Decree 900

Decree 900 was a Guatemalan land reform law ordered on June 27, 1952 by President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. This decree redistributed unused lands of sizes greater than 223 acres (0.902 km²) to local peasants. Proponents of the law stated that is was intended to “eliminate all feudal type property...especially work-servitude and the remnant of slavery.” ¹ It expropriated the unused lands of large plantations (estates with lands fully in use were exempted from the law), paying the oligarchs whose lands were expropriated through government bonds.

Because of the Agrarian Reform Law, the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company in August 1952 announced that it would no longer purchase Guatemalan chicle. Since Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company had been the sole buyer of the product, the Arbenz government suddenly had to provide a massive aid program for chicle harvesters. ²

In 1953 Arbenz announced that under the Agrarian Reform Law Guatemala was expropriating 234,000 acres (947 km²) of uncultivated land from the United Fruit Company. United Fruit owned 550,000 acres (2,200 km²) in Guatemala, 42% of the nation’s (arable) land.³ The United Fruit Company had reduced its tax burden in Guatemala by declaring a low value for its land, much lower than it would later claim it was worth. The company was compensated with $627,572 in bonds for the expropriation of their holdings, the amount United Fruit had claimed the land was worth for tax purposes. United Fruit continued its lobbying campaign for US intervention. The US State Department, on behalf of the United Fruit Company, claimed to Guatemala that the land was worth $15,854,849. ⁴

By 1954, 100,000 families had received land as well as bank credit and technical aid for sowing and marketing. The countrywide union block which ran the program was under non-communist leadership until 1954.^{[citation needed]}

In 1954 the CIA-organized covert operation Operation PBSUCCESS overthrew the democratically-elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

Footnotes

• Note 1: La Feber, Walter (1993). Inevitable Revolutions The United States in Central America. Norton Press. ISBN 0-393-03434-8. , pg 118, Citing Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (Garden City, N.Y., 1981), page 224; Neale J. Pearson, "Guatemala: The Peasant Union Movement, 1944-1954," in Latin American Peasant.Wovements ed. Henry A. Landsberger (Ithaca, 1969), page 224

• Note 2: La Feber, Walter (1993). Inevitable Revolutions The United States in Central America. Norton Press. ISBN 0-393-03434-8. , pg 119, Citing Donald Dozer, Are We Good Neighbors? Inter American Relations 1930 1960 (Gainesville, Fla., 1959), page 264

• Note 3: La Feber, Walter (1993). Inevitable Revolutions The United States in Central America. Norton Press. ISBN 0-393-03434-8. , pg 120; Citing Graham H. Stuart, and James L. Tigner, Latin America and the United States, 6th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1975), page 519-520; Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (Garden City, N.Y., 1981), page 221-225

• Note 4: Kinzer, Stephen and Stephen Schlesinger (2005). Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Harvard University David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. ISBN 0-674-01930-X. , pg 76