Blowback - S2 Bonus 1 - "Red-Handed Sleight of Hand"

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

Guatemala: an origin story, inspiration, and cautionary tale just a few hundred miles from our main story.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In June 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris took a tour of Latin America. On June 7th, Harris delivered a speech during her stay in the Central American Country of Guatemala. As she delivered her remarks, Harris shared the stage with Guatemala's right-wing president Alejandro Giamate. Ahead of Harris' visit, protesters in Guatemala took to the streets to complain about recent actions taken by Giamate. Over the first half of 2021, Giamate has arrested.

prosecutors and activists responsible for the arrest of a previous Guatemalan president on corruption charges. According to Reuters, Secretary of State Tony Blinken placed a call on June 4th to his counterpart in Guatemala to officially express the displeasure of the United States with Giamante's actions. But three days later, Harris was in Guatemala at a podium right alongside Giamante. She didn't say anything about the crackdown on the Guatemalan left and anti-corruption activists over the past few months. Instead, as the voice of America, the U.S. government-funded news agency put it, quote, Harris emphasizes power of hope to keep Latin Americans from migrating to U.S.

I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous track to the United States-Mexical border. Do not come. We, as one of our priorities, will discourage illegal. migration. And I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back. Welcome to Blowback. I'm Noah Colwyn, and welcome to the first bonus episode of season two. Now, this episode is going to be a brief overview of the American government's successful 1954 covert plot to thwart the Guatemalan revolution and to overthrow Guatemala's

left-wing leader, Akobo Arbenz. Now, this season of our show is about Cuba. But as we talk about in our main story episodes, the Guatemalan coup in the 1950s was a significant influence on how the United States went about trying to stop the Cuban Revolution less than a decade later. It also helps explain a bit about why the leaders of the Cuban Revolution made the choices they did, why the Cuban Revolution radicalized, and why the moderates in the bunch were dismissed and eventually discredited. And perhaps it also explains a bit why, as we're reminded all the time in the U.S., certain political freedoms were curtailed in Cuba. And furthermore, Guatemala offers a counter-example to the story in Cuba. As the historian Greg Grandin has noted, Guatemala is where

death squads, people practiced in the art of disappearing and murdering political dissidents, were created in the 1960s. It's the story of a neo-colony that was forced to stick to the American script, rather than be allowed to determine its own future. What came after the overthrow of Arben's became carnage, destruction, and misery for most Guatemalans, a fight for dignity and freedom that continues to this very day. In the first half of the 20th century, few countries had it as bad as Guatemala. Sandwiched between Mexico, El Salvador, Belize, and both oceans, Guatemala was a center of the Maya civilization in the pre-Columbian world. But, much as they had done in Cuba, colonial powers reorganized Guatemala to suit their own needs. In the following centuries of

Spanish rule, followed by American corporate domination, Guatemala developed a system of plantation agriculture as its structure of economy. There were poor indigenous peasants who worked on coffee or fruit fincas or plantations. There was a small and restricted middle class in the Urban Corps, and then a rigid military hierarchy keeping it all in place for whichever colonial power was calling the shots. And, of course, there was a sliver of a domestic-born non-military elite. By the 20th century, although Guatemala had technically been an independent republic since 1847, it was the country's land-owning class that still held all the power. We'll start with the dictatorship of General Jorge Ubiko, which lasted from 1931 until 1944.

Peasants in Ubiko's Guatemala worked on these Fincas or coffee plantations for between 5 and 20 cents a day. Vagrancy laws required indigenous Guatemalans at least 100 days a year to work on the Fincas for a fixed price of 5 cents a day. Decree 1816 from 1932 effectively legalized the murder of indigenous Guatemalans. The life expectancy for an indigenous Guatemalan during the Ubiko years was under 40 years old, whereas it was 50 years old. Whereas it was 50 years old for the white Ladino ethnic majority. Nationwide, the literacy rate was about 30%. For the indigenous population, it was between 1 and 10%. Essential parts of Guatemalan society were not controlled by the Guatemalan government, you know, let alone the people. The railroads that transported the coffee were

owned by the Americans. The United Fruit Company, which now goes by the name Chiquita, absolutely dominated Guatemalan political and economic life as the journalist Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer have thoroughly documented. This was hardly unique to Guatemala. United Fruit and other American conglomerates like Dole had successfully sunk their hooks into Honduras, Colombia, and, of course, Cuba. Now, this neo-colonial corporate racket was incredibly lucrative. According to one 1936 estimate over the previous 37 years,

United Fruit shareholders received an annual return of 17.75 percent, several times higher than the market average. Furthermore, according to Schlesinger and Kissinger, quote, in 1936, the United Fruit Company signed a 99-year agreement with General Ubiko to open a second plantation. Ubiko granted the company the kind of concessions to which it had become accustomed, total exemption from internal taxation, duty-free importation of all necessary goods, and a guarantee of low wages. Ubiko, in fact, insisted that laborers be paid a daily wage of no more than 50 cents in order to keep other Guatemalan workers from demanding better pay. During the 1930s and 40s, incompetent management of the Finkas and the Guatemalan economy

more generally led to the overthrow of Ubiko in 1944. On July 1st, 1944, Ubiko officially resigned after it was clear that the Americans were not going to give him help to back him up against the military fomented revolt against him. According to the historian, Piero Glahesus, U.S. officials were beginning to see the dictator as an anachronism. They considered his handling of the crisis ineffectual, and they were confident that should Ubiko be replaced, his successors would be friendly to Washington. Now, it was a really decrepit military regime by this point, and Glehesis has a pretty good anecdote that shows how that was. Quote, when another general started to ask Ubiko to stay, the dictator cut him short. Shut up, he exclaimed, and he left.

The first act of the new rulers, a three-man junta, was to get drunk. Ubiko, for what it's worth, died in New Orleans, two years later in 1946. Now, why did the U.S. let Ubiko go down? As Glahissus said, whoever would replace Ubiko wasn't likely to be a leftist of any stripe. Ubiko had done the repression part of his job well, and fledgling attempts to organize unions and Communist Party cadres had been snuffed out effectively in the preceding two decades. But while the overthrow of Ubiko was bloodless, his successor's reign did not end so smoothly.

The incompetent three-man junta that ran to the country was dominated by one of its members, General Ponce, who after his appointment, on July 4th, persuaded the Guatemalan Congress to make him the country's provisional president. Though unions and dissident parties were formed for the first time after Ubiko's overthrow, Ponce made it clear that he expected to win the presidential election scheduled for the coming fall. And Ponce bust in indigenous Guatemalans from the countryside, hoping to intimidate white Ladino Guatemalans into supporting him out of a racist panic. On October 1st, Ponce's government assassinated the editor of the leading opposition newspaper.

With elections just around the corner, the heads of rival political parties, activists, and others had begun to hide in the embassies of sympathetic or at least neutral governments. Evening, October 19th, 1944, a group of army officers coordinating with student and civilian activists distributed weapons to, according to, Glehesis, between 2,000 and 3,000 volunteers. A Salvadoran diplomat, quoted in the Miami Herald the following week, observed that the munitions used to depose the Guatemalan junta had been supplied by the United states, and that, quote, the present movement of liberation in Guatemala is not a military coup, having enlisted all the best civilian elements in the country, as well as the younger

officers of the armed forces, tired of being the pawns in the eternal play for power on the part of the 60-odd generals who have hitherto formed the ruling clique of Guatemala. This diplomat, a former president of the Consular Society of Miami, was not a revolutionary. But his judgment of Ubiko, Ponce, and America's hand in Guatemala was scathing. As to the specific case of Guatemala, he said, it is generally agreed in that country that Ubiko owed his coming into power 14 years ago in 1930 to the intervention of the American diplomatic representative at the time, Sheldon Whitehouse.

During 14 years, Liberty was a dead letter in Guatemala, and Ubiko's Gestapo worked far more efficiently than Himmler's. If that name, Sheldon Whitehouse, is familiar, it's because his grandson is currently a Democratic senator from Rhode Island. In 2016, White House was photographed in his office with a photo of FDR, quote, with a hand-signed note to White House's grandfather, the American enabler of the Guatemalan Himmler. As you just heard, the late October Revolution in 1944 that led to the ouster of Ponce and the dissolution of the junta was led by young military officers.

Two guys in particular, Francisco Arana and Acobo Arbenz. These two men essentially paved the way for the democratic election of Juan Jose Arevalo, then an agricultural professor who had been living in Argentina and had been brought in as the unity candidate. Arevalo was kind of a weirdo,

but he was one of the very few educated Guatemalans with any connection to political activity who could be presented as a plausible face for Guatemalan democracy. Without political parties under Ubiko's rule, there had been no path for a moderate to emerge, let alone an actual left-winger. Arrevelo promoted his own doctrine, which he called spiritual socialism, which in retrospect was less a cohesive ideology than an attempt to forge a middle path. Near the beginning of Arevalo's tenure, he would make a secret deal, however, that would hang over his head the whole time that he was president.

Not long after his inauguration in 1945, Arevalo was in a car accident while driving with his American mistress. Before he had fully recovered, and before it was clear for how long Arrevalo would be incapacitated, Francisco Arana and the dominant political party, the P.A.R. struck a deal. Once Arevalo's two terms were up, in 1951, it would be Arana's country to run. So, Arevalo was in power for seven years. or so. And here's his government in brief. Rampant corruption persisted, although there were tentative steps taken toward democracy. There was the creation of a social security program that was the

envy of Central America. And naturally, there were at least a couple dozen coups during his tenure, or at least attempted coups. For example, from Bitter Fruit by Schlesinger and Kinser. Quote, late in 1948, Aravalo declared a state of national emergency when a large shipment of arms was found in railroad cars at Puerto Barrios, the Atlantic terminus of the Fruit Company's rail line. Soon afterward, a group of disgruntled exiles attempted to depose the government by invading from Mexico.

Now, the key thing in Guatemala, as in Cuba, was land reform. In an, quote, unusually candid, a Revelo speech found by Piero Glehesis from 1945, the president pretty well lays out his narrow vision to dealing with this problem. quote, in Guatemala, there is no agrarian problem. The problem is that the peasants have lost their desire to till the soil because of the

attitudes and politics of the past. My government will motivate them, but without resorting to any measures that hurt other classes. As the State Department would note later on, quote, except for the passage of compulsory land rental legislation in 1950, no positive action was taken by the Arevalo administration in the field of land reform during his seven-year tenure. Now, what was the American response to the Revolution of 1944, punishing Arevalo and the new Guatemalan government? We only gave Guatemala aid when it directly benefited us, and the United Fruit Company, which held significant sway

with the State Department, instructed them not to support any moderates in the country. And American elites looked disdainfully on Arevalo's spiritual socialism, but they largely ignored the country, except to evaluate whether it was communist infiltrated. Under Arevalo, the Ladino-European descended Guatemalans who lived in the country's urban core had gained substantial political freedoms in advances in social welfare. But the country's wealth still came from commodities, and the fincas, the plantations, were still in the hands of the rich, and without land reform, the mostly indigenous rural peasantry, who worked on those fincas, still lived in brutal squalor.

By the summer of 1949, with less than two years left on the clock before Arana was to take over, the pressure was getting to President Arevalo. Referencing Arana, the Guatemalan president said, in Guatemala there are two presidents, and one of them has a machine gun with which he is always threatening. The pact of the ravine, which was the name of the secret deal between Arana, the P.A.R. and Arevalo was broken in July 1949. Arevalo and Arbenz preempted a coup threat from Arana, and Arana was killed in the countryside in an ambush.

Arbenz didn't likely have a hand in Arana's death, but Arevalo surely knew what was coming. As a consequence, the 1950 election is basically Arbenz's to win. At the end of 1949, as Arevalo was exiting the Guatemalan government, the American ambassador to Guatemala, wrote to United Fruit President Sam Zimurray about the, quote, all-out barrage in the U.S. on the bad treatment of American capital in Guatemala. This perspective was well represented in the American press. In the summer of 1950, prior to the Guatemalan election, the New York Times ran a multi-part series on, quote, Russian penetration in Central America that was syndicated in newspapers across the country. In the Des Moines Register, in Iowa, for example, it ran under the all-caps heading

Reds in Latin America, with the headline, other Central American lands woo U.S. firms, Guatemala harries them. According to the New York Times, Guatemala's improved labor protections effectively discriminated against the American companies that owned Guatemala's land, railways, and ports. Though Arevalo insisted to the Times in an interview that these were labor matters between employees and employers. The Times came up with what it called, quote, a classic example of the kind of villainy into which Guatemala had descended. An owner of a bar in a restaurant told this story. He had a bartender who got drunk on the job. Catching the employee red-handed one day, he dismissed him. But as a precaution first had the man

examined by a government physician, the man was able to weave to his feet. The verdict was a classic. Your man is obviously very drunk, the physician said, but it is apparent that he is willing to work and would say so if he could speak coherently. As he is able to stand, it cannot be said without a doubt that he is unable to work. As it cannot be said without a doubt, I cannot say it. The employer threw up his hands and rewarded the employee for the repeated delinquency with four months wages. That's definitely a very real thing that happened. But it was written in the New York Times that way. On November 15th, 1950, Arbenz was elected president, defeating the candidate of the right, Miguel Idigoras Fuentes, in a landslide. Speaking at

Arbenz's swearing in, Aravalo said this on his way out, addressing the end of World War II and the transfer of power that had supposedly taken place. Roosevelt lost the war. The real victor was Hitler. Little caricatures of Hitler sprang up and multiplied in Europe, and here in the Americas. It is my personal opinion that the contemporary world is moved by the ideas that served as the foundation

on which Hitler rose to power. The Guatemalan Revolution, and specifically Arbenz's presidency, heralded reforms in many aspects of Guatemalan life. But the biggest of them all, of course, was the land reform legislation of 1952. Decree 900, enacted June 1952,

hit American and elite interests in Guatemala hard. Quote, all lands to be taken were to be paid for in 25-year bonds issued by the government bearing a 3% interest rate, Schlesinger and Kinzerite in Bitter Fruit. The valuation of the land was to be determined from its declared taxable worth as of May 1952, a provision that deeply disturbed some targets of the law, especially United Fruit, which had undervalued its land for years in order. order to reduce its tax liability. The historian Max Gordon notes that land reform records were

destroyed in subsequent years. So there are varying estimates of its side. Here's Gordon, quote, a 1965 report by an agency of the Organization of American States estimated that about 100,000 peasants actually received land in the 18 months that the law was in operation. About 1.5 million acres were distributed for which the government paid 8.3 million in indemnities. Credit to land reform beneficiaries and other small farmers amounted to nearly $12 million. Furthermore, according to Gordon, among the lands expropriated were 1,700 acres owned by President Arbenz and 1,200 acres owned by foreign minister Guillermo Torrello. Initially, the American government and business interests were ambivalent about Arbenz, but only because Guatemala seemed a very small problem

relative to the international anti-communist to-do list for the Truman administration. In fact, Trubin had previously scrapped one CIA Guatemala coup plan, codename P.B. Fortune, on the grounds that it would be really obvious that the Americans were doing all this. Now, Arbenz wasn't a communist, but he shared power and worked with them, which was just as bad the Americans, especially the newly established central intelligence agency. Never mind that the Soviet Union had no real interest in Guatemala. In fact, the USSR only made one official diplomatic visit to Guatemala in 1953. Earlier, I said that there wasn't an organized communist movement in Guatemala. Well, now there was in the form of the PGT. The thing is, what the Americans

were now saying is that this was a Soviet Communist Party and Guatemala. had become a Soviet satellite. Of course, the evidence for this was the Guatemalan land reform and the role of the PGT in making it happen. And well into 1954, Guatemalan reforms continued a pace. On June 7, 1954, the Guatemalan Congress approved the first income tax in the country's history, an advancement that would have been able to fund further reforms. Arbenz would never get to implement it. The church, anti-communists, landowners, military men, Guatemala's conservative elements, after the Guatemalan revolution in 1944,

were their own worst enemies. Piero Glehesses writes that, quote, lacking popular support, the sions of the upper class had little alternative but to seek a foreign patron. The first time that Guatemalan military officer Carlos Castillo Armas came to the attention of the CIA was in January, 1950, Castillo Armus was a protege of Francisco Arana, and after Arana's death, Castillo Armas attempted an uprising that, according to Glehesus, quote, would hardly deserve a footnote, were it not that in

1953, he was selected by the CIA to lead the liberation of Guatemala. Armus was arrested in 1950 because of his failed extremely wimpy coup, evidently, but he was released the following year. In August 1953, a year after the Guatemalan government's land reform with Decree 900, Washington sent a request to the Guatemalan embassy asking for a recommendation for someone to lead a movement to take out Arbenz. We decided that among poor starters, an embassy official later said, Castillo Armas was probably the best. The following month, a senior State Department official approached the head of the CIA, Walter Bedell

Smith, and he told him. told Smith that he thought a CIA organized coup was the only solution in Guatemala. Smith nodded and smiled, and I got the impression that the plan was already underway. 1954, U.S. officials meet with Guatemalan military leaders. A coup d'etat is devised. The CIA's Directorate of Planning, the division in charge of covert operations, fully handled Operation P.B. success, as it was called. The agency's deputy director of Plans, Frank Wisner, who was also a key player in the December 1953 overthrow of Iranian leader Mohamed Mossadegh, was in total control of the Guatemala plan and directly reporting to Alan Dulles.

Word had gotten around in Guatemala right-wing circles that the CIA was looking for a face on a coup, and by that September, Castillo Armas was told by the CIA that he was the contest winner. Now, Castillo Armas and his band of Liberationistas were only one. one part of the operation. The other two key pieces of the plan were an all-out diplomatic assault, as well as a psychological warfare campaign in the media. The diplomatic assault came in the form of a new U.S. ambassador handpicked by the P.B. success plotters, pistol-packing James Purifoy, who is less of a diplomat and more of a constant whirlwind of headlines and aggression meant to be the State Department's attack dog in Guatemala.

His resume of anti-communist activities in Greece surely didn't give the Guatemalans any comfort either. Over the time of Arbenz's regime, the U.S. produced more than just negative headlines about Arbenz. They prevented Arbenz from buying weapons. The U.S. communicated directly to the Guatemalan military that it would require Arbenz's removal if they wanted such aid to resume.

In 1953, the American Deputy Chief of the American Deputy Chiefs of Mission in Guatemala wrote back to the State Department that, quote, Guatemalan military officers may not yet be said to have abandoned their often reported loyalty to Arbenz, but at the moment they are wondering and speculating more than hitherto about his actions. In March 1954, the Americans embarrassed the Guatemalan government at an inter-American conference that they organized in Garacas, supposedly revealing Soviet subversion in the hemisphere. The conference was operated in coordination. with the United States Information Agency

and propaganda was pumped out around the world and within Guatemala meant to emphasize how isolated the country had become. According to Pierre O'Glahesse, quote, even before the conference opened, the psychological pressure was brutal. Caracas only heightened the Guatemalan army's fears.

Now, despite a new illegal U.S. naval blockade, which was prompted by constant and false threats of communist support, Guatemala amazingly was able to obtain weapons from Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1954, not with the Soviets directly. The arrival of the alfam, the ship carrying the weapons in Guatemala, and the successful trickery of Arbenz and his deputies in surprising the U.S. about it, it set the more active phase of P.B. success into motion. Now that the U.S. believed that these Czech weapons were

proof enough of communistic influence. The final key ingredient, but by no means the last or least important, was the covert propaganda campaign. The news of the Czech weapons arrival became useful propaganda to be pumped out through Vos de la Liberation. The clandestine radio service set up by the CIA's David Atley Phillips, previously an actor and magazine editor in Chile, fake air attacks, massive leafletting campaigns, and on top of that there were the orchestrated defections and the departures of foreign officials, widely publicized by the opposition press, which was owned and supported by Arbenz's opponents. On June 4, 1954, Guatemala's head of the Air Force defected.

Not long before that, Honduras's ambassador to the country made an ostentatious exit. On June 15, 1954, Eisenhower officially signed off on the operation. Castillo Armas was to proceed. On the eve of the invasion, Alan Dulles personally secured the expulsion of New York Times reporter Sidney Grusen, helping to ensure that Americans would only get the CIA sanctioned story on what happened. Guatemalan rebels, dissatisfied with Red Guatemala, had done what they needed to do all on their own. On June 17, 1954, Castillo Armas and his 250 Liberationistas crossed the border into Guatemala, and all the local strong men were watching quite closely what was happening with hopeful eyes.

Though the Guatemalan army wasn't anything special, it could have stopped the Liberationistas, pretty quickly, but Arbenz wasn't willing to mount a full defense. For example, putting guns into the hands of civilians, as they had during the overthrow of Ponce a decade earlier, might be cast publicly as arming citizen Soviets, like in Kami Russia. And even if Arbenz could defeat Castillo Armas, as he said he could publicly, he also said privately that he knew what the U.S. could do to his government and to the Guatemalan people should he keep up a fight. A memorandum from Alan Dulles, head of the CIA, to Eisenhower, summing up the state of affairs in Guatemala, said that as of June 20th, Castillo Armas' revolt was in jeopardy. Aerial bombardments were needed

to finish the job, and two days after that, Eisenhower agreed to replace the planes that Castillo Armas had lost. Oh, right, I forgot to mention. That same day, June 22nd, both of the rebel planes, yes, both of the rebel planes had been shot down. Although the psychological image, of the plains's presence was substantial, because of the non-existent Guatemalan Air Force and the propaganda, Glehassas writes, quote, in material terms, the major achievement of the rebel air force was the sinking of a British freighter on June 27th. A separate rebel bombing of a Honduran town near the border with Guatemala, which was a bombing mistake, the guys just missed their target, this was used by the Honduran government to publicly blame Guatemala. Over the course of that week,

Senior officers in the Guatemalan Army withheld information from Arbenz. For example, the Army Chief of Staff visited the front lines, saw the soldiers wouldn't fight because they had no morale to, because they thought what was the point of fighting against the U.S., and so the Army Chief of Staff didn't tell Arbenz because he later told Glehesis, what could you do with the U.S. coming? When Arbenz got good information, though, he realized that he was out of options. His failsafe had been to go to the U.N. to make the public case that the U.S. was waging a covert coup against him. But the Security Council froze him out. Without options and increasingly

scared and dispirited population, Arbenz resigned on June 27th and then left for exile in Mexico. After all these tense weeks, the young Argentine doctor Che Guevara, who was in Guatemala City, observed the reaction of the urban center, previously ground zero of socialism in Latin America. As a testament to how cowed the Guatemalan people had been by the propaganda campaign, the press campaign, and the military and diplomatic offensives against Arbenz, when Castillo Aramis arrived in the city, Guevara wrote, quote, the people really applauded him. Power was handed off to Arbenz's former deputy, a man named Diaz,

who was immediately disallowed by the American and, official Purifoy from having any role in what would come next. There are five provisional governments in 11 days. After Castillo Armas' parody of an invasion defeats Guatemala's parody of an army, he forms a new government with the Guatemalan military leadership, a new junta on July 2nd, 1954. A week after the resignation of Akobo Arbenz, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State,

gave a radio address on the recent events in Guatemala. Let me assure the people of Guatemala, as peace and freedom are restored to that sister republic, the government of the United States will continue to support the just aspirations of the Guatemalan people. A prosperous and progressive Guatemala is vital to a healthy hemisphere. The United Fruit Company had for years been represented by Sullivan and Cromwell, the law firm of John Foster Dulles.

The United States pledges itself to support not merely political opposition to communism, but to help to alleviate conditions in Guatemala and elsewhere, which might afford communism and opportunity to spread its tentacles throughout the hemisphere. 1954 was a significant year in anti-colonial struggle, not just from the perspective of John Foster Dulles, but also from some of the emerging revolutionaries whom he would be forced. fighting later in the decade. The battle of D.N. Bienfu in Vietnam had led to the creation of a communist government in the country's north. And in Cuba, according to Tad Schultz, quote,

the CIA intervention in Guatemala had an enormous impact on Fidel Castro. Fidel was then in prison for his attack on the Moncada barracks, and he realized that the U.S. would dislodge any Latin American government that sought to choose its own fate. And Che Guevara had actually been in Guatemala at the time of the counter-revolution. Here's John Lee Anderson from his biography of Guevara. Quote, by the time he arrived in Guatemala to see the country's socialist experiment firsthand, Che seems to have undergone a political conversion. For the first time in his life, he openly identified with a political cause. Despite its many flaws and defects, he told his family, this was the country in which one could breathe the most democratic air in Latin America.

Guevara, like other left-wingers, fled to a foreign embassy, in his case the Argentinian embassy. Having met Montcadistas from Cuba during his time in Guatemala, Che was headed for Mexico City, where Guatemala's fallen left-wing leader, Akobo Arbenz, had also gone, and also where, after Fidel was released from prison by Batista, Che and Fidel would meet the following year. Anti-American sentiment grows in the 50s. Vice President Nixon's goodwill tour, a foreign policy disaster. Angry crowds meet him at every stop. What are they angry about? One

answer? Nixon, your government is responsible for the tragedy in Guatemala. Until the Guatemalan revolution of 1944, Piero Glehesas writes, Guatemalan military officers were the instrument of the dictators. After the coup of 54, the officers had become the bride of the upper class. That August, Guatemalan military officers were booed at a parade by pretty much the entire Guatemalan public. Quote, it was a moment that the Guatemalan officers neither forgot nor forgave, Glehesis concluded, after interviewing more than half a dozen Guatemalan military leaders. Henceforth, they vowed, they might be cursed, but never again would they be jeered. Over the following two years, Castillo Armas would set about reversing as many consequential gains

of the Arben's government as possible. The same month the officers were booed, they announced a new decree allowing for the detention of people on a military blacklist. According to an official CIA history of P.B. Success, written in the 1990s, quote, Guatemala quickly came to depend on handouts from the United States as foreign reserves dropped from $42 million at the end of 1953 to $3.4 million a year and a half later. On May Day, 1956, workers booed government ministers off a stage and the state of the state. The following month, U.S. embassy officials reported that, quote, the Guatemalan Communist Party was well on its way toward recovery.

On June 25th, the military shot and killed six student protesters, marching on the presidential palace, wounding dozens more. By the time Castillo Armas was assassinated by a member of his own presidential guard in 1958, all but 200 of the original squatters, as the new Guatemalan regime called beneficiaries of the land reform, they'd been chased off their land. Castillo Armas was replaced by General Miguel Idigoras Fuentes, the right-wing candidate whom Arbenz defeated in an election eight years earlier. My husband was assassinated because he's one of the founders of the Mayan uprising,

the ORNG forces, and he'd been in combat for 17 years. I think he was inconvenient to the CIA notion of world communism, even though the Cold War supposedly is over. It's not for the CIA. They interrogated me and burnt my back with cigarettes 111 times. They raped me numerous times. And if that wasn't bad enough, they lowered me into an open pit, saturated with human bodies and swarming with rats.

When they speak out in Guatemala, they're shot. Our government is always covered up for the Guatemalan army. We funded them. We've trained them. them in power. We've kept them in power. The million dollar question is why. And that's what I hope the Congress and Senate will set about to find out. In the early 1960s, as Guatemala remained unequal, underdeveloped, and under the thumb of its army rulers, a guerrilla war emerged. This civil war would last into the 1990s, as the military refused year after year to give in to the demands of

the left, the poor, and the indigenous. In March, 1963, Edigoras was ousted in a coup, started and supported by the Kennedy administration. He immediately murdered eight labor and political leaders by running them over with trucks. The U.S. felt that this guy was not hardcore enough and did not embrace the special forces ethos from the U.S. adequately. From October 1966 to March 1968, Amnesty International estimated that somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 Guatemalans were killed by police, military, death squads, and anti-communist vigilantes, groups that are really all interrelated and in many cases the same people. In the decade to come, these numbers would rise to at least 20,000 in a country whose population at the time was less than New York cities. Bodies were

constantly ending up in rivers and lakes to the point where one area stopped fishing because fishermen were turning up too many human corpses half eaten by the fish. By 1968, the guerrilla movement of the decade was pretty much broken up, if not totally eradicated by this terror campaign. violence in the country would only grow, with 7,000 people reportedly disappearing in the beginning of the 1970s. Earthquakes, murders, and emigration to the United States through a dangerous land journey via Mexico would all increase in the following years. It's worth noting that U.S.-friendly Cuban exiles, those freedom fighters we've heard about this season, who fled Castro, they trained the Guatemalan security forces. In the late 1970s, some in the U.S.

Congress got a little squeamish about the violence that America was supporting, and some laws were passed attempting to limit the amount of money and material that we could give. Ronald Reagan would reverse even this half-hearted slowdown. One big fan of Reagan was Fred Sherwood, a CIA pilot who participated in the overthrow of Arbans, settled in Guatemala, ended up running several factories, owning land, and becoming president of the American Chamber of Commerce. In a Washington Post article from 1982, Sherwood gives a tour of his textile plan. Guatemala has a large labor market and the workers are very good, Sherwood said.

You teach them, and they don't mind doing the same thing day after day for the $4.50 he pays them. What about claims by one peasant labor leader, shown in an interview, that 120 of his people were killed last month? Well, in the first place, I very much question it because I don't think there's been and 120 people of all types assassinated here in the last year. I mean, I'm not counting the peasants.

But anyway, Sherwood continues, if any political figures were killed, it is perhaps because these people are, I think, our enemies. Shortly before Ronald Reagan would become president and renew support for the Guatemalan military, Sherwood said, should we be worried about the death squads?

They're bumping off the commies, our enemies. The death squads, I'm for it. Shit, there's no question. We can't wait till Reagan gets in. And sure enough, when Reagan got in, gaps in the Carter era legislation were exploited, and money began to flow by the millions to our friends in Guatemala, while Reagan told everyone about the evils of communism in Poland. The death toll of the Guatemalan Civil War, overwhelmingly caused by the military, is estimated to be as many as 200,000 people killed.

Pierre O'Glahesus' book Shattered Hope was first published in 1991, and Glehesus' grim assessment of Guatemalan politics still rings true, given the military and the upper class's continued stranglehold over society. Quote, in 1985, the Army organized elections to lend an aura of legitimacy to a regime in which it would retain power, but be relieved of the burden of coping with the economic morassies. into which it had sunk the country. A democratic Guatemala, moreover, would be better able to obtain foreign economic assistance. And so in January 1986, a civilian president was inaugurated. He boasts about Guatemala's new human rights legislation and its new institutions to protect human rights. But the laws are not enforced and the institutions are spineless. Glehess concludes, perhaps someday, the process that the United States crushed in 1954 will resume. Perhaps someday the social reforms that the upper class and the military now

oppose will become possible. And the culture of fear will, again, loosen its grip over the land of Guatemala. A communist conspiracy was invented. Soviet intervention was decried, proclaimed. The CIA armed Castillo Armas. And with the full backing of the CIA, with planes, with arms, Castillo Armas invaded Guatemala from Honduras, and the democratic experiment came to an end in Guatemala. Now, this was done in the name of democracy. I don't know.