1944 – President Juan Jose Arevalo is elected. Arevalo and 1951 successor Jacobo Arbenz carry out land reforms and increase the balance of payments.
1954 – U.S. invade to overthrow the only democratic government in Guatemalan history and prevent Jacobo Arbenz from buying 1/2 million acres of unused “United Fruit” land for the native population. Other land reforms were repealed, beneficiaries dispossessed, peasant co-ops dissolved, literacy programme halted. Economy collapses, unions destroyed… and then the killing started.
150,000 dead. To bring that statistic to life, let’s look at one example. In one town in Quiche province, the town were rounded up and put in the town building – the men were decapitated, the women raped and murdered, the children killed by bashing their heads with rocks.
Arevalo was kept abroad by legal and physical threats. U.S. train army and Police specialising in political repression, esp. the “Mobile Military Police”, later implicated in many massacres.
US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles calls it “a new and glorious chapter”.
1963 – Kennedy and U.S. support a coup to prevent re-election of the returning Arevalo. Green Berets sent on counter-insurgency operation – 10,000 dead. American planes from Panama use napalm.
1963 – United Fruit PR Director Edward Bernays reveals the planting of Russian weapons, the “phoney arms ploy”, in 1951 in Honduras. This one action provided the one, big necessary illusion for the North American media and generated massive and decisive anti-communist political propaganda for the “Red Menace on our doorstep” and subsequent witch-hunts… “The threat in our very homes”. That threat of course is that we work out who’s exploiting us.
The Phoney Arms Ploy paved the way for the invasion of Guatemala in 1954 as an anti-Bolshevik crusade.
1963 – CONDECA The Central American Defence Council formed to unite armed forces of all Central America (apart from Costa Rica) against “left wing guerrilla movements”. More efficient repression under Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.
1966-68 – Napalm bombing by U.S. planes from Panama. 10,000 peasants killed. 95,000 political killings, 40,000 disappearances since 1954 noted by the New York Times.
mid ’70s – Beef exports double as local beef consumption declines. Costa Rica 41% drop in local consumption, El Salvador 38%, Guatemala/Nicaragua 13%.
late 70s – U.S., limited by congressional Human Rights legislation, instead use Israel and neo-Nazi Argentina as proxies to kill thousands more. Estimated that 100,000 children lost both parents.
Let’s pause at this point. Let us say that I am writing this in 1975, and you are reading it in 1980. It is 2 years out of date now. Nothing has appeared in the newspapers about Guatemala (it never does) but since all is quiet then the problem has probably gone away, right? And then 10 years later, another book appears, detailing the latest news in Guatemala. Have things, as you may have thought, changed?…
1980 – U.S. continue aid to Dictator Lucas directly and via arms from Israel, Argentina and others.
1980 – Council on Hemispheric Affairs – El Salvador and Guatemala are the worst human rights violators in Latin America, replacing Argentina.
1982 – Rios Montt massacres. Amnesty report widespread massacres – destroying entire villages, tortured and mutilated locals, mass executions, burning of livestock and land. 50,000 dead in the last 2 years, most of them Mayan Indians. U.S. aid continues.
1983 – 1 million homeless Indians. Rate of assassinations double and abductions quadruple (to 100/month).
1983 – Honduras/Guatemala – U.S. proxy Israel discuss Third World Services with U.S..
1984 – since 1960 … 100,000 killed, 100 political assassinations/month, 10 disappearances/week, 100,000 orphans, 1/2 million displaced. 20,000 Guatemalans dying of starvation every year.
Lowest life expectancy in Central America – 49 years, 35% of children (up to 60% in rural areas) die before age 5, 80% of agricultural labour force in servitude to land-owners and labour contractors – a “Nation of Prisoners”.
But ample resources, good economic growth, concentrated wealth. And all this to prevent the threat of communist tyranny, a.k.a. national self-determination without foreign (U.S.) interference.
1986 – More than 50 000 Guatemalans, most of them Mayan Indians, killed since 1980.
1988 – Human farms discovered in San Pedro Sula in Honduras, and in Guatemala where corpses found of babies aged 11 days to three months with missing organs. The Director of the latter, on arrest, declared that the children were sold to American or Israeli families whose children needed organ transplants at a cost of $75,000 per child.
I first started writing this book in the mid 1990s, and you may be reading it in the 2020s. But the information stops here. Again, does this mean that things have changed in Guatemala? Nothing in the papers for the last 25 years. No news is good news right?…
In whatever year you may be reading this, you may be tempted to think that this information must have become obsolete because it is in the past. And of course, I am not able to report events that have not yet happened. Instead, take a look at the sources and decide for yourself whether the information above looks very different to what is happening in that country in your present.
For example, search “Human Rights Watch”. If you look in 2021, you will see some familiar headlines regarding Guatemala – “excessive use of force by police”, “free press under attack”, “congress assaulting judicial independence”.
As we move into the mainstream we see that the Guardian will report isolated incidents rather than systemic problems. And thus, wrapped up in the style of presentation, it is not possible to draw wider conclusions from fragmentary incidents. Nevertheless if you search on “Guardian Guatemala”, in 2020 you will see “Covid outbreak exposes dire conditions at Guatemala factory making US brands”. In 2021 you will see “Guatemala mine’s ex-security chief convicted of Indigenous leader’s murder”.
Guatemala has been struggling against US domination for well over 50 years and it is impossible to imagine the trauma lived by families who have lost loved ones in the most brutal of circumstances to the cause of independence, autonomy, self-determination. It must never be ignored and if the media fail to report it then someone must. US Foreign Policy does not enjoy publicity.