Guatemala

Between 1931 and 1944 Jorge Ubico had ruled the small Central American nation of Guatemala with an iron hand. A typical Latin American dictator, Ubico had nurtured his relationship with the United States and the largest single landowner in Guatemala, the United Fruit Company (UFCO).

Ubico suppressed efforts to organize the Guatemalan labour force, repressed any political dissent and showed little interest in the large native Indian population. In July 1944 Ubico was forced to resign and, following a brief interval when General Federico Ponce ruled with the help of the local military, Guatemala held presidential elections. The winner of the December 1944 elections was Juan Jose Arevalo, a professor of literature and philosophy. During his six-year rule Arevalo championed political, social and economic reform, provoking General Ponce to brand him a communist. Beset with other priorities and concerned about the negative impact that any overt intervention might have at a time when Washington was building hemispheric unity, the United States did not respond positively to Ponce’s requests for support. The combination of Arevalo’s reform efforts and Ponce’s warnings of ‘Moscow’s growing influence’ in Guatemala did, however, encourage the type of thinking embodied in George Kennan’s summary of the need to contain communism in Latin America.

While Arevalo was able to complete his six-year term, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, a reform-minded military officer who took over the presidency in 1951, was not as fortunate. On taking office Arbenz began an ambitious reform programme of progressive taxation, new social welfare programmes and increased wages for labour. In 1952 he ensured the enmity of UFCO when he expropriated approximately 400,000 acres of non-cultivated UFCO land. Consequently UFCO launched a massive lobbying effort inside the United States, portraying Arbenz as a communist and Guatemala as a breeding ground for the spread of Soviet influence in the Western Hemisphere.

Although lacking any real evidence that Arbenz was a communist, the Eisenhower administration concluded in 1953 that events in Guatemala were too ominous to be left alone. Accordingly Eisenhower approved a CIA plan to overthrow the Arbenz regime with American-trained Guatemalan exiles. In 1953—54 training camps were set up in Nicaragua and Honduras, headed by Castillo Armas. In addition, the United States initiated a resolution in the OAS that declared the communist domination of any state in the Western Hemisphere a threat to the security of all member states. The resolution was passed in early 1954 by seventeen votes to one (with Guatemala as the lone objector). By now the United States had also cut off all assistance to Guatemala.

Events advanced rapidly. Arbenz, convinced that a campaign to topple his government was under way, turned to the Soviet bloc in a desperate search for arms. In May 1954 a Swedish ship carrying Czech-made weapons arrived in Guatemala. The following month Castillo Armas and his small contingent attacked from Honduras while American planes bombed Guatemala City. After Arbenz had fled, Guatemala, ruled by Armas until his assassination in 1957, returned to ‘normalcy’. UFCO lands were returned, left-wing critics imprisoned and the Guatemalan rulers remained loyal supporters of the United States, to the extent that in the early 1960s Guatemala would be a training ground for another CIA force of Latin American exiles: the Cubans preparing to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime.

However, while the CIA, and its legendary director Allen Dulles, were widely congratulated within the Eisenhower administration (and by UFCO) for its successful operation, the overthrow of Arbenz did little to blunt the growing criticism of the United States throughout Latin America. To many Latin American intellectuals, students and others, the not-so-hidden hand of the Eisenhower administration in Guatemala only confirmed that the real source of the region’s economic and social problems lay in the north.

As the links between the CIA, Armas and UFCO entered the folklore of a growing group of radicals throughout Latin America, nationalism and anti-Americanism easily blended with various left-wing groups demanding social and economic reform. ‘Yankee go home’ thus became a widespread slogan.

It was Vice-President Richard Nixon’s unenviable fate to experience the growth of anti-Americanism at first hand. In April to May 1958 Nixon toured South America on a goodwill visit. In Uruguay and Peru he encountered a mix of supporters and protesters, but in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, he felt the full force of regional anti-Americanism. Earlier in the year the United States had provided asylum for the country’s recently deposed dictator, Marcos Perez Jimenez, as well as for Jimenez’s much hated chief of police. Venezuelan crowds therefore took out their frustrations on Nixon, whose motorcade was surrounded by hostile crowds. The vice-president narrowly escaped before actual shooting broke out and eventually returned to the United States unharmed, but the incident brought home to Washington the unpopularity of its policies and persuaded the Eisenhower administration that the threat of communism in Latin America was growing.

In response, the United States therefore started to increase its aid programmes south of the border, abandoning Eisenhower’s previous ‘trade not aid' approach to economic development. In a characteristic move, however, the US administration emphasized military over economic aid and stressed the need to bring home to Latin American opinion the dangers of communism. The new approach did little to answer the general demands that lay at the heart of Latin American nationalism, namely an end to American interference in their internal affairs and increased control over raw materials.

In 1959 the United States supported the establishment of the Inter-American Development Bank and pledged $500 million for projects that would be managed by the new body. However, the same year saw further problems emerge. In Panama there were widespread riots and demonstrations against continued American ownership of the Canal Zone. Even more dramatically, in Cuba the American- supported dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had ruled the country for almost three decades, was overthrown by a movement headed by a man who would end up leading the small Caribbean nation for an even longer period of time.

Inter-American Development Bank

Organized in 1959 to foster the economic development of the Western Hemisphere. It is mainly funded by the United States.

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Source: Best Antony. International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Routledge,2008. — 638 p.. 2008

Guatemala

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