Banana, a sweet and common fruit, became a bitter fruit for Guatemala.
United Fruit Corporation (UFCO), an American company, was the monopoly producer and exporter of bananas from Guatemala in the first half of the twentieth century. The company became more than a banana monopoly. It functioned as a state within a state. It was the largest land owner in the country with about 550,000 acres.
The company controlled the main port Puerto Barrios and the town around it. Any business seeking to export or import goods through the port was at the mercy of the company for charges, terms and conditions.
UFCO owned the IRCA rail line, the only means of moving products to and from Puerto Barrios. IRCA was charging the highest freight rate in the world.
UFCO was running the telegraph and telephone service of the country.
UFCO was the largest employer in the country.
In essence, the company had nearly complete control over the nation’s international commerce and domestic economy.
The company had used its clout to get the best deal from the country’s corrupt ruling establishment who had granted the company exemption from taxation, duty-free importation of goods and a guarantee of low wages and restrictions on trade unions.
But the company faced challenges from the leftist President Jacobo Arbenz who assumed the presidency in March 1951. He was a nationalist with ideals of helping the poor and reducing the exploitation of the country by UFCO and the local oligarchs. He initiated policies for poverty alleviation, protection of labor and better educational system. He started land reforms by expropriating uncultivated land from the rich (after compensating the owners with government bonds). During the first eighteen months of the program, his government distributed 1.5 million acres to some 100,000 peasants. The properties expropriated included 1,700 acres owned by President Arbenz himself and another 1,200 acres owned by his friend and later Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello.
In 1953, the Arbenz government seized 209,842 acres of the UFCO’s uncultivated land. The government offered $627,572 of compensation in bonds, based on UFCO’s declared tax value of the land. But UFCO had undervalued its property in official declarations in order to reduce its already insignificant tax liability. But now that the declared value was being used to determine compensation, the company howled in protest. On April 20, 1954, a formal complaint was delivered to Guatemalan authorities, not by the company but by the U. S. State Department. The note demanded $16 million in compensation basing its claim on international law, which, it contended, required fair compensation for lands seized from foreigners despite domestic laws. The amount offered by Guatemala averaged about $2.99 per acre, while the State Department wanted over $75 per acre; the company had paid $1.48 per acre when it bought the land nearly twenty years earlier. In the negotiations, the United States ambassador took the lead on the side of the company. Guatemalan Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello refused to accept the State Department note, branding it “another attempt to meddle in the internal affairs of Guatemala”.
Many influential members of the American establishment had personal interest or stake in UF. These included Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and John Moors Cabot, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, whose family owned stock in the company. His brother Thomas had served as president of the corporation in 1948. American ambassador to UN Henry Cabot Lodge was a stockholder. He had been a vigorous public defender of UFCO while he was senator from Massachusetts. The wife of Edmund Whitman, UFCO’s public relations director, was Eisenhower’s personal secretary, Anne Whitman. Undersecretary of State Bedell Smith was seeking an executive job with UFCO while helping to plan the coup against Guatemala (he later was named to its board of directors). Robert Hill, ambassador to Costa Rica during the coup, was close to the UFCO hierarchy, having worked for Grace Shipping Lines, which had interests in Guatemala. In 1960, he became a director of UFCO.
The US State department, CIA and UFCO started a coordinated malicious propaganda campaign against President Arbenz calling him as a communist and falsely accusing that Guatemala was becoming a beach head for Soviets. UFCO appointed a PR firm which lobbied with the American Congress and the media feeding them fake news and lies. The firm produced a 94-page study, called “Report on Central America 1954” according to which Guatemala was ruled by a Communist regime bent on conquering Central America and seizing the Panama Canal. The US media such as New York Times carried such propaganda and amplified it through their own reporters sent to Guatemala as guests of UFCO.
The United States Information Agency cranked up a more sophisticated crusade. Its propagandists wrote more than 200 articles, made twenty-seven thousand copies of anti-Communist cartoons and posters and distributed them to US and Latin American newspapers. The agency shipped more than 100,000 copies of a pamphlet called “Chronology of Communism in Guatemala” throughout Latin America. It produced special movies and radio commentaries and distributed them across the hemisphere.
Even the American Catholic establishment collaborated with the CIA. Cardinal Spellman of New York arranged clandestine contacts between Guatemalan Archbishop Mariano Rossell Arellano and a CIA agent. The Guatemalan priests read a pastoral letter in all the churches calling the attention of citizens to the presence of Communism in the country and demanding that the people should rise against this enemy of God and country. The CIA air-dropped thousands of leaflets of the pastoral message all over Guatemala.
The Americans started preparing a ‘regime change’ operation and initiated talks with Guatemalan army officers to overthrow President Arbenz. They chose Colonel Castillo Armas as their man for the job. He was in exile in Honduras after he lost out in a coup attempt earlier. The American ambassador and the CIA officials sorted out the rivalries among the rival presidential contenders from the army and forced everyone to line up behind their man. They used the right wing dictatorship regimes of Honduras, El Salvador and Dominican Republic to establish bases there for supplies to the rebel army. The CIA arranged arms and aircrafts. American planes flew over Guatemala throwing bombs and leaflets causing panic among the public. UFCO provided logistics support through its port, ships and railway lines. The American ambassador bullied the Guatemalan president and openly instigated the army officers to rebel against the government. Finally, the Americans succeeded in overthrowing President Arbenz in June 1954 and sending him out on exile. They made their man Col Armas as President. The American president Eisenhower celebrated the American victory and felicitated CIA and State Department officials involved in the Guatemalan coup. UF rewarded some of the CIA and State Department officials with plum posts.
This Bitter Fruit story of Guatemala is not a Magical Realism fiction by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The book “Bitter fruit: The story of the American coup in Guatemala” is the work of two American authors namely Stephen Schlesinger (Director of the World Policy Institute, a foreign policy think-tank at the New school in New York) and Stephen Kinzer (a journalist who has written extensively on Latin America in media such as New York Times and became Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University) They have done a thorough research of the unclassified US government and CIA documents and interviewed some of those involved in the story from both sides. They have used the research materials themselves to narrate the events, like in a novel. They published this book in 1982 and updated it in 2005.
Guatemala was the first case of “regime change” operation by the US. It was a guinea pig and test laboratory for CIA. It was this success in Guatemala which encouraged the Americans to try regime changes in other countries of Latin America and the rest of the world. The US followed the same formula to overthrow the leftist President Allende in Chile in 1973.
The US installed military dictator Castillo Armas was succeeded by other military regimes in the next three decades. These regimes in collaboration with the local oligarchy had ruined the country with their oppressive policies and atrocities. Naturally, people rose in revolt and leftist guerilla groups sprang up. The US came to the help of the dictators to counter the insurgencies. They trained of Guatemalan military and police in counter insurgency operations and supplied arms. The US posted their own military officers in Guatemala to direct and advise the Guatemalan security forces. The US planes, based in Panama, dropped napalm bombs on areas suspected of being guerrilla haunts.
Guatemala suffered more than two hundred thousand killings during the civil war. The Guatemalan military was responsible for ninety-three percent of the murders. The indigenous people of Guatemala, who constitute the majority of the population but have been historically excluded and marginalized, suffered the worst. The death and destruction of the civil war made people to migrate to the US. The end of the civil war and restoration of democracy in the late nineties had not given any relief to the people. The civil war has been replaced by gang wars which have made Guatemala as one of the countries with the highest murder rates in the world.
El Salvador and Honduras neighboring Guatemala have also suffered the same fate. The American supported military dictatorships of these countries destroyed their countries with oppression and unleashing civil wars. The Americans used all the three countries as bases for their “Contra Wars” to destabilize the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the eighties. More destruction and death followed. The civil wars were followed by gang wars especially in the Northern Triangle of Violence which includes Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The continuing violence has made hundreds of thousands of people to flee and migrate to the US. The guns used for crimes and violence by the gangs are mostly American guns trafficked illegally through the thousands of gun shops in the border with Mexico.
The problem of immigration of Central Americans into the US is, therefore, an inevitable and logical consequence of the destruction of these countries by the US. It is a ‘No Brainer’ as the American would say.
The author is an expert in Latin American affairs
