Following the end of Arévalo's presidency in 1951, Jacobo Árbenz was elected to the presidency in a landslide. The progressive military leader of 1944 continued Arévalo's reforms, and began an ambitious land-reform program, known as Decree 900. Under it, the 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. Árbenz's policies ran afoul of the United Fruit Company, which lost some of its uncultivated land. The company lobbied the US government for the overthrow of Árbenz, and the State Department responded by engineering a coup under the pretext that Árbenz was a communist. Carlos Castillo Armas took power at the head of a military junta, provoking the Guatemalan Civil War. The war lasted from 1960 to 1996, and saw the US-backed military commit genocide against the indigenous Maya peoples, and widespread human rights violations against civilians.