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A Latin American Third Way? Juan José Arévalo's Spiritual Socialism, 1916–1963
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 December 2023
Abstract
Scholars and US officials mocked Juan José Arévalo Bermejo, the first democratically elected president of Guatemala (1945–51), for the opacity and alleged incoherence of his “spiritual socialism.” He was eclipsed by his successor, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, who introduced sweeping land reform to Guatemala and whose overthrow in a CIA-orchestrated coup in 1954 launched the Latin American Cold War. But Arévalo's ideology is not only decipherable but potentially of great value—when we trace its origins back to Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, a forgotten philosopher who was Hegel's contemporary, and the Argentine intellectuals who developed Krause's abstract theories into an approach to governance that shaped Argentina's experience in social democracy under Hipólito Yrigoyen, while Arévalo was living in exile there. Arévalo's social reforms, which improved the standard of living for workers and peasants without sacrificing individual liberties or property rights, reflect a Krausean philosophical commitment to harmonious nationalism based on ethical relationships rather than hierarchies. The experiment was foreclosed by the 1954 coup and a lesser known, US-backed coup in 1963 that denied Arévalo a second term in office. This analysis of Arévalo's writings and governing practices shows their relevance to Latin America's search for a third way between revolutionary class struggle and neoliberal authoritarianism.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academy of American Franciscan History
Footnotes
The author thanks Roberto García Ferreira, Tom Long, Aaron Coy Moulton, Kirsten Weld, and the anonymous reviewers assigned by The Americas for their generous comments on the manuscript. Thanks also to Thelma Porres, director of the Archivo Histórico Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA; La Antigua, Guatemala), and to Paul Behringer, Nicholas Pigeon, and Valery Valdez Pinto for research assistance. The research and writing were supported by funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, American Philosophical Society, American University's College of Arts and Sciences, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
References
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4. I wrote this sentence before Arévalo's son, Bernardo Arévalo de León, was unexpectedly elected president of Guatemala in 2023, producing a brief flurry of news accounts that referred to his father's presidency as a success—another reason for the need for greater understanding of his father's intellectual legacy.
5. Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 36, 38; Streeter, Stephen, Managing the Counterrevolution: The United States and Guatemala, 1954–1961 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 14Google Scholar. Charles D. Ameringer writes: “He spoke vaguely of ‘spiritual socialism,’ placing the liberation of the human spirit above the distribution of material goods.” Ameringer, , The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians, and Soldiers of Fortune, 1946–1950 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 4–5Google Scholar. Gleijeses concludes that other scholars, such as Marie-Berthe Dion and Angela Delli Sante-Arrocha, have made “vain attempts to penetrate the mysteries of Spiritual Socialism.” Shattered Hope, 39 n40. Dion, Marie-Berthe, Las ideas sociales y políticas de Arévalo (Mexico City: Editorial América Nueva, 1958)Google Scholar; Sante-Arrocha, Angela Delli, Juan José Arévalo: pensador contemporáneo (Mexico City: Corte-Amic Editores, 1962)Google Scholar.
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11. The infighting on the left is thoroughly documented by Culpepper in “The Exile of Juan José Arévalo.”
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34. “La tesis del ‘socialismo espiritualista’ que Arévalo sostiene resulta, a través de su sinceridad y su entusiasmo, muy interesante, y el lector deseará siempre verla plenamente, desarrollada en futuros trabajos.” Andrés Iduarte, review of Arévalo's Escritos políticos, in Revista Hispánica Moderna 13:3/4 (1947): 291–292.
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37. Arévalo, Escritos complementarios, 153.
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39. For this and subsequent citations of articles of the 1945 Constitution, see Ruggiero, “Origins.”
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41. Quoted in Roig, Los krausistas argentinos, 35, 59.
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43. “Guatemala Takes German Land,” New York Times, July 23, 1945, 5; “‘End of War’ Act Aids Guatemala,” New York Times, November 25, 1956. On the German expropriations, see Max Paul Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
44. Susanne Jonas and David Tobis, eds., Guatemala (Berkeley: NACLA, 1974), 46; Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas, 1982), 55.
45. Handy, Gift of the Devil, 108.
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51. Arévalo, Escritos políticos, 147.
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54. Krause did not care for the phrase “human rights” (“derechos humanos”), which he put in scare quotes because the powerful “trumpeted it” too often. Arévalo, Escritos complementarios, 147.
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