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Globalization in the Banana Republic:
A Case Study of U.S. Imperialism in Guatemala
Giovanni (John) DiLuca
Michigan State University
Introduction
For most of the postwar period the dominant scholarly consensus on the United
States role in international politics closely paralleled the image that policy makers
themselves held: the United States was a defective, status-quo power seeking to
contain the revolutionary or simply imperialist expansionism of Soviet-led
communism. (Slater, 63)
In a remarkably short time, the image of the role the United States has played
since World War II has shifted. Since the early 1960s the world has seen the American
role as imperialistic rather than defensive: a deliberate, planned, and successful effort at
world domination under the pretext of the “containment” of a largely nonexistent
communist military or political threat. The central goal of this domination often is
described in terms of capitalism. The government, acting as an instrument of American
corporatism, has consistently sought to preserve a capitalist status quo around the world
by covertly or overtly employing the vast range of power at its disposal to crush any risk
of a threat. During the Cold War, policy makers never really believed the threat to be
communism per se in Latin America, but rather revolution, socialism, or even simply
nationalism, for truly socialist or nationalist regimes would close off their economies to
the United States penetration and domination. History proves that economic selfaggrandizement at the heart of American imperialism was the force that served to
deepen and legitimize American expansionist drive.
Benjamin Cohen’s definition of imperialism seems appropriate: “any relationship
of effective domination or control, political or economic, direct or indirect, of one nation
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over another.”1 Such a definition implies that great power is involved, and it is possible
to examine three dimensions of power: control, defined as the capacity to achieve
objectives even in the face of opposition; domination, implying great power but falling
short of outright control; and influence, meaning the capacity to affect the policies and
behaviors of other states. The term “imperialism” should be limited to cases in which the
power of one state over another is sufficient to establish control or at least a high
degree of domination. Even critics would agree that during the Cold War, imperialism
dominated U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, especially in Guatemala.
Some scholars have raised the question whether globalization is a new
phenomenon, or whether it is just imperialism or modernization with a new label.2 It is
beyond the scope of this paper to explore these fascinating questions. For our purposes,
at any point in the last century, globalization fostered American imperialism. In his now
classic book, John Tomlinson focuses on the language used to speak of globalization.3
His goal is to make a strong case against use of the term "imperialism" to represent the
effects of globalization. By carefully analyzing the contexts in which cultural imperialism
is used as a mark of protest, Tomlinson shows how each of its many different senses
connotes a power-relation that is an imposition or coercion. He argues, however, that
such a language is appropriate only for the project of imperialism and not for
globalization. From an American standpoint, it is imperialism, however, that the
globalization theories discuss.
1
See Benjamin J Cohen, The Question of Imperialism; The Political Economy of Dominance and
Dependence. New York, Basic Books, 1973, p. 61
2
A small sample of this debate includes: Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, New York: Times
Books, 1995; John H. Dunning and Khilil A. Hamdini, The New Globalism and Developing Countries,
Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1997
3
See John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction, London: Pinter Publishers, 1991
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In the midst of growing corporate interests in Latin America, the American
government did literally everything it could to protect those interests as well as the
interests of individual members in government. Guatemala is no different from the rest
of Latin America (and most of the Third World) in that America exploited it for its
resources and commodities, specifically bananas. In order to guarantee that the
exploitation could continue over time, the United States established “puppet regimes”
that were controlled in Guatemala City as much as they were in Washington, D.C.
After decades of brutal civil war, which brought about the killing of up to 200,000
unarmed civilians, the arrest and torture of tens of thousands, and the forced
displacement of more than a million people, Guatemala is now attempting to achieve
some measure of peace. Culminating in an agreement signed December 29, 1996,
government officials and guerrilla forces have entered into a series of peace accords
ranging from the guarantee of Indians' rights to the reform and reduction of the
country's armed forces and the resettlement of refugees and displaced persons.
As severe as the war has been, it is likely that any efforts at peace will also be a
battle. Undoubtedly, the most controversial aspect of the peace process has been the
amnesty law passed by the Guatemalan Congress in mid-December 1996, which
exempts both soldiers and guerrillas from prosecution for the killings, kidnappings, and
acts of torture committed during the conflict. Beyond questions of truth and
accountability, however, Guatemala will struggle to achieve any form of stability because
the same phenomena that brought about the civil conflict in the first place, particularly
the enormous differences between rich and poor, remains entrenched.
One question that remains unanswered is what role the United States will play in
achieving peace in Guatemala. In answering this question, one must focus on both the
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degree to which the United States government bears some responsibility for
Guatemala's decades of horror, and whether American involvement in the affairs of this
afflicted country should prompt special measures to help the Guatemalan people achieve
some measure of peace, security, and justice.
These questions are not familiar to us because, quite simply, we do not think this
way. The way we do think, instead, is to presuppose that countries (and particularly our
own country) are allowed to pursue what they consider to be their own "national
interests" in other countries, notwithstanding how corrupt, repressive, or genocidal the
governments of allied countries happen to be. “We have a strong hand with which to
influence world affairs to our benefit - if only we are persistent, use our advantages
wisely, and apply the necessary resources to the conduct of our foreign relations.”
4
American foreign policy has maintained a strong commitment to this realist school of
thought throughout all of Latin America. There is a strong national consensus on
American foreign policy objectives. The United States, both in the past and present,
seeks to: Protect the safety of our nation against aggression or subversion; Promote
domestic prosperity; Foster the values of freedom and democracy both at home and
abroad; and act in a manner consistent with our humanitarian instincts.
It was exactly this realist paradigm that not only shaped American foreign policy,
but also altered the “rules of the game” in world politics.5 Although globalization
encompasses economic, technological, military, and cultural influence, this paper
focuses on imperialism driven by economic motives with goals achieved through military
4
Secretary Shultz's statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 3, 1987.
For a historical analysis of U.S.-Latin American relations and a detailed explanation of how the United
States dictated the terms of engagement/containment, see Peter H. Smith’s Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics
of U.S.-Latin American Relations.
5
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might. It is imperative to note, however, that globalization does not mean the same to
subaltern states as it does to the most developed states.6 Put simply, from the American
perspective, globalization is merely a term used to describe America’s incredible
influence over the world. Critics of realism such as Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye
argue that the world is a system of complex interdependence with transnational
connections (interdependencies) between states and societies. But the fact remains that
for the majority of the last century, the United States has had the largest economy and
most powerful military in the world. This unprecedented sphere of influence allowed for
the alteration (if not the unilateral creation) of the rules of international relations.
The periphery sees globalization from a very different standpoint. Whereas the
United States (and the Soviet Union during the Cold War) dictates the rules of the game,
countries similar to Guatemala have no choice but to follow the rules. In essence,
although the Third World has the largest amount of players in the game, they still must
rely on the imperialist powers for survival.
Guatemala is no different from the rest of Latin America in that it was plagued by
American foreign policy. To begin, there is evidence that the CIA-backed overthrow of
President Jacobo Arbenz Gutman in 1954 "started the cycle of Government-sponsored
violence and repression." (Rohter, A1) The United States not only set the wheels of
repression in motion, it helped to perpetuate the violence. In 1966, the United States
sent hundreds of Green Berets to Guatemala, thereby playing a crucial role in training
and reorganizing what it had viewed as an inefficient army. This was the origin of the
6
For an excellent explanation of alternative perspectives to international relations, see Mohammed Ayoob,
“Inequality and Theorizing in International Relations: The Case for Subaltern Realism.” International
Studies Review, Volume 4, Issue 3, (2002), pp. 27-48.
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killing machine that became the Guatemalan army. As Susanne Jonas, one of the world’s
leading authorities on Guatemala, has written:
It was in Guatemala that Latin America first saw such phenomena as death
squads and "disappearances," which subsequently became standard operating
procedure in counterinsurgency wars throughout the hemisphere. U.S. military
advisers were involved in the formation of the death squads, and the head of the
U.S. military mission publicly justified their operations.
In addition to military training, the United States also provided hundreds of
millions of dollars in economic and security assistance, although the latter was ostensibly
cut-off between the years 1977 to 1983 because of the negative publicity surrounding
human rights violations in Guatemala. Still, behind the scenes it was business-as-usual,
and U.S. aid proceeded virtually unabated, whether in the form of collaboration on
counterinsurgency plans or economic support provided by covert CIA operations.
What has been described thus far, unfortunately, does not differ much from U.S.
relations with a number of other countries, such as Angola, Argentina, El Salvador, and
Indonesia, which have also experienced gross levels of human rights abuses. What
makes Guatemala somewhat unique, however, is what is now known about U.S.
operations in that country, namely, that the U.S. government employed assets who
were known human rights abusers (Rohter), thus going far in blurring any distinction
that might otherwise exist between Guatemalan human rights violations and our own.
The purpose of this analysis is to examine the effects of globalization from a
perspective outside of the United States, specifically Guatemala. Part II provides an
overview of U.S. relations with Guatemala as well as a brief history of 20th century
Guatemalan politics. Suffice it to say that U.S. support for the various Guatemalan
governments from 1954 on was part of a larger political goal of fighting communism in
the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere. Part III of this note examines the role of the
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United States, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in Guatemala. Evidence
suggests that policymakers had ulterior motives (other than security concerns) for
invading Guatemala. Part IV focuses on the question of U.S. responsibility for the gross
levels of human rights abuses that have occurred in Guatemala since the time of the
Arbenz coup in 1954. This section first addresses the broader question of whether a
country that has pursued foreign policy objectives in another country, particularly when
this other country has experienced the brutalities that a country like Guatemala has,
bears some of the responsibility for these horrors. It then focuses on the Intelligence
Oversight Board's 1996 report on the CIA's activities in Guatemala, which essentially
found that the Agency employed intelligence operatives in Guatemala who were known
to be responsible for committing egregious human rights practices. This section
concludes with an analysis on recent developments in which President Clinton
apologized to Guatemala for U.S. involvement in its role in gross human rights
violations. Finally, Part V addresses the issue of whether the United States owes a
special duty to assist in the reconstruction of Guatemalan society, and what that duty
might entail.
An Overview Of United States-Guatemalan Relations
A direct product of a 450-year process that began with the Spanish invasion in
1529, Guatemala is one of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the
Western Hemisphere. The Spanish conquest represented the violent clash of two
socioeconomic systems and two cultures, with the forced integration of the indigenous
Indian population into Western civilization resulting in an unmitigated calamity of
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genocidal proportions. The colonial experience, which lasted until independence in 1821,
was marked by political priorities established by the Spanish crown and by the Spanish
ruling classes. The dominant sector in Guatemalan society was the criollo, or landed
classes, which was totally dependent upon forced Indian labor. In fact, the violent abuse
of the indigenous population became the essential means of perpetuating this
exploitative class system, which in turn was exacerbated by racial differences.
Independence itself did little to change the basic patterns of underdevelopment.
United States involvement in Guatemala began in the economic sphere, but soon
spread to the political sphere. The adverse effects of globalization, however, are not
only direct result of government action, but also through corporatism. The pivotal player
in U.S. and Guatemalan relations was United Fruit Company (UFCO), which began
exporting bananas from Guatemala in 1870 (Schlesinger and Kinzer, 62). By the turn of
the century, the United Fruit Company owned 212,394 acres of land in the Caribbean
and Latin America, of which only 61,263 acres were actually producing fruit, with the
rest lying fallow. Guatemala was United Fruit's centerpiece. During the course of the
19th century, United Fruit's economic and political power in Guatemala grew in tandem
(Adams, 120). Within this time period, the company enjoyed almost unimaginable
benefits including: unlimited use of much of the country's best land, complete access to
Guatemala's resources, exemption from nearly all taxes and duties, and unlimited profit
remittances. It is not an exaggeration to say that United Fruit essentially ran Guatemala,
as there was a very strong alliance between the Guatemalan oligarchy and American
business interests (Immerman, 112).
It is important to discuss whether or not the United States exploited Guatemala
for its commodities. To begin with, what does the term “exploitation” mean at the
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nation-state level? While discussing imperialism in Latin America, Jerome Slater identifies
two common usages.7 First, there is the deliberate use of power by one state to attain
economic advantage at the expense of the victimized state. In this case there is
absolute deprivation in which the exploiter’s gains are the exploitee’s losses; thus, in the
absence of the exploitative relationship, the exploited state would be better off. Second,
it may be understood to mean the deliberate use of power by one state simply to
maximize its economic advantages in exchange relationships with weaker states. In this
case there is relative rather than absolute deprivation because each side is economically
better off than it would be in the absence of the relationship. It is important to
emphasize the distinction between “exploitation” from mere “inequality” in that the
advantages (a) must be very great, not merely somewhat unequal, and (b) must stem
from the deliberate use of power by the stronger party. Even under the less stringent of
the two interpretations, Guatemala was exploited by UFCO and the U.S. government.
It was not until World War II that Guatemala began to emerge from its feudal
past. In October 1944, the U.S.-supported Guatemalan dictator, General Jorge Ubico,
was forced to step down from office in the face of a social, economic, and political
upheaval. Ubico appointed Federico Ponce as provisional president, but Ponce was
quickly deposed in an army coup when it became apparent that he intended to pursue
the repressive policies of his predecessor. An interim junta was named, consisting of two
army officers, Francisco Arana and Jacobo Arbenz, and a civilian, Jorge Toriello (Jonas).
This was the genesis of what became known as the "October Revolution."
7
See Jerome Slater, “Is United States Foreign Policy ‘Imperialist’ or ‘Imperial’?” Political Science
Quarterly, Volume 91, Number 1, Spring 1976. pp. 63-87
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During this time, Guatemala experienced its first real taste of democratic
governance in the form of congressional and democratic elections, with Juan Jose
Arevalo winning the presidency with eighty-five percent of the vote. Arevalo immediately
moved to reaffirm democratic principles. Universal suffrage was granted to all adults
except illiterate women, and the new constitution guaranteed basic freedoms of speech
and press. Arevalo also embarked on a fairly extensive social welfare program, and he
established a new Labor Code, which, for the first time in Guatemalan history, protected
the rights of workers (Schlesinger and Kinzer, 24). Still, Arevalo neglected to directly
threaten the real power in Guatemala, the economic and political power wielded by
United Fruit. This was left to his successor.
Jacobo Arbenz, Arevalo's Defense Minister, won the 1950 presidential race after
his main rival, Francisco Arana, head of the armed forces, was assassinated under
suspicious circumstances. Upon taking power in 1951, Arbenz attempted to create a new
relationship with foreign investors. "Arbenz's strategy was to limit their previously
unchecked power, not by nationalizing them, but by competing with them and forcing
their compliance with national laws." The centerpiece of this new policy was the 1952
Agrarian Reform Law under which the government expropriated unused land from large
landholders, with compensation in the form of government bonds (NCR, 15). "During
the eighteen months the program was in operation, some 100,000 families received a
total of 1.5 million acres” (Schlesinger and Kinzer, 55). Arbenz had expropriated 234,000
acres of land owned by United Fruit, offering compensation that United Fruit called
"unacceptable." President Arbenz was truly genuine in agrarian reform; his family was
among those whose property was confiscated.
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To put things mildly, the land reform program was not well received by either
United Fruit or by the U.S. government. Outwardly, the U.S. government responded by
cutting Guatemalan aid. Secretly, however, United Fruit and the U.S. government had
already started plotting Arbenz's removal. In early 1953, the CIA initiated contact with
Guatemalan exiles under the leadership of Carlos Acastillo Armas, who had at one time
received military training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (Zinn), and began providing funds
for the training, equipment, and payment of a mercenary force. The pretext for overt
American action occurred with the discovery of a small cache of Czech arms on the
Swedish ship Alfhem. The U.S. government responded by increasing its shipment of
arms to conservative governments in Honduras and Nicaragua, and by increasing its
propaganda effort against Arbenz on Radio Liberty (Schlesinger and Kinzer, 167-169).
“At the March 1954 Inter-American Conference of the Organization of American States
(OAS) in Caracas, the United States (in the person of Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles) twisted enough arms to secure passage of a resolution directed against
Guatemala, calling for hemispheric unity and mutual defense against 'Communist
aggression'" (Jonas, 29).
The Cold War and the CIA: A Conspiracy?
Secretary of State Dulles had made the most noise about rolling back the Iron
Curtain. His goal was to contain communism, which seemed a large enough task in the
early 1950s. The place it was growing fastest was in the Third World, where colonialism
was giving way to chaos. He saw the CIA as a convenient tool that could stop the Red
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stain from spreading on the map. It was his personal action arm. All he needed to do
was call his brother, Allen, the director of the CIA.
So the battleground was not fought on American or Soviet soil. These proxy wars
occurred in the barracks from Cairo to Havana. The Third World beckoned as an easier
place to operate than the East Bloc. The Kremlin had long tentacles, but they became
attenuated with distance; local communist movements were easier to penetrate than
ones close to Moscow Center. By judiciously dispensing cash and favors, an American
CIA station chief could gain the kind of power enjoyed by a colonial proconsul. The odds
for intervention seemed so encouraging that the men who ran the CIA overlooked one
shortcoming. They knew almost nothing about the so-called Developing World.
On June 18, 1954, Operation Success opened when Castillo's mercenary army
launched an invasion from Honduras (Jonas, 29). To the surprise of American analysts,
however, no popular uprising took place. Because of this, the CIA was forced to take a
far more active role in the coup. The CIA, manned by U.S. pilots, began regular
bombardment of the capitol and other cities. Under the control of Allen Dulles, the CIA
put together a rather unimpressive "army" of 300 irregular soldiers with Colonel Carlos
Castillo Armas in command. In the face of increasing military and political pressure from
the United States, Arbenz was forced to step down.8
The government that the United States overthrew was the most democratic
Guatemala had ever had. Arbenz was a left-of-center Socialist; Communists held only
four of the fifty-six seats in the Congress. Shortly after, Armas, in power, gave the land
8
Ironically, according to common historical accounts, the overthrow of Arbenz inspired the beginning of
the Guatemalan resistance, the first guerrilla movement in Latin America after Cuba's rebels. According to
Victor Perera, "Since both Castro and Che Guevara had received part of their political education in
Guatemala during Arbenz's presidency, their formative influence on Guatemala's guerrilla organizations
amounts to a repayment of an ideological debt."
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back to United Fruit, abolished the tax on interest and dividends to foreign investors,
eliminated the secret ballot, and jailed thousands of political critics (Zinn).
The Dulles brothers and other top dogs in the Eisenhower administration
instigated the coup, executed by the CIA through a phony invasion - and a
puppet successor installed - to preserve the interests of the United Fruit Co. As
rich and strong as Guatemala was poor and weak, the multi-tentacled firm
controlled 40,000 jobs there and felt threatened by Arbenz's planned economic
reforms. (Rosenberg, 1)
According to Thomas McCann, an executive for United Fruit Co., UFCO was
involved in the invasion of Guatemala at every level. For example, prior to the invasion
in 1954, the CIA shipped weapons via UFCO boats. Moreover, Colonel Armas was
provided food housing on Fruit Company property just across the Guatemalan border in
Honduras and that the invading troops were assembled from UFCO land in Honduras
(McCann, 60).
In the capital city, the CIA broadcast a fictional account of the military advance,
while the American Embassy played battle sounds on huge speakers on its roof and
American planes swooped past the national palace. Arbenz was soon history, and only
then did the CIA allow in the mostly pliant press to cover his overthrow that the agency
had secretly engineered (Rosenberg, 1).
With the direct assistance of the United States, Armas immediately began to
reverse the October Revolution. Nearly all of the land that had been expropriated was
returned, and literacy programs and other social welfare initiatives halted. More
importantly, the reign of terror that was to afflict Guatemala for the next four decades
began immediately, with as many as 8,000 peasants being murdered in the first two
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months of Armas' rule. Communists were specially targeted for removal. The United
States played a vital role in this action, with Secretary of State Dulles providing Armas
with lists of names of individuals who were to be murdered (Jonas, 29).
Attempting to make the Guatemala counter-revolution a showcase for
democracy, the United States poured in large amounts of aid. In fact, for a time more
assistance was provided to Guatemala than to the rest of Latin America combined. For
the first years of the counterrevolution, the United States provided Guatemala with $8090 million in donations, which was considerably more than the $60 million provided for
the rest of Latin America (Jonas, 58).
The CIA would continue to operate in Guatemala, aiding the military in its
campaign against the rebels, which turned into a genocidal campaign against the
country's Mayan population. Because Guatemala is the largest country in Central
America and certainly one of the richest in natural resources, business concerns from
the United States and other nations have always figured into the equation and generally
supported the traditional Guatemalan social structure dominated by a rich class and the
military.
Formal U.S. counterinsurgency assistance began as early as 1960, and U.S.
Special Forces set up a secret military training base in Guatemala in 1962 (Jonas, 69).
This program became massive in 1966. In fact, the winner of the presidential election
that year, Mendez Montenegro, was not allowed to assume office until after he had
signed a pact, brokered by the American Embassy, that guaranteed the Guatemalan
army (and their American allies) free reign in counterrevolutionary operations against
the small band of leftist guerrillas (Jonas, 70). The result was a further intensification of
the conflict, as "U.S. training, bomber planes, napalm, radar detection devices, and
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other sophisticated technologies…were decisive in smashing the insurgency” (Jonas,
70). In addition to these forms of military assistance, substantial evidence exists that
U.S. advisers played a direct role in the formation of paramilitary death squads. Jonas
writes:
Although the United States claimed that its training would "professionalize" the
Guatemalan security forces, there is substantial evidence of the direct role of
U.S. military advisers in the formation of death squads: U.S. Embassy personnel
were allegedly involved in writing an August 1966 memorandum outlining the
creation of paramilitary groups, and the U.S. military attaché during this period
publicly claimed credit for instigating their formation as part of "counter terror"
operations.
Recently declassified CIA documents suggest that as early as 1966, officials from
the U.S. State Department, far from opposing the torturers, set up a "safe house" for
security forces in Guatemala's presidential palace, which eventually became the
headquarters for "kidnapping, torture... bombings, street assassinations and executions
of real or alleged communists." CIA documents also prove that, from the beginning, U.S.
intelligence was fully aware that "disappearances" were actually kidnappings followed by
summary executions. Rather than act to stop the slaughter, however, the State
Department continued to provide tens of millions of dollars in aid (Harris, 44).
Why did the U.S. not disengage itself at this point? The answer has partly to do
with bureaucratic inertia, partly with the incurably optimistic American conviction that
foreign armies can be reshaped into our own image and likeness. But the fundamental
reason was that the Cold War in Latin America was then at its height, with Cuban and
Soviet-sponsored guerrilla movements operating by now in a dozen countries.
Guatemala, as it happens, was one of the two key targets selected by Castro for
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subversion (the other was Venezuela) and could not easily be abandoned without
important geopolitical consequences.
And the guerrilla challenge in Guatemala was by no means negligible. For much
of the 1960s, large parts of the countryside were controlled by the Armed Revolutionary
Forces (FAR), which on occasion showed themselves capable of reaching deep into the
capital; in 1968, they managed to assassinate the U.S. ambassador.
Military aid to Guatemala ceased in the mid-1970s, due in large part to the fact
that the Army's reign of terror, which protected American security and economic
interests, was sufficient to the task. During those years, however, Israel, among others,
filled the position of arms trader and kept the military and death squads well equipped.
By the mid-1970's, this threat had receded to the point where Washington could
afford the luxury of casting a skeptical eye on some of its more unsavory allies.
Important figures in the Ford administration - most notably, Assistant Secretary of State
William D. Rogers, as well as our diplomatic representatives in Guatemala City and at
the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights - deliberately distanced themselves
from the regime (Falcoff, 45). But the decisive change came during the administration of
Jimmy Carter, who publicly condemned the government's human rights abuses. In 1977,
the United States for the first time conditioned its military aid to Guatemala on an
improved human-rights performance - a policy that was extended well into the second
Reagan administration in the mid-1980's (U.S. Congress). In other words, from 1977 to
1986, the United States provided Guatemala with no military assistance, no foreign
military sales, and exactly $300,000 in training only in 1985, after the armed forces had
agreed to return to their barracks (Falcoff, 45).
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By teaching the Guatemalan military just how easy and painless it was to flout
Washington, the American embargo strengthened the hand of the most vicious and
intransigent officers and their allies in the business community, and removed whatever
restraints might have been inhibiting them from fighting the civil war on their own terms
and in their own way.
The period from 1980-83 represents the most gruesome period in Guatemalan
history (U.S. Congress). Susanne Jonas described this period as a "silent holocaust.”
"What is most striking is the unity and single-minded determination of all those involved
in the campaign against la subversion. Inherent within this vision was the assumption
that the planned genocide that left 100,000-150,000 civilian casualties was necessary to
establish social peace...” (148).
Most of the genocide occurred through the Army's scorched earth policy in the
Highlands, where over 440 villages were entirely destroyed, and one million people
displaced, in addition to the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians.9 Reflecting on
U.S. relations with Guatemala, Jonas writes:
We know now that the legacy of that intervention has been Latin America's
longest and dirtiest war. Even today, after thirty years and up to 200,000 civilian
casualties, the United States and the Guatemala army are no closer to pacifying
the country on a lasting basis. Guatemalans live in much worse conditions than
ever. But once having glimpsed the possibility of a better life, during the 19441954 Revolution, many people have refused to accept a "fate" of misery and
9
My moral convictions require me to explain the significance of the disappeared and killed. In the social
science discipline, it is almost second nature to read over the number of people killed in acts of genocide.
However, after reading personal accounts and descriptive stories of these heinous crimes, I need to stress
how horrific the actions actually were. The victims are viewed as icons – powerful, conflicting images that
reintroduce the missing into the public sphere as pure representation. There were thousands and thousands
of tortured and mutilated bodies, dead bodies, bodies dumped into mass graves, or cut into pieces and
burned in ovens, or thrown into the ocean from military planes (Taylor). The reality of their ordeal becomes
unreal to us through the very process of trying to illuminate it. It is imperative to recognize and never
forget about what happened to the thousands of casualties who died in Guatemala.
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repression and have continually sought redress for their grievances. This is why
issues of social revolution remain on the agenda.
Jonas offers this view of what might have occurred in Guatemala and in the rest
of Latin America:
But let us suppose that the Eisenhower Administration had decided to leave the
Arbenz Government in place in 1954. What would have ensued? Not
communism, but capitalist industrialization and modernization. Land reform had
to be part of that process, but it would have served primarily to rationalize
Guatemalan capitalism, to stabilize the country by bringing its dispossessed
majority into the economy. Not only Guatemala but perhaps all of Central
America might have undergone a nonviolent modernization process, if the
Guatemalan example had been permitted to survive and even to spread. (240241)
It is difficult to prove why the CIA sought to overthrow the government of
Guatemala in 1954 because most documents are still classified. However, research
alludes to a possible conspiracy. The story begins in 1936 on Wall Street with a deal set
up by John Foster Dulles, then a lawyer with Sullivan & Cromwell, to create a banana
monopoly in Guatemala for his client, United Fruit Company (McCann, 58). In 1952,
Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, Guatemala's president, expropriated United Fruit's holdings. To
get his company's land back, Sam "The Banana Man" Zemurray, the head of United
Fruit, hired Washington lobbyist Tommy "Tommy the Cork" Corcoran. His case was
sympathetically heard, in part because just about everyone in a position to do
something about Guatemala was, in one way or another, on United Fruit's payroll. Both
Dulles brothers had sat on the board of United Fruit's partner in the banana monopoly,
the Schroder Banking Corp. Allen Dulles was also a shareholder (Dosal, 230). General
Robert Cutler, special assistant to the president for national security affairs, was a
former UFCO director. Additionally, Thomas Corcoran was a paid consultant to UFCO at
the same time he worked for the CIA (Dosal, 230.) The assistant secretary of state for
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inter-American affairs, John Moors Cabot, owned stock in United Fruit. (His brother,
Thomas, had served as president of the company until 1948.) U.N. Ambassador Henry
Cabot Lodge was a stockholder and had been a strong defender of United Fruit while a
U.S. senator. Ann Whitman, Eisenhower's personal secretary, was the wife of Edmund
Whitman, United Fruit's PR director. Walter Bedell Smith, the Undersecretary of State,
was actively seeking a job with United Fruit and later sat on the company's board.
Again, it is difficult to prove that a conspiracy exists, but evidence suggests that the key
players in the CIA had personal motives to invade Guatemala.
It is also important to briefly discuss the role of the American press during this
charade. Unfortunately, it is difficult to prove a conspiracy between the government and
the press because both control the flow of information to the public. Much of the
literature written on the topic is hearsay and inconclusive. However, it is certain that the
press simply ignored Arbenz's cry that the CIA was plotting against him. Most reporters
accepted uncritically whatever American officials told them. Dispatches from Time
magazine reporters in Guatemala, generally sympathetic to Arbenz, were rewritten at
the magazine's editorial offices in New York to take a hard line against the Guatemalan
government. The editor-in-chief of Time Inc., Henry Luce, was a friend of Allen Dulles,
and the reporters strongly suspected government intervention. The most naked - and
successful - attempt to control the press came at the New York Times. The dispatches of
Sydney Gruson, the Times's man in Mexico City, seemed overly influenced by the
Guatemalan foreign minister. Since the Times reporter was taking the wrong line,
Wisner suggested to Dulles that the CIA try to silence Gruson. As a "left-leaning" émigré
who traveled on a British passport issued in Warsaw, Gruson was a "security risk,"
Wisner argued. The necessary phone calls were made, and - as a patriotic gesture -
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New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger ordered Gruson to stay out of
Guatemala, just as Gruson was about to launch an investigation of Castillo Armas's
army.
In some rather perverse and puzzling way, the question of state responsibility for
human rights abuses committed by an ally has seldom been raised. I believe that there
are at least two reasons why this issue of state complicity has received so little
attention. First, Americans are unable, or perhaps unwilling, to make any substantive
connection to our past actions. It is difficult for many to believe that the United States
would preserve democracy and liberty through totalitarian means. Consider the
overthrow of President Arbenz discussed earlier. While it was reported in the media that
the U.S. backed coup helped to set off the decades-long civil war in Guatemala, what is
missing from such reports is any indication that the United States might thereby share
some of the responsibility for the atrocities that ensued. Whatever the reason, while
there has been rather frank public admission that the U.S. Government played a vital
role in setting in motion the horrible events that Guatemala suffered, there certainly has
been no attempt to accept any type of responsibility for the events that subsequently
unfolded in that country.
The second reason why the issue of state responsibility has not been raised is
that we are unable, or unwilling, to make any connection between our own actions and
the human consequences that result from these actions.10 This psychological criticism
explains America’s willingness to accept the role the U.S. played in Guatemala. Our
willingness to exaggerate their importance and to create incidents – coupled with the
willingness of the American press to amplify our cries throughout the United States – led
10
The term “we” implies the U.S. government and American society at-large.
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not only to the collapse of the Arbenz regime, but also created a subsequent
environment in the United States that, when a real Communist threat actually did occur
four years later in Cuba, the American public and some members of the press were
unwilling to believe the truth. Thus, while we readily admit to pursuing foreign policy
objectives in other countries, we are immune to the potential consequences of our
behavior. One reason for our perspective is that we do not actually see American actors
harming others. Instead, we readily accept the notion that while the United States
provided substantial amounts of assistance to the Guatemalan government throughout
the civil war, it did not directly order or incite the gross levels of human rights abuses
that were carried out. Instead, the Guatemalan government is treated as a completely
autonomous entity, while the U.S. government, notwithstanding the fact that it provided
hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and assistance, is treated as completely divorced
from Guatemalan atrocities.
Newly declassified American documents, for example, place a CIA officer in the
room where Guatemalan intelligence officers - men responsible for death squad killings planned their covert operations in 1965. They show that CIA and other American
officials played a key role in the latter 1960s in centralizing command structures and
communications of agencies that would be involved in death squad killings for years
(Krauss, 1). They contain CIA reports of secret executions of Communist Party leaders
by Guatemalan Government agencies in 1966 that Guatemalan officials publicly denied.
They also show that the CIA station in Guatemala City knew that the
Guatemalan army was massacring entire Mayan villages while Reagan Administration
officials publicly supported the military regime's human rights record (Krauss, 1). Even
after the war was won, the documents reveal, Defense Intelligence Agency officials
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knew that the Guatemalan military was destroying evidence of torture centers and
clandestine graveyards in 1994.
President George Bush cut off Washington's military aid program following the
unexplained 1990 murder of an American innkeeper near an army base (U.S. Congress).
Even then the CIA continued to give monetary assistance to the military behind the back
of the State Department. Two senior CIA officers lost their jobs after Congressional
intelligence committees found that the CIA station in Guatemala was keeping human
rights violations secret from CIA headquarters and Congress.
Can We Ever Fix the Past?
What is ironic is that U.S. foreign policy is purportedly founded on normative
principles. This is, after all, why we waged the Cold War against Communism. And it is
also why there are federal statutes designed to prevent U.S. military and economic
assistance from going to countries experiencing gross levels of human rights abuses.
Yet, what the Cold War actually allowed us to do was to remove much of the
moral component from our conduct of international affairs. Rather than weighing the
costs and benefits of both our ends and means, and instead of examining the nature of
the regimes with which we were aligning ourselves, we blindly assumed that our actions
were legitimate, and so were our means. This way of thinking, in turn, placed the U.S.
government in alliance with a host of regimes that systematically violated human rights.
The litmus test was simply whether or not the regime rejected communism. As surreal
as it sounds today, more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, if these regimes
shared this ideological trait with us, we would align ourselves with them, no matter how
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repressive or genocidal they happened to be. Guatemala was simply one of the worst
manifestations of this "morality". What does morality dictate? When one government
supports an unjust regime in another country, it shares responsibility for the crimes and
human rights abuses committed by that other government.
Evidence strongly suggests that the United States shares a substantial
responsibility for the human rights abuses committed in Guatemala from 1954 to 1996.
Although by the time of the Arbenz coup the Guatemalan people had suffered through
literally hundreds of years of exploitation and terror, there is little doubt that the actions
of the October Revolution would have brought about substantial changes (Jonas). Not
only were the Guatemalan people enjoying the fruits of democratic rule for the first time
in their history, but the country itself was experiencing a social and economic revolution
that was in the process of removing the feudal conditions that had marked Guatemala
from the time of the Spanish conquest.
Perhaps, if the Arbenz coup had somehow been an isolated incident of U.S.
meddling, critics would not attribute so much blame. However, as outlined earlier, this
was not an isolated incident. The United States' involvement essentially created an army
that systematically violated human rights. The United States also provided military and
economic assistance to a string of Guatemalan military dictatorships, again, knowing full
well the massive levels of human rights violations that were being carried out (Rairn,
511). Furthermore, the U.S. government was directly implicated in the form of
employing assets who were known human rights abusers. Essentially, this means that
there was a very thin line between the Guatemalan atrocities and those committed by
the United States.
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On March 30, 1995, President Clinton directed the Intelligence Oversight Board
(IOB) to conduct a government-wide review concerning allegations regarding the 1990
death in Guatemala of U.S. citizen Michael DeVine, the 1992 disappearance of
Guatemalan guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, who was the husband of Jennifer
Harbury, an American citizen. Under terms of reference issued on April 7, 1995, the
scope of the IOB inquiry was to cover any existing intelligence bearing on the torture,
disappearance, or death of US citizens in Guatemala since 1984 (Harrington, 1).
On June 28, 1996, the IOB issued its report (hereinafter Report), the publication
of which was without precedent. The Report found that:
Achieving them and maintaining influence in Guatemala required that the CIA
deal with some unsavory groups and individuals. The human rights records of
the Guatemalan security services were widely known to be reprehensible, and
although the CIA made efforts to improve the conduct of the services, probably
with some limited success, egregious human rights abuses did not stop.
(Harrington, 2)
The Report continues:
We found that several CIA assets were credibly alleged to have ordered,
planned, or participated in serious human rights violations such as assassination,
extrajudicial execution, torture, or kidnapping while they were assets -- and that
the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) headquarters was aware at the time of
the allegations. (Harrington, 3)
The Report criticized two aspects of CIA behavior. The first was the finding that
insufficient attention had been given to allegations of serious human rights abuses made
against several station assets or liaison contacts. Secondly, the Report found that the
CIA had failed to provide enough information on this subject to policy makers and the
Congress to permit proper policy and Congressional oversight (Harrington, 7). The
authors of the Report were "disturbed" that until the recent Guatemalan inquiries, the
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CIA did not have any agency-wide written guidance with respect to the appropriateness
of using assets who were suspect because of their criminal and/or human rights
practices (Harrington, 4). Anticipating this criticism, in February 1996 the CIA issued
guidance for dealing with serious human rights violations or crimes of violence by assets
and liaison services (Harrington, 4). These guidelines generally bar such relationships;
however, the guidelines do permit senior CIA officials to authorize them in special cases
when national security interests so warrant. Although the Report was replete with
various aspects of wrongdoing by the United States, what was totally ignored was any
sense of responsibility or any measures of restitution for this wrongdoing. Thus, while
the IOB Report found the human rights record of the Guatemalan security services to be
reprehensible, and while it also found that this fact had not stopped the U.S.
government from employing a number of "unsavory groups and individuals," still, the
Report failed to even mention what measures the U.S. government might, or should,
take to attempt to rectify its past practices, except, of course, not to do them again. In
essence, then the Report reads: In our Guatemalan operations we were in bed with
some pretty awful characters, so let's not do that again - unless national security
dictates (Weiner, A12).
In September 1996, the U.S. Department of Defense admitted that manuals used
until recently to train Latin American soldiers included numerous illegal practices,
including summary execution. In January 1997, two declassified CIA manuals on
interrogation contained plain references to electrical and chemical torture. In fact, one
of the CIA manuals, prepared for its 1954 covert war in Guatemala, is a twenty-one
page "Study of Assassination" which admits that murder "is not morally justifiable" while
at the same time explains how to kill by whopping someone with "a hammer, axe,
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wrench, screwdriver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and
handy."
In March 10, 1999, the world finally received confirmation of happenings that
most human rights activists already knew. President Clinton arrived in Guatemala to
participate in the Central American summit, where free trade and migration head the
agenda. On arrival, he was forced to remain in his aircraft for 45 minutes due to street
demonstrations by environmentalists, students, unions and human rights groups (IPS
Correspondents). And in order to meet with his Guatemalan counterpart, Alvaro Arzu, he
was forced to go in the back door an hour later than planned, due to the large number
of demonstrators waving placards and burning U.S. flags in front of the building.
President Clinton apologized to the people of Guatemala for the fact that the
United States had supported "military forces and intelligence units which engaged in
violence and widespread repression" during the 36 years of civil war in that troubled
Central American country. He was applauded for his courage and forthrightness. He
said:
For the United States it is important I state clearly that support for military forces
and intelligence units, which engaged in violence and widespread repression was
wrong. And the United States must not repeat that mistake… During the Cold
War, when we were so concerned about being in competition with the Soviet
Union, very often we dealt with countries in Africa and in other parts of the world
based more on how they stood in the struggle between the United States and
the Soviet Union than how they stood in the struggle for their own people's
aspirations to live up to the fullest of their God-given abilities… I am making
great efforts to change our historical relations with Central America (qtd. in Lane,
8).
In a single sentence, the President of the United States finally said what our
homegrown "peace constituency" and its epigones in the media had been dying to hear
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for decades: that in Central America, if not indeed elsewhere in the world during the
Cold War, the United States was on the "wrong side" of history.
To many outsiders, the fact that the U.S. government had cooperated with the
commission in its investigation and that the United States had finally acknowledged its
role in the Guatemalan tragedy signaled an end of sorts to the struggle to discover the
truth about U.S. crimes. But its findings about the U.S. role amount to less than three
percent of the whole report. Left undocumented are any details about U.S. involvement,
not just in the torture and killings of Guatemalans, but of U.S. citizens in Guatemala as
well. Ironically, the commission's report and the president's apology have served to
deflect pressure that had been building steadily for a complete accounting of how and
why U.S. intelligence operatives spread terror throughout these tiny Central American
countries.
Clinton, in fact, was formally putting America's imprimatur on the then just
released report of the UN-appointed Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification,
which concluded that the training of Guatemalan military officers in counterinsurgency
techniques by the CIA had played a significant role in the torture and execution of
thousands of civilians. The Commission issued a nine-volume report called “Guatemala:
Memory of Silence”. Created as part of the 1996 peace accord that ended Guatemala's
civil war, the Commission and its 272 staff members interviewed combatants on both
sides of the conflict, gathered news reports and eyewitness accounts from across the
country, and extensively examined declassified U.S. government documents. The
Commission found that "the majority of human rights violations occurred with the
knowledge and by order of the highest authority in the state" and "the vast majority of
the victims of the acts committed by the state were not combatants but civilians". Four
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percent of the acts of violence it attributed to the guerrillas, 93 percent to the state. The
commission's report in turn followed findings by the Catholic Church the year before that
may have resulted in the death two days after their release of Bishop Juan Gerardi, who
was killed in Guatemala City on April 26, 1998 (Schultz, 7).
Unfortunately, CIA "anti-drug" money continues to flow into Guatemala. Not that
it is serving any visible anti-drug function; Guatemala trails only Mexico as a
transshipment point for Columbian drugs entering the United States, and many of the
same CIA-supported military officers suspected of human rights abuses are also
considered to be major drug traffickers. The State Department knows that at least 250
tons of cocaine passes through Guatemala each year (Harris, 46).
Concluding Statements
Rather than walking away from Guatemala now that the Cold War is over, or
worse, re-arming the country in order to fight our drug war (Rohter, 1), the U.S.
government and the American people need to reflect on our complicity in the horrors
that have afflicted this country. We assassinated Guatemala's democratically elected
President, thereby bringing to a complete halt a social, economic, and political revolution
that was in the process of transforming Guatemala from the Middle Ages. We then
created one of the most brutal armies in the world, and we continued to do business
with Guatemala even during the "silent holocaust" period from 1981 to 1983 when in a
period of two years more than 150,000 civilians were killed. We willingly and knowingly
employed intelligence operatives who were known human rights abusers. Yet, perhaps
the most remarkable thing about all of this is that we feel absolutely no connection
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between our own actions and the atrocities that have taken place in Guatemala over the
past five decades.
Although it is impossible to erase the past, we have an opportunity to write the
future. Globalization can be used to rebuild and modernize Guatemala, but much effort
is needed from within and abroad. First, the United States should begin to assist the
Guatemalan people in learning and understanding who was responsible for the horrors
that took place. It seems likely that the truth will never become known and/or publicly
acknowledged. The United States, however, knows this truth, or at least a substantial
part of it, and should begin to make this information known to the Guatemalan people.
President Clinton’s apology is a step in the right direction, but the government
can do more to remedy the situation. For example, it needs to acknowledge the fact that
in working with such people it is implicated in their actions. Apologies are not only
empty words, but they also prejudge a historical record that remains largely secret. If
the president really wants to do something tangible to help us understand the past, he
will order the speedy declassification of the rest of America's Cold War intelligence
archive. It is time to lay bare the documentary details of the long, twilight struggle. The
public should decide what we as a country have to apologize for.
Furthermore, the American people should also engage in some measure of selfexamination. Americans need to wrestle with the fact that we have aligned ourselves
with a series of utterly ruthless and genocidal regimes, and not just in Guatemala, but
throughout the world. The United States justified its participation in such events by
fighting the scourge of the communist menace, but, in hindsight, it is easier to
understand our selfish actions by recognizing our willingness to support American
political realism and national interests. But perhaps this will make us reflect on the
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regimes we have aligned ourselves with, and what this says about our conduct of
foreign policy.
Finally, and most important of all, the United States needs to begin to help
rebuild Guatemala. This does not mean rebuilding the Guatemalan army; it does not
mean priming Guatemalan society for American-based multinational corporations; it
does not mean using Guatemala to fight our drug war; it does not mean that we impose
our imperialistic values, beliefs and culture on a foreign nation; and it certainly does not
mean perpetuating the incredible economic inequalities that exist in Guatemala where
eighty-seven percent of the population lives in poverty. What it does mean, instead, is
that for the very first time, we recognize and honor the Guatemalan people for their
humanity, and not merely as means to our own ends.
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