Guatemala + America

“With its policy in supporting dictatorships, the United States has collaborated in the strengthening of these regimes and burdened our people with debt, often for the most superfluous programs. With its policy in police and military assistance, the United States has collaborated in the acts of repression, and consequently in the violation of human rights”

For me, this quote nicely summarizes the Guatemalan political history from the 1950s-1970s in a nutshell. It is a history heavily laden with unjustified American intervention, political corruption, massive military participation, and human rights abuses on a very large scale. Unfortunately for the Guatemalan people, their recent history is just as shockingly corrupt and murder-filled as Argentina’s, although for significantly different reasons. The most noticeable difference between these two Latin American countries is the significant involvement of the United States in Guatemala’s domestic affairs. With this understanding I think it is fair to insinuate, or blatantly state as the above quotation eloquently does so, that the US is responsible for facilitating the human rights abuses that have occurred in Guatemala because of the significantly large role the America government played in overthrowing the democratically elected President, Arbenz.

When democratically elected Arbenz became President of Guatemala, he began to enact significant reforms in an effort to modernize his poor country. Land reforms, a common Latin American initiative, angered the monopolistic, American United Fruit Company because land was taken; the owners and investors of this multinational refused to sit by and allow the Guatemalan President to expropriate “their” land. Thus a call to overthrow the government was conjured up and supported by many American officials, including Dulles of the CIA (who was an investor in the United Fruit Company). Dulles managed to gain support for this coup from the American government by framing it as anti-communist campaign, designed to rid Guatemala of its supposedly pro-communist President and stop the dreaded spread of communism in the Western Southern hemisphere. Through a series of ill-conceived political and military manipulations, the US managed to oust Arbenz (through shear luck if you ask me) and (eventually) replace him with a military dictator, Castillo Armas. From 1954 until the 1980s (or at least as far as this book was written), Guatemala suffered through a series of unstable military dictatorships, each more brutal than the next. Unfortunately, following Arbenz’s exit and as seems to be characteristic of dictatorships, human rights were the next things to leave the country.

One common goal shared by each junta was a desire to rid Guatemala of any political opposition, especially any right leaning revolutionaries. Through a series of disappearances, kidnappings, mass killings, and murders, thousands of students, intellectuals, professionals, professors and basically any minutely educated persons, with the ability to create dissent, were silenced. Just as we saw in Argentina, state sponsored terrorism against its own people was frequently and indiscriminately employed against any person who could pose the slightest threat to the government. And once again, American governmental intervention, this time in the form of police training and governmental support, collaborated with the Guatemalan government to abuse its people and deny them basic freedoms, freedoms the millions of American citizens living a few countries away would dismantle their government for depriving them of. And so the infuriating and almost unbelievable American hypocrisy continued to thrive, causing utter chaos and disaster in a country far away from the American government’s “caring” eyes. Therefore, while both Argentina and Guatemala are undeniably guilty for state sponsored terrorism that killed thousands of people, it could be argued that Guatemala was propelled down this path by an outside force, whereas Argentina managed to get there largely by itself. American intervention, causing the demise of democracy in Guatemala, is at the very least partly responsible for the ensuing decades of human rights abuses, as it paved the way for ferociously corrupt and violent dictators to gain power and strip their people of the rights granted to them under democracy.