In 1944, Guatemala entered their "ten years of springtime" with the democratically elected president Juan Jose Arevalo. He began the institution of reforms that were aggressively continued by the socially aware president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Guzman took office in 1951 with a list of planned programs, some of which being land, employment and social reforms. Under the auspice of communist infiltration, the United States and its corporations were concerned that Guatemala represented " a serious threat to hemispheric solidarity and to our security in the Caribbean area." The National Security Act (NSA) of 1947, and the creation of the CIA because of that act, radically changed the direction and methods United States foreign policy would take. .
The NSA act helped create a secret government within a legitimate government willing to overthrow democratically elected leaders in favour of multinational U.S. corporations and puppet dictators. The situation in Guatemala in the early 1950s motivated the United States to use overt and covert action to destabilize and overthrow the government of Guatemala. The Central Intelligence Agency's orchestrated coup in 1954 ended Guatemala's fledgling democracy, making it the zenith of America's Cold War foreign policies.
In 1944, the "October Revolutionariries", a group of dissident military officers, students, and liberal professionals, overthrew General Jorge Ubico's Guatemalan dictatorship, thus, paving the way for the democratically elected leftist government of Juan Jose Arevalo. Arevalo quickly won broad support of the young liberal students and professionals alike, winning with 255,000 of 295,000 votes in the election of 1944. To them he personified " all the civic virtues associated with democratic government ." Arevalo was clear that his government would not head in materialist directions but aim at " liberating man psychologically and spiritually.