Get Rid of This Stinker
excerpted from the book
Overthrow
America's Century of Regime Change
from Haiti to Iraq
by Stephen Kinzer
Times Books, 2006, paper
p129
Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was the second of two presidents who
governed Guatemala during the country's "democratic spring,"
which lasted from 1944 to 1954. For decades after the CIA overthrew
him and chased him from his homeland, it was dangerous to speak
well of Arbenz or lament his fate. He died alone and forgotten.
Only when his remains were finally brought home to Guatemala and
buried, on October 20, 1995, did his people have a chance to honor
him. They did so with a fervor born of unspeakable suffering.
Arbenz took office in 1951, the same year
another nationalist, Mohammad Mossadegh, became prime minister
of Iran. Each assumed leadership of a wretchedly poor nation that
was just beginning to enjoy the blessings of democracy. Each challenged
the power of a giant foreign-owned company. The company howled
in protest, and charged that the government was Communistic. Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles agreed.
Few private companies have ever been as
closely interwoven with the United States government as United
Fruit was during the mid-1950s. Dulles had, for decades, been
one of its principal legal counselors. His brother, Allen, the
CIA director, had also done legal work for the company and owned
a substantial block of its stock. John Moors Cabot, the assistant
secretary of state for inter-American affairs, was a large shareholder.
So was his brother, Thomas Dudley Cabot, the director of international
security affairs in the State Department, who had been United
Fruit's president. General Robert Cutler, head of the National
Security Council, was its former chairman of the board. John J.
McCloy, the president of the International Bank for Reconstruction
and Development, was a former board member. Both undersecretary
of state Walter Bedell Smith and Robert Hill, the American ambassador
to Costa Rica, would join the board after leaving government service.
During the first half of the twentieth
century, United Fruit made great profits in Guatemala because
it was able to operate without interference from the Guatemalan
government. It simply claimed good farmland, arranged for legal
title through one-sided deals with dictators, and then operated
plantations on its own terms, free of such annoyances as taxes
or labor regulations. As long as that system prevailed, men like
john Foster Dulles considered Guatemala a "friendly"
and "stable" country. When a new kind of government
emerged there and began to challenge the company, they disapproved.
For thirteen years during the 1930s and
1940s, United Fruit thrived in Guatemala under the patronage of
Jorge Ubico, a classically outsized Latin American caudillo. According
to one historian, Ubico "called anyone a Communist whose
social, economic and political ideologies were more progressive
than his own" and "trusted only the army, wealthy indigenous
landowners and foreign corporations." The most important
of those corporations was United Fruit, which provided tens of
thousands of full- and part-time jobs in Guatemala. Ubico showered
United Fruit with concession agreements, including one in 1936
that his agents negotiated personally with Dulles. It gave the
company a ninety-nine-year lease on a vast tract of land along
the rich Pacific plain at Tiquisate, and guaranteed it an exemption
from all taxes for the duration of the lease.
Guatemalans became restive as Ubico's
harsh rule wore on. An emerging middle class, inspired by the
democratic rhetoric of World War II and the examples of reformist
presidents Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico and Franklin
D. Roosevelt in the United States, began agitating for change.
During the summer and fall of 1944, thousands of demonstrators,
led by schoolteachers, launched a wave of street protests. As
they reached a peak, young officers staged a lightning uprising
and toppled the old regime. Guatemala's own "October Revolution"
was won at the cost of fewer than one hundred lives.
A few months later, Guatemalans went to
the polls in their country's first democratic election. By an
overwhelming margin, they chose a visionary young schoolteacher,
Juan José Arévalo, as their president. In his inaugural
address, delivered to an expectant nation on March 15, 1945, Arevalo
cited Roosevelt as his inspiration, and vowed to follow his example.
There has in the past been a fundamental
lack of sympathy for the working man, and the faintest cry for
justice was avoided and punished as if one were trying to eradicate
the beginnings of a frightful epidemic. Now we are going to begin
a period of sympathy for the man who works in the fields, in the
shops, on the military bases, in small businesses .... We are
going to add justice and humanity to order, because order based
on injustice and humiliation is good for nothing.
President Arévalo laid a solid
foundation for Guatemala's new democracy, and did much to bring
his country into the modern age. During his six-year term, the
National Assembly established the country's first social security
system, guaranteed the rights of trade unions, fixed a forty-eight-hour
workweek, and even levied a modest tax on large landholders. Each
of these measures represented a challenge to United Fruit. The
company had been setting its own rules in Guatemala for more than
half a century, and did not look favorably on the surge of nationalism
that Arévalo embodied. It resisted him every way it could.
Arévalo's term ended on March 15,
1951. As thousands watched, he handed the presidential sash over
to his elected successor, Jacobo Arbenz.
p132
Arbenz was a thirty-seven-year-old colonel who had helped lead
the 1944 uprising against Ubico, but he was by no means a typical
Guatemalan army officer. His father was a pharmacist who had emigrated
from Switzerland and had committed suicide while Jacobo was still
a boy. That ended his hope of becoming a scientist or an engineer,
but a friend in the tight-knit Swiss community arranged for him
to be given a place at the Military Academy. There he compiled
a brilliant academic record and excelled at boxing and polo. He
was also strikingly good-looking, blue-eyed and fair-haired but
with a Latin profile. At a Central American athletic competition,
he met a young Salvadoran woman, Maria Cristina Vilanova, who,
despite her upper-class background, was a passionate leftist.
After their marriage, she encouraged him to develop a social conscience
and political ambition. He showed both in his inaugural address,
setting out "three fundamental objectives" for his presidency:
to convert our country from a dependent
nation with a semi-colonial economy into an economically independent
country; to convert Guatemala from a country bound by a predominantly
feudal economy into a modern capitalist state; and to make this
transformation in a way that will raise the standard of living
of the great mass of our people to the highest level.
This was a sweeping agenda, and as soon
as President Arbenz began to press it, he found himself at odds
with all three of the American companies that dominated Guatemala's
economy. First he announced plans to build a publicly owned electric
system, which would break a highly lucrative monopoly held by
Electric Bond & Share. Then he turned his attention to International
Railways of Central America, which owned nearly all the country's
rail lines, including the sole link between the capital and the
Atlantic port of Puerto Barrios-most of which it also owned. Arbenz
proposed to build a new deepwater port, open to all, with a highway
connection to the capital. Then, confronting the cruelly unbalanced
system of land ownership that was and is at the root of poverty
in Guatemala, he won passage of a landmark law that threatened
United Fruit itself.
The Agrarian Reform Law, which the National
Assembly passed on June 17, 1952, was the crowning achievement
of Guatemala's democratic revolution. Under its provisions, the
government could seize and redistribute all uncultivated land
on estates larger than 672 acres, compensating owners according
to the land's declared tax value. This was a direct challenge
to United Fruit, which owned more than 550,000 acres, about one-fifth
of the country's arable land, but cultivated less than 15 percent
of it. The company said it needed these vast, fertile tracts for
future contingencies. To citizens of a country where hundreds
of thousands went hungry for want of land, this seemed grossly
unjust.
The three interlocking companies most
affected by Arbenz's reforms had controlled Guatemala for decades.
United Fruit was by far the country's largest landowner and largest
private employer. It held 46 percent of the stock in International
Railways of Central America, thereby securing freight service
and access to Puerto Barrios at highly favorable rates. Electric
Bond & Share supplied power for the railways and banana plantations.
Together, the three companies had more than $100 million invested
in Guatemala. Arbenz subjected them to a host of new regulations,
and many of their executives and stockholders came to detest him.
So did the New York lawyer who represented all three of them,
john Foster Dulles.
Early in 1953, the Guatemalan government
seized 234,000 uncultivated acres of United Fruit's 295,000-acre
plantation at Tiquisate. It offered compensation of $1.185 million,
the value the company had declared for tax purposes. United Fruit
executives rejected the offer, asserting that no one took self-assessed
valuations seriously. They demanded $19 million.
p134
United Fruit rose to its mythical status in Guatemala under the
leadership of Sam Zemurray, the visionary "Banana Man"
who had organized the overthrow of President Miguel Dávila
of Honduras in 1911 and gone on to become one of the most powerful
figures in Central America. Soon after Guatemala turned democratic,
in 1944, Zemurray sensed that its reformist government would give
the company trouble. The stakes were high, and he wanted to be
sure that American public opinion was with him. He decided to
hire an outside public relations expert. The new man was Edward
Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and the dominant figure in
his young profession.
Bernays was one of the first masters of
modern mass psychology. He liked to describe himself as the "father
of public relations," and no one disagreed. His specialty
was what he called "the conscious and intelligent manipulation
of the organized habits and opinions of the masses." He proposed
to Zemurray that United Fruit launch a campaign to blacken the
image of Guatemala's government. That, he argued, could decisively
weaken it and perhaps set off events that would trigger its collapse.
"I have the feeling that Guatemala
might respond to pitiless publicity in this country," Bernays
surmised.
Never before had an American corporation
waged a propaganda campaign in the United States aimed at undermining
the president of a foreign country. Zemurray was reluctant to
make United Fruit the first. Then, in the spring of 1951, Bernays
sent him a message with alarming news. The reformist leader of
faraway Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, had lust done the unthinkable
by nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. "Guatemala
might follow suit," Bernays wrote in his note.
That was all Zemurray needed to hear.
He authorized Bernays to launch his campaign, and the results
soon began to show. First were a series of articles in the New
York Times portraying Guatemala as falling victim to "reds";
they appeared after Bernays visited Times publisher Arthur Hays
Sulzberger. Next came reports in leading magazines, most of them
written, like the Times series, with helpful advice from Bernays.
Then Bernays began organizing press junkets to Guatemala. They
produced glowing dispatches about United Fruit and terrifying
ones about the emergence of Marxist dictatorship in Guatemala.
p138
Operation Success was now fully approved in Washington, and fully
funded-with $4.5 million, more than the CIA had ever spent on
a covert operation. It lacked only one essential element: a Guatemalan
to play the role of rebel leader. After several false starts,
the CIA settled on a former army officer, Carlos Castillo Armas,
who had led an abortive uprising in 1950 and had become a familiar
figure in Guatemalan exile circles. Agents found him in Honduras,
flew him to Opa-Locka, told him they were working with United
Fruit on an anti-Arbenz project, and proposed that he become its
putative leader. He accepted immediately.
During the spring of 1954, Castillo Armas
waited in Honduras while the CIA hired fighters, requisitioned
planes, prepared bases, and secured the cooperation of Honduran
and Nicaraguan officials.
p138
While the CIA was busily laying the groundwork for a coup in I
Guatemala, Secretary of State Dulles intensified his diplomatic
campaign. In March he traveled to Caracas, Venezuela, for a meeting
of the Organization of American States. Some foreign ministers
came to Caracas with hopes of discussing economic development,
but Dulles insisted that their "major interest" must
be Communism. He introduced a resolution declaring that if a country
in the Western Hemisphere fell under the control of "the
international communist movement," any other nation in the
hemisphere would be legally justified in taking "appropriate
action." Guatemala's representative, Foreign Minister Guillermo
Toriello, called this resolution "merely a pretext for intervention
in our internal affairs."
... Sixteen countries supported the "Declaration
of Caracas." Only Guatemala opposed it, with Mexico and Argentina
abstaining.
p140
Some doubts about the administration's policy toward Guatemala
did emerge, publicly and privately, but they were easily brushed
aside. One came on the pages of the New York Times, where the
reporter Sydney Gruson wrote several articles after the Alfhelm
incident suggesting that Guatemalans were rallying around their
government and that they were caught up not in Communism but in
"fervent nationalism." This was not what United Fruit
and the Eisenhower administration wished Americans to hear. Allen
Dulles arranged a dinner with his friend Julius Adler, the business
manager of the Times, and complained. Adler passed the complaint
on to Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger. A few days later,
Gruson's boss pulled him out of Guatemala.
p142
Arbenz ... had come to realize that the United States was behind
this rebellion, which meant that he could not defeat it with armed
force. This realization drove him first to drink, and then to
a decision to address his country by radio. In his speech he declared
that "the arch-traitor Castillo Armas" was leading a
"United Fruit Company expeditionary force" against his
government.
Our crime is having enacted an agrarian
reform which affected the interests of the United Fruit Company.
Our crime is wanting to have our own route to the Atlantic, our
own electric power and our own docks and ports. Our crime is our
patriotic wish to advance, to progress, to win an economic independence
that would match our political independence ....
It is completely untrue that communists
are taking over the government .... We have imposed no terror.
It is, on the contrary, the Guatemalan friends of Mr. Foster Dulles
who wish to spread terror among our people, attacking women and
children by surprise with impunity from pirate airplanes.
p145
Arbenz addressed his people for the last time.
Workers, peasants, patriots, my friends,
people of Guatemala: Guatemala is enduring a most difficult trial.
For fifteen days a cruel war against Guatemala has been underway.
The United Fruit Company, in collaboration with the governing
circles of the United States, is responsible for what is happening
to us ....
I have not violated my faith in democratic
liberties, in the independence of Guatemala and in all the good
that is the future of humanity. .
I have always said to you that we would
fight regardless of the cost, but the cost should not include
the destruction of our country and the sending of our riches abroad.
And this could happen if we do not eliminate the pretext that
our powerful enemy has raised.
A government different from mine, but
always inspired by our October Revolution, is preferable to twenty
years of fascist bloody tyranny under the rule of the bands that
Castillo Armas has brought into the country.
After Arbenz finished his broadcast, he
left the studio and walked forlornly to the Mexican embassy, where
he asked for and was granted political asylum.
p147
[John Foster Dulles] believed that Arbenz was a tool of "Communist
imperialism" rather than what he actually was: an idealistic,
reform-minded nationalist who bore Americans no ill will. By overthrowing
him, the United States crushed a democratic experiment that held
great promise for Latin America. As in Iran a year earlier, it
deposed a regime that embraced fundamental American ideals but
that had committed the sin of seeking to retake control of its
own natural resources.
Overthrow
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