Every 90 minutes someone is murdered in Guatemala. The country is riddled with drug and gang related violence. Millions have fled to the United States. It is believed that about 2 million are here illegally, but the central government in Guatemala City does not actually know the exact amount. Violence is nothing new to this tiny country in Central America. A brutal civil war was fought here from 1960 to 1996 (yes, a THIRTY SIX year civil war) that killed close to 200,000 people.
The root causes of the civil war are plenty: The feudal caste system inherited from the Spanish way back in the 1800s. The lack of education for a vast majority of the population (well at least the mestizo and native populations). And, of course, the CIA backed coup that overthrew the democratically leader of the county back in 1954. As I stressed in my article, "Why DO they hate us? Here are 7 Pretty Good Reasons," the United States is NOT the sole reason for the ills of this world. Far from it. However, just like in the Muslim world, we certainly had a hand in creating said ills. A pretty big hand.
To be sure, Guatemala had problems long before the CIA made things worse. From independence to 1944, the country was ruled by dictator after dictator. By 1944, 2% of the population owned 70% percent of Guatemala’s arable land. In that year, however, the county managed to hold free and fair elections. In 1951, Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was elected president. Guzman implemented many far-reaching liberal reforms. The biggest reform? Radical redistribution of land. And this is where things started to go downhill.
Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman and his wife.
Under previous governments, the United Fruit Company (today’s Chiquita Banana) had acquired 42% of Guatemala’s land. They were also granted exemption from all taxes and duties on both imports and exports. Although the Arbenz administration compensated United Fruit for their land, this was not enough for the company. They were convinced more land would be taken and they would go bankrupt. Something had to be done. They hired the PR guru Edward Bernays. By the time he was through, the American public thought the United Fruit Company was the victim. The company also lobbied the Truman, and Eisenhower administration to topple the now re-fashioned communist Arbenz. It did not take much convincing. Guatemalan elites had already been working hard in persuading the United States that Arbenz was no good. United Fruit just finished the job.
It is true that Arbenz’s supporters in the Guatemalan congress included the Communist Party. They were far from the majority, however. To date, there has been no evidence that Arbenz himself was a communist. He was more of a European-style democratic socialist. Ironically, Arbenz’s land reform program was less generous than the one suggested by the Reagan administration in El Salvador decades later.
The United Fruit Company in Guatemala in the 1920s.
Emboldened by their great success in overthrowing the Iranian government the previous year, the CIA figured they wouldn’t have any trouble doing the same in Guatemala. They didn’t. Operation PBSUCCESS was authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. $2.7 million budget was set aside for "psychological warfare and political action" and "subversion." If this didn’t work, the CIA had a backup plan: just assassinate Arbenz. It never came to because the psychological warfare worked. The author Tim Weiner writes:
“For four weeks, starting on May Day 1954, the CIA had been waging psychological warfare in Guatemala through a pirate radio station called the Voice of Liberation, run by a CIA contract officer, an amateur actor and skilled dramatist named David Atlee Phillips. In a tremendous stroke of luck, the Guatemalan state radio station went off the air in mid-May for a scheduled replacement of its antenna. Phillips snuggled up to its frequency, where listeners looking for the state broadcasts found Radio CIA. Unrest turned to hysteria among the populace as the rebel station sent out shortwave reports of imaginary uprisings and defections and plots to poison wells and conscript children.”
A few weeks later Arbenz and his top aides fled the country. Declassified documents actually criticized the coup plotters for their shoddy planning. The documents also noted that the coup triggered ferocious international protests against the United States. Nicholas Cullather, a CIA historian, states "Castillo Armas' [the man who the CIA put in Arbenz’s place] new regime proved embarrassingly inept. Its repressive and corrupt policies soon polarized Guatemala and provoked a renewed civil conflict."
The iconic Che Guevara picture...he was inspired by what he saw in Guatemala.
Castillo Armas’ regime stopped the land reforms, rescinded the constitution, and outlawed political parties and labor unions. This, in turn, galvanized the opposition. By 1960, there was an all-out guerrilla war in Guatemala. The civil war would rage for over 35 years. Close to 200,000 are thought to have died during the conflict. It was not until 1997, when the documents were declassified, that the CIA admitted its key role in the Arbenz coup. In 2011, over fifty years after the events took place, democratically elected President Alvaro Colom publicly apologized to the Arbenz family for the coup:
“That day changed Guatemala and we have not recuperated from it yet,” he said. “It was a crime to Guatemalan society and it was an act of aggression to a government starting its democratic spring.”
The Arbenz family has asked the United States for a similar apology. It has yet to come. To our credit we did apologize for what happened after. President Bill Clinton officially expressed regret for the role the US played in backing a brutal counter-terrorism campaign that caused the deaths of thousands of civilians in Guatemala's civil war. Oh, as an interesting side. A young Argentine by the name of Che Guevera happened to be in Guatemala to witness the coup. After what he saw, he was quoted as saying. “I lost my path to reason [after that].”
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