After an intense love life and drug abuse, she killed herself in front of her last lover, Mexican bullfighter Jaime Bravo, in Colombia.

[3] The Arbenz family embarked into exile, going first to México, then to Canada, where they went to pick up Arabella who was attending school there, and then on to Switzerland via the Netherlands.

Furthermore, Arbenz could not seek political asylum, because Switzerland had not yet ratified the 1951 agreement of the newly created United Nations Refugees Convention, which was designed to protect people fleeing from communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

Czechoslovak officials were uncomfortable with Arbenz, unsure if he would demand the government compensate him for shipments of Second World War-era arms that they had sold Guatemala in 1954.

The family's experience turned out to be lukewarm: the former president's communist ties, especially with José Manuel Fortuny, and forced passage through Czechoslovakia, the USSR and China, aroused suspicions.

When the Arbenz family arrived in Moscow, Soviet Union they sent Arabella to a boarding school, where she ended up leading a rebellion of Latin American students against the rigid standards of the institution.

[1] Arbenz Vilanova was an intelligent, beautiful woman who fluently spoke Spanish, English, Italian, French and Russian, who also displayed a strong and difficult personality.

She decided not to accompany her father to live in exile in Cuba after he was invited by Fidel Castro, preferring to stay in Paris studying acting and working as a model.

After leaving Paris for Mexico, she had torrid romances with Guatemalan journalist Jorge Palmieri and with the future owner of Televisa, Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, who helped her begin her acting career.

Palmieri, who had strong influence in the Mexican government at the time, received permission to bury Arabella in the Pantheon of the National Association of Actors of Mexico, since she had worked in an experimental film a few months earlier.