United Fruit, CIA, Do Business in Guatemala, Cold War Style: 3) Precursor to Civil War and an Export Model for Anti-Communists a

Comparative politics, Economics and society,, International Relations, Politics, Regional History

fortnight after Jacobo Árbenz Guzman fell on his sword, resigning the presidency of Guatemala, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who had led the so-called “Army of Liberation”—the US-financed and trained rebel force which had invaded the country—was made president of Guatemala’s ruling military junta. Despite Washington’s professed intention to rebuild Guatemala through comprehensive reforms into a “showcase for democracy”, the US’s ongoing preoccupation with the drive to eliminate communism in the region took precedence [Brockett, Charles D. “An Illusion of Omnipotence: U.S. Policy toward Guatemala, 1954-1960.” Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 44, no. 1, 2002, pp. 91–126. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3177112. Accessed 4 Aug. 2020].

Árbenz’s resignation speech 

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Doubling down on communism
America’s ‘Liberator’ for Guatemala however took a blanket approach to the communist witch hunt, his repressive crackdown targeted anyone suspected of opposing his increasingly dictatorial regime. Political opponents, labour leaders, remnants of the Árbenzista peasantry, were all rounded up (over 3,000 were arrested by Castillo Armas and an unknown number liquidated). Non-communists were routinely caught up in the purge, including ordinary farm workers from local agrarian committees. Árbenz’s agrarian land reform system was dismantled, the land appropriated from United Fruit Company (UFCo) was returned to it. Resistance to Castillo Armas’s removal of peasants from their lands acquired during the revolution was met with repression by the regime. Castillo Armas also had to deal with insurrections by disaffected left-wing Ladino officers (remnants of the military remaining loyal to Árbenz and Areválo), fighting a guerrilla insurgency from the highlands (Brockett).

Árbenz and his supporters spent 73 days in asylum in the Mexican Embassy before an inglorious exile  

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Armas’ presidency, which ended in 1957 when he was assassinated by an Árbenz sympathiser, was a disaster for a recovering Guatemala. The fallout from the Armas regime’s soaring debts and entrenched corruption was that it became almost completely dependent on US aid. The deteriorating situation under Ydígoras (the new president) led him to declare a “state of seize” in 1960, suspending civil liberties and establishing military rule. An attempt by a group of dissident military officers to overturn Ydígoras’ increasingly oppressive government triggered a civil war in Guatemala which lasted 34 years and claimed the lives of approximately 200,000 civilians, including a genocidal “scorched earth” policy conducted against the indigenous Q’eqchi Maya community [‘Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, American Republics, Volume V’, Office of the Historian, www.history.state.gov/]

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the Guatemalan junta post-democracy 

“Guatemala as domino” – a blueprint for coups in Latin America and the Caribbean
Post-1954 the US continued to provide Guatemalan security forces with “a steady supply of equipment, training and finance, even as political repression grew ferocious”. The type of practices rehearsed in Guatemala—covert destabilisation operations, death squad killings by professional intelligence agencies—were lessons learnt for dealing with future ‘maverick’ regimes trying to chart a different political and economic path to that acceptable to Washington [Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, (2011)].

The most tragic and wide-reaching legacy of the 1954 Guatemala coup is that it provided a model for future coups and instability in the region set off by a heightened Cold War. The US followed the Guatemala playbook in orchestrating the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by reactionary exiles in 1961 – albeit with a very different outcome. The US’ toppling, with British complicity, of the democratically elected Jagan government in British Guiana in 1964 had familiar reverberations to 1954: Washington’s fear of confronting a communist government in the hemisphere after the Cuban Revolution resulted in “an inflexible and irrational policy of covert subversion towards a moderate PPP government” in British Guiana [Stephen Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story, (2005)]. The CIA and right-wing dissidents within the Brazilian military colluded in a coup which overthrew the liberal government of João Goulart in 1964 (golpe de 64), replacing it with an uncompromising military junta. Washington’s involvement was prompted by Goulart’s plans to nationalise the Brazilian oil industry and other large private businesses. The same techniques and rhetoric were employed in the Dominican Republic coup/counter-coup in 1965. Most notoriously the Guatemalan putsch was to have echoes in the 1973 coup d’état in Chile which violently removed Marxist president, Salvador Allende. This was in response to Allende’s move to nationalise foreign businesses including US-owned copper mines and telecommunications giant I.T.T. US president, Richard Nixon, in fact had already tried to prevent Allende from taking office after the socialist won the Chilean elections fair and square in 1970 [‘Chilean president Salvador Allende dies in coup’, History, www.history.com/].

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 CIA headquarters in Virginia, USA

CIA hit-list for Guatemala
CIA documents declassified in the 1990s reveals lists were compiled as early as 1952 of individuals in the Árbenz government “to (be) eliminated immediately in event of (a) successful anti-Communist coup”. Because the names were deleted during the agency declassification it can’t be verified if any of the assassinations were actually carried through [‘CIA and Assassination: The Guatemala 1954 Documents’, (Edited by Kate Doyle & Peter Kornbluh), The National Security Archive, www.nsarchive2.gwu.edu].

Footnote: the removal of Árbenz from Guatemala didn’t mean the CIA and Washington were done with the deposed president. The CIA continued its campaign to trash the reputation of Árbenz in exile, even though, personally, he was a politically impotent figure by this time. The CIA found it useful to continue to smear Árbenz as a “Soviet agent”, tying him to the ongoing US crusade against communism in the hemisphere [Ferreira, Roberto Garcia. “THE CIA AND JACOBO ARBENZ: HISTORY OF A DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN.” Journal of Third World Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2008, pp. 59–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.og/stable/45194479. Accessed 6 Aug. 2020].

Nixon and Armas

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PostScript: A mea culpa of sorts
Decades later the US government through President Clinton issued an apology, not for the 1954 coup, but for the US’ role in the human rights abuses of the civil war in Guatemala, which slaughtered thousands of civilians. It wasn’t until 2011 that the Guatemalan government (under President Colom) apologised for the “historic crime” against Árbenz and his family [‘Apology reignites conversation about ousted Guatemalan leader’, (Mariano Castillo), CNN, 24-Oct-2011, www.edition.cnn.com; ‘Clinton apology to Guatemala’, (Martin Kettle & Jeremy Lennard), The Guardian, 11-Mar-1999, www.theguardian.com].

US I.T.T. (International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation) entreated the Nixon administration to wage “economic warfare” and take other covert measures against the Allende regime to ensure its ouster from power, ‘Papers Show I.T.T. Urged U.S. to Help Oust Allende’, New York Times, 03-Jul-1972, www.nytimes.com

back in Guatemala, President Armas and the latifundios (rich conservative landowners opposed to the Árbenz agrarian policy) provided a in-synch chorus, echoing the US charges of communist collusion by Árbenz

 

On the Cuban Guerrillero Cultural Icon Trail: Channelling ‘Che’ in Santa Clara

Military history, Popular Culture, Regional History, Travel

Having visited the site of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the Museum that commemorates its triumphant outcome for the Cuban people, our appetite to learn more about “The Revolution” was piqued. The city of Cienfuegos was on our itinerary and as another saga of the war to liberate Cuba from a right-wing dictatorship with US mafiosi connexions was at hand in nearby Villa Clara province, a small detour was in order.

The pueblo of Santa Clara is inextricably woven into the story of Ernesto Guevara and his victory in the decisive battle of the civil war against the Batista regime. Guevara or simply ‘Che’ – the image that launched a million T-shirts, and the man who signed many more million pesos’ worth of Cuban bank notes! – is proudly remembered and commonly revered, especially in this part of Cuba, as two separate Santa Clara monuments testify.

The first is in the centre of the township itself, a monument to the final victory of the war (Battle of Santa Clara, 31st December 1958) when a Cuban battalion under Comandante Che derailed a train carrying government troops, ammunition and heavy weapons, intended to reinforce Batista’s embattled army in Havana.
A portion of the captured train still sits on the site, now part of a monument to the battle which clinched victory for Castro and the Cuban rebels. In Spanish the monument is called
Monumento a la Toma del Tren Blindado (literally “Monument to the Taking of the Armoured Train”)

The other tangible tribute to the legendary Cuban revolutionary líder is more personal, not far from the city is Guevara’s sombre but impressive mausoleum (Mausoleo de Ernesto Guevara). The monument was originally conceived as a memorial to the charismatic maestro guerrillero who was executed and buried in the Bolivian jungle in 1967… thirty years later the Cuban government retrieved his exhumed body and returned it to Santa Clara. The remains of Che and 29 of his fellow guerrilla fighters are interred here in a large burial vault (in area a decent sized lounge room).

The mausoleum remains a popular place to visit for tourists as well as Cubans, there were several big tourist buses and umpteen dozen cars in the parking lot when our group visited. The immediately noticeable feature of the mausoleum building which is set down on a wide patch of land is the extra-large statue of Che. Cast in bronze, it is 22 feet high and characteristically depicts Che armed and dressed in army/militia fatigues. The statue officially goes by the somewhat ‘highfalutin’ title Ernesto Guevara Sculptural Complex (AKA Complejo Monumental Ernesto Che Guevara).

Security around the mausoleum entrance was pretty tight, more guards than you think might be necessary hovered around the entrance portal. We all lined up and were soon ushered in by a bevy of serious-faced officials and whisked out again fairly rapidly. There was not a lot to see inside in any case, it was dimly lit and unnervingly cold. We glanced at the photos of the 30 dead comrades on the wall and spotted a few pieces of Che paraphernalia on display – such as Che’s handgun (Czechoslovakian), his water canteen and field glasses.

There’s not much else to the complex (a lot of vacant space actually) but there is a gift shop (Tienda Artex) (opportunity to get that authentic “Che in classic Guerrillero Heroico pose” T-shirt on Che’s own turf!) and a restaurante/cantina. There’s another, official looking building close to the arched entrance to the shops but I couldn’t work out what it was used for.

The museum maintains a strict prohibition on the taking of photos within the burial vault, so I didn’t even give a thought to trying to sneak a quick ‘Polaroid’ (even if I had one) – the officials, all wearing the same “not happy Juan” face, gave the impression they meant business!

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from when he was governor of the National Bank of Cuba and succinctly signed his nickname ‘Che’ on all legal tender