AMERICAN
INTERVENTION IN GUATEMALA (1944-1990):
A TEST CASE FOR
THE DEADLY CONNECTION THEORY
[A preliminary
draft of paper published at the proceedings of 17th Third World Conference1]
I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've
reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that,
"for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry‑‑and
he has his hand on the nuclear button"‑‑and Ho Chi Minh
himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.
Richard Nixon,2 1968
Two Interpretations of
Western Military
and Foreign Policies
Deterrence Throughout the Cold War, most Americans
perceived their country's military policies in something like the following
terms. We were caught between a rock
and a hard place, and had to choose between the more or less equally
distasteful alternatives of either continuing the arms race or laying down our
arms. From 1945 through 1990, the free
world has chosen to continue the arms race, and for excellent reasons. Ideally, we would have liked to live without
the risks of the arms race and totalitarianism, but the nature of the Soviet
state made this impossible. So, in the
real world, we could only choose a policy that would have minimized both risks
to the greatest extent possible.
Unilateral disarmament would have almost certainly cost us our
freedom. In contrast, it appeared far
less certain that the arms race would have ended up in nuclear war, while its
other costs were remote or negligible in comparison to an inevitable
totalitarian takeover. Given these
unequal probabilities and the equal distaste with which most of us regarded
totalitarianism and nuclear war, the choice‑‑unfortunate as it was‑‑seemed
clear enough: continue the arms race,
cross our fingers, and hope for the best.
This
interpretation of the historical record holds that American policies have been
defensive and that they have been strongly influenced by ethical
considerations. It holds that the U.S.
and its democratic allies cherished their freedom and national independence,
and that their policies were virtually devoid of aggressive and exploitative
motives. Though they would have loved
nothing better than being left alone by the militaristic and imperialistic
Soviet Union, they were realistic enough to know that, in this less than
perfect world, freedom must be defended from its external enemies.
Translated into the realm of nuclear weapons, this essentially defensive
posture leads to deterrence as the cornerstone of the democratic West's
military strategy. Both the Soviet
Union and the United States possessed the physical means of decimating each
other; neither country could prevent its own destruction. Each relied, therefore, not on defense but
on deterrence, for the threat of destruction was mutual: each nation could see to it that its
destruction was followed by the destruction of the other. In effect, each side cautioned the other: "You can destroy me and there is
nothing I can do to stop you from doing so, but I can destroy you too. Therefore, I appeal not only to your
humanity in asking you not to destroy me, but also to your self‑interest,
for, if you destroy me, I can, and will, destroy you."
Brinkmanship
A
radically different interpretation claims that policies of nation states have
rarely been influenced by moral considerations or the welfare of the majority
of their citizens, and that American policies from 1945 through 1990 were no
exception. According to this view,
America emerged from the war as the most powerful nation on earth. Its monopoly of nuclear weapons, its
military and economic might, its commercial and political foothold in most of
the world's nations, its belief in itself as a stronghold of freedom, decency,
and civilization, its unequal commercial, political, and military relations
with most of the world nations, the dependence that this inequality created on
one side and the stupendous profits it brought to the other, and America's
willingness to resort to economic blackmail and brute force to achieve its
commercial and security objectives, have rendered a good part of the planet's
land surface into, essentially, an American empire.
The international goals of the United States
have been clear and remarkably consistent since the end of World War II. Since 1945 U.S. policy has never deviated
from its support of the status quo in all noncommunist and nonsocialist
countries. This policy is designed to
maintain control over the allocation of world‑wide resources and
available labor and to ensure U.S. access to market and investment areas. No alternative forms of government could be
allowed to replace existing friendly governments, since successful alternatives
could demonstrate that there were different paths to national economic development
from those approved by the United States.3
According
to this view, the Third World's people did not enjoy illiteracy, malnutrition,
malaria, injustice, exploitation, poverty, and hopelessness. If left alone, they were likely to rebel
against the dictators who ruled them.
With our economic and military assistance, however, our dictatorial
friends could easily quench such popular uprisings, provided our support for
the dictators was not counterbalanced by another powerful country's support for
the rebels. And herein, according to
this interpretation, lies the crux of America's Cold War policies.
Only the
Soviet Union could conceivably interfere with the status quo. The Soviets did not depend upon us
politically or economically, they seemed able to acquire the capacity to
intervene in conflicts far away from their shores, and they disliked America's
Third World policies. They might take
exception, for instance, to the U.S.‑created and supported bloody
dictatorships in the Philippines, Vietnam, Chile, Iran, Nicaragua, or
Greece. They might counteract American
culpability in the decades‑long imprisonment of the South‑African
anti‑apartheid activist Nelson Mandela.4 They might not sit silently by while the
U.S. takes an active part in the massacre of a quarter million Indonesians.5
They might wish to neutralize American support for the genocidal Khmer Rouge in
Kampuchea.6 Or they might
have curtailed our actions during the Persian Gulf War. Moreover, they might have liked to gain a
foothold in these regions for ideological, economic, and balance of power
considerations. If left alone, they
might have therefore been tempted to provide assistance to Third World
insurgents, including, at times, direct military aid and intervention. Our military and foreign policies were aimed
at containing the Soviets from doing so.
Translated
into the realm of nuclear weapons, this essentially aggressive posture leads to
the unavowed, but nevertheless real, policy of brinkmanship‑‑the
policy of pushing a potentially deadly conflict to its limits, of risking a
mutual descent into the abyss in order to scare off a more cautious opponent‑‑as
the cornerstone of the democratic West's military strategy. One analyst explains:
Chiefly, the arms race is justified . . . and
sustained by the geopolitical and ideological struggle between the USA and the
Soviet Union, and derives its importance from the USA's determination to
dominate and control the Third World and sustain its global hegemony. Within this context nuclear weapons are seen
by the USA as being a means of threatening the Soviet Union and thus preventing
her from challenging US hegemony.7
A noted hawk concurs:
It is . . . mainly over the freedom of action
of the United States to use a few nuclear weapons, selectively and not against
cities, that the nuclear competition unfolds.8
According
to this view, the use of nuclear weapons in implementing these political
objectives falls roughly into three historical periods. During the first, which lasted at least
until the mid‑1950s, the U.S. enjoyed a decisive nuclear edge. The period started with American atomic
monopoly, but the Soviet first atomic explosion did not even come close to
bringing this period of meaningful nuclear edge to an end, for the Soviets
still lacked a sufficient number of bombs and delivery vehicles. Until 1955 or so, an all‑out nuclear
war would have resulted in the virtual pulverization of the Soviet Union, and,
at worst, a partial pulverization of the U.S.
Throughout this period, according to this view, our military policies
were aimed at retaining this military advantage and thereby containing Soviet
meddling in our Third World affairs.
In the
second period, according to this view, we intermittently employed a more
refined variant of this policy. We no
longer sought raw nuclear superiority, for the Soviets by now enjoyed a
credible nuclear force. Rather,
America's military policies were aimed at retaining a more subtle edge over its
chief adversary:
The essence of the asymmetry in the U.S. and
Soviet strategic nuclear capabilities . . . had to do with the credibility of
striking first. Until 1966 or 1967, the
U.S. intercontinental forces were so superior in every category . . . that it
was possible to contemplate a first strike directed against the much smaller
Soviet forces, using only a fraction of the U.S. arsenal, in which a large part
of the soviet retaliatory capacity would be destroyed before it could be
used. The Soviet leaders would then
face the choice of capitulating or launching a relatively weak retaliatory
blow, with the latter course sure to result in their country's complete
destruction by the sizable remaining forces of the U.S. At the same time, no such
"attractive" first‑strike option was open to the Soviet Union,
because its forces were insufficient to destroy a suitably large fraction of
the U.S. forces in an initial blow.
This asymmetry‑‑that the United States could and the Soviet
Union could not credibly threaten to resort to the first use of
intercontinental nuclear weapons against its adversary's homeland‑‑gave
meaning to the term "nuclear dominance."9
In the
third phase (mid‑1960s through 1990), the U.S., by and large, continued
on the same course. Depending on one's
perceptions of the military balance during those years, our goal, according to
this view, has been either the retention of this "nuclear dominance"
and the political advantages it conferred, or its restoration. "The West," two influential
analysts wrote in 1980, "needs to devise ways in which it can employ
strategic nuclear forces coercively . . .
If American nuclear power is to support U.S. foreign policy objectives,
the United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war
rationally."10
In this
paper, I shall present evidence that while the U.S. preached deterrence, it
either practiced brinkmanship or a combination of deterrence and brinkmanship.
Nuclear Diplomacy
The notion
of brinkmanship is counterintuitive. Given
the enormously destructive power of nuclear bombs, their potentially
devastating environmental impact, and the 12,000 nuclear bombs the Soviets
could fire at the continental United States, any attempt to use these weapons
in any role other than deterrence appears insane. Ordinary people might be familiar with something like the oft‑cited
advice to American policy makers at the dawn of the nuclear age: "Thus far the chief purpose of our
military establishment has been to win wars.
From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful
purpose."11a From
cradle to grave Americans are assured that their country does indeed subscribe
to this notion. Even when the U.S.
enjoyed a decisive nuclear edge, American leaders often embraced this view in
public. As early as 1954, for instance,
President Eisenhower said: "We
have arrived at that point, my friends, where war does not present the possibility
of victory or defeat. War would present
to us only the alternative of degrees of destruction. There can be no truly successful outcome."3b
All the
same, we need more than apparent implausibility to reject, or accept, the
brinkmanship interpretation. The best
clue to its verisimilitude does not lie in intuition, avowals, and a priori
reasoning, but in the historical record.
Truthfulness and objectivity seem to be the exception in politics, not
the rule. Early Americans said little
about dispossession and economic exploitation of the red man and a great deal
about manifest destiny. European
colonialists said little about profits, the balance of payments, or national
power and prestige, and much about civilizing missions, Christianity, and the
white man's burden. Iosif Stalin
declared‑‑and the majority of Soviets and Eastern Europeans
probably believed‑‑that his policies sought peace and justice. During their long war with the Spartans, the
ancient Athenians had to be reminded:
"Do not imagine that you are fighting about a simple issue, freedom
or slavery; you have an empire to lose, and there is the danger to which the
hatred of your imperial rule has exposed you."12 Such historical precedents show that a
nation's key policies can sharply differ from its stated policies, and that a
great number of citizens can confuse avowals with facts.
A detailed
examination of the historical record suggests that this applies to Cold War
America too.1. I cannot give this controversial issue the attention
it deserves in this paper. Instead,
the following discussion will briefly highlight a few points which seem to lend
additional support to this more
pessimistic view of American nuclear and Third World policies.
‑‑The
brinkmanship interpretation is not, by a long shot, the imaginary
hallucinations of some wild‑eyed radicals. Apparently, it has been taken for granted by some of our most
influential decision makers. A former
Secretary of State wrote in 1982 that the loss of American nuclear superiority
in the early 1970s "was a strategic revolution even if the Soviets did not
achieve a superiority of their own. For
that, to some extent, freed the Soviet capacity for regional
intervention."13 This view is shared by other mainstream
analysts: "American superiority in
nuclear weapons . . . was an important element in inducing Soviet
caution."14 Another
analyst attributes "the surrender of Soviet pretensions over West Berlin,
. . . the [favorable] outcome of the Cuban missile crisis, and . . . the
prudent Soviet stance in the 1967 Arab‑Israeli war" to the
diplomatic leverage the United States obtained from the nuclear edge it still
enjoyed in the 1960s.15a
‑‑Some
observers believe that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki "may well
have been intended as much to impress and intimidate the Soviet Union as to
bring the war with Japan to a prompt conclusion."9a State‑supported American historians
scoff at this "revisionist" charge.
Still others take an intermediate position. For instance, after expressing uncertainty about Hiroshima,
President Kennedy's special assistant for national security affairs wrote in
1988 that "it is hard to see that much could have been lost if there had
been more time between the two bombs."16a But regardless of one's views on this
controversial matter, it is certain that the first peacetime tests of nuclear
weapons were carried out by the U.S. and that "the idea that nuclear bombs
are actually usable as military weapons and as instruments of coercion in
international affairs is an invention of the Western powers."9b
That the
U.S. was the first to test and use nuclear weapons is well known, but we must
explore the point about coercion.
"In addition to the abstract notions of deterrence ostensibly
conferred on the US and USSR by their mutual nuclear weapons capabilities held
in readiness against the other, these weapon systems have been utilised in
crises far more often than people‑‑including political scientists‑‑are
aware of. We have been fortunate that
this level of use has not yet led to actual use in wartime, but that has perhaps
been due to more complex factors than the restraint with which we ordinarily
assume nuclear weapons are handled."17a "U.S. leaders have run calculated
nuclear risks not for self‑defense, high moral principles, or the
protection of weak countries from the Soviets, but to further U.S. power."18a
The first
quotation might have raised some eyebrows in 1980, when it was published. By now the facts it describes are either
acknowledged or ignored‑‑but not to my knowledge denied‑‑in
all Western scholarly and official publications. At the very least, the U.S. employed nuclear coercion in nineteen
separate incidents.17b It
certainly did not take much to trigger this tactic. For instance, Guatemala's acceptance of "Soviet block
support" (see below) in May 1954 led to an implicit nuclear threat against
the Soviet Union.19
Similarly, according to President Eisenhower, veiled nuclear threats
were decisive in ending the Korean War in 1953 and the conflict over the tiny
Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu in 1955 and 1958.16b President
Carter made it clear in 1980 that "an attempt by any outside force to gain
control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital
interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled
by any means necessary, including military force."18b Administration officials made it clear that
Carter was referring to nuclear weapons:
"The Soviets," said one, "know that this terrible weapon
has been dropped on human beings twice in history and it was an American
president who dropped it both times.
Therefore, they have to take this into consideration in their
calculus."18c
‑‑Psychologically,
brinkmanship throws some light on the ever‑lasting gaps, windows, and
plans to win nuclear wars which our policy makers and their literary servants
routinely ascribed to the Soviets. It
is far easier to attribute one's own intentions and capabilities to an
implacable enemy than to figure out what the other side thinks and does. Also, real motives and intentions‑‑regardless
of who actually holds them‑‑are as a rule far more credible than
imaginary ones.
‑‑The
recurring theme in influential political and military circles in the U.S.
"that the use of nuclear weapons must be regarded as absolutely normal,
natural, and right" and the efforts to attack "emotional resistances
to using nuclear weapons"11b are utterly incomprehensible under
deterrence theory; practitioners of deterrence are expected to daily sing the
horrors of nuclear war, not its praises.
But the West's proclivity to normalize the unthinkable is entirely
consistent with brinkmanship. Even
today, high‑ranking American officials are not in the habit of admitting
in public‑‑as their Soviet counterparts have been freely doing for
decades‑‑that a nuclear war would be an unparalleled catastrophe.
A few
quotations will suffice to give the flavor of this line of thinking. An American Secretary of State (1954): "It should be our agreed policy in case
of war, to use atomic weapons as conventional weapons against the military
assets of the enemy whenever and wherever it would be of advantage to do
so."11c A former
commander of our nuclear forces (1968):
"A war fought from . . . a
base of nuclear superiority would leave the United States sorely wounded, but
viable and victorious."11d
An influential analyst (1979):
"There is a role for . . . the sensible, politically directed
application of military power in thermonuclear war."11e George Bush felt that a nuclear war can be won
(1979): "You have a survivability
of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a
percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more
damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you. That's the way you can have a winner."18d
‑‑The
United States has never disavowed the first use of nuclear weapons. On the contrary, it has been explicitly
committed to use such weapons first "to repel a Soviet invasion of Western
Europe."9b This
commitment is also implicit in America's declaratory policies, dating from
1979, to use any means necessary to protect its interests in the Middle East.
‑‑In
the late 1980s, the USSR presented the deterrence/ brinkmanship dispute with a
crucial test. Practitioners of
deterrence and democracy would have welcome Soviet reforms with open arms. They would have agreed, as early as 1985, to
massive bilateral military cutbacks.
They would have responded to the Soviet testing moratorium with gestures
of their own. They would have gasped
with disbelief and joy at Soviet disengagement from Eastern Europe, though they
may have been somewhat wary about the re‑unification of Germany and the
chaos, bloodshed, nationalist hysteria, ethnic feuds, and religious fanaticism
that the breakup of the Soviet Union itself might unfold. Their suspicions that the Soviets were still
playing war and politics by the old rules would have been largely dissolved
once they noticed Soviet willingness to accept unfair disarmament
proposals. They would have realized
that Soviet humanitarians faced formidable reactionary opposition (especially
from communists and nationalists), that they faced severe economic challenges,
and that their fate hinged in part on Western cooperativeness and help. Though Soviet reformers may succeed despite
America's wait‑and‑see attitude, American policies raised the
probability of reversion to the authoritarian past and renewal of the Cold
War. Even though American policy makers
understood that much, they seemed unduly reluctant to let go of the
"enemy" which so faithfully justified their domestic, foreign, and
military policies. Needless to say,
their actions accord with the brinkmanship interpretation, not its deterrence
rival.
‑‑Proponents
of the deterrence interpretation fail to account for America's pursuit of
nuclear overkill. In contrast,
brinkmanship theory demands it. As one
Pentagon consultant put it:
One hears it said endlessly that the
competition between American and Soviet . . . nuclear forces is . . . futile,
because each side can already destroy the population of the other "many
times over." That . . . is a
vulgar misunderstanding. It is not to
destroy the few hundred cities and larger towns of each side‑‑easy
targets neither protected nor concealed‑‑that . . . nuclear forces
continue to be developed. The purpose
is not to threaten cities and towns already abundantly threatened, to
"overkill" populations, but rather to threaten the . . . nuclear
forces themselves. . . . Thus there are several thousand targets, as opposed to
a few hundred cities and towns, and many of those targets can be destroyed only
by very accurate warheads.15b
Though
there is no attempt to trace the origins of this "vulgar
misunderstanding" in this analyst's writings, the point itself is well
taken and explains much that otherwise defies explanation. It is consistent with the brinkmanship's
theory basic postulate of the strive for asymmetry. It puts the perennial obsession with missile accuracy in a new
light. It tells us why we developed the
H‑bomb, multiple warheads, killer submarines, and the like. It explains our plan to militarize space in
the next quarter century: it is not the
technically impossible absolute shield that we are after, but a shield which
might appear strong enough to continue playing Russian roulette. It tells us why the U.S. targeted 10 percent
of its strategic weapons at Soviet population centers and some 90 percent at
the Soviet Union's military forces.20. It explains why, even under Secretary of Defense McNamara, the
shift to assured destruction was at the declaratory level, while the actual
targeting policy remained unchanged.21 Indeed, how else could the reported 1983 existence of more than
40,000 potential targets be explained?11f It elucidates otherwise inexplicable utterances about thinking
the unthinkable, acceptable casualty levels, limited nuclear exchanges,
controlled nuclear salvos, escalation dominance, nuclear victories, and well‑managed
nuclear conflicts.
American
Intervention in the Third World
I have
documented elsewhere1 the sharp contrast between (i) American
domestic policies, which have been, taken as a whole, more humane and rational
than pre‑1985 Soviet policies, and (ii) American disarmament
policies, which have been, for the most part, less humane and rational than the
Soviets.' The same sharp contrast was
unfortunately observed between the two nations' domestic and Third World
policies. Here is a 1980 appraisal:
The Soviet regime is without doubt the
bloodiest and most deceptive caricature in modern history, a cruel parody of
the ideas that supposedly inspire it. . . . And yet in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America, national liberation movements . . . generally find that the
Soviet Union is on their side, while the liberal democracies of the West have
almost always during the past three decades been on the side of oppression in
the Third World.22
In public,
American policy makers and their academic underlings usually explained this
strange situation in something like the following terms. We faced, they said, an unpleasant
dilemma. Sure, many of the Third
World's peoples have been ruled by cynical, heartless, and greedy tyrants. We did not like these tyrants, but we kept
them in power because the alternative was even worse: if we abandoned these tyrants, they would have been replaced by
even more ruthless communists, who would then pose a grave threat to their
people and to our security and freedom.
Convincing
as this argument may sound, many proponents of the brinkmanship interpretation
persuasively argue that it has nothing to do with the real world. The choices we faced in Greece, Turkey,
Cuba, South Vietnam and scores of other places were not between dictators and
totalitarians, but, they say, between dictators, totalitarians, and New Deal democrats. To be sure, unlike the dictators but like
genuine democrats everywhere, these democrats have been more concerned with the
plight of their peoples and less concerned with the profit margins of American
corporations; their foreign policies were more independent of ours; and they
believed that the best way of fighting totalitarianism was not jailing,
killing, or torturing communists, but bringing greater freedom to their
peoples.
In view of this issue's controversial
nature and vast scope, the following story subserves a modest goal: showing that allegations of American
preference for Third World dictators over both communists and democrats are not
as far‑fetched as a casual reading of our newspapers and semi‑official
histories might suggest. To do this,
the narrative is limited to just one country‑‑Guatemala‑‑chosen
at random from among a score of countries which readily present
themselves. It is largely confined to
one period in that country's history: The
Guatemalan Spring, 1945‑1954.
It avoids questionable occurrences and mute theoretical points, sticking
instead to accepted facts. I shall then
argue that this sad tale provides a reasonable approximation of not only U.S.‑Guatemalan
relations but of America's Third World policies as a whole.23 From this I shall conclude that, at the very
least, brinkmanship and imperialism‑‑despite their untextbookish
nature‑‑are more plausible than the competing interpretations of
deterrence and of American commitment to a democratic Third World. At the end of this paper, I shall explore
the implications of these findings to the pursuit of freedom, prosperity, and
justice in the Third World.
In 1944,
the order which prevailed in Guatemala can be best described as feudalism,
twentieth century style. Malnutrition
was widespread. The death rate was one
of the highest in the world,24a which meant, for example, that one
out of every two Guatemalan children never made it beyond the age of five.25a Only three out of ten Guatemalans could
read.26a Some 2 percent of
the people owned more than 70 percent of the land, and 75 percent owned less
than 10 percent of the land. Annual per
capita income was $180 overall, and for the poorest two‑thirds, $70. More than half of all Guatemalans lived in
one‑room shacks with no running water, windows, or cooking
facilities. More than half could not
afford to buy a single pair of shoes.
In some
ways, these numbers portray an unrealistically bleak sketch. They ignore, for example, the rewards of
economic self‑sufficiency; the beauty of semi‑communal village
life; the psychological rewards of firmly belonging to one place, of
cooperation with one fellows, of frequent, whole‑hearted celebrations,
and of intimate ties to the land. In
other ways, the picture these numbers portray is not dark enough. It is hard for the average book reader to
grasp the meaning of these numbers and their impact on every aspect of one's
life. It is not even enough to spend
months in a remote highland village to grasp this ghastly side. One must grow there and then escape‑‑from
intellectual darkness, helplessness, continuous struggle for sheer survival,
debilitating diseases, premature deaths, indignation suffered because of one's
race, poverty, or backwardness‑‑to know what it really means. The closest that one can come to
understanding such misery from afar is through works of fiction.
But while
the majority was living in abject poverty, a few thousand families‑‑wealthy
Guatemalans and foreign employees of American corporations‑‑were
living very well indeed. These
individuals usually owned a few cars, one or more modern houses, a large
country estate, or an industrial concern.
They maintained a retinue of servants.
They often studied and traveled abroad.
They thus made up a few scattered reefs of affluence and extravagance in
an ocean of penury and depredations.24b
The
American‑owned and operated United Fruit Company (UFCO) held a special
place in this feudal society. UFCO
began its Guatemalan operations at the turn of the century. At that time, an enterprising railroad baron
developed and acquired control of the nation's transportation network,
including Guatemala's only railroad and shipping port. This monopolistic position made it possible
for the new company to railroad small banana‑growing companies out of
business and to gradually acquire a major share of Guatemala's banana
business. As UFCO's economic power
grew, it proceeded to make the political climate of its host country as
congenial to profit maximization as possible.
Given an income greater than that of any government in Central America,
and given UFCO's willingness, while in Guatemala, to behave as the local
politicos and power elite did, UFCO became a dominant force in Guatemalan
politics. To many Guatemalans it was
known as El Pulpo‑‑an octopus holding sway over Guatemala's
political and economic life.27a
By the
1940s, UFCO owned some 20 percent of Guatemala's arable land and was the
country's largest employer. By then,
UFCO's profits from its Latin American operations amounted to twice the
revenues of the Guatemalan government.
The profits from its Guatemalan operations alone amounted to about a
half of total government revenues.
Naturally, by the early 1940's UFCO was virtually exempt from paying
taxes. The living conditions UFCO
provided for its Guatemalan farm workers were far worse, for example, than
those depicted in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath or In Dubious Battle,
but they were better than those enjoyed by most Guatemalans under the employ of
their own fellow countrymen.
UFCO was
the largest and, probably, most hated, foreign company in Guatemala, but it was
not the only one. About 80 percent of
Guatemala's electric power was provided by a private, American‑owned and
operated, power company.28a
In addition to foreign corporations, a few Guatemalan landowners,
politicians, and industrialists were taking their fair share of the spoils too.
From 1931
to 1944 the country was under the rule of one Jorge Ubico, who came to power as
the result of a "U.S.‑engineered election."27b By today's standards Ubico was a benign,
somewhat comical dictator with Napoleonic aspirations and a great deal of
admiration for Franco and Mussolini.29 But to most of his subjects his long rule was no laughing
matter. Executions, tortures, a salary
some 1,300 times that of his average subject, election results 308,000 to 0 in
his favor, being but a few of his misdeeds.
As elsewhere
in the American continents, Native Americans suffered oppression, depredation,
and exploitation. But unlike North
America, Native Americans constitute the majority of the population in
Guatemala. Most of them lived, as
mentioned, under conditions of unimaginable poverty. Under Ubico, discrimination against them was the law of the land;
it being legal, for example, for wealthy landlords to shoot on sight any Native
American found hunting wild game on their land.30
Like other
Central American countries, Guatemala was a virtual protectorate, or semi‑colony,
of the United States.31a To
avoid costly and unpopular direct interventions in this region, the U.S.
created and trained professional armies.
This led to the "militarization of political life and an
institutionalising of armed terror as the basis of the stability of
oligarchical rule."31b
As a result, Central American governments in the early 1940s were
"anti‑democratic . . . a throwback to feudal despotism.31c
In 1944, a
series of demonstrations, protests, and strikes ensued. In the face of widespread opposition to
Ubico's rule, the army eventually refused his orders to crush the
rebellion. Ubico resigned and went into
retirement in New Orleans. There
followed a few months of a new, equally repugnant dictatorship, which in turn
was ousted from power through a second revolution in October, 1944.
Revolutions frequently bring about greater horrors than the ones they
set out to eliminate, e.g., Iran's Islamic Revolution. In contrast, Guatemala's October Revolution
was an exceptionally successful affair.
It was followed by fairly free elections, certainly the freest in
Guatemala's turbulent history.26b
The revolutionary party's presidential candidate was Juan Arevalo, a
liberal writer and teacher who was in exile during the revolution; the old
guard put forward a few candidates of its own.
Arevalo won and became president in March of 1945.
Early
during Arevalo's presidency a new democratic constitution was ratified. This constitution, which remained in force
throughout the Guatemalan Spring (1945‑1954), mandated checks and
balances between the three branches of government, universal suffrage, freedom
of speech, press, and assembly; as well as a few other items that Westerners
take for granted but that were never before enjoyed by Guatemalans.
Arevalo's
foreign policies were more independent of the U.S. than those of his
predecessors. When the Korean War broke
out, Guatemala expressed solidarity with the U.S. Unlike the U.S., Guatemala severed political relations with two
repressive governments in its vicinity‑‑Nicaragua and the Dominican
Republic. Arevalo's government
supported a movement of radical democrats, the Caribbean Legion, which
was committed to the restoration of democracies by any means, including
revolutions (a movement which contributed, incidentally, to the rise of Costa
Rican democracy.26c) Arevalo
felt that the Central American countries ought to merge into a single nation,
but failed to convince his dictatorial neighbors to do so. In short, Guatemala's foreign policies, like
its internal policies, seem to have been democratically inspired.
Arevalo's
administration enacted a Labor Code which laid down the foundations for a
social security system and protected employees from arbitrary firing. This code marginally improved employees'
rights and working conditions. However,
true to Arevalo's gradualist philosophy, those conditions were still a far cry
from those enjoyed then by North American workers.
Arevalo's
government allocated more funds and resources to education, especially of the
illiterate poor, than any other previous Guatemalan administration. Official racial discrimination was ended,
although under the best of circumstances it would have taken generations to
close the social, economic, and cultural gap between the races.
A few
hundred communists were politically active during Arevalo's tenure in
office. Arevalo himself was decidedly
anti‑communist, but as in all other democracies today, communists were
left unmolested. They were also
permitted to hold a few low‑level official posts. Though critical of Arevalo's slow,
gradualist, approach, the communists supported his reforms. The Communist Party was small and had little
access to the army, police, or cabinet.
Given this weakness, along with Arevalo's popularity and anti‑communism,
the chances of a communist takeover were probably miniscule; slightly higher,
perhaps, than they were in 1982's Spain.
The charge
of communism is critically important to our saga, as it provided the sole
official justification for subsequent American policies. Even today, most journalistic reviews and
college textbooks take this charge for granted. Yet, the record itself unequivocally suggests that Americans have
not been told the truth. To dispel
doubts, let me quote two former State Department officials. First, a memo written in 1945 concerning
suspicions that Arevalo had communist sympathies:
Anyone even reasonably well informed about
his teachings, writings and general activities would be inclined to pass over
such suspicions as being so utterly without foundation as to call for no
response.26d
Second, a retrospective look (published in 1976) by
another official:
Arevalo held that communism, as a doctrine,
was antidemocratic and that the international movement was an enemy of
democracy and of the people of Latin America.
Arevalo banned the Communist party and deported Communist leaders for
illegal activities early in his administration. Yet he insisted that the civil rights of all citizens, including
Communists who did not violate the law, be protected. As a result, Communist leaders did have an opportunity to air
their beliefs and programs, and popular support for them grew under
Arevalo. Communists from abroad were
allowed to visit the country and local Communists held posts in his
administration.28b
However,
American policy makers were troubled by the 1944 revolution's democratic
aftermath. The U.S. ambassador was
implicated in several attempts to overthrow the young democracy, and in 1950
Arevalo formally requested his recall.28c The democracy badly needed financial aid; in nine years Guatemala
received less than one million dollars.
It needed arms to defend itself; since 1948 the U.S. turned down
repeated requests to supply arms and applied strong and effective pressures on
all its allies to do likewise.
According to some Guatemalan writers, this embargo was so effective that
by 1954 it left their country unable, not only to equip its army, but to
provide game hunters with ammunition.
Notwithstanding Arevalo's entire record, Congress and leading American
newspapers conducted an anti‑Guatemalan campaign. "What is surprising," says one
former State Department official, "is that there was virtually no
expression of the Guatemalan side of the story in Congress" or in major
American newspapers.
For example, Guatemalan national resentment
about how the United Fruit Company allegedly had gained its hold was not
mentioned, nor was the fact that the company had almost exclusive control of
Guatemala's major railroads, port, and
of many of the ships which carried its foreign trade. . . . Perhaps the most
notable omission was any reference to the many social and economic reforms
which had been introduced in Guatemala since Ubico's fall and the sharp
contrast in the democratic practices of the Arevalo administration as compared
with the dictatorial methods of many of his predecessors.28d
Arevalo
left office in 1951, thoroughly disillusioned about U.S. hostility to his
efforts to establish capitalism with a human face. "In the ideological dialogue," he said in his farewell
address "Roosevelt lost the war.
The real winner was Hitler."28d
In short,
while Americans were being killed by the thousands in Korea, defending one pro‑American
dictator against an anti‑American totalitarian, and while the U.S. was
paying hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up dictatorial regimes in Greece
and Turkey, a Western‑style democracy was emerging in Guatemala, just
south of the Mexican border, from the ravages of feudalism. Amazingly, the U.S. was going out of its way
to bring feudalism back.
The next
elections were held in 1950. Though
they involved some inexcusable government fraud, irregularities, violence, and
intimidation of the opposition, they "marked the first time in Guatemalan
history that executive power had freely passed from one civilian to
another."27c The two
chief contenders were Jacobo Arbenz, a man from Arevalo's party and a leader of
the October Revolution, and an old order oligarch. After reportedly receiving more than 60 percent of the votes,
Arbenz assumed the presidency.
Arbenz
shared Arevalo's political philosophy.
In his 1951 inaugural address, Arbenz set out to transform Guatemala
"from a dependent nation with a semi‑feudal economy to an
economically independent country . . . from a backward nation
. . . to a modern capitalist country
. . . and . . . to accomplish this transformation in
a manner that brings the greatest possible elevation of the living standards of
the . . . people."25b
To
accomplish these goals, Arbenz was willing to take greater risks than
Arevalo. The centerpiece of his program
was moderate land reforms. Under his
plan, idle land in excess of 223 acres would be transferred from the
1059 largest landowners (including land owned by himself and by his foreign
minister). The land was to be handed
over to peasants, each receiving from 8 to 33 acres. Most of the recipients were to pay rent at the rate of 3‑5
percent of the value of annual produce of the land. Previous landowners would receive partial compensation for their
losses (based on the unrealistically low value they themselves assigned to it
in their tax returns). By 1954, about
100,000 peasant families, or some 500,000 individuals (mostly Native
Americans), were cultivating land that otherwise would have been idle and were
often getting financial credits, technical aid, and training. As a result, food prices went down and
living standards went up.
Arbenz's
agrarian program could be criticized on various grounds. It was, for example, hastily conceived and
implemented; it gave the government too much power and influence over the
peasants; and, like inheritance tax in many American states, it marginally
eroded the privileges of the upper class.
But there is no doubt that the program served well the long‑term
interests of democracy, Guatemala, the U.S., and even the Guatemalan upper
class itself. In the words of a former
State Department official:
To the land hungry peasant in Guatemala the
agrarian reform probably looked like manna from heaven . . . policies of forced
labor and debt peonage had been commonplace throughout most of Guatemala's
history. Good farm land is scarce . . .
where most of the population resides and most . . . landholdings are
pitifully small. Suddenly, the agrarian
law promised land for the landless, more land for those having too little to
provide a living for their families, and an end to land monopoly and
exploitation by wealthy landlords . . . Peasants and workers . . .
were made to feel that the government had suddenly acquired a genuine interest
in their welfare.24c
Needless
to say, this program did not endear Arbenz to most of the 1,059 comfortable
landowners, including UFCO, the largest of them all. UFCO also had to deal with a labor force demanding reforms, often
with some government backing. UFCO also
faced a threat to its monopoly of Guatemala's overland and overseas
shipping. The threat in this case did
not come from attempts to nationalize Guatemala's railroads (which in 1951 were
charging the highest rates in the world) or its single port, as democratic governments
elsewhere had done. The threat came
from building a new railroad (parallel to UFCO's) and a new port on the Pacific
Coast (besides UFCO's port on the Atlantic).
Likewise, to break the monopoly of the American electric power utility,
Guatemala refrained from regulating its affairs‑‑as Americans chose
to do in their own country. Instead, it
set about constructing additional power plants.
With
Arbenz in power, Washington's McCarthyization of Guatemala escalated. Communists held some low‑level
positions in Arbenz's administration: for
the President, Congress, and the media this sufficed to turn Guatemala into a
"beachhead for Soviet Communism" in the Americas. The U.S. continued the arms embargo and
twisted the arms of other Western democracies to do the same. At the same time, the U.S. supplied arms and
money to the democracy's foes. In
desperation, after years of vainly trying to purchase arms in the West, Arbenz
decided to buy some arms from Czechoslovakia, thereby clinching the witch‑hunters'
case against the Guatemalan Spring.
The
Eisenhower administration came to power in 1953. It wasted little time carrying Truman's Guatemalan policies to
their logical conclusion of forcibly overthrowing the democracy. The final act, planned and bankrolled by the
CIA, involved a 1954 invasion of Guatemala by a small band of mercenaries and
disaffected oligarchs. Because they
could not prevail over the Guatemalan army on their own, their invasion was
boosted by bombing of the capital with planes flown by American pilots, a CIA‑operated
radio station, and bribes given to Guatemalan generals by the United States'
ambassador. The invasion was preceded
by the stationing of long‑range U.S. bombers in Nicaragua; apparently, a
nuclear warning to the Soviet Union to refrain from counteracting America's
Central American policies.19
Arbenz
resigned. For a few days, the American
ambassador played the role of a de facto Guatemalan president. Through a variety of tactics (including
intimidation and bribes), he installed the man chosen by the CIA to lead the
coup, Carlos Castillo Armas, as Guatemala's new ruler.
Typically, President Eisenhower's speech writers
misled their countrymen about the true nature of the Guatemalan Spring:
The people of Guatemala, in a magnificent
effort, have liberated themselves from the shackles of international Communist
direction and reclaimed their right for self‑determination . . . I pay
tribute to the historic demonstration of devotion to the cause of freedom given
by the people of Guatemala and their leaders.26e
There is no
reference here to the people of the CIA or UFCO. No mention of the "number of close connections" between the Eisenhower administration and
UFCO, "beginning with Secretary of State Dulles, whose law firm . . .
numbered UFCO among its clients."27d No acknowledgment of the dirty psychological warfare, complete
with bribes, arms embargoes, and intimidations. No forecast of the likeliest outcome of this "liberation": decades of human rights abuses "as
appalling as any in the hemisphere."27e No mention of nuclear brinkmanship. No mention of risking a rift on this issue
with Britain and France.26f,32
No mention of the fact that Guatemalans have never been as free as they
had been during the nine years of their mid‑century Spring. No attempt to prove a Stalinist direction;
on the contrary, the Soviets seemed to have regarded the October Revolution as
a "petty bourgeois" democracy.28e Nor, when talking about regained freedom,
could Mr. Eisenhower mean freedom to speak without fear, organize political
parties, or read Dostoyevsky‑‑which was brought to an end in 1954;
but freedom to starve, be exploited, shot, and discriminated against‑‑which
was reinstated.
So much
for intelligence and candor in high places.
A truer assessment appeared elsewhere:
Deep down everyone in Guatemala knows that
Communism was not the issue. Feudalism
was the issue, and those who profited from feudalism won.26g
In the 36
years which followed (1954‑1990), Guatemala has shown greater respect for
U.S. interests than it had shown during its brief democratic interlude. Shortly after assuming power, Castillo Armas
dispossessed 100,000 families of their newly‑acquired lands, returning
these lands to UFCO and other rich landowners.
(By 1970, UFCO changed its name to United Brands, Inc.27f) The oil and timber concessions which Arevalo
and Arbenz denied American corporations were granted. In time, the number of thriving American corporations climbed
into the dozens. The government was
anxious to create an ideal business climate.
For instance, American corporations in Guatemala were living in the
executive's dreamland‑‑a strike‑free environment in which
intransigent labor leaders were routinely incarcerated, tortured, and killed.
The price
of this favorable business climate was onerous. Today, Central American societies and nations are even more
polarized than they were in the mid‑1950s, with the opposition even more
anti‑American than before. The
Guatemalan Spring was largely a middle class affair; since then, many less
educated peasants have joined the conflict.
To one well‑meaning American official, at least, the best hope is
recurrence of the Guatemalan Spring.
Surveying the spreading reprisals, massacres, and tortures, he commented
in 1980: "What we'd give to have
an Arbenz now."33
Though
the price paid by ordinary Americans was burdensome enough, the heaviest toll
was exacted from the Guatemalan people.
Arevalo's constitution and the rule of law are gone; instead the country
has been turned into a slaughterhouse, alternating from 1954 to 1990 between
periods of bloodshed and relative calm.
Since 1954, "state terrorism" has been institutionalized in
Guatemala, the oligarchy and military waging "open warfare against all reformist
elements."31d
Intermittently throughout the last 36 years, government‑backed
organizations like The Death Squadrons and An Eye for an Eye were
terrorizing the vast majority.
Communists were assassinated without trial, as were outspoken liberals,
clergymen, union leaders, intellectuals, anyone else the military and oligarchs
harbored suspicion against, as well as countless innocent bystanders.
By 1983,
all this "spiral of progovernment and antigovernment violence" led
"the country to the most extreme state of violence, to wit, the
establishment of a reign of terror.
This constituted a weapon of social repression used against unions,
opposition groups, universities, political parties, cooperatives, leagues of
peasants and the Church; in other words, against all the institutions and
groups critical of the Government."34a In 1983, members of these groups were being
murdered at an average rate of 35 per day.
There were then about 240,000 political refugees and exiles abroad, and
the number of people who had to leave their homes and re‑settle elsewhere
in Guatemala may have been as high as one million. These figures constituted, respectively, 3.3 and 13.7 percent of
all Guatemalans. There was "the
daily appearance, throughout the country, of mutilated bodies with signs of
having suffered brutal tortures before being machinegunned to death."34b The total death toll from political violence
from 1954 to 1983 was estimated at over 40,000 lives, or one out of 200
Guatemalans. By early 1989, the country
averaged five daily murders and kidnapings. By late 1990, the U.S. continued
to finance the army despite its participation
in suppressing and killing. . . . Until the army is drastically reformed and
reduced, electoral politics will be a cruel game perpetrated on the people of
Guatemala to assuage the consciences of those who supply arms and money to the
army . . . . Despite the facade of
Guatemalan democracy, teachers, students, workers and untold number of rural
indians continue to be kidnaped and murdered, their assassins never to be
tried.35
Many
victims were innocent civilians. The
Army's fight against the guerrillas, according to the Organization of American
States, in reality was often directed at the peasants. On June 6, 1982, for example, in one village
"the Army rounded up all the families, tied them up and put them in a
house which they then burned, killing all 200 people inside."34c By late 1990, "some 500 communities,
their fields, and nearby forests have been burned and leveled to deprive left‑wing
insurgents of recruits, food, and shelter."36
Despite
the relative calm and democratic facade of the late 1980s,' U.S. foreign policy
spelled the virtual end of social progress in Guatemala. UFCO and other landowners got back their
idle lands, thereby restoring one‑fifth of Guatemala's 1954 population to
landlessness, economic dependence, and destitution. The literacy campaign and labor laws were written off. Full‑time child labor, often beginning
at eight years of age, was near universal in rural areas. Half the nation's children went on dying
before reaching their fifth birthday.25a In 1989, farm workers were making the country's minimum wage‑‑$1.75
a day‑‑and were still employed in slave‑like conditions.
It is
interesting to compare Guatemala's stationary misery to social advances in
Costa Rica. A few cold statistics would
suffice. In 1960, 7 percent of all
Costa Rican infants died before their first birthday; by 1981, this figure had
declined to 1.9 percent. During the
same period, infant mortality in Guatemala declined too, but at a slower pace
(9.2 to 6.4 percent). From 1970 to
1980, maternal death rates in Costa Rica steeply declined; in Guatemala they
rose. In 1981 Costa Rica, the principal
causes of death were cancer and heart disease.
In Guatemala they were the maladies of poverty and neglect: infectious, parasitic, and intestinal
diseases, influenza, and pneumonia.37 (Unfortunately, in the 1980s, a large foreign debt, pressures
from Western business interests, and a shift towards plutodemocracy contributed
to a rise in Costa Rican hunger, infant mortality, and other negative
indicators of the quality of life.38)
A more
disturbing comparison involves totalitarian Cuba‑‑conventionally
viewed as a notable failure of American foreign policies, and feudal Guatemala‑‑a
success story. In some ways, even
before drastic reductions in Soviet aid came into effect, Cubans under Castro
were worse off than Guatemalans. They
were, for example, subject to more thoroughgoing indoctrination and meddling in
some of their private affairs. Their
centralized, inefficient economy merely shifted its unwholesome dependence on
one country (the U.S.) to another (the USSR).
Also, the average Cuban was better off than the average Guatemalan even
before Castro's rise to power. But
these differences were more than offset, in my opinion, by more significant
advances in social conditions in postrevolutionary Cuba than in re‑feudalized
Guatemala
By the
early 1980s, Cuba had moved towards a more equitable distribution of income.39a Considerable progress had been made in life
expectancy, social security, welfare, assistance to the aged and handicapped,
the status of women, pervasive administrative corruption40, and
nutritional levels. Medical and dental
care were free. Education up to ninth
grade was compulsory; secondary education was free. The 30 percent illiteracy rate was wiped out. Since 1970, infant mortality has been the
lowest in Latin America. Many
infectious diseases like malaria had been completely eradicated. In short, though Cuba in the 1980s was
unfree, it "has shown itself to be notably efficient in meeting the basic
needs of the population, especially of those sectors that were the most
disadvantaged prior to the revolution"39b (that is, the vast
majority).
In making
this comparison, I certainly do not wish to imply that totalitarianism is
better than democracy. I believe that
democracy, had it been given a chance in Cuba, would have done better. Had the U.S. provided Arevalo and Arbenz
with the kind of aid that the Soviet Union has given to Cuba, or had the U.S.
merely granted Guatemalan reformers the same freedom of actions it gave their
Mexican and Costa Rican counterparts, the average Guatemalan today would have
been freer, in every sense of the word, than the average Cuban. The point I wish to make is this: in Guatemala our foreign policies triumphed,
in Cuba they failed. As a result,
though both Guatemalans and Cubans were unfree, the average Cuban‑‑as
long as his country was able to withstand American attempts of military,
economic, and political strangulation‑‑was better off.
This last
point brings me to a dreadful question which I have never thought of before,
and, which, just a few years ago, I would have been loath to consider. We are all familiar by now with the such
costs of communism as dreariness, quiet desperation, and anti‑individualism. One gruesome feature of communism's first
few decades is avoidable deaths. In the
Stalin's USSR, for example, estimates ranged from 20 to 100 millions, or
roughly 20 percent of total population; in Tibet, one million, or 17
percent. What then have been the costs
of American policies in Guatemala?
Again, let
us ignore the refugees; the half‑starved, illiterate, terrorized, and
brutalized children and adults in their one‑room, windowless shacks; the
fear that engulfs everything and everyone; the burning of books. Let us focus instead only on the number of
dead. As we have seen, the first,
shallow layer of the communal grave comprised well over 40,000 political
murders. But we must not stop
here. With American aid, or at least
without American intervention, there is every reason to believe that in
Guatemala, as in Costa Rica and Cuba, death rates would have gradually gone
down; needless to say, there was absolutely no reason for Guatemalan children
to have only an even chance of making it past their fifth birthday. An anti‑malaria campaign, a bit more
food, vaccination, sanitation, and a few such simple steps would have worked
wonders. American policies in Guatemala
killed most victims indirectly, through neglect and exploitation. It is impossible therefore to assess the
exact number of needless deaths. Let us
settle then on the highly conservative estimate that American policies cost on
average, from 1945 to 1990, 10,000 premature deaths a year. That is, 10,000 human beings who could have
lived to old age but did not because of exploitation and neglect. For 46 years, that would amount to 460,000
avoidable deaths, or some 5 percent the current population. Until freedom returns, this number will
obviously continue to rise.
Guatemala, let me again assure the reader, is not the exception. </