The Foreign Service Journal, June 2004

in the amount of $600,000, a figure based on the under- estimated land values the company itself had declared in order to avoid taxes. But United Fruit vigorously protest- ed what it regarded as inadequate compensation. Because both Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, owned stock in United Fruit, some have speculated that personal financial interests influenced their policy decisions on Guatemala. In their 1982 book, Bitter Fruit , authors Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger assert that the company played a decisive role in encouraging the Eisenhower administration to depose Arbenz. However, there is no proof that United Fruit had any role in orga- nizing the 1954 coup or in executing it, though the com- pany presumably welcomed Arbenz’s ouster. In any case, José Manuel Fortuny, the former leader of the Guatemalan Communist Party, said United Fruit’s role was irrelevant. “They [the U.S.] would have over- thrown us even if we had grown no bananas,” he said, as quoted in a study by Stephen M. Streeter of Canada’s McMaster University. John Foster Dulles concurred. Commenting just a few weeks before the coup against Arbenz, he said, “If the United Fruit matter were settled, if they gave a gold piece for every banana, the problem would remain as it is today as far as the presence of communist infiltration in Guatemala is concerned.” Against this background, the Eisenhower administra- tion launched a public relations campaign to demonize Arbenz as a communist, even though there was scant evi- dence to support that view. In March 1954 the New York Times published a story headlined “How the Communists Won Control in Guatemala” — just four days before an Organization of American States meeting in Caracas. At that session, John Foster Dulles goaded Latin American foreign ministers into adopting a resolution insinuating that Arbenz was indeed a communist. The vote was 17-1, with the lone negative vote cast by Guatemalan Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello, who had delivered an impas- sioned plea for rejection of the measure. A Coup Is Born Undeterred by American opposition to his policies, Arbenz carried his activism beyond Guatemala’s borders. His government became allied with a group called the Caribbean Legion, which took a strong stand against rightist dictatorships in the region. Many of the Legion’s targets were friendly to the United States, including Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. With the Cold War at a peak, American officials were concerned that Latin American democracies might not have the spine to deal with communists and other non- democratic elements in their midst. This certainly was the view of Kennan, one of the State Department’s leading Soviet-affairs experts. In particular, they were concerned that Arbenz’s land reform program could plant the seeds of peasant rebellion elsewhere in the region. In his 1991 book, Shattered Hope , historian Piero Gleijeses writes that a State Department official warned in late 1953 that Guatemala threatened the stability of Honduras and El Salvador because “its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; [and] its broad social program of aiding the work- ers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail.” It was in this late-1953 period that the Eisenhower administration dispatched career Foreign Service officer John Peurifoy to Guatemala as ambassador. Peurifoy had a well-deserved reputation for toughness. He was asked to assess the degree of communist infiltration in Guatemala and to inform Arbenz that any such penetra- tion must be rooted out. As he reported back to Dulles, there were indeed communists in the government and the Congress. They were small in number but nonetheless served as lightning rods for U.S. disapproval of the Arbenz government. Understandably feeling insecure, Arbenz was in the market for weapons by early 1954. (The United States had cut off military aid to Guatemala in 1944 after a revo- lution deposed the dictatorship of President Jorge Ubico.) So Arbenz’s government looked for help in Europe, where his agents purchased several hundred thousand dollars worth of arms from a dealer in Czechoslovakia, a loyal Soviet ally. When the shipment was discovered aboard the freighter Alfem in May 1954, American suspicions about Soviet bloc influence in Guatemala were rein- forced. But the shipment turned out to be less of a smok- ing gun than many people initially thought. The State Department concluded that the Czech dealer had no links to the Czech government. The weapons also turned out to have an odd pedigree: they were leftovers from the Nazi era. In any case, the CIA-backed operation against Arbenz, code-named “PBSuccess,” was already unfolding at the time of the weapons discovery. On June 17, 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas, a retired Guatemalan colonel recruited by J U N E 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 53 George Gedda, a frequent contributor to the Journal , is the State Department correspondent for the Associated Press.