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to this conversation about US policy on Guatemala, as well. If there's any DU'er who hasn't read about Guatemala and what the hell has happened to it, please don't waste any time before you start researching, asking questions. U.S. aggression against smaller, or less powerful countries in this hemisphere accelerated horrendously after 1950, and it started with Guatemala, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. A "killing field" in the Americas:
US policy in Guatemala
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~snip~
"10 Years of Springtime"
Repressive governments have plagued Guatemala throughout its history, with alternating waves of dictators being the rule. But, between 1945 and 1954, there was a period of enlightenment -- an experiment with democracy called the "10 Years of Springtime" -- that started with the election of Juan Jose Arevalo to the presidency.
While in power from 1945 to 1951, Arevalo established the nation's social security and health systems and a government bureau to look after Mayan concerns. Arévalo's liberal regime experienced many coup attempts by conservative military forces, but the attempts were not successful.
Arévalo was followed by Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán who became president in democratic elections in 1951. At the time, 2% of landowners owned 70% of the arable land and farm laborers were kept in debt slavery by these landowners. Arbenz continued to implement the liberal policies of Arevalo, and instituted an agrarian reform law to break up the large estates and foster individually owned small farms. The land reform program involved redistribution of 160,000 acres of uncultivated land owned by United Fruit Company. United Fruit was compensated for its land.
United Fruit, Eisenhower and the end of reform
United Fruit was a state within the Guatemalan state. It not only owned all of Guatemala's banana production and monopolized banana exports, it also owned the country's telephone and telegraph system, and almost all of the railroad track. In addition to redistributing United Fruit land, the government also began competing with United Fruit in the production and export of bananas.
Important people in the ruling circles of the US, involved with United Fruit Company, used their influence to convince the US government to step in. (Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' law firm had prepared United Fruit's contracts with Guatemala; his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, belonged to United Fruit's law firm; John Moors Cabot, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, was the brother of a former United Fruit president; President Eisenhower's personal secretary was married to the head of United Fruit's Public Relations Department.)
In 1954, Eisenhower and Dulles decided that Arbenz finally had to go, and the US State Department labeled Guatemala "communist". On this pretext, US aid and equipment were provided to the Guatemalan Army. The US also sent a CIA army and CIA planes. They bombed a military base and a government radio station, and overthrew Arbenz Guzmán, who fled to Cuba.
The coup restored the stranglehold on the Guatemalan economy of both the landed elite and US economic interests. President Eisenhower was willing to make the poor, illiterate Guatemalan peasants pay in hunger and torture for supporting land reform, and for trying to attain a better future for themselves and their families. In order to ensure ever-increasing profits for an American corporation, the US State Department, the CIA, and United Fruit Company had succeeded in taking freedom and land from Guatemala's peasants, unions from its workers, and hope for a democratic Guatemala from all of its people. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/US_Guat.htmlBig Fruit
By DANIEL KURTZ-PHELAN
Published: March 2, 2008
When the Banana Company arrives in Macondo, the jungle town in Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” it brings with it first modernity and then doom. “Endowed with means that had been reserved for Divine Providence in former times,” García Márquez writes, the company “changed the pattern of the rains, accelerated the cycle of harvests and moved the river from where it had always been.” It imported “dictatorial foreigners” and “hired assassins with machetes” to run the town; it unleashed a “wave of bullets” on striking workers in the plaza. When the Banana Company leaves, Macondo is “in ruins.”
(snip)
If Macondo is meant to represent Latin America, it is fitting that “the Banana Company” plays so central a role in its development and decline. For much of the 20th century, the American banana company United Fruit dominated portions of almost a dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere. It was, Peter Chapman writes in “Bananas,” his breezy but insightful history of the company, “more powerful than many nation states ... a law unto itself and accustomed to regarding the republics as its private fiefdom.” United Fruit essentially invented not only “the concept and reality of the banana republic,” but also, as Chapman shows, the concept and reality of the modern banana...
(snip)
...Throughout all of this, United Fruit defined the modern multinational corporation at its most effective — and, as it turned out, its most pernicious. At home, it cultivated clubby ties with those in power and helped pioneer the modern arts of public relations and marketing. (After a midcentury makeover by the “father of public relations,” Edward Bernays, the company started pushing a cartoon character named Señorita Chiquita Banana.) Abroad, it coddled dictators while using a mix of paternalism and violence to control its workers. “As for repressive regimes, they were United Fruit’s best friends, with coups d’état among its specialties,” ...
(snip)
..When a left-wing democratic president named Jacobo Arbenz tried to roll back the company’s dominance in the 1950s (by, among other things, redistributing its fallow land), United Fruit executives saw it as an affront — and set out to help pressure the United States government to engineer a coup. Fortunately for them, virtually every major American official involved in the plotting had a family or business connection to the company itself.
A young Argentine traveler named Che Guevara happened to be in Guatemala when Arbenz was overthrown in 1954. After that, Che told his mother, “I left the path of reason.” And so, too, did Latin America. That day marked a turning point, the end of a hopeful age of reform and the beginning of a bloody age of revolution and reaction. Over the next four decades, hundreds of thousands of people — 200,000 in Guatemala alone — were killed in guerrilla attacks, government crackdowns and civil wars across Latin America... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Kurtz-Phelan-t.html?ref=review
~~~~~~~~~~~~Abuses are common across the Guatemalan economy, especially in textile factories known as maquilas, where workers put in long hours for little pay. Activists say companies often close factories when workers try form unions.
In January, Pedro Zamora, head of Guatemala's port workers' union, was murdered in front of his two sons in the middle of contentious negotiations between the union and company bosses. Two leaders of the municipal vendors' union were killed a month later.
In 1999, SITRABI leaders were forced to resign after 200 armed men threatened them ahead of a planned strike. Seven still live in exile in the United States.
In July, soldiers raided the SITRABI union's office asking to see information about members. The ministry of defense later said the action was unjustified.
Since Ramirez's death, suspicious cars have followed union members on and off the company's property, his brother said.
Such intolerance of labor unions has a long history.
Hundreds of union members were murdered or 'disappeared' by state security forces during the country's 1960-1996 civil war between the army and left-wing rebels. http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N17372849.htm
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~U.S. POLICY IN GUATEMALA, 1966-1996
Kate Doyle, Project Director
Carlos Osorio, Project Associate
Document 1
January 4, 1966
United States Agency for International Development, Secret cable
U.S. Public Safety Advisor John Longan, on temporary loan from his post in Venezuela, assists the Guatemalan government in establishing an urban counter-terrorist task force in the wake of a rash of kidnappings for ransom by insurgent organizations. During meetings with senior military and police officials, Longan advises how to establish overt and covert operations in Guatemala, to include designing "frozen area plans" for police raids, setting up new road blocks within the capital, and creating a "safe house" in the Presidential Palace to centralize information gathered on the kidnappings. Longan also addresses the role of U.S. military advisors, the sale of U.S. supplies and equipment to the Guatemalan armed forces and Col. Peralta’s national address offering cash rewards for top communist leaders -- dead or alive.
Document 2
March 1966
Central Intelligence Agency, Secret cable
The CIA Station in Guatemala City reports the secret execution of several Guatemalan "communists and terrorists" by Guatemalan authorities on the night of March 6, 1966. The victims -- the leader of the Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajadores (PGT), Victor Manuel Gutiérrez, among them -- are several of the more than two dozen PGT members and associates abducted, tortured and killed by Guatemalan security forces in March of 1966. The incident became famous as the first case of forced mass "disappearance" in Guatemala’s history.
Document 3
Request for Special Training
December 3, 1966
Department of State, Secret cable
U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission in Guatemala Viron Vaky forwards to Washington the text of a cable the embassy received from the SouthCom Commander-in-Chief, Gen. Porter. Porter’s cable describes a request made to him by the Guatemalan Vice Defense Minister, Col. Francisco Sosa Avila, for U.S. assistance in the covert training of special kidnapping squads that would target leftists. Although Porter declines, he does not hesitate to recommend that the United States "fully support current police improvement programs and initiate military psychological warfare training and additional counterinsurgency operations training." Vaky is troubled.
Document 4
Guatemala: A Counter-Insurgency Running Wild?
October 23, 1967
Department of State, Secret intelligence note
The Bureau of Intelligence and Research questions the current Guatemalan government’s ability to control military and police forces in light of "accumulating evidence that the counter-insurgency machine is out of control." The document describes some of the methods utilized in Guatemala’s "successful" campaign, including the formation of clandestine counter-terrorist units to carry out abductions, bombings, torture, and summary executions "of real and alleged communists."
Document 5
Guatemala and Counter-terror
March 29, 1968
Department of State, Secret memorandum
Viron Vaky, back in Washington with the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, writes an extraordinary indictment of U.S. policy in Guatemala in a memorandum to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Covey Oliver. Vaky argues that the Guatemalan government’s use of counter-terror is indiscriminate and brutal, and has impeded modernization and institution building within the country. Furthermore, he writes, the United States has condoned such tactics. "This is not only because we have concluded we cannot do anything about it, for we never really tried. Rather we suspected that maybe it is a good tactic, and that as long as Communists are being killed it is alright. Murder, torture and mutilation are alright if our side is doing it and the victims are Communists." Vaky urges a new policy in Guatemala that rejects "counter-terror" as an accepted tactic and represents a "clear ethical stand" on the part of the United States. More:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB11/docs/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Wikipedia
Efraín Ríos Montt
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José Efraín Ríos Montt
26th President of Guatemala
In office
March 23, 1982 – August 8, 1983
Preceded by Fernando Romeo Lucas García
Succeeded by Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores
Born June 16, 1926
Political party Guatemalan Republican Front
José Efraín Ríos Montt (born June 16, 1926) is a former de facto President of Guatemala, army general, and former president of Congress. In the 2003 presidential elections, he unsuccessfully ran as the candidate of the ruling Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG).
Huehuetenango-born Ríos Montt remains one of the most controversial figures in Guatemala. Two Truth Commissions, one sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church and the other conducted by the government as part of the 1996 Peace Accords, documented widespread human rights abuses committed by Ríos Montt's military regime, including widespread massacres, rape, torture, and acts of genocide against the indigenous population. Supporters claim that he had to rule with an iron hand because the country was becoming unstable due to the civil war. Ríos Montt has, at times, had close ties to the United States who gave him aid to fight against left-wing guerrillas.
Ríos Montt is best known outside Guatemala for heading a military regime (1982–1983) that was responsible in some of the worst atrocities of Guatemala's 36-year civil war. The war ended with a peace treaty in 1996. The civil war pitted left-wing rebel groups against the army, with huge numbers of Mayan campesinos caught in the crossfire. At least 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during the conflict, making it one of Latin America's most violent wars in modern history.
Indigenous Mayans suffered greatly under his rule, and it is documented that his government deliberately targeted thousands of them since many of them in the countryside were suspected of harboring sympathies for the guerrilla movement. The UN-backed official Truth Commission (the Historical Clarification Commission) maintained that this was a campaign of deliberate genocide against the population.<1><2>
(snip)
Ríos Montt denounced a "massive electoral fraud", blaming Catholic priests who had questioned the mistreatment of the Catholic Mayans, and claimed that the priests were leftist agents. It is alleged that he was given a payoff of several hundred thousand dollars along with the post of military attaché in the embassy in Madrid, Spain, where he stayed until 1977.
In 1978, he left the Roman Catholic Church and became a minister in the California-based evangelical/pentecostal Church of the Word; since then Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have been personal friends. Efrain Rios Montt's brother Mario Rios Montt is a Catholic bishop, and in 1998 succeeded the possibly assassinated Bishop Gerardi as head of the human rights commission uncovering the truth of the disappearances associated with the Guatemalan military and his brother.     
Efraín Ríos Montt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efra%C3%ADn_R%C3%ADos_Montt |
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