​The Central American historical context.

Over the last two centuries, the United States has meddled in the affairs of Latin America, ‘dispatching marines, installing dictators, backing military coups, training repressive armed forces, and destabilizing progressive governments’ (Livingstone, 2013: 2). Indeed, since the Monroe Doctrine (1823), it was clear that Washington considered Central and South America to be its “own backyard”. The Roosevelt Corollary (1904) reinforced this concept, through the “big stick” policy of “speak softly and carry a big stick”, which was justified ‘in flagrant cases of wrongdoing, …the exercise of an international police power’ (Richardson, 1905, vol. IX: 7053). Before 1945, the “exercise of an international police power”, signified a series of U.S. military actions in the Dominican Republic (1903, 1914, 1916), Honduras (1903, 1907, 1912, 1919, 1924), Cuba (1906, 1912, 1917), Nicaragua (1907, 1909, 1915), Panama (1912, 1918, 1925), Guatemala (1920) and El Salvador (1932). Moreover, the outbreak of the Cold War increased U.S. imperialistic activity. Simultaneously, American multinational firms benefited from the recently established U.S. political hegemony, spreading their business all around the Caribbean basin. (Wilkin, 1974). Such external interferences created extremely unstable political and socio-economic conditions in Central America. Malevolent dictators, such as the Somoza family in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Tiburcio Carìas in Honduras and Jorge Ubico in Guatemala, ruled these countries during the 20th century. They represented political instruments used by the United States and multinational companies to repress workers’ rights and maintain economic control over the region (Bulmer-Thomas, 1987). In this way, the American multinational, the United Fruit Company, became the symbol of commingling between local politicians and foreign interests. At the beginning of the last century, this company started to build a huge empire based on the banana trade, controlling plantations, railways, telegraph lines, housing, hospitals and ports in Central America (Bucheli, 2005: 44–50). Already, by the 1920s, United Fruits was dominating more than 70 percent of the world banana market. Over the years, its aggressive policy ‘has throttled competitors, dominated governments, manacled railroads, ruined planters, choked cooperatives, domineered over workers, fought organised labour and exploited consumers. Such usage of power by a corporation of a strongly industrialised nation in relatively weak foreign countries constitutes a variety of economic imperialism’ (Kepner et al. 1935: 76). Charles Kepner and Henry Soothill carried out in-depth studies on the behaviour of United Fruits and they discovered a correlation between the American multinational’s business and the political choices of local dictators. Other scholars confirmed such a dichotomy too (Ricord, 1974; Zanetti et al. 1976; MacCameron, 1983; Argueta, 1989; Dosal, 1993), concluding that the weaker a democracy, the more likely that foreign firms will have monopolistic power (Bucheli, 2008: 436). In addition, the result of this is that multinational companies involved in the primary sector (such as United Fruits) will tend to support right-wing dictatorships and the use of violence (Le Billion, 2001: 561- 584; Ross, 2004). In this context, Guatemala was no exception and its recent history is one of the cruellest among the so called “banana republics” (a pejorative expression used to define those backward countries whose economy relied entirely on the exportation of bananas). Between 1898 and 1920, General Manuel Estrada Cabrera governed Guatemala. Under his unchallenged leadership, United Fruits acquired a monopoly in many strategic sectors of Guatemalan society. In 1901, it received a transportation concession between New Orleans and Puerto Barrios. Three years later, a branch of United Fruits, the International Railways of Central America (IRCA), obtained a 99-year grant for the realisation and management of a railway from Puerto Barrios to Guatemala City, followed in 1906 by a concession for banana production (Dosal, 1993). When General Estrada’s regime fell in 1920, there was a decade of short-term governments, until the rise of the dictator General Jorge Ubico, in 1931. His leadership saw the increase of ethnic conflicts and racial segregation. Mayan ethnicities represented most of the Guatemalan population. Their members were poor farmers, who did not speak Spanish and, because they were indigenous, they were relegated to the bottom of the social pyramid by the ladino elite (Böckler, 2016: 51-83). Referring to the indigenous race, a ladino intellectual wrote: ‘[it] is cowardly, sad, fanatical, and cruel ... [it is] closer to beast than man ... For the Indians there is only one law – the lash’ (Gliejeses, 1991: 12–13). Ubico used the racism in the society to strengthen the elite’s privileges. For instance, he declared that every native who owned little or no land was obligated to work for the local landowner for 100 days a year. This represented a sort of renovated slavery, since the wages were miserly due to the absence of competition among employers and because landowners were empowered to kill rebellious or stubborn workers (Bucheli, 2008). Eduardo Galeano (1997: 50) gave a measure of the phenomenon: ‘in a continuous annual cycle they leave their “sacred lands”— high lands where each small farm is the size of a corpse— to contribute 200,000 pairs of hands to the harvesting of coffee, cotton, and sugar in the lowlands. They are transported in trucks like cattle, and it is not always need, but sometimes liquor, that makes them decide to go. The contractors provide a marimba band and plenty of aguardiente and when the Indian sobers up he is already in debt. He will pay it off labouring on hot and strange lands which— perhaps with a few centavos in his pocket, perhaps with tuberculosis or malaria— he will leave after a few months’. In order to maintain order in the country and prevent any opposition to his power, Ubico built a sophisticated spy network and industrialisation was strictly regulated, because he was concerned that it would lead to an insurgent working class. “Communist” expressions such as “strike”, “trade unions” or “petition” were forbidden and the term “workers” was replaced with “employees” (Bucheli, 2008). Such state control was welcomed by the U.S. and its enterprises, and as confirmed by the IRCA annual reports, Ubico was considered a precious ally. However, he went too far in favouring the interests of foreign multinationals, not just in oppressing the indigenous class, but by making discontented the growing Guatemalan middle class who felt disadvantaged by his policy. Therefore, Captain Jacobo Arbenz removed Ubico in 1944 and organised elections the following year (Dosal, 1993). From this point on, Guatemala underwent a democratic shift. The military junta removed censorship, declared racial discrimination illegal, and forbade presidential re-election for more than two mandates. In addition, it ended governmental restraints over universities, condemned private monopolies, reduced the working week to 40 hours and readmitted labour unions. In 1945, former exile Juan Jose Arévalo was elected president of Guatemala. He brought continuity to democracy and survived a military coup, which was neutralised by Captain Jacobo Arbenz, who became a national hero and was elected president in 1951 (Bucheli, 2008). Arbenz implemented an ambitious plan of social reforms focused on challenging foreign economic interference and class struggles. For the first time, he introduced an income tax and began to develop the state’s enterprises, in order to undermine economic dependency on the U.S. Therefore, Arbenz pushed for the creation of a highway from the capital to the Atlantic coast: one that would compete with the railway managed by United Fruits. He promoted the construction of a new port under governmental jurisdiction and planned the creation of a hydroelectric plant to remove the American monopoly on energy (Bucheli, 2008). As stated in the IRCA’s Annual Reports (IRCA, Annual Report 1944; 1945; 1948; 1949; 1951), United Fruits began to be concerned about the possible economic consequence of such nationalist reforms. But in 1952, the situation irremediably deteriorated. In that year, the agrarian reform, which authorised the redistribution of 1.5 million expropriated acres to around 100,000 landless families, was approved. Indeed, one of the biggest problems in Guatemala was, and still is, the ownership of land. Since the Spanish colonisation, most of the land was owned by an oligarchy of terratenientes. Arbenz wanted to put an end to feudalist practises, the source of backwardness and class struggles (Bucheli, 2008). At that time, United Fruits was the main landowner in Guatemala, so it was also the main target of the agrarian reform. In two years, it lost more than 400.000 acres of uncultivated land, receiving a governmental compensation of $1,185,000, based on the amount declared by United Fruits for tax purposes. For the company, it was a huge loss in terms of money and political power. Indeed, the real value of the land was 20 times higher, but any complain failed, since United Fruits constantly cheated on its tax forms (Gliejeses, 1991). Therefore, the company asked for help from the US State Department, which in March 1953 requested, through its American ambassador, ‘prompt, adequate, and effective compensation’ (James, 1954: 65). And in the next year, it formally demanded $15 million compensation. Arbenz refused and went on with his socialist reforms (Bucheli, 2008). For the US and their multinationals, this was the sign that diplomacy was no longer the path to follow and that more “effective” solutions were required to deal with the Guatemalan question. In this sense, it is interesting to see how this dissertation must focus again on the figure of Edward Bernays. Indeed, United Fruits hired him already in the 1940s, to promote banana consumption among Americans. And when the tension rose between the company and Guatemala, he was asked to design a plan, in order to induce the public opinion, to consider the president Jacobo Arbenz as a Communist threat to the American democratic values (Tye, 1998). Therefore, Bernays started his propaganda, creating the Middle America Information Bureau and the Weekly Guatemalan Newsletter, to provide guided news to journalists and academics (Tye, 1998: 33-34). Under his guidance, United Fruits influenced members of Congress by dispensing anonymous “Reports on Guatemala” and pushing universities, lawyers, and politicians to label the agrarian reform as illegitimate and immoral. In 1952, Bernays brought a group of journalists to a tour in Guatemala, arranged to show an extremist image of the country; with some of them he built close relationships (e.g. the columnist Walter Winchell) and as result, influential newspapers such as the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly and Time, published at the beginning of the fifties articles warning about the alleged rise of Communism in Guatemala (Tye, 1998: 160-170). In June 1954, the ground was ready and a military coup backed by the C.I.A. put an end to the democratic decade. Jacobo Arbenz was forced into exile and Carlos Castillo Armas became the new president of Guatemala (Immerman, 2010). This marked the beginning of a state of terror. All the previous social reforms were abolished, illiterates lost their right to vote (this meant exclusion of almost all the indigenous inhabitants), and political oppositions and labour unions were declared illegal. Anyone suspected of subversive activity was arrested; during the first week of his presidency, the police imprisoned over 4.000 people; and four months later, the number increased to 72.000 (Germani, 2012: 105). Armas was quickly substituted by other dictators. Thus, this political and socio-economic instability deteriorated in November 1960, with the eruption of one of the longest civil wars in the history. The conflict ended 36 years later with the signing of peace treaty. As stated by the UN’s Commission for Historical Clarification report, Memory of Silence (CEH, 1999), during the Guatemalan civil war there were ‘200,000 dead, 626 massacres, 430 villages wiped out by scorched-earth counter insurgency, 45,000 disappeared, 1.5 million internally displaced, and 150,000 refugees in Mexico (out of a population of 8 million). The military state was found responsible for 93 percent of the documented abuses and the guerrillas 3 percent; 83 percent of the victims were indigenous’ (Nelson, 2010: 88). In reality, Jacobo Arbenz had no link with Moscow. He was a democratic socialist who dreamed of a Guatemala free from foreign interferences and social injustice.