In reading over the literature from Guatemala there were two things that really stood out to me. The first was the lack of unification by the federal US gov on the issue and the other was the link between being “anti-communist and christian.”  Although, on a quick aside, I would like to say that I find it sad that all of the bombings or the actions of the CIA are not what stood out to me. Somehow corruption and killing has become normalized for me and the actions of governments are interesting. Perhaps this says something about the state of human rights? Do we study cause and effect only, and on which side should importance be placeg, how violations happen or those who were harmed?

Back to focusing on the effect side, I found it fascinating how disjointed the entire affair was on the part of the US. Like on pages 160-1 where an official in the US gov ‘finds out’ about the happenings by glancing at a memo, not from a formal briefing or something of that nature. There are also incredible descriptions of people in the administration actively objecting to what was happening on the basis on international law, yet they proceeded with capturing ships etc.

All of this is very interesting because the US, especially the government, is often portrayed as one unified force which thinks and acts the same. I am even from the US and I generalize  the administration as one unified (often evil) force. It is interesting to be reminded of the agency of different actors and how one really can’t group people into one category or another even if they are members of the same cabinet. I think that this is an excellent reminder about generalizing these human rights cases. Even when the overall effect is as horrific as the case of Guatemala, not everyone on either side is actually complicit in what’s happening nor are they necessarily being silent about the proceedings either.

The next thing that struck me was on page 174: “he told the US ambassador that direct US intervention might be the only way to protect ant-communists and christians in Guatemala.” It’s amazing to me what this statement implies. First that to be anti-communist one must also be christian and second that to be christian is to promote bombings. There are a million things I could say about all of these links, but the thing I find very intriguing is the constant link between US politics and christianity.  Even growing up in the US, there was often a debate over weather a  non-christian president could ever get elected and the conclusion was almost always that it wouldn’t be possible. That idea seems to resonate well with this piece where two concepts communism and christianity are placed in conjunction with one another.  In this case it seems that the pursuit of preserving christianity is one major justification for eradicating “communists.”  It’s fascinating to me how the US evokes christianity as a reasoning for so many of its political movements while the country still professes to have a separation of church and state.

Overall, I think it is quite interesting to look at these nuances behind how all of these conflicts. How on one hand the administration itself was not really unified, but then at the same time the US does seem to have a driving justification of christianity behind many of its decisions, regardless of how many people really agree with it.

The selections for this week were focused on the United Fruit Company, or la frutera as it was known in Guatemala. United Fruit was an American company based in Guatemala, and basically dominated Guatemala’s international commerce from the 1800s and still has a presence today. The concept of human rights comes up a couple times within this selection. On page 71, the living conditions and situations of the workers employed by United Fruit is discussed. Basically, the employees had better living conditions and pay than many other Guatemalan labourers. However, they were basically dependent upon the company, including living in the which made a disproportionate profit from conducting business in Guatemala, then selling the product in the United States. The company is described as “benevolent and paternal” (p 71), a term reminiscent of colonists and missionaries who ‘know what’s best for the people’, etc. Indeed, United Fruit provided housing and medical facilities for their workers as well as education for the employees’ children. However, the company’s employees worked seven-day work weeks, and the company continually refused to allow their workers to join any kind of independent labor union, and for a time I’m sure they were okay with that due to the benefits that they received from the company already. However, in 1945, Jose Arevalo’s administration began to target United Fruit, and strikes broke out, with workers demanding better pay and working conditions, fuelled by the Labor Code of 1947. In fact, at one point the Labor Code almost motivated United Fruit to withdraw from Guatemala.

Many Guatemalans were aware of the negative affects that United Fruit had upon their country. The Minister of Labor and Economy believed that the company was “the principal enemy of the progress of Guatemala, of its democracy, and of every effort directed at its economic liberation” (p 73). It seems as though the company had the country in a economic hold, as it had managed to make deals with a great number of politicians which did seem to impede the country’s progress, for example, their deal with General Ubico, who signed a 99 year long deal with the company which guaranteed them “exemption from internal taxation, duty-free importation of all goods and a guarantee of low wages” (p 70). Ubico seemed to think that the benefits the company would bring to Guatemala would outweigh the accompanying drawbacks, as well as probably wanting to extend good relations with the United States, an obvious international power.

Indeed, the matter of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala became an international issue. In an effort to undermine the Guatemalan government, United Fruit officials informed the American government that there was a possibility of communist influence in Guatemala. President Eisenhower appointed ‘The Liberator’ of Guatemala, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, and the CIA dispatched 170 troops to Guatemala through Honduras. Meanwhile United Fruit was providing the US military with access to its railroads, its communications systems and even places to stay on its properties in order to counteract the rebellious forces. This entire process led to a coup in 1945, and afterwards the United Fruit company lost its power within Guatemala, as the government of the US had lost its faith in the company, and without that they could not continue on the same level as before. All in all, the United Fruit Company had an unfathomable impact upon the citizens of Guatemala, mostly due to it bringing the country to international attention and linking it to the United States.

Reading Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer's now classic account of the 1954 Guatemalan coup, Bitter Fruit, comparisons with the United States' more recent adventures in regime change and nation-building are inevitable.

As in Iraq, toppling the Guatemalan government proved easier than many expected. Indeed, in 1954, and despite some nervous moments, US provision of air power to its small proxy army meant that the overthrow of reforming (and democratically elected) president Jacobo Arbenz was almost too easy. On being debriefed by the CIA operatives who orchestrated the coup, and hearing that the rebel force had suffered only one fatality in the whole process, "Eisenhower shook his head, perhaps thinking of the mass slaughter he had seen in World War II, and muttered 'Incredible!'" (218).

What's striking, in fact, is how modern were the methods used to bring down Arbenz. Beyond buzzing the capital and strafing a few provincial towns, the CIA relied for the most part on PR and psychological warfare. In short, their aim was to sow fear--or better, terror--within the country, and to ensure complacency outside. Precisely in its paucity of casualties (and loyalist forces themselves only lost "a total of fifteen soldiers, with another twenty-five wounded" [194]), the coup was very much a media event, complete with the US ambassador feeding the foreign press (dis)information over drinks at Guatemala City's American Club (186).

Together with the covert operation to topple Iran's Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, the coup against Arbenz marked a departure for the CIA, which under Truman had since its foundation in 1947 mainly confined itself to passive intelligence gathering: but with John Foster Dulles as head of the State Department, the Agency had "embarked on an activist course" (100). One might speculate that had the outcomes of these two operations been different, the US might have thought twice in subsequent years about such aggressive intervention in overseas jurisdictions. As it was, however, "the CIA as an institution got a renewed lease of life" thanks to its apparently almost effortless success (228).

But that success was short lived. Schlesinger and Kinzer quote "the 'official' historian of the coup, Ronald Schneider," as saying that "in the light of subsequent events it might reasonably be considered little short of disaster" (227). They also cite a former advisor in the US Embassy to Guatemala: "Having a revolution is a little like releasing a wheel at the top of a hill. You don't know where it's going to bounce or where it's going to go" (227).

For, in the first place, the US had installed a military class that was almost comically divided and fractious. Though they, in conjunction with the influential United Fruit Company, had set up Colonel Castillo Armas to be the country's putative "liberator," soon a rather squalid power struggle erupted. Castillo Armas, chosen in part "because he was a stupid man" was in fact the Americans' third choice, and he soon had to face the contending claims of various other army leaders, not least General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, who eventually came to power upon Castillo Armas's assassination in 1957.

Second, and in part because of the precarious legitimacy of the regimes subsequent to the coup, the history of Guatemala since 1954 has been remarkably violent and bloody. The country holds the dubious distinction of being the first place to see the practice of "disappearing" political opponents, a fact that Greg Grandin underscores in The Last Colonial Massacre (which I review here) and also in an interview on the University of Chicago Press website:

In March of 1966 [. . .] over thirty leftists were captured, interrogated, tortured, and executed between March 3 and March 5. Their bodies were placed in sacks and dropped into the Pacific from US-supplied helicopters. Although some of their remains washed back to shore, and despite pleas from Guatemala’s archbishop and over five hundred petitions of habeas corpus filed by relatives, the government and the American embassy remained silent about the fate of the executed.

More generally, though the 1980s genocide in the Guatemalan highlands is relatively well known, as Bitter Fruit (as also The Last Colonial Massacre) makes evident, this was merely the culmination of years of slaughter: more than 30,000 people "abducted, tortured, and assassinated" in the 1960s and 1970s (247); already by 1976 René de León Shlotter can speak of "a spectacular form of violence" over the previous two decades, notable for its "intensity--the high number of victims and the cruelty of the methods used" (qtd. 250).

Third, however, Grandin also argues that the coup was

perhaps the single most important event in twentieth-century US-Latin American relations [. . . leading] to a radicalization of hemispheric politics. [. . .]

The overthrow of Arbenz convinced many Latin American reformers, democrats, and nationalists that the United States was less a model to be emulated than a danger to be feared. Che Guevara, for example, was in Guatemala working as a doctor and witnessed firsthand the effects of US intervention. He fled to Mexico, where he would meet Fidel Castro and go on to lead the Cuban Revolution. He taunted the United States repeatedly in his speeches by saying that "Cuba will not be Guatemala." For its part, the United States promised to turn Guatemala into a "showcase for democracy" but instead created a laboratory of repression. Practices institutionalized there—such as death squad killings conducted by professionalized intelligence agencies—spread throughout Latin America in the coming decades.

In some ways, the whole cycle of violence that will later lead to such concern for human rights in the region starts here, in 1954. In other ways, it's in Guatemala more than anywhere else that we see the clearest continuity with the kinds of practices documented by Bartolomé de las Casas as early as the 1530s.

But again, if only the US had taken to heart at the time the lesson that regime change is easy; yet political legitimacy and stability cannot be assured thereafter.