatemalan press. He was offered the leadership of some revolutionary movements in Guatemala but refused, as he was pessimistic about the outcome.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: In 1965 Árbenz was invited to the Communist Congress in Helsinki. Soon afterwards, his daughter Arabella committed suicide in Bogotá, an incident that badly affected Árbenz. Following her funeral, the Árbenz family remained indefinitely in Mexico City, while Árbenz himself spent some time in France and Switzerland, with the ultimate objective of settling down in Mexico.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: On one of his visits to Mexico, Árbenz contracted a serious illness, and by the end of 1970 he was very ill. He died soon after. Historians disagree as to the manner of his death: Roberto Garcia Ferreira stated that he died of a heart attack while taking a bath, while Cindy Forster wrote that he committed suicide. On 19 October 1995, Árbenz's remains were repatriated to Guatemala, accompanied by his widow María. After his remains were returned to Guatemala, Arbenz was given a military honor as military officers fired cannons in salute as Arbenz's coffin was placed onto a horse-drawn carriage and transported to San Carlos University, where students and university officials paid posthumous homage to the former president. The Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, which previously held autonomy following the 1944 Guatemala Revolution, awarded Arbenz with a posthumous decoration soon after. After departing from the university, the coffin containing Arbenz's remains was then taken to the National Palace, where it would remain until midnight. On 20 October 1995, thousands of Guatemalans flocked to the Guatemala City's cemetery for his burial service. During the burial service, then-Guatemala Defense Minister Gen. Marco Antonio Gonzalez, who received Arbenz's remains after they were returned to the country, stayed in his car after crowds booed and screamed, "Army of assassins get out of the country."


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: In 1999, the Arbenz family went before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to demand an apology from the Guatemalan government for the 1954 coup which saw him ousted. Following years of campaigning, the Arbenz Family took the Guatemalan Government to Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington D.C. It accepted the complaint in 2006, leading to five years of stop-and-start negotiations. In May 2011 the Guatemalan government signed an agreement with Árbenz's surviving family to restore his legacy and publicly apologize for the government's role in ousting him. This included a financial settlement to the family, as well as the family's insistence on social reparations and policies for the future of the Guatemalan people, a first for a judgement of this kind from the OAS. The formal apology was made at the National Palace by Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom on 20 October 2011, to Jacobo Árbenz Vilanova, the son of the former president, and a Guatemalan politician. Colom stated, "It was a crime to Guatemalan society and it was an act of aggression to a government starting its democratic spring." The agreement established several forms of reparation for the next of kin of Árbenz Guzmán. Among other measures, the state:


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: The official statement issued by the government recognized its responsibility for "failing to comply with its obligation to guarantee, respect, and protect the human rights of the victims to a fair trial, to property, to equal protection before the law, and to judicial protection, which are protected in the American Convention on Human Rights and which were violated against former President Juan Jacobo Árbenz Guzman, his wife, María Cristina Villanova, and his children, Juan Jacobo, María Leonora, and Arabella, all surnamed Árbenz Villanova."


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: Historian Roberto Garcia Ferreira wrote in 2008 that Árbenz's legacy was still a matter of great dispute in Guatemala itself, while arguing that the image of Árbenz was significantly shaped by the CIA media campaign that followed the 1954 coup. Garcia Ferreira said that the revolutionary government represented one of the few periods in which "state authority was used to promote the interests of the nation's masses." Forster described Árbenz's legacy in the following terms: "In 1952 the Agrarian Reform Law swept the land, destroying forever the hegemony of the planters. Árbenz in effect legislated a new social order ... The revolutionary decade ... plays a central role in twentieth-century Guatemalan history because it was more comprehensive than any period of reform before or since." She added that even within the Guatemalan government, Árbenz "gave full compass to Indigenous, campesino, and labor demands" in contrast to Arévalo, who had remained suspicious of these movements. Similarly, Greg Grandin stated that the land reform decree "represented a fundamental shift in the power relations governing Guatemala". Árbenz himself once remarked that the agrarian reform law was "most precious fruit of the revolution and the fundamental base of the nation as a new country." However, to a large extent the legislative reforms of the Árbenz and Arévalo administrations were reversed by the US-backed military governments that followed.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: The Guatemalan movie "The Silence of Neto" (1994), filmed on location in Antigua Guatemala, takes place during the last months of the government of Árbenz. It follows the life of a fictional 12-year-old boy who is sheltered by the Árbenz family, set against a backdrop of the struggle in which the country is embroiled at the time.


title: Jacobo Árbenz

text: The story of Árbenz's life and subsequent overthrow in the CIA sponsored coup d'état has been the subject of several books, notably "PBSuccess: The CIA's covert operation to overthrow Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz June–July 1954" by Mario Overall and Daniel Hagedorn (2016), "American Propaganda, Media, And The Fall Of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman" by Zachary Fisher (2014), as well as New York Times Best Seller "The Devil's Chessboard" by Author David Talbot (HarperCollins 2015). The Arbenz story was also the subject of the multi award-winning 1997 documentary by Andreas Hoessli "Devils Don't Dream!"


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: The British Aerospace Hawk 200 is a single-seat, single engine light multirole fighter designed for air defence, air denial, anti-shipping, interdiction, close air support, and ground attack.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: In 1984, British Aerospace (now BAE Systems) decided to pursue development of a combat-orientated variant of the Hawk aircraft, designated as Hawk 200; up to this point the Hawk family had been typically employed by operators as an advanced trainer with secondary combat capabilities. A single flying demonstrator aircraft was produced to support the development process. This made its first flight on 19 May 1986.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: Less than two months after first taking flight, the Hawk 200 demonstrator was lost in a fatal accident at Dunsfold Aerodrome, killing BAe test pilot Jim Hawkins; Hawkins is alleged to have either become disoriented or to have fallen unconscious, due to g-LOC (g induced loss of consciousness), while executing high-g manoeuvres to explore the aircraft's agility.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: Despite the loss of the demonstrator, the company decided to proceed with the Hawk 200; by 1987, the first pre-production samples were being manufactured. In 1990, the Hawk 200 received its first order when Oman opted to procure a batch of twelve "Hawk 203"s, all of which were delivered by 1993.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: The Hawk 200 is a single-seat, single engine light multirole fighter with a small visual signature and high manoeuvrability. It has a low-mounted cantilever wing and is powered by a single turbofan engine. The Hawk 200 differs from the earlier Hawks in having a new forward fuselage in which the forward cockpit area which normally houses a pilot is replaced by an electronics bay for avionics and onboard systems, including a fire control computer, multi-mode radar, laser rangefinder and forward-looking infrared (FLIR). The Hawk 200 also has an upgraded wing which, in addition to four wing pylons seen in previous Hawks, also has wingtip missile support as well as greater wing area, increased wing droop, larger flaps and an optional mid-air refuelling capability.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: The Hawk 200 has 7 external store points with four underwing pylons, an under-fuselage pylon, and wingtip air-to-air missile stations. The range of external stores which the aircraft can carry includes air-to-air missiles (AAM), a gunpod, rocket launchers, reconnaissance pod, retarded and free-fall bombs up to , runway cratering, anti-personnel and light armour bombs, cluster bombs (meanwhile prohibited), practice bomb and rocket carriers and external fuel tanks.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: The Hawk 200 can launch many NATO standard guided missiles including AIM-9L Sidewinder AAM, ASRAAM AAM, AIM-120 AMRAAM AAM, AGM-65 Maverick AGM. The Hawk 200 can also carry a variety of bombs, including 113 kg bombs, 240 kg bombs, 540 kg bombs and Paveway II guided bombs. The AIM-9L Sidewinder missiles are launched from the wingtip air-to-air missile stations on each wing.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: The Hawk 200 is equipped with a Northrop Grumman AN/APG-66H multi-mode radar, LINS 300 ring laser gyroscope inertial navigation system, air data sensor, display processor and mission computer. The systems are connected with a dual MIL-STD-1553B digital bus. The Hawk 200 is also equipped with a Ferranti laser rangefinder and a Marconi forward-looking infrared. The self-protection systems include a BAE SkyGuardian 200 RWR and automatic or manual Vinten chaff/flare dispensers located above the engine exhaust.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: The AN/APG-66 radar is a solid state medium range (up to ) pulse-doppler planar array radar designed by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation (now Northrop Grumman) for the F-16 Fighting Falcon. It has ten air-to-surface and ten air-to-ground modes for navigation and weapon aiming purposes. The APG-66H variant of the radar is installed on the Hawk 200, which has a smaller antenna for slightly reduced capabilities.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: The pilot has a hands-on throttle and stick (HOTAS) control system and a wide-field-of-view head-up display (HUD). Using the weapon control panel, which controls the stores management system, the pilot can select the weapons and release mode prior to initiating an attack.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: As in all other modernised Hawks, the Hawk 200's all-glass cockpit has a multi-functional colour display, with a dedicated processor and 15-colour graphics symbology generator. There are 27 display formats which provide flight and aircraft data. The cockpit is also compatible with night-vision goggles. Just outside of the cockpit is an inflight refuelling probe.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: The Hawk 200 was originally powered by an Adour 871 two shaft, low bypass ratio turbofan engine from Rolls-Royce Turbomeca, providing the aircraft with 26.00 kN of thrust. In 2005, the Adour 951 engine was certified for use on the Hawk 200. The improved Adour 951 has improved performance (rated at thrust) and has up to twice the service life of the Adour Mk 871. It features an all-new fan and combustor, revised HP and LP turbines, and introduces Full Authority Digital Engine Control (FADEC).


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: Both engines are non-afterburning versions of the Adour series, and are fed by air intakes on both sides of the fuselage. The internal fuel tanks are installed in the fuselage and compartmented integral tanks located in the wings, containing up to 1361 kg of fuel. Up to two 591-liter drop tanks can also be carried on the inboard underwing pylons.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: On 5 March 2013, amidst the 2013 Lahad Datu standoff, 5 Hawk 208s aircraft, along with 3 F-18D Hornets of the Royal Malaysian Air Force, were deployed in airstrikes on hideouts of the defunct sultanate and terrorist group Royal Security Forces of the Sultanate of Sulu in Lahad Datu, Sabah Malaysia ahead of the ground assault by joint forces of the Malaysian Army and Royal Malaysia Police.


title: British Aerospace Hawk 200

text: The Hawk 208s flew 15 sorties, each Hawk 200 dropping Mk 82 unguided bombs in the first sortie and firing CRV7 rockets at additional ground targets on the second and third. A spokesman for Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said in a phone interview that the objective of the airstrikes was to "soften the ground before troops move in".


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: The Green Hornet is an American action television series broadcast on ABC during the 1966–1967 television season, starring Van Williams as the Green Hornet/Britt Reid and Bruce Lee as Kato. It was produced and narrated by William Dozier.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: The single-season series premiered September 9, 1966, and ran through March 17, 1967, lasting 26 episodes; ABC repeated the series after its cancellation by the network, until July 14, 1967, when "The Green Hornet" had its last broadcast on network television. With the later success of Lee as a premiere star of the martial arts film genre, the series has become a cult favorite.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: Playboy bachelor and media mogul Britt Reid is the owner and publisher of the "Daily Sentinel" newspaper but, as the masked vigilante Green Hornet, he fights crime with the assistance of his martial arts expert partner, Kato, and his weapons-enhanced car, a custom Imperial called the "Black Beauty". On police records, the Green Hornet is a wanted criminal, but, in reality, the Green Hornet is masquerading as a criminal so that he can infiltrate and battle criminal gangs, leaving them and the incriminating evidence for police arrival. Beyond Kato, Britt's dual identity is known only to his secretary Lenore "Casey" Case and District Attorney Frank P. Scanlon.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: Britt's motive for fighting crime was explained on-screen: his father had died in prison after having been framed for a crime he did not commit.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: The character had originated as the star of a radio series (1930s to 1950s), and it had previously been adapted to movie serials, comic books, and other media. Owing in part to George W. Trendle and Fran Striker having created all the central characters and developed the core formats of both radio shows, Britt Reid shares the same family name as the Lone Ranger, as Britt's father had been the Lone Ranger's nephew Dan Reid.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: Despite character co-creator George W. Trendle's failed efforts to generate interest in a Green Hornet TV series in 1951 and 1958, it was not until the success of ABC's 1960s "Batman" series that the network decided to adapt the venerable radio and movie-serial character. The task was taken on by William Dozier who produced and narrated the series. The series stars Van Williams as the Green Hornet and introduced martial artist Bruce Lee to American television audiences as his partner, Kato. Unlike the campy and humorous "Batman" series, "The Green Hornet" was played straight. Though it was canceled after one season, Lee became a major star of martial arts movies. Lee's popularity in Hong Kong, where he was raised, was such that the show was marketed there as "The Kato Show". It was Lee's insistence that Kato be played as a martial artist—rather than an American-style fisticuffs fighter—that pushed the directors to rethink the character's portrayal. The Green Hornet was the first time broad swaths of the American public saw true martial arts fighting, and led to its increasing popularity. Indeed, Van Williams took lessons from Lee so that he could do some of the increasingly popular moves as well.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: The Green Hornet and Kato also appear in three episodes of "Batman"; "The Spell of Tut" (as a brief cameo) and "A Piece of the Action"/"Batman's Satisfaction", with Reid mentioning that he and Bruce Wayne had been acquaintances and rivals since childhood. Though other characters in the story are all led to believe wrongly that the Green Hornet and Kato are villains, as on "The Green Hornet", Roger C. Carmel played the real villain, who called himself Colonel Gumm.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: As with the later years of the radio version, secretary Lenore "Casey" Case (played by Wende Wagner) is again aware of Reid's secret, and the Hornet also has a confidant within the law enforcement community, but now he is District Attorney Frank P. Scanlon (played by Walter Brooke). This character was changed from the original's police commissioner because the "Batman" TV series was already using a man in that post as the hero's official contact, and William Dozier, the executive producer of both programs, wanted to downplay comparisons between the two shows. Michael Axford (Lloyd Gough), the bodyguard turned reporter of the radio series, is now solely a police reporter for "The Daily Sentinel", the newspaper owned by Britt Reid/the Green Hornet. The first episode, "The Silent Gun", provides a connection between the radio and the TV series, as Axford reminds Reid of the "old days" when he lived in the same apartment with Reid's father, which hints that Reid's father may have been the Green Hornet of the radio series. In this series, Reid owned a television station as well.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: There were visual differences as well. Promotional artwork for the radio program and the comic books of the day depicted the Hornet wearing a mask that covered all of his face below the eyes (the two Universal Studios Saturday matinee serials contained a full face mask with eye holes) while Kato wore goggles. Here, both men wear masks that cover only the upper portions of their faces. These masks initially had a stylized angularity that soon proved problematic: neither man could see much. They were soon replaced with masks molded to the performers' faces.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: In a technological update, the Hornet carried a telescoping device called the Hornet's Sting, which projected ultrasonic soundwaves. He most frequently used it to open locked doors, although he was also seen using it to set things on fire (presumably by vibrating them and causing heat through friction) and to threaten criminals to get information. In the episode "The Secret of the Sally Bell", the Hornet used it to explode the thug's gun, causing the thug to fall and suffer a concussion, resulting in the criminal's being hospitalized. He also had a Hornet knockout gas gun.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: The television version Kato used green "sleeve darts" to give him a ranged attack he could use to counter enemies both at a distance and in hand-to-hand combat. The impression Bruce Lee made at the time is demonstrated by "Kato's Revenge Featuring the Green Hornet", a TV series tie-in coloring book produced by Watkins & Strathmore.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestral interlude, "Flight of the Bumblebee", used for the radio series, was so strongly identified with "The Green Hornet" that a similar, jazz-styled theme modeled after the Rimsky-Korsakov piece was used for the series, arranged by Billy May, who also composed the background scores, and conducted by Lionel Newman, with trumpet solo performed by Al Hirt. Hirt recorded a longer, stereo version of the theme with a somewhat different arrangement for his album "The Horn Meets The Hornet". A similar recording titled "The Green Bee" recorded by trombonist Urbie Green that appears on Green's 21 Trombones album had also been considered as the tv series theme.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: Years later, the version of the theme from "The Horn Meets The Hornet" was featured in the 2003 film "Kill Bill, Vol. 1", in which director Quentin Tarantino paid tribute to Kato by featuring the dozens of sword-fighting members of "The Crazy 88" wearing Kato-style masks during one of the film's fight sequences.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: Van Williams and Bruce Lee make a cameo appearance as the Green Hornet and Kato in "window cameos" while Batman and Robin were climbing a building. This was in part one of a two-part second-season episode of the "Batman" TV series: "The Spell of Tut", which aired on September 28, 1966. There is also mention of "The Green Hornet" TV series on the "Batman" two-part episode "The Impractical Joker", transmitted on November 16, 1966, as Alfred, Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne are watching television, and Bruce Wayne says, "It's time to watch "The Green Hornet!"".


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: Later that same season, the Green Hornet and Kato appeared in the two-part second-season episodes "A Piece of the Action" and "Batman's Satisfaction", which aired on March 1–2, 1967. In the two episodes, the Green Hornet and Kato are in Gotham City to bust a counterfeit stamp ring run by Colonel Gumm (portrayed by Roger C. Carmel). "Batman's Satisfaction" leads up to a mixed fight, with both Batman & Robin and The Green Hornet & Kato fighting Colonel Gumm and his gang. Once Gumm's crew is defeated, Batman and Robin square off against The Green Hornet and Kato, resulting in a stand-off interrupted by the police. In this episode, Batman, Robin and the police consider the Green Hornet and Kato criminals, though Batman and Robin were cordial to the duo in the earlier window appearance.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: In December 9, 1966 "The Green Hornet" episode "The Secret Of The Sally Bell" the Batmobile is seen on a television receiver, turning around inside the Batcave. In the February 3, 1967, "Green Hornet" episode "Ace in the Hole", which was transmitted in between the September 1966 and March 1967 "Batman" appearances (mentioned above), an unidentified episode of "Batman" is seen playing on a television set, showing Batman and Robin climbing a building. One other appearance of The Green Hornet, Kato, and Batman was broadcast in Autumn 1966 on a Milton Berle "Hollywood Palace" television variety show.


title: The Green Hornet (TV series)

text: The TV series featured the Green Hornet's car, The Black Beauty, a 1966 Imperial Crown sedan customized by Dean Jeffries at a cost of US$13,000. Two cars were built for the show and both exist today. "Black Beauty 1" is located in the Petersen Automotive Museum collection and "Black Beauty 2" has been fully restored and is located in a private collection in South Carolina.