Long live Arévalo!", yesterday and today On September 3, 1944, Juan José Arévalo returned to Guatemala after developing most of his academic training and professional career outside the country. In June of that year, the protests of university students, teachers and workers had achieved the resignation of the dictator Jorge Ubico after 14 years of exercising an absolutist Presidency. Facing the December elections, the revolutionary parties proposed Arévalo, who was in Argentina, as their presidential candidate. Thousands of people came to welcome him at La Aurora airport, shouting "Long live Arévalo!" He was escorted to the center of the city.
Arévalo's oratory, figure and career made him the favorite candidate, who summoned thousands of people to his rallies throughout the country. This produced the attempt of General Federico Ponce Vaides (appointed provisional president by Congress after Ubico's resignation) to perpetuate himself in power. The response was a civic and military movement that ended at dawn on October 20, 1944, when Ponce Vaides was overthrown and a revolutionary government junta assumed the leadership of the country. The date established for the elections was respected, and after a devastating campaign with enormous popular support, Arévalo obtained the Presidency with the vote of 85% of the voters.

His government, reformist and revolutionary, was
Phone Number List to taking Guatemala into the 20th century; education, labor rights, social security are some of his legacies. After the overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in June 1954, Arévalo had to remain in exile, during which time his son Bernardo was born. Having become a benchmark for the political opposition, in 1963, in a bold decision, Juan José Arévalo returned clandestinely to Guatemala to present himself as a presidential candidate. The power groups, sure that if Arévalo participated he would win, opted to carry out a coup that inaugurated an authoritarian political regime, in which the opponents were not only outlawed, but also assassinated and disappeared.