Lost Illusions in Guatemala

MEXICO CITY

Since the end of the second World War Communism has achieved no victory in Latin America as effective as its defeat in Guatemala.

The optimistic declarations of diplomats could not help. Nor did legal action undertaken by the Attorney General of the United States against the United Fruit Company as a monopolistic enterprise succeed in diminishing the importance of the Communist success.

United Fruit, the most reactionary element in Guatemala, and, perhaps, the politics of the State Department, have triumphed, for the moment. It is a pyrrhic victory. For what is defeated is not Communism, but the people of Guatemala and left, non-Communist opinion in Latin America.

We are all familiar with the events: in May, the State Department announces that arms from behind the iron curtain have arrived in Guatemala, where the Communists have infiltrated the administration, the unions and even the parties of the left. United Fruit maintains tenacious resistance against the strikers and continues to oppose the expropriation of a section of its fallow land. In June, an “army of liberation” (some 300 men, 5 planes, and an efficient propaganda apparatus) is formed in Honduras. A group of the Guatemalan military—young, formed by the revolution of 1944, that is, by the left—demands that President Jacobo Arbenz remove the Communists from the positions they hold. Arbenz must give his reply 72 hours later. A man of feeble but obstinate character, who passes through successive periods of euphoria and depression, Arbenz is on the verge of acceding to the demands of the military. The first consequence, therefore, of the alliance of leftist parties with the Communists is, in the world conjuncture, to give the military a political role contrary to the very principles of the revolution which, in 1944, had put an end to the armed dictatorship of Ubico.

It seems logical to suppose that an intelligent policy would be to let events ripen and permit the military and possibly the leftist parties of Guatemala to free themselves from Communist confines. Thus the Communist danger (not imminent, but purely political and non-military) would disappear without risk to social legislation, agrarian reform and the essentials of the democratic regime which has been in existence barely ten years.

But this suits neither the army of “liberation” nor those who finance it. On the eve of the day fixed for Arbenz’s reply, the invasion of Guatemala begins. For twelve days, it continues without struggle, without victims but not without terror on both sides. All the parties of Guatemala —made up of youngsters, raised under the dictatorship of Ubico, who had come into political life in the era of the alliance between Moscow and Washington—are thus put into the same bag as the Communist Party. Colonel Castillo Armas and his ministers (all known reactionaries, some of them, at one time, great lando...