Britain has an awful history, and I’ll talk about that another week, but sometimes it’s worth just sitting down and reminding yourself how much of a twat America can be. The power of bullshit is such that on reflex the country is still filed in some vague chapter of my brain labelled ‘probably a good thing’. I assume it got there because of all the episodes of the Simpsons I watched after school, and the fact that it’s a democracy. I quite like democracies, and you might think America would as well, but they’ve had an active hand in messing up quite a few of them over the years.
In 1953, Britain and America covertly contributed to the overthrow of the democratically elected Government of Iran. A year later in Guatemala, with the aid of a fruit company, the U.S.A. deposed the second democratically elected leader Guatemala ever had. That’s right, a fucking fruit company. The C.I.A. considered Jacobo Arbenz Guzman a threat because he was helping the poor. This led them to think he might be planning to aid a Soviet invasion of America, which is a logical and sensible leap, and incidentally why I’ve always eyed the Salvation Army with suspicion.
A mural of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman
Debate rages on as to the actual role of the United Fruit Company (now ‘Chiquita Brands International Inc.’) in the coup. What is fairly accepted is the context. The UFC held a tight grip over much of South America in the 1950s, often seeming quasi-governmental, an independent and powerful international organisation. They had their own ports, shipping lines and railways across South America and the Caribbean. In Guatemala they owned about 75% of the land. The term ‘banana Republic’ was genuinely invented because of the activities of the United Fruit Company, whose presence in a country often relied on an authoritarian dictatorship willing to take sacks of money from the American business and violently suppress dissent among its impoverished populace, who were in turn exploited for cheap labour by the company. Kind of like an East India Company for the 20th century. (By the way I just had a look at the East India Company website – they still exist apparently as a fine foods company. Their only reference to the widespread misery they caused is in the ‘Heritage’ section where they graciously admit that their ‘pioneers’ “may have sometimes got it wrong.”)
So yeah, after a couple of coups (as you do) in 1944, relatively free elections were called in Guatemala, and an exiled teacher and academic was elected to rule the country. I wish teachers could still become elected heads of countries (but not P.E. teachers). After serving his first term Juan José Arévalo Bermejo stepped down and allowed his elected successor Arbenz to take over. But poor old Jacobo hadn’t reckoned on the Cold War coming over and mercilessly fucking up his country with it’s dumb, paranoid, bigoted aggression.
Part of the United Fruit Company’s modus operandi was to buy up as much land as possible, and then let a lot of it sit unused. Their reasoning for this was that their business heavily depended on weather conditions and they needed a surplus to use in case crops were ruined by the unpredictable weather conditions of South America. Fine. This policy also meant that by owning a majority of the land in Guatemala they essentially created a feudal society where peasants relied entirely on income from working land that wasn’t theirs. If they had a problem with it, that was generally their problem. If they tried to do something about it they occasionally got massacred, which happened to over a thousand striking UFC workers in Colombia in 1928. You can read a fictionalised account of this event in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. Get a copy if you haven’t already, because it’s a great book and reading it makes you able you to say things like: “You can read a fictionalised account of this event in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’.”
Arbenz wanted to confiscate some of the unused land from the United Fruit Company and give it to peasants, so that they could have more control of their future and a chance to make a little more money. America saw this as dangerously communist. United Fruit had a lot of links with American Government. They persistently lobbied Eisenhower’s administration to do something about Arbenz, who clearly stood to harm their business interests. They whipped up fears in the White House and Pentagon, until the director of the C.I.A. publicly expressed a belief that Guatemala could act as a Soviet “beachhead” in the Americas. This was, plainly, all bollocks.
Carlos Castillo Armas
The C.I.A. trained and armed a four hundred man force led by an exiled army officer named Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. They bombed the city to create panic and with the crucial element of an amazingly complex, sustained and well targeted propaganda campaign, they succeeded in getting Colonel Carlos into power. I’d be an arse to suggest that Guatemala was a perfect wonderland free democracy in 1953, but at least it had a bit of potential. Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán resigned as the coup took hold. He fled the country and died an exile in Mexico. Over the next thirty or so years, between 140,000 and 250,000 of his countrymen would be killed by the violence and political instability visited on the country by a succession of repressive dictatorships. Next week: more crap things humans do to humans.
Comments