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

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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[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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