Paranoid and ignorant, Ubico seemed to glory in the fear his name inspired and delighted in the popular image of himself as a “wild and dangerous beast.” Once when a minor official named Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, a rather conservative man, suggested that Guatemala’s truck drivers, who were often on the road for three days at a time, receive some traveling expenses, Ubico screamed at him, “So! You too are a Communist!” On another occasion he accused Ydigoras of reading Communist literature: When the latter protested that he had been reading a papal encyclical and showed it to Ubico, Ubico
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