Tikkun olam

1950s & 60s ~ Guatemala, The Potassium Deficiency Scare, & Disorder in the Caribbean

25 Mar 2009 Leave a Comment

by Marvin Lance Wiser in U.S.-Latin American Relations Tags: Allen Dulles, American Foreign Policy, Batista, Bay of Pigs Invasion, Carlos Castillo Armas, Che, CIA, CIA Operations, Cuba, Cuban Revolution, Dwight D. Eisenhower, El Che, Ernesto Guevara, Fidel Castro, Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, John Foster Dulles, Latin America, PBFORTUNE, PBHISTORY, PBSUCCESS, Platt Amendment, U.S.-Latin American Relations, United Fruit Company, WASHTUB

This is entry #6 in a series of entries that can be found in the category U.S.-Latin American Relations.

As the Koren War came to a close something sinister, something rotten was brewing in Central America.  In 1954 the CIA embarked on its first full-scale covert operation: the overthrow of the Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, which plunged the country into political turmoil and social chaos. This was much more than just renegade business magnates, the U.S. had become much more sophisticated in its dealings within the Inter-American System; it had now entered a new era, one in which it charaded under anti-communism.

What was it that caused the U.S. to engage with such outright (though seemingly covert) force?

Árbenz assumed the presidency in 1951 as the first to undergo a peaceful democratically-elected transition to power in Guatemala.  He allowed the legalization of the Guatemalan Party of Labor (which allowed a communist minority) and repossessed and distributed uncultivated land in attempts to create an independent economy and initiate agrarian reforms- not at all unlike the Homestead Act in the United States.  Reform was very much needed for the progression of the country, which in 1945 had 2% of its population controlling 72% of its land. The U.S. corporation United Fruit Company was, at the time, the largest land owner in Guatemala, with nearly 85% of its holdings uncultivated.  It is easy to see why the U.S. government frowned upon Árbenz and his reforms.  The U.S. gets a little touchy when people mess with their bananas (by bananas, I mean business).  Gringos love their potassium- and they like it cheap, at the expense of others.  Árbenz’s sympathy towards communism would serve as the perfect initiative for intervention, as the world-over had been polarized into good and evil (much as Bush did in his “War on Terror” to harbor support). Árbenz clearly fell into the “evil” category. After the Eisenhower administration had been lobbied by the UFC, it and then CIA director, Allen Dulles (who had connections with UFC and Sam the Banana Man, as did the U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles) decided they would tolerate no such “evil” happenings on their continent.

The CIA operation was dubbed PBSUCCESS, working in close connection with new fangled psych-war techniques and strategies designed to create a sense of anxiety, stress, and uncertainty among the citizens to distrust the outcomes of Árbenz’s administration and to sponsor a coup d’état.  Even Sigmund Freud’s nephew was on board.  Media and press was infiltrated by the CIA, resulting in the systematic manufacturing and implantation of lies and deceit. Common townsfolk were led to believe that underground movements were on the rise and were about to topple the government and create civil unrest.  Of course,  later we learn that these radio transmissions were recorded in Florida and transmitted into the country from Nicaragua (Grandin’s EW, 43). Some transmissions were even staged battles. The campaign also entailed U.S. planes flying at low altitudes over Guatemala City, dropping propaganda material. Among the material were manuals on how to produce bombs and explosives, telling the people to take matters into their own hands (Grandin’s EW, 44).

On February 19, 1954, the CIA orchestrated Operation WASHTUB, which planted Soviet arms in Nicaragua in order to facilitate a Soviet connection to Guatemala (I was extremely surprised that the Bush administration did not celebrate the 50th anniversary of Operation WASHTUB by following suit and authorizing the planting of WMDs in Iraq post-invasion to tie Saddam’s regime with intelligence assertions and to maintain public opinion). On June 27, 1954, Árbenz resigned after a CIA-backed invasion of the capitol by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, sensing that a U.S.-led invasion was imminent.  He sought refuge in the Mexican embassy.   Immediately after the coup the CIA conducted Operation PBHISTORY, which entailed the confiscation of all of Árbenz’s government documents.  It’s intention was to prove the Soviet-Guatemalan connection in order to give good reason for intervention. As Grandin puts it: “They wanted to appear as acting within the letter of Roosevelt’s “non-intervention” pledge, if not the spirit.”  In the end, the CIA disclosed that out of roughly 150,000 reviewed documents, the only ties Árbenz’s government had to the Soviet Union were a receipt from a bookstore in Moscow and an unrealized agriculture deal. U.S. business interests were secure.  The threat of potassium deficiency had been eradicated.

The U.S. left Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas in power, crushing a flowering democracy which resulted in 40 years of violence and oppression in Guatemala, culminating in the loss of over 150,000 lives.  However, compared to later hellish operations of pure terror, this was small bananas- time being spent in the laboratory perfecting “non-intervention”.

For further reading, I recommend Stephen Schlesinger, et. al Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala.

Perhaps a more well-known U.S. military intervention in Latin America was conducted under the Kennedy administration: The Bay of Pigs invasion, which sought to oust Fidel Castro.

Shortly after the U.S.-backed coup in Guatemala, attorney Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl began to meet in Mexico City (where I live) to plan the overthrow of the “U.S. puppet” Batista’s regime, which was responsible for nearly 20,000 deaths in Cuba.  During this time Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine philosopher, physician, and Marxist revolutionary, who had been in Guatemala during the coup, joined the crew in September of that year.

In 1959, the Marxist revolution was realized and Batista fled to the States with hundreds of millions of dollars. Fidel took control of the government, executed numbers of Batista soldiers, and swiftly implemented Marxist ideals.  Before the revolution foreigner’s (mostly from the U.S.) owned over 75% of Cuba’s arable land and enjoyed quite the gambling playground.  Not only do gringos not like people messing with their bananas, they can’t stand it when people interfere with their leisure time.

The U.S. invasion in 1961 of Bay of Pigs, Cuba, designed to topple Castro ended in humility.  Fidel liked to chide Washington saying, “Cuba will not be Guatemala.”  And it wasn’t, to this day Fidel Castro remains in power.  The U.S. learned that maybe “non-intervention” really is better.  This led to mass covert activity in the coming decades. Che became a very important figure in the new government, traveling as far as the Congo.  However, he was executed by the CIA in Bolivia in 1967.  He went on to become one of the most inspiring figures in Latin America, in some places overshadowing Christ himself.   In 1965 the U.S. sent 23,000 troops into the Dominican Republic to “restore order,” or to look after its interests.  During George W. Bush’s time in office the U.S.-Cuba relationship was extremely stressed (as it was with nearly every country in the international community), but signs of a more normalized relationship is seen in the Obama administration.

The 1960s saw the U.S. preoccupied with Asia and the Pacific with operations conducted in Loas, Thailand, Zaire (Congo), Vietnam and Cambodia, this deterred attention from what it was doing in its own backyard.  The following decades would be the most gruesome in history for U.S.-Latin American relations, as the U.S. would still charade under the Cold War to get what it wanted from ruthless dictators.

-MLW