The Illusion Of Communism Essay, Research Paper

Constructing Enemies:

The Illusion of Communism

and U.S. Intervention in Guatemala

1944-1954

Abstract

Understanding the history of Central America is quite impossible without an examination of the United States” efforts at ensuring stable markets for the proprietor of 70% of the world’’s banana supply, the Boston-based United Fruit Company (UFCO). This paper attempts to explore the relationship between the UFCO, the State Department, and Guatemala between 1944 and 1954, a time when Guatemalans began to challenge United Fruit’’s domination of Guatemala on both a geographic and economic level. The result of the conflicts in interest between Guatemalans and the UFCO was a complex process of enemy construction.” The UFCO carried out a campaign to convince the U.S. public, Congress, and State Department that Guatemalans” challenge to foreign domination were the warning signs of Soviet influence in the hemisphere. The result of this campaign was U.S. intervention in Guatemala in 1954.

What this paper attempts to do is deconstruct and examine the reasons and motives behind U.S. intervention in Guatemala. The majority of the material used to formulate this analysis was secondary. However, many of the sources used included detailed primary source information that was of great assistance in forming an objective study of Guatemala-U.S. relations. These sources were used to examine the motives of the UFCO and the State Department in their construction of the Communist illusion in Guatemala, and to etch out an understanding of the contradiction between the U.S. claim: that intervention was instrumental in preventing foreign domination, and the reality: that U.S. intervention was done to protect U.S. business interests. The conclusion of the paper helps in illuminating a continual problem in Central America: U.S. intervention at the expense of both the lives and democratic efforts of Central Americans.

Introduction

As most of Central America assumed a low priority role within the purview of United States” foreign policy during the 1940′’s and 1950′’s, an abundance of governmental changes and social programs were taking place in Guatemala that made it an exception to the rule. These changes took place at the same time the U.S. began preparing itself for half a century of Cold War politics, preparations that would come to permeate almost all forms of U.S. foreign policy. As the effects of Cold War politics grew, Central America found itself a target of examination by President Truman who, along with the rest of the United States, was attempting to determine who was a friend and who was an enemy in the war against international Communism. Guatemala was determined to be an enemy of the U.S. in this war using the kind of extra-judicial evidence Ambassador Patterson had spoken of in his “duck test.” As such, Guatemala fell victim to the politics of intervention, a recently conceived method of enforcing U.S. hegemony in Latin America. In June of 1954 one-hundred and fifty Guatemalan exiles, trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), passed over Guatemala’’s Honduran border and attempted to overthrow Guatemala’’s democratically elected government. The evidence used by the State Department and President Truman to justify the application of a Communist label to Guatemala is not strong when contrasted with the reality of Guatemala’’s political decisions at the time. The fact that Guatemala had aligned itself with the United States against North Korea at the start of the Korean War, in addition to the fact that most of the reforms carried out by Guatemalan President Juan Jos Ar valo were modeled not after Moscow’’s Communist agenda, but after President Roosevelt’’s New Deal, made the argument that Guatemala was a pro-Communist nation, at least on an ideological level, a tenuous one at best. On a physical level, there was even less evidence of Guatemala’’s supposed Communist nature. Guatemala’’s dictator prior to Ar valo’’s ascendance to the Presidency had expunged the vast majority of Communists during the 1930′’s, and by 1954 Communists held only 7.1% of the seats in Guatemala’’s Congress. The answer to how Guatemala and its President were constructed as Communists in the eyes of the United States lies in an exploration of the complex set of perceptions that were being created and sent between Guatemala and the United States, and a critical examination of the agendas of the U.S. State Department and U.S. business interests. Only by studying these relationships can the contradiction between U.S. intervention and the concept of upholding free and independent governments be fully understood.

Guatemala’’s Social Revolution: A Brief History

“I wished well to their cause; but I had seen and yet see no prospect that they would establish free or liberal institutions of government War and mutual destruction was in every member of their organization, moral, political, and physical.”

Thomas Jefferson

on Latin American Governments, 1821

Guatemala, up until 1944, was governed by a series of self-interested military dictators that fit perfectly into the corrupt description that Thomas Jefferson had given the governments of Latin America more than a century before. Jorge Ubico, Guatemalan dictator prior to Ar valo’’s ascendance to the Presidency, had brought the profits of Guatemala’’s economy back into Guatemala for the first time in decades and created for the first time a middle class in Guatemala. Along with a growing middle class however, Ubico also faced a growing amount of class consciousness; Guatemalan’’s began to challenge the extent to which Ubico insisted on maintaining U.S. business domination in Guatemala. As such, when Ubico once again extended preferential tax agreements to the United States, domestic control became an impossibility. Guatemala’’s growing middle class with the support of Guatemala’’s young military officers overthrew Ubico’’s regime in 1944 and established a military junta until free and fair elections were held in 1945. What made the overthrow of Ubico’’s regime such an important event, however, was the amount of interest the U.S. had invested in Latin America prior to the Cold War. The creation of the Good Neighbor policy under President Roosevelt did much to cement U.S. support of dictatorships in Latin America, and entrench an ideology of “maintaining stability at all costs.” As a principle, the United States supported dictatorships because they were the most inexpensive way of maintaining stable markets for U.S. companies. To create this stable reality, Roosevelt incorporated parts of the New Deal, like the substitution of Import-Export Bank loans for private investment, into the Good Neighbor policy to increase the amount of economic control the federal government had in Central American regimes. To back up the economic control the Good Neighbor policy created, the Pentagon proposed a series of bilateral military policies that would supply Central American countries with arms and create a dependence on the United States to maintain their armies. After the U.S. felt secure in the Good Neighbor policy’’s ability to sustain relations with the nations of Central America for an indefinite amount of time, the U.S. was pleased to rank Central America low on its list of foreign priorities as Cold War concerns mounted in other regions of the world. It was this combination of low priority coupled with such an intricate political, economic, and military relationship that would make relations an inevitable source of conflict. The situation in Guatemala was a sort of political deism, where the United States had constructed forms of government and, assuming that they were complete, left them to go about their business in whatever way they saw fit. The problem with this scheme was the number of lessons left untaught and leaders left unfettered with new methods of creating capital; Central American dictators were left unprepared to prevent the possibility of social unrest. This lack of foresight would prove to be troublesome, if for no other reason than the U.S. would be forced to intervene later under false pretenses; for the only grounds for intervention were if the threat originated outside the Americas, and in this case, the lack of stability came from within.

U.S. hegemony, which had come to epitomize the arrogance and distrust in Latin Americans inherent in Jefferson’’s quotation, was fundamentally challenged in 1944 when after a non-violent, middle class revolution, Juan Jos Ar valo, a self proclaimed “spiritual socialist”, won 65% of the popular presidential vote in a free, fair and democratic election. Both Ar valo and his successor Jacobo Arbenz pursued a large number of social reforms modeled after the Roosevelt’’s New Deal. In 1952, Arbenz implemented what was to become the focus for much of the controversy between the United States and Guatemala; the Agrarian Reform Law (ARL). As previously mentioned, Arbenz’’s regime came to an abrupt halt after a U.S. sponsored invasion in June of 1954, at which point Arbenz resigned as President and turned his power over to a liberal military leader. The U.S. quickly pressured the military leader into transferring his power to the U.S. supported revolutionary Castillo Armas, who took no time in assuming the role of a “ruthless dictator.” Guatemala’’s efforts at social and land reforms had been ended in the name of stability for U.S. business interests.

Creating the Illusion of Communism

“All the achievements of the Company were made at the expense of the impoverishment of the country The United Fruit Company is the principal enemy of the progress of Guatemala, of its democracy, and of every noble effort directed at its economic liberation.”

Alfonso Bauer Paiz, Guatemalan Economist

The key to understanding how the situation in Guatemala changed from a peaceful, democratic revolution in 1944 to violent U.S. intervention in 1954 involves a close examination of the two stage process that created the illusion of Communism in Guatemala. The initial stage came from the reaction of U.S. businesses that maintained substantial interests in Guatemala, of which the largest and most influential was Minor Keith’’s banana conglomerate, the United Fruit Company (UFCO). Although the major crop in Guatemala was coffee and not bananas, almost all of Guatemala’’s transportation, communication, and utility systems were owned by the UFCO. This in addition to the fact that the UFCO owned 85% of Guatemala’’s arable land, and 42% of the country’’s net area meant that the vast majority of land available for producing capital and the infrastructure used for transporting such goods lay in foreign hands. It was the observation of these facts that formed one of the root reasons for the middle class” anger in Guatemala, and as such, formed the focus of many of the reforms President Ar valo implemented after his election. Not surprisingly, it was these reforms in addition to those implemented later by President Arbenz that also formed the focus of the UFCO’’s complaints against Guatemala’’s government, and the core of their arguments in persuading American politicians of Guatemala’’s communist link to Moscow.

Of the abundance of reforms that were taking place in Guatemala between 1944-1954, there were two specific agendas that seemed to incite the anger of the UFCO, the first being Ar valo’’s creation of a Guatemalan labor code. In 1947, it was observed that for “the first time in history, employers found themselves suddenly on the short end of the power relationship,” when Ar valo proposed the formation of a central bank and allowed both labor unions to form and strikes to take place. As the largest company operating in Guatemala, the UFCO felt the effects of the new labor code first and foremost. By 1948, labor strikes were regularly shutting down UFCO operations, and as a result, the UFCO sought consolation in the State Department, claiming that it was being discriminatorily targeted in Guatemala. The State Department issued a memorandum claiming that while the new labor laws were not “proof of Communism,” there was no evidence indicating there was, “no Communist inspiration behind them.” This and other early statements were to form a precedent for the attitude of U.S. politicians toward Guatemala. Actions to increase the rights of workers in Guatemala were seen as generally negative with respect to U.S. businesses. As such, U.S. politicians were quick to apply a “generally negative” label like Communism to Guatemala as a means for combating a perceived threat to market security.

The second and most publicized action taken by Guatemala to incite the anger of United Fruit was the expropriation of uncultivated land that was carried out in two stages. The first, enacted by President Ar valo as a means of assisting peasant farmers was the Law of Forced Rental, which mandated that all land not presently being intensively cultivated be leased to peasants at low rates. What followed was more efforts by the United States” at branding Guatemala as Communist. J. Edgar Hoover’’s Federal Bureau of Investigation quickly published a memorandum claiming that there were over 1,000 Communists in Guatemala. The United States did, however, receive substantial assistance in creating the image of a Communist Guatemala from Guatemala’’s own Communist labor movement, who after the implementation of the Law of Forced Rental, took no time in claiming it as a personal victory. This occurred despite the fact that Ar valo’’s original policy had no basis in communism. Rather, the Law of Forced Rental found its focus in supporting indigenous Guatemalans who, after decades of subsistence, were now being given a chance to cultivate the land their ancestors had raised crops on long before the arrival of United Fruit.

Nonetheless, fears of Communism in the U.S. became linked to a fear of Ar valo. It is to this end that the U.S. refused to continue arms shipments to Guatemala’’s military, and began to search for a new leader in Guatemala. The United States was spared the difficulty of selecting a new dictator in 1951 however, when Guatemalan elections placed a new individual, a Defense Minister with a decidedly military background, at the head of their government. Jacobo Arbenz had been a member of the military junta that had sustained Guatemala’’s government after the fall of Ubico in 1944. As President, the United States hoped that because of his more conservative military background that Arbenz’’s pursuit of continued land reforms would be less intense. As matters turned out, the opposite occurred. After Arbenz had instituted a number of liberal reforms, the United States unleashed a policy intended to embarrass him and incite a more conservative movement within Guatemala’’s government. The policy mandated an abrogation of all of Guatemala’’s financial aid and an end to the preferential trade relationship developed between Guatemala and the U.S., with the hope that Guatemala’’s military would backlash against Arbenz, and return Guatemala to a more authoritarian state. As crippling as the United States” action appeared however, Arbenz refused to buckle and retaliated with a second phase of land expropriation. In 1952 Arbenz introduced the Agrarian Reform Law, which mandated the expropriation of 234,000 acres of uncultivated land (approximately 7.8% of the UFCO’’s total holdings, and about 8.2% of their uncultivated land) and offered the UFCO one million dollars in compensation for the expropriated property. Despite the fact that U.S. agronomists concluded that the policy proposed fair compensation for the land taken, and the fact that the UFCO itself admitted that the sole reason for maintaining ownership of such a large parcels of uncultivated land was to check potential competition, the UFCO demanded sixteen times the amount Arbenz had offered in compensation. Evidence supporting the claim that United Fruit would have conceded the territory for even $16 million is questionable however. It is far more likely that because the UFCO was well aware that Guatemala’’s government did not have $16 million that it asked for that amount; a situation that would force Arbenz into appearing as if he were nationalizing private property, not expropriating unused land at a fair price. To this degree, the UFCO’’s harsh reaction to such minimal land expropriation that posed no serious threat to any critical pieces of its banana producing industry can be seen as largely symbolic. After decades of territorial domination, the seizure of land by a government so long kept on a short leash by U.S. business interests had the propensity of being perceptually damaging. It was Arbenz’’s refusal to pay such an exorbitant amount that formed one of the key motivations for the UFCO’’s program of creating the illusion of Communism in Guatemala; if Guatemala’’s status quo under Arbenz was unwilling to retain the imperialist geographic situation United Fruit had come to depend on, then the United Fruit Company was going to do its best to recreate a more cooperative government in Guatemala, even if it meant the forced upheaval of a democratically elected regime.

It was after this level of anger had been incited in the UFCO that the second stage of creating the Communist illusion in Guatemala began. The U.S. had committed itself during the 1930′’s via the Good Neighbor policy to maintaining stable dictatorships as a prerequisite for stable markets for U.S. businesses in Central America. Now that Guatemala had rebuffed the paradigm of foreign domination, the easiest way to justify intervention and the reestablishment of “stable” governments was to construct the illusion that Guatemala was under the direct influence of Moscow as an actor in the international movement toward Communism. The reason for creating this illusion was twofold. First, it was important that threat come from Moscow because the U.S. had no ground for intervention in Latin American unless under the auspices of the Monroe Doctrine, which required the threat to stability to come from outside the Americas. Second, it was important that the threat be Communist; public and congressional support for actions against Communist regimes at the start of the Cold War was high, and it would be easy to collect the political capital needed to urge the State Department into action. As such, the UFCO began the process of creating the illusion of Communism by utilizing its powerful connections in the media. The UFCO began by financing trips for American media figures to observe the situation in Guatemala and report favorably about the UFCO’’s actions and policies. The plan worked; the expropriation of unused land was portrayed as Communist nationalization by the New York Times in what one United Fruit official later referred to as, “the Disney version of the episode.” One sided reporting was not enough however; the UFCO took their media campaign one step further by ensuring that Guatemala’’s side of the story was excluded from the eyes and ears of U.S. citizens. After months of their media blitzkrieg, the UFCO was successful in persuading the American public that their productions in Guatemala had become the victim of international Communism.

The next step to climb in creating the Communist illusion was the persuasion of Congress, which not only proved easy, but extraordinarily advantageous, because once Congressmen were convinced of the UFCO’’s story, they were more than willing to publicly voice their concerns about the threat that the international Communist movement posed to security in the hemisphere. Once the UFCO had informed members of Congress about Arbenz’’s legalization of the Communist party, the vast increase in Communist labor unions since Arbenz’’s ascension to the presidency, and prominent roles that Communists held in Guatemala’’s Congress, members of the U.S. Congress were quick to speak out against the “discrimination against United Fruit,” and, “the growing influence of international Communism.” It is at this level that a gross mischaracterization of Guatemalan politics took place; for while the influence of Communism may have grown in Guatemala, there was no evidence to support that Guatemala was controlled by Communists or that it was under the control of Moscow. The struggle against foreign economic domination that was taking place in Guatemala was indigenous; Guatemala was not a “beachhead” for International communism like some U.S. Senators claimed, but instead a challenge to the right of foreign businesses to control the land that Guatemalans knew was rightfully their own.

The last and probably most important group that the UFCO sought to convince of Guatemala’’s Communist intentions was the State Department, where United Fruit was especially gifted with respect to connections. The head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, had been a member of the UFCO’’s board of trustees. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and his former law firm, had long represented the UFCO. In the years preceding the U.S. invasion, meetings with United Fruit officials produced comments such as, ” the international communist conspiracy to destroy free governments was prejudicing the independence of Guatemala,” despite a deficit of evidence proving that Guatemala’’s government had direct ties to Moscow or the international Communist movement. Additionally, Eisenhower’’s personal secretary was married to Ed Whitman, the UFCO’’s top public relations official and producer of much of the propaganda that the UFCO used to influence the American public. The eventual result of pressures from the UFCO and observations of continued land expropriation was a paradigm of intervention that was embodied in the words of a State Department official at Dartmouth College in 1953, when he stated, “The suppression of communism, even by force, in an American country would not constitute intervention in its internal affairs;” the UFCO had effectively convinced the State Department that training troops to depose a foreign government was not intervention. This attitude was fortified in the form of U.S. foreign policy when in March of 1954, just months before the scheduled invasion of Guatemala, the U.S. proposed a collective security agreement to the countries of Central America that outlined the United States” right to intervene in any nation that faced domination by the forces of international Communism. The language of the document and the ideology behind it are largely symbolic of the UFCO’’s tactics of creating the Communist illusion and the hysteric climate the Cold War had created in the U.S.; attention to detail in determining the link between Moscow and Guatemala was abandoned to a fear of Communism that lead to intervention three months later.

There were other State Department representatives that helped reinforce the UFCO’’s narrative about Guatemala’’s communist ties, of which the most prominent was former Ambassador to Guatemala Richard C. Patterson. Patterson was asked to leave Guatemala after offending President Arbenz at the Central American Olympic games, and after his return to the United States focused his efforts on ridding Guatemala of its links to the international Communist movement. His actions included the creation of “the duck test” as a means of proving that Guatemala’’s President was a Communist in addition to maintaining ties with Guatemalan exiles that were eager to overthrow Arbenz’’s regime. The fascinating aspect of Patterson’’s role in the creation of the Communist illusion in Guatemala was not so much the practical application of his “test,” but rather the way in which he served as a microcosm of the ideological contradiction that was inherent in the United States” foreign policy toward Guatemala. Whereas the United States justified intervention on the grounds that it was necessary to depose Arbenz’’s regime to keep the country and hemisphere safe from communism, the reality seems to be much more accurately reflected by the public proclamations of Ambassador Patterson: his a priori concern with respect to U.S. foreign policy toward Guatemala was the protection of U.S. business interests.

The efforts of the UFCO and the growing disdain for the “Communist threat in Guatemala” that was emanating from the State Department culminated in June of 1954, when after months of CIA training in Honduras, a group of Guatemalan exiles lead by Castillo Armas crossed into Guatemala and began to advance on the capital. Although the raid was complemented by a series of radio broadcasts by the CIA which announced, “The time has arrived to overthrow Arbenz;” nothing happened. The fact that Guatemalans had no cause to support Arbenz’’s upheaval, in addition to the fact that Castillo’’s 150 man force was no match for Guatemala’’s military, meant that the revolution had little chance of succeeding. As the State Department watched its revolution fail, they called on President Eisenhower to help the revolution succeed, which he managed by ordering the commission of third party aircrafts to strafe Guatemala’’s countryside and major cities and scare the public into action. While only dropping dynamite, and no real bombs, Eisenhower’’s tactic worked. Soon a scared Arbenz, after a failed attempt at rallying a peasant military, resigned the presidency at which point the U.S. micromanaged the power struggle into the hands of Armas, who assumed the role of dictator and took little time in restoring the property rights of the UFCO and revoking Arbenz’’s Agrarian Reform Law. Guatemala had been, in effect, restored to the position it held a decade earlier, where the interests of U.S. business took precedent over the needs of Guatemalan citizens.

Final Analysis: The Effects and Implications of U.S. Intervention

The Monroe Doctrine required that any U.S. intervention in Latin America be justified on the grounds of protecting those governments from the threat of renewed European hegemony in the hemisphere. As such, it is no surprise that the United States justified intervention in Guatemala on the grounds that it was protecting Guatemalan independence from corrupting forces of international Communism. This justification was a political illusion; the United Fruit Company and the State Department had, through a process of denying the reality of Guatemala’’s political situation and creating false links between Guatemala’’s government and Moscow, operationally defined Guatemala as a nation in league with the Soviet bloc as justification for intervention. The reality of the situation was that Guatemala’’s government had implemented a broad range of social reforms that threatened the assumption that U.S. businesses had made for decades in Central America; that domination at the expense of land-less peasants was an acceptable mode of earning capital. It was this challenge to U.S. market domination that marked the reason for U.S. intervention, an intervention carried out under the false pretense of saving Guatemala from Soviet intervention, when in reality Russia had no control over Guatemala’’s government. U.S. intervention in Guatemala was marked with philosophical contradictions to U.S. claims of protecting the freedom and independence of Guatemala; the establishment of a dictatorship to protect hundreds of thousands of acres of the UFCO’’s unused land from use by impoverished peasants served to protect the the freedom and independence of no one, save U.S. business executives. The United States” intervention in Guatemala was both hypocritical and tragic. It did nothing to ensure freedom from foreign political domination like the Monroe Doctrine mandated, and did everything to establsih and sustain oppressive political structures that would ensure the subservience of Guatemalan political leaders to the UFCO and other U.S. firms for decades to come.