Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in the maelstrom of political scandals, ideological contests and overall outrage and dismay at the way life has become in these United States in today’s era.
To understand where we are, sometimes it is worth taking a look at where we’ve been. And to do that, I’m going to tell two stories, both set in the tiny Central American nation of Guatemala. But it is actually a story about the United States of America.
There’s an old joke in Spanish, “Guatemala, Guatepeor” which plays on the fact that the name of the country sounds like “Guate is bad”, thus the joke ends “Guate is worse”. Actually the name Guatemala comes from a dialect of the Mayan language for the region that makes up what is today the lands of the nation of Guatemala. But it is sadly true that life has been pretty bad for most people in this country for the last 60 years.
The first part of this story is the CIA, which morphed from a war-time semi-autonomous unit of the military to a “peacetime” organization almost completely unrestrained by either the Congress or by law.
Most people tend to think of the CIA as an intelligence organization, using either advanced technology (SIGINT) or flesh and blood spies (HUMINT) to secretly gather information on other nations. That’s certainly a role played by the CIA and continues to be so today.
But there’s another role inside the CIA, under an ever-shifting number of names or departments (including at one time the SAD branch) which summed up in a nutshell is a ghost army, a ghost government, acting with almost no accountability to further the aims of the United States government in near or total secrecy.
The CIA began this second role shortly after its inception, at the end of World War 2, and decided that overthrowing foreign governments fell within the legitimate scope of its mandate. Second on the hit list was the tiny nation of Guatemala in 1954 codenamed PBSUCCESS.
Severely shortening Guatemalan history, the region of Central America broke away from the Spanish Empire and then its legacy successor, the Mexican Empire, in the early 19th century. Fast forward to 1931, when a general in the military, Jorge Ubico declared himself president and ruled for 13 years as a dictator until 1944.
Ubico believed that only the elite of the country could be trusted to run the country. He surrounded himself with a small group of the extremely wealthy, most of them landowners and business leaders. Ubico was a “friend” of the United States and created laws that allowed for extensive foreign investment in the country, most notably banana plantations by the United Fruit Company (UFC).
This love for the UFC went so far as exempting them from all import taxes, all real estate taxes and creating the nation’s only railroad to service the country’s largest port on the Atlantic, Puerto Barrios, almost primary for their use.
By 1944, populist resentment at his government led to his ouster and Ubico was welcomed in the United States where he lived out the rest of his life.
A few months later Guatemala held its first ever democratic elections for president and elected a man named Juan Jose Arevalo, who was a writer who had been living in exile. Arevalo served for 6 years in office and was succeeded by Jacobo Arbenz, who was elected freely and democratically in 1951. It’s worth noting here that Arbenz was not a member of any political party.
Arbenz however made a “mistake” that nearly cost him his life and led to the CIA’s decision to overthrow him. This was a new law (called Decree 900) that ironically was inspired by a United States law from 1862 known as the Homestead Act. In short it was a major effort at land reform.
In 1945, 2.2% of the country’s population controlled 70% of the nation’s arable land but only 12% of it was being utilized. Arbenz’ modest proposal was to pay these landowners for this arable land they were not using and distribute it to the poor.
A great deal of this arable but uncultivated land belonged to the UFC. The Arbenz government paid the UFC for the land at the value established by the UFC on its tax forms, which essentially was almost nothing.
Some histories of Guatemala state that the UFC did little more at this point than throw up its hand in despair and that what followed was almost entirely at the initiative of the CIA and the United States government. That’s not quite true as we’ll see below but first let’s see what the U.S. government did.
To begin with, the U.S. State Department intervened and said that the land appropriated from the UFC was actually worth 15 times as much and demanded the Guatemalan government pay the difference, which it refused to do.
The U.S. government then began imposing a number of sanctions, which deeply hurt the Guatemalan economy (and people) as it relied almost entirely on two exports: coffee and bananas, and its single biggest market was the United States.
The CIA then began to arm and equip a tiny rebel force (400 men), who were also supported and sheltered by two pro-U.S. Central American dictators, Rafael Trujillo (DR) and Anastasio Somoza (Nicaragua). These rebels were given training (and shelter) in bases in Honduras on land owned by the UFC.
The CIA then began setting up a “psyops” campaign, broadcasting anti-Arbenz propaganda on a radio station, dropping leaflets, etc. This including “smearing” Arbenz and his supporters with the label of being Communists. In actuality, Arbenz had no official or unofficial ties to the Communist Party or to the Soviet Union. Simply put, his socialist ideology, most especially land reform, was perceived as being possibly friendly to Communist (and the Soviets) and was definitely not pro-capitalism (and U.S. companies) and therefore was tarred with that most convenient brush.
The U.S. Navy began a series of “patrols” near Guatemala that developed into a near naval blockade. And there was a build-up of American troops in neighboring Honduras, the pretext being the “fear” that Guatemala would invade Honduras. In actuality (as planned by the CIA), Arbenz and the people of Guatemala began to fear an American invasion of their country.
Eventually the CIA-backed guerillas invaded Guatemala and while Guatemala’s troops were fully capable of defeating them militarily they felt pressured into signing a deal with the rebels to prevent the American government from having a “legitimate” pretext to invade. Faced with this, Arbenz resigned, dissolved his government and spent the rest of his life in exile.
Guatemala was then run by a serious of dictators, which led to a 40 year long civil war, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and a society that is still heavily fragmented and struggling to recover even today. And the UFC got all of its land back.
There’s a rather chilling video clip if you ever get to see it of U.S. Vice President Nixon speaking in Guatemala City with the new military junta praising their government. Behind him is a gigantic stack of “discovered” Communist materials from Arbenz’ government, none of which was real and was in reality delivered as stage dressing by the CIA.
Now that is the story of what happened in Guatemala and Central America. But the second part of the story is what happened in the United States. It’s by far the lesser-known half of the story (and no reference is made to it whatsoever on Wikipedia).
Pure and simple, Arbenz’ land reforms were cutting into UFC’s profit margin. But instead of just sitting around “hoping” something would be done, they hired the best man in the business, Edward Bernays, to help them out. Bernays had one and only one mission: to change the American public’s view of Arbenz from an easygoing, democratically elected president of a tiny nation which grew bananas to a rabid, pro-Communist Soviet loving dictator. The UFC got their money’s worth out of Bernays as his plan succeeded on every single level.
It’s hard to summarize these things adequately without losing essential details but I’m going to try. By the early 1920’s, Sigmund Freud had emerged as the leader (and “founder”) of the field of psychoanalysis. His primary view was that human beings had a tiny portion of rationality under their control that floated above a vast sea of irrational and dangerous impulses and feelings. Thusly, people’s inner drives were dangerous and had to be controlled.
One of the most fervent believers in this philosophy was Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. He truly believed that for a democracy to work, a small group of educated elite must harness and control the masses’ irrational desires and instincts for their own good.
Bernays is best known for inventing the field of public relations. Bernays firmly believed (and wrote several books outlining exactly how to do this, most of which are in the public domain and free to download) that products could be sold by manipulating, shaping and “crystallizing” the public’s emotions and feelings in a deliberate fashion.
This later transformed into the manipulation of people’s political views, starting with Calvin Coolidge in 1924. This success garnered a lot of respect and admiration from fellow propagandists, including Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. I hate to throw in the Nazi angle as it serves as a big distraction to what I’m saying, but all Goebbels did was copy Bernays’ very effective techniques for twisted ends while Bernays (and his modern day counterparts) allegedly use these techniques for “noble” purposes.
So let’s sum it all up now, concerning Guatemala.
A small, poor country escapes centuries of dictatorship and authoritarian rule by electing Jacobo Arbenz. In a heartbreakingly selfless attempt to lift his people out of poverty, Arbenz sets up some modest land reform that threatens the profit margin of a gigantic American corporation. The United States government responds by trying to crush this with military intimidation as well as withering economic sanctions. The virtually autonomous clandestine wing of the U.S. government, the CIA, spends millions of dollars on a propaganda campaign to destabilize Arbenz’ government as well as to finance and equip a rebel army. The giant American company whose profits are threatened hire the master of manipulating and shaping domestic public opinion.
In the end the Guatemalan people are cowed, the American people are largely fooled by the propaganda and hundreds of thousands of people lose their lives but the corporations end up raking in giant profits. Sound familiar?
You can repeat this formula almost line by line in Chile, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Venezuela, Haiti, Argentina, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Congo (Zaire), Iraq (1963, 1968 as well as 2003), Puerto Rico, Grenada, Panama, Indonesia, Ukraine, Serbia, Laos, Cambodia, Peru, Georgia, Viet Nam, Angola and the Philippines.
Only one of those attempts listed above overtly failed (Cuba) but there’s been blowback and vastly negative consequences of these actions in the other incidents, both the suffering (and deaths) of millions of local people as well as disastrous turns of events for U.S. influence, prestige and power.
Propaganda, public relations and any other related term is now the mainstay of both capitalism and western politics. A lot of times it is a lot easier to see and remember the movement of actual soldiers, “boots on the ground”, bombs and missiles than it is to see the “hidden hand” of those who can and do work tirelessly to shape public opinion.
I wrote this article not to break any new ground in historical research, but to just remind myself (and hopefully you) of exactly what our government has been doing in our name for the last 60 years. I also wrote it to provide a little perspective on the recent “scandals” involving Joe Klein and the National Review.
Sometimes I feel like I woke up yesterday in 1950’s Russia and was the last person on the block to realize Pravda was not an accurate, factual newspaper, that when I was a kid I was sold a fairy tale about what the United States government was supposed to be versus what it actually was. But knowing the truth about the lies and scandals, whether 1954 or 2007, is not quite enough. The first step is awareness, the second step… well I don’t know. I’m open to suggestions.
All I can do is trust that the American people (and those of the entire world), as a majority, don’t want to live like this anymore. Some might call me foolishly optimistic for relying on that but I don’t think I am. Because I don’t want to live in a world where the majority of the people want to live like this.
Pax
