Carlos
Castillo Armas
Before
the coup of 1954, Castillo Armas was a retired military officer working in
Honduras as a furniture salesman. He was chosen by the CIA to lead the National
Liberation Movement (MLN) into Guatemala to overthrow the Arbenz regime.
With the resignation and flight of Arbenz,
Castillo Armas was flown into Guatemala on the personal plane of U.S.
Ambassador John Peurifoy. He was installed as President and given some $80
million from Eisenhower over the next three years to boost his government. As
president, he re-instituted the mechanisms of repression, including the MLN's
Committee Against Communism, which compiled lists of thousands of union members
and Arbenz supporters who were suspected subversives.
In 1957 Castillo Armas was assassinated by
military rivals.
John Foster
Dulles and Alan Dulles
Under
the Republican Administration of Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles and his brother
Alan were placed in positions of great influence. John Foster was the Secretary
of State and Alan sat as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Both were
essential Cold Warriors, convinced of an international conspiracy to increase
the communist sphere of influence and construct a beach-head in the Western
Hemisphere. This virulent anti-communism and their own personal ties to United
Fruit made them perfect connections in the U.S. government to implement an
ouster of Jacobo Arbenz.
Jacobo
Arbenz Guzman
Jacobo Arbenz was a
nationalist military officer elected as president in 1951. In addition to
continuing the progressive reforms begun under Arévalo, he set out to challenge
the monopoly held by United Fruit in the Guatemalan economy.
Though he was not himself
a communist, his wife was and he accepted the support of other communist
intellectuals. Additionally, the newly legal Communist Party won some 4 of the
50 seats in the National Legislature. These facts, along with limited land
expropriations he enacted, were enough to convince Washington that he was 100%
"Red" and a threat to American hegemony in the region.
United
Fruit Company
United Fruit Company
(now known as Chiquita) has long exerted enormous influence throughout Central
America and within the United States Government. It had grown to be the most
important corporation in Guatemala. United Fruit controlled roughly 40% of the
most fertile land, owned a railroad, held a monopoly on electricity production
and ran the port facilities in Puerto Barrios, Atlantic Coast.
Though United Fruit owned huge tracts of land,
it paid little in the way of property tax in Guatemala in part because they
claimed their land was only worth a fraction of it's real value on tax
receipts. When Arbenz expropriated 400,000 of their 500,000 acres, he offered
them the $1.2 million they had claimed it was worth. United Fruit demanded $16
million.
When Arbenz refused, they turned to their
friends in the United States Government to assist. Some, like Assistant
Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs John Moors Cabot had family ties
to the company. Others, such as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge,
were major stockholders. The Dulles Brothers had both worked as lawyers for
United Fruit's legal firm. With connections such as these, it was not difficult
for UFCo. to convince the U.S. Government of the need for action against
Arbenz.
In
order to bring communities in guerrilla territory under government control,
"model villages" were constructed, often on or close to the ruins of
villages destroyed by military counter-insurgency. Though the government
promised water, electricity, a school, a church and so on, these facilities and
services often went unprovided. Meanwhile, military detachments kept a close
eye on the activities of everyone, as no person was above suspicion of
"subversion".
|
Copyright ©
Vince Heptig |
Civil
Defense Patrols
The
so-called Civil Defense Patrols were an integral part of military's
counter-insurgency plans. All able-bodied males in a given village were forced
to go on patrol for 24 hours, once each week. Ostensibly, this was to protect
the villages from guerrilla attack. Often, civil patrollers were forced to beat
or kill neighbors, for fear of themselves being branded a
"subversive". Some of the worst human rights violations, including
massacres of entire villages, were committed by civil patrol members.
Though the
Guatemalan Constitution of 1985 declared that un-paid, forced military service
is illegal, civil defense patrols have persisted, even through the present
period.