Coups and Coups

 “Harsh Times” by Mario Vargas Llosa, 2019

This is a fictional recreation of the coup and its’ aftermath against Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in Guatemala.  It has all the standard characters behind coups in Latin America – United Fruit, Edward Bernays, the CIA, Howard Hunt, David Atlee Phillips, the Dulles brothers, hired mercenaries, Somoza, Trujillo and local military reactionaries chosen to take his place.  In this case it was Colonel Castillo Armas – Hatchet Face – a swarthy looking thug of poor birth, born out of wedlock, chosen by the CIA to lead the coup.  He’d been trained in counter-insurgency at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  Armas had hated Árbenz since they both went to military school in Guatemala City. 

The political logic was that the land reform, taxing United Fruit and labor rights instituted by the Arbenz government meant he was ‘a communist.’  Though everyone – especially Edward Bernays, the propagandist for bananas and United Fruit – knew he idolized democracy and the U.S., not socialism or communism or the USSR.  As Bernays basically put it to the UF Board of Directors – “even democracy is not good for the profits of United Fruit.” This might remind one of assertions by Marxists that capital cannot carry out a true democratic revolution.  The lie that finally got everyone’s attention was that the USSR was using Guatemala to ‘take over the Panama Canal.’  Ludicrous claims like this were normal during the Cold War.

Llosa is probably the top writer in Latin America, in spite of his conservative politics.  His consistently political novels are both readable and, oddly, ‘on the left’ so to speak. Even today after the coup, years of bloody civil war, more coups and changes of government, decades of repression of Mayan peasants and official corruption, Guatemala is still sunk in capitalist misery – even after ‘peace’ was declared. Landed families and foreign corporations rule through various conservative factions, with the silent support of the U.S. mothership.  This coup in 1954 was significant because it served as a modern CIA template in all of Latin and Central America.    

The Coup

In this story Nicaragua’s Somoza provides training facilities for the rebels.  The Dominican Republic’s Trujillo sends guns and money.  The CIA sets up a radio station in Key West, supplies planes and hires mercenaries. Árbenz is pictured as a decent military man who is too naïve for his own good, especially when he expected the ruling elite and the military to put up with land reform.  His proposed 'civilian militias' to defend the 'revolution' were stymied by the military, who later handed power over to the coupists. He was exposed to new ideas by his wife's friends. Árbenz has an ‘unfortunate’ friend, Jose Manual Fortuny, who leaned towards Marxism and helped found the tiny Guatemalan Party of Labor... the only real commies in the country, if that.

The agrarian reform passed was mild, only applying to land left fallow or abused by landlords.  Yet the peasant masses saw it as a doorway to all landless peasants getting land.  Árbenz opposed the land occupations that followed.  He had wanted to promote small-scale capitalism in the countryside instead of latifundia, but not at the expense of the jefes and patrones.  He opposed any cooperatives, communes, collectives, confiscation without compensation and state farms.  U.S. Ambassador Purifoy, the 'butcher of Greece,' ignored this.

The land reform gave the pretext for the new dictatorship, which threw thousands into jail, executed others and forced many to apply for asylum or leave the country.  It dropped all land taxes and returned any land taken back to United Fruit and the racist jefes. Col. Armas was welcomed by the Eisenhower administration, Richard Nixon presiding, with open arms as a hero.  One of the other highlights of the coup regime was the local Archbishop dressing ‘the Black Christ of Esquipulas’ carving in military attire, and parading it through the streets in support of the regime.  Yet after 3 years Armas' military dictatorship was under threat, not an unfamiliar story.

Personal Stories

A weird, possibly fictional ‘side story’ involves a plot to kidnap Armas’ beautiful lover Marta after the coup by agents hired by Trujillo, who had developed a grudge against Armas for breaking promises to him.  But this plot after the coup is not actually a ‘side’ story - it becomes one focus of the book.  I suspect it is for those who can't follow the multiple political machinations.  The girl, Marta, Miss Guatemala, becomes a central figure, and ends up in the Dominican Republic under the shaky dictatorship of Trujillo.  Rinse and repeat? Intrigue, mistrust, lust for power, assassinations and factions all ruin a good dictatorship or two or three, as even Haiti is thrown in here.  If you want to know how U.S. sponsored coups and their dictatorships cum governments are run – and they are still being run in Latin America – this is a good inside look, with the standard secretive and personal twists you'd expect.

P.S. - Bernardo Arevelo, the son of a prior progressive president of Guatemala, won the recent election overwhelming on 8/20/23 and will be the first progressive after Arbenz to be elected.  Let's see how long he lasts.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Central America’s Forgotten History” (A. Chomsky); “American Made,” “The Open Veins of Latin America” (Galeano); “Kill the Messenger,” “Not a Nation of Immigrants” (Dunbar-Ortiz); “November – A Novel,” “Manufacturing Consent” (Chomsky), "Drug War Capitalism."  

And I got it at the Minneapolis Library!

Red Frog

June 20, 2023