Guatemala 1954

   During the early 1950s a new reform candidate in Guatemala emerged as a man of the people. His name was Jacobo Arbenz. Guatemala was ruled previously but military dictators and had largely been a servant of foreign corporations, especially the United Fruit Company. Arbenz was democratically elected and this was seen as a model of successful democracy in Latin America, as a triumph for the people of Guatemala. The biggest issue in Guatemala at the time was the problem of land ownership. Only three percent of the population owned seventy percent of the land in Guatemala. And yes, United Fruit Company was one of the largest owners of land in Guatemala.
   During the election process, Arbenz was speaking to the poor, promising that he would put into action policies that would help the destitute to get out of their desperation, to have a chance at life.  So many in Guatemala, like most other so-called "less-developed countries", are born into poverty. They are born into desperation just as their parents were and their children were sure to be. Upon election, Arbenz declared that he would implement a comprehensive land reform, a reform that redistributes the land to ensure that even the most poor had a piece of land to live on. The land would be divided up amongst the people of Guatemala and not controlled by very few. The bottom line was that United Fruit could not let Arbenz's ideas spread. United Fruit was pulling in huge profits from Columbia, Costa Rica, Panama, Santo Domingo, Cuba, Jamaica, and Nicaragua in addition.
   United Fruit, with help from the US government and the US media launched a huge smear campaign on Arbenz and Guatemala. They essentially convinced the US population that Arbenz was a puppet of Russia and a Communist satellite threat in Central America. The campaign was very successful, as they normally are. None of what was said was true but it worked nonetheless. In 1954, the CIA - working on behalf of United Fruit - orchestrated a coup in Guatemala. American fighters flew in and dropped bombs on Guatemala while the CIA trained guerrillas fought from the ground (a modern example or comparison is the NATO-led coup in Libya last year). The democratically elected Arbenz was assassinated and his ideas were suppressed.
  Arbenz was replaced by the US chosen Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas who turned out to be a ruthless dictator. Surprise, surprise. The new government of Guatemala owed their position of power to United Fruit. As you could guess all the nationalist and reform legislation put in place by Arbenz was reversed. The first thing to go was the land reform. United Fruit kept control of their massive plantations and pieces of land. The government abolished the newly created taxes on interest and dividends for foreign investors. Then the new government began to violently repress.
   In the ensuing years, decades, the military government that was put into power by the United States arrested, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of thousands. Most of these were people that were sympathetic to Arbenz or his policies. Tagged as "communists", these ordinary civilians were often kidnapped, tortured and then murdered by CIA trained death squads. These death squads were trained at American created School of the Americas type training facilities. There is no clear number of how many were killed by the following military dictator but estimates start @ 200,000 and are certainly much more than that.
   This type of involvement became the staple of the US in Latin America. As I mentioned in my previous blog about Ecuador, these sort of coups have been orchestrated on a regular basis in Latin America. There is always a common theme to the leader though and I am trying to set the stage for a later blog with this common theme. I should write one about Panama very soon. Thanks for reading. These histories are very important to what is happening around the world today.