Juan José Arévalo Bermejo (10 September 1904[1] – 8 October 1990) was a Guatemalan statesman and professor of philosophy who became Guatemala's first democratically elected president in 1945.

Although it only had four issues, it published texts by renowned Guatemalan writers Rafael Arévalo Martínez, Flavio Herrera, and Carlos Wyld Ospina.

[5] In 1927, as part of a nationwide educational reform project, the government of General Lázaro Chacón organized a teacher competition, where the best would be awarded scholarships to study pedagogy abroad.

His philosophy of "spiritual socialism," referred to as Arevalismo, may be considered less an economic system than a movement toward the liberation of the imagination of oppressed Latin America.

In the post-World War II period, the governments of the United States and other countries misinterpreted Arevalismo as communism, serving as a cause for unease and alarm, which garnered support from neighboring satellite caudillos such as Anastasio Somoza García.

The benefits did not spread to the rural agrarian areas where hacendado traditions, termed latifundia, remained patrician, racist, unyielding, and harsh.

In 1956,[8] he would write a notable book called "The Shark and the Sardines," which attacked the United States Government and powerful American companies for their treatment of Latin America.

[11] Dictator Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, who (despite the firm opposition of the Kennedy administration) had pledged to oversee a free and open election in which Arévalo would participate, flew into exile to Nicaragua after he was deposed in a coup on 31 March 1963.

[12] Arévalo, the revolution's intellectual pillar, positioned his theoretical doctrine as integral to the construction of a progressive and peaceful Guatemalan society.

[13] The revolution's first president asserted that safeguarding the free will of citizens generates popular support for governmental institutions, which ensure the security of the individual and collective equally.

Arevalismo did emphasize the importance of civil freedoms as the essential groundwork for human development, but the political principle maintained that "Individual liberty must be exercised within the limits of social order".

[14] Democracy, according to Arévalo, was a social structure that required the restriction of civil rights in the event individual liberties conflict with national security and the will of the majority.

[15] Arévalo's rejection of Western oriented liberal individualism and apparent socialist inclinations led conservative sectors of the press to denounce the revolutionary president as a communist.

[17] Regardless of the aforementioned measures, Arévalo endured nearly 30 attempted coups from members of the Guatemalan military due to his perceived empathy for communists.

Arévalo's political philosophy stressed the importance of government intervention in the realm of economic and social interests as necessary to sustain the desires of the majority's free will.