IN
1954, the American government committed one of the most reprehensible
acts in its history when it authorized the C.I.A. to overthrow the
democratically elected leader of Guatemala, President Jacobo Arbenz. It
did so secretly but later rationalized the coup on the ground that the
country was about to fall into communist hands.
Guatemalan
society has only recently recovered from the suffering that this
intervention caused, including brutal military dictatorships and a
genocidal civil war against its Indian population, which led to the
deaths of an estimated 200,000 people. Only in the 1980s, when a peace
process commenced, did democratic governance resume. But a silence about
the Arbenz era continued.
Now, after 25 years of increasingly vibrant democratic rule, Guatemalans feel confident enough to honor the memory
of their deposed leader by incorporating his achievements into the
national school curriculum, naming a highway after him, and preparing an
official biography. America should follow suit by owning up to its own
ignoble deed and recognizing Arbenz as the genuine social progressive
that he was.
Washington
feared Arbenz because he tried to institute agrarian reforms that would
hand over fallow land to dispossessed peasants, thereby creating a
middle class in a country where 2 percent of the population owned 72
percent of the land. Unfortunately for him, most of that territory
belonged to the largest landowner and most powerful body in the state:
the American-owned United Fruit Company. Though Arbenz was willing to
compensate United Fruit for its losses, it tried to persuade Washington
that Arbenz was a crypto-communist who must be ousted.
Dwight
D. Eisenhower, along with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his
brother, Allen, the C.I.A.’s director, were a receptive audience. In
the cold war fervor of the times, Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers
believed a strike against Arbenz would roll back communism. And the
Dulleses had their own personal sympathies for United Fruit: they had
done legal work for the company, and counted executives there among
their close friends.
It
is true that Arbenz’s supporters in the Guatemalan Legislature did
include the Communist Party, but it was the smallest part of his
coalition. Arbenz had also appointed a few communists to lower-level
jobs in his administration. But there was no evidence that Arbenz
himself was anything more than a European-style democratic socialist.
And Arbenz’s land reform program was less generous to peasants than a
similar venture pushed by the Reagan administration in El Salvador
several decades later.
Eisenhower’s
attack on Guatemala was brilliantly executed. A faux invasion force
consisting of a handful of right-wing Guatemalans used fake radio
broadcasts and a few bombing runs flown by American pilots to terrorize
the fledgling democracy into surrender. Arbenz stepped down from the
presidency and left the country. Soon afterward, a Guatemalan colonel
named Carlos Castillo Armas took power and handed back United Fruit’s
lands. For three decades, military strongmen ruled Guatemala.
The
covert American assault destroyed any possibility that Guatemala’s
fragile political and civic institutions might grow. It permanently
stunted political life. And the destruction of Guatemala’s democracy
also set back the cause of free elections in Nicaragua, El Salvador and
Honduras — all of which drew the lesson that Washington was more
interested in unquestioning allies than democratic ones. It was only
after the cold war and a United Nations-negotiated peace deal with
leftist guerrillas in 1996 that genuine democracy began to take hold in
Guatemala. And even since then, the cycle of violence and lawlessness
unleashed by the 1954 coup has continued.
In
1998, an assassin bludgeoned to death the Catholic bishop Juan Gerardi
shortly after he issued a damning report blaming the army for widespread
massacres. In 2007, Guatemala had the world’s third-highest homicide
rate, according to a United Nations-World Bank study. In 2009, more
civilians were murdered in Guatemala than were killed in the war zones
of Iraq.
Washington
took the first step toward making amends when President Bill Clinton
visited Guatemala in 1999 and offered a vague apology for America’s
support of violent and repressive forces there. This year is an
opportunity for Washington to fully own up to its shameful role in
destabilizing Guatemala and honor Arbenz for having the courage to lead
one of Central America’s first democracies — and send a signal that
America has learned to stop placing its ideological concerns and
business interests ahead of its ideals.
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