Maria Cristina Villanova de Árbenz
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Doña María Cristina Vilanova Castro de Árbenz |
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| First Lady of Guatemala | |
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In role March 15, 1951 – June 27, 1954 |
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| President | Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán |
| Preceded by | Elisa Martínez Contreras |
| Succeeded by | Odilia Palomo Paíz |
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In role October 20, 1944 – March 15, 1951 Serving with Amalia Arana and Inés Toriello |
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| Leader | Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán Francisco Javier Arana Jorge Toriello Garrido |
| Preceded by | Judith Ramírez Prado |
| Succeeded by | Elisa Martínez Contreras |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
April 17, 1915 San Salvador, El Salvador |
| Died | January 5, 2009 (93) San José, Costa Rica |
| Spouse(s) | Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán |
| Children | Arabella Arbenz Vilanova, Jacobo Arbenz Vilanova |
| Residence | Guatemala City, San Salvador |
| Occupation | politician |
| Religion | Roman Catholic |
| Nickname(s) | «Periquita» |
Doña María Cristina Vilanova Castro de Árbenz (17 April 1915 – 5 January 2009) was the First Lady of Guatemala from 1951-1954, as wife of the Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.
Vilanova de Arbenz was born in San Salvador in 1915, where her parents belonged to the society elite. She received a privileged education in elite European institutions. On a family trip to Guatemala she met the then-colonel Arbenz, and they eventually married there in 1937.
Vilanova was the first wife of a Guatemalan president to attend all of his public functions, and also the first one to perform socially active work. She has been often compared to Eva Perón given that she was also a feminist and had strong influence in the government during her husband's time in office. She was accused, along with her husband, of sympathies to Communism , and of exacting influence over him while in exile.
After her husband died in 1971 in Mexico, Vilanova moved to Costa Rica with her family, where she died in 2009.
After resigning due to the coup organized by the United Fruit Company and the United States Department of State, the Árbenz Vilanova family remained for 73 days at the Mexican embassy in Guatemala, which was crowded with almost 300 exiles. When they were finally allowed to leave the country, Jacobo Arbenz was publicly humiliated at the airport when the liberationist authorities made the former president strip before the cameras, claiming that he was carrying jewelry he had bought for his wife at Tiffany's in New York City, using funds from the presidency. No jewelry was found during the hour-long interrogation. The Arbenz family then embarked into exile, taking them first to México, then to Canada, where they went to pick up daughter Arabella, and then on to Switzerland via the Netherlands. As a condition for entry, the Swiss authorities asked Arbenz to renounce his Guatemalan nationality, to prevent the ousted president from continuing his resistance in Switzerland. Arbenz refused this request, as he felt that such a gesture would mark the end of his political career. Furthermore, he could not benefit from political asylum, because Switzerland had not yet ratified the 1951 Agreement of the newly created United Nations High Commission for Refugees, designed to protect people fleeing from communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Árbenz and his family ended up instead the victims of an intense, CIA-orchestrated defamation campaign that lasted from 1954 to the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959. Árbenz's close friend Carlos Manuel Pellecer worked for the CIA, playing a key role in the defamation campaign.
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