America in Guatemala

Iran and Guatemala were very similar cases, in the sense where there was a foreign company present on their lands that dominated the whole economy and resources of those countries.

In Guatemala, the resource was bananas, and the company was the United Fruits Company. A uniquely powerful company based from the US, the UFC were extremely well connected with the Eisenhower administration.

Guatemala, at that time, had been under classic Latin American tyranny for many years, until after a civil uprising in 1944, the country took their first steps towards democracy. This lead to an increasingly popular trend of nationalism among the Guatemalans, who were insistent on profiting out of the fruit company.

To this effect, the Guatemalan Congress passed a land reform law requiring that any entity in Guatemala owning more than 100k acres of unused land would need to sell it off to the government to be distributed to the local peasants. While the only company that fit into that category was the United Fruit Company – which had half a million acres of land that it was just keeping for possible future needs – they were clearly very upset.

So, the UFC flew back to Washington to complain about their injustice, and soon enough, a whole public relations campaign was launched in the US. They had portrayed Jacob Arbenz, the Guatemalan president, as a communist and a tool of the Kremlin.

Although the manipulation of the American press and public opinion was nothing new, – it played significantly in the US’s role in their invasion of Iraq – it is something that American leaders as well as leaders from other countries have learned how to do.

On the back of this campaign, the US organised a modest little exile invasion and a bombing campaign by CIA planes. This really was the case in which the CIA decided that it would try to use some Guatemalan exiles as a cover to the American CIA operation. They recruited small gangs of Guatemalan exiles and sent them across the border from Honduras – that was the invasion.

Meanwhile, there was a CIA radio station (that had been taped in advance in Miami) was purportedly broadcasting from withing the country; the great progress of the invasion, they called it. This broadcast portrayed handfuls of ragged exiles in cars amongst crowds of Guatemalan patriots in deserting military units sweeping across the Guatemalan islands towards the capital. In order to underline these false reports, the CIA sent planes over Guatemala City and over several other areas to bomb them and make it seem as if there was some coordinated attack going on.

All of this was a reflection of governments in poor countries who were not yet equipped to deal with the kinds of subversive tools that the CIA had come up with. Later on however, these governments became more cleaver and difficult for covert operations like these to work. That’s why someone like Saddam Hussein was never vulnerable to covert action.

President Arbenz was finally forced to resign in 1954, and Guatemala was introduced to a US-imposed government that proved to be extremely repressive. This, in turn provoked the most savage episode in the modern history of Latin America – an uprising that led to a 30-year civil war, killing far more people in the Chile, Argentina and Brazil conflicts put together.

Having being bathed in blood for 30 years, Guatemala served as a political example to a whole generation of rising leaders in Latin America.

During the period when Jacob Arbenz was in office, Guatemala was a democracy – a completely foreign concept in Latin America. And so people from countries all over Latin America came to Guatemala just to watch and see what was happening there.

One of the these was a young Argentine doctor named Che Guevara. He was in Guatemala at the time the US overthrew the government, and had watched the whole process that led up to that overthrow. He met Fidel Castro when he moved to Mexico, who, at that time, was a Cuban man planning his revolution back in his home country. The two men discussed the intervention of the US in Guatemala, and how they had corrupted the congress and the local press to get away with their plan.

Their conclusion was that if we get into power, it’s not going to be possible for us to push a reform programme within the framework of democracy. The US won’t allow that because we’ll be bothering American countries, and they’ll use our democratic institutions like political parties and the press to subvert the country and overthrow us. So if we get into power, the first thing we’ll do is close all newspapers, ban all political parties, outlaw demonstrations and dissent, and we’ll wipe away the entire army – replace it with our own army. 

This is the lesson that the US, through its intervention in Guatemala, taught to a whole generation of rising leaders in Latin America: You can’t have real reform in democracy if you want to try something radical to change the qualities of life; you have to do it under dictatorship, and that led to an untold pain for Latin America.