Bananas, p.13
Bananas, page 13
The question remained, however, of what was to be done about the Guatemalans who had no radios. In distant rural areas of Guatemala, many poor inhabitants would surely be grateful to hear of the plan to overthrow the government of Arbenz. He was almost certainly an Antichrist and, if he wasn’t, then his wife was. The people of rural Guatemala, by contrast, were devout people, awaiting a sign.
Hunt approached Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, who readily accepted the chance to help stop the spread of atheist influences. The cardinal put Hunt in touch with Guatemala’s archbishop and bishops, who were also alarmed at the prospect of Communism in their country. They penned a pastoral letter for the people. Hunt had CIA planes drop thousands of copies of it over forlorn areas whose inhabitants would otherwise not have learned of their pending liberation. When they did, the word came from the skies.
Bernays was ahead of the game. He had drip-fed United Fruit’s view into the veins of public opinion since it had become clear that Arbenz would come to power. He had his long list of friendly opinion formers which included sub-categories of those even better placed to manipulate society’s ‘hidden mechanism’. To take care of them meant all else would follow.
The publishers or senior editors of newspapers were first to be approached. Generally they spent their professional lives office-bound and cut off from the journalistic cutting edge. Bernays put them on planes and United Fruit paid their expenses.
They might lodge in one of the pleasant rooms of the Pan-American hotel, elegantly mock colonial with windows looking out on to the hubbub of Zone One, the heart of Guatemala City. Somewhere in the middle distance pandemonium might erupt. It would be far enough away not to alarm them unduly and near enough to reach just as the crowd was dispersing. It was the perfect foreign correspondent’s story: a bit of broken glass, a bullet hole and perhaps a lingering whiff of gun smoke in the air. File it as a ‘Communist Outrage’.
Bernays kept up the junkets. These tropical ‘fact-finding’ tours generally headed first for Bogotá in Colombia and took a whirl by air to the Santa Marta plantations on the Caribbean coast. They set north for Panama, Costa Rica and Honduras, all of which were tranquil and at peace with the company’s world. The tension rose as they neared Guatemala. On arrival, company men met them: smiling, reassuring men. It had to be admired how well they withstood the pressure. The company men introduced them to others, local people of some social standing, though not from the government. They did their best to keep smiling, not as gamely perhaps as the company men, while they explained the nature of the rising terror. It was fortuitous that all was still quiet, yet there was no mistaking that feeling of war in the air.
Bernays called the stories that appeared ‘masterpieces of objective reporting’. There was something in what he said: United Fruit’s version of events rose above the usual pettiness of news outlets’ subjective persuasions. Liberal or conservative, it didn’t matter. The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Miami Herald, Time-Life magazines, Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor – it was almost unfair to single them out. They all went along for the ride. Bernays rigorously denied any suggestion of news manipulation and here, too, he had a point. Thomas McCann, the chief in-house PR man at the time, later wrote An American Company, a book about his days at United Fruit. He said it was difficult to make a convincing case for manipulation of the press when the victims had proved ‘so eager for the experience’.
What accounted for this complicity? Many journalists saw their trade as reporting the ‘facts’ presented to them by apparently decent and honest people. Among those with an instinct to probe, there was the fear that they and their editors would have to deal with the likes of Senator McCarthy. Vice-president Nixon, too, was comparably hawkish and a staunch supporter of the Guatemalan operation. For the journalists there was also the potential glory. Many of the older scribes had reported on the Second World War. Guatemala promised to be the next generation’s ‘story of their lives’. Where the last war had been fought so distantly, this one threatened much closer to home. Thanks to the sharp-eyed attentions of United Fruit, the conflict could even be seen at the very lock gates of the Panama Canal. Well, the company had at least flown them over it.
United Fruit expanded its visual side, in line with advancing technology. It was some time since it had mastered the airwaves, with ‘Radio Bound for Banana Land’. It produced a film, Journey to Banana Land. ‘Travel with us on the Great White Fleet and meet your neighbours in Middle America’, read its opening titles. Scenes moved from crashing surf on the Caribbean, to volcanoes and aerial shots of Guatemala City. Contented natives abounded on urban streets or with their mules on company plantations. United Fruit had brought them ‘greater purchasing power’ and ‘twentieth-century living’. The film ran for twenty-one minutes, its concluding scenes from the US itself. They showed family meals, school cafeterias, bananas enjoyed on cereal and in milkshakes. In 1954, the crisis year for Guatemala, Journey to Banana Land was in high demand in US classrooms.
Apparent philanthropy remained uppermost in the company’s mind. It took out magazine advertisements promoting the Red Cross. The organisation was only too pleased to get the support. So were the publishers of the magazines, because United Fruit paid well above normal advertising rates. In return, articles appeared promoting the company’s vision of ‘Banana Land’.
In delicate issues of diplomacy John Foster Dulles led the charge. In March 1954 the secretary of state stayed two weeks in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, at the conference of the Organisation of American States (OAS). The city was in a state of unrest because a military dictatorship had recently seized power. In protest democratic Costa Rica refused to attend the conference; but Dulles seemed quite at home. Some cajoling of OAS members was required since several had not grasped that Guatemala, one of Latin America’s weaker countries, posed such a threat to its ‘small neighbours’. The Guatemalan delegate complained that the US was ‘cataloguing as Communism’ all efforts in Latin America for economic independence and ‘intellectual curiosity’. In other words, only one line was allowed and most toed it when the time came to cast the vote for ‘positive action’ against Guatemala. Costa Rica wasn’t present and only Mexico and Argentina abstained. The rest went along with the US position, either happy to do so, or persuaded by Dulles’s suggestions that they would face the withdrawal of US aid.
At the UN, Henry Cabot Lodge’s ambassadorial efforts had worked well. Then came a blip as the Security Council proposed that it would send observers to the region. As members of the Council, the British and French backed the idea. Churchill happened to be visiting Washington. President Eisenhower resolved to talk ‘cold turkey’ with his British friend over this unwarranted European intervention in the American hemisphere. Britain and France were presently engaged in imperial wars, the British in Cyprus and the French in Vietnam. They could count on no help from the US, Ike said, if they carried on taking the wrong stance on Guatemala. Britain and France duly withdrew their support for the idea of UN observers in Guatemala and the proposal was quashed.
The question was who would lead the Guatemalan invasion. Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas was an enemy of Arbenz and had been part of an earlier plot to overthrow him. He had fled into exile and, lately, had a career as a furniture salesman in Honduras. Castillo Armas was dapper, moustachioed and had ‘that good Indian face’, Howard Hunt reported. He would be ‘terrific for the people’.
Castillo Armas was a ‘little prick’, responded the Somozas in Nicaragua, who offered to launch the invasion. The US had provided the Nicaraguan army with the finest military equipment in Central America, which they claimed could easily handle Arbenz’s forces. Washington counselled that it would be unwise for a foreign country to be such an obvious presence in the invasion. Cards had to be played far more carefully. The US accepted the Somozas’ offer of training camps and an airfield on the Atlantic coast at Puerto Cabezas, the old pirate haven of Bragman’s Bluff.
Castillo Armas was housed, fed and watered on a United Fruit plantation on the Honduran side of the border with Guatemala and awaited his call. Eventually, a straggling force of Guatemalan exiles crossed the frontier and began its march on the capital. The CIA’s Voice of Liberation radio station reported an army progressing triumphantly and people flocking to join it. The local mule population fell sharply, with slaughtered animals dumped on the road to give the impression of battles fought along the way.
Many journalists were holed up in the bar of the Pan-American hotel. Any who wanted to go to the ‘front’ were prevented from doing so for their ‘own safety’. Gun in belt, ambassador Peurifoy briefed reporters on another point of concern. He had heard that some of them were calling what was happening an invasion and he put them right: it was a liberation. They were only allowed to see for themselves when the battle was finally done and when Castillo Armas, the good Indian, showed his face on the national palace balcony to spontaneous rapture from the crowd.
Earlier CIA planes had dropped bombs on military bases and in the slums of the capital to create panic among the people and uncertainty in the armed forces. President Arbenz had had the impression that security had broken down and that his forces had abandoned him. In his final broadcast to the nation, he blamed United Fruit for the invasion. A handful of people heard him as the CIA worked to jam the transmission.
In Boston, journalists showed little frustration at not being at the frontline. United Fruit kept them so well informed and most were happy with the hospitality and regular updates, as United Fruit appointed itself the news agency of the war. At company headquarters, they were shown pictures of bodies of alleged victims of atrocities by Arbenz’s forces. Thomas McCann, there as part of United Fruit’s PR machine, later wrote that the pictures could have been of victims from either side, or of one of Central America’s many earthquakes.
10
‘Betrayal’
Howard Hunt had faced an existential dilemma. Life was far better viewed as a simple division between the guys in the white hats and the guys in the black hats and, for a moment, he had lost his usual clarity. He had, perhaps, been on an airfield outside Guatemala City near one of the ravines at the capital’s outskirts, with gentle wisps issuing from the nearby Fuego volcano. Though the details are vague, after a brief and vigorous bout of combat Hunt had captured a rag-tag group of fighters opposed to efforts by the CIA and the United Fruit Company to overthrow the government. Hunt had wondered whether he should shoot the members of this vanquished band or let them go. In victory he chose the path of mercy and later reflected that this had been a disastrous mistake. One of his captives had been Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.
It is difficult to know whether this really happened. Twenty years later, during the administration of President Richard Nixon, a CIA colleague said Hunt had told him the story. Hunt enjoyed putting out false reports and, having made the better part of a career of it, wrote his autobiography, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent, in which he neglected to mention the Guevara incident. He said he had not been in Guatemala at the time. It was one of his greatest professional regrets as he had done so much of the groundwork to remove the government of the day, the first Communist regime, as Hunt viewed it, to meet such a fate since General Francisco Franco’s victory in the 1930s in Spain. Come the time of triumph in Guatemala, Hunt wrote, the CIA had reassigned him to Japan. Of course, that might not be true either.
There are scattered details of Che Guevara’s time in Guatemala. He had left Argentina to tour Latin America and was especially keen to see what was happening in Guatemala under the government of Jacobo Arbenz. As a young doctor, Guevara wanted to get an idea of developments in healthcare. Among his efforts, he applied to work in the hospital of a United Fruit plantation but did not get the job. A short-back-and-sides sort of company, United Fruit might not have liked the cut of his beard. Guevara kept body and mind together in Guatemala with various jobs, including one selling encyclopaedias. The future revolutionary icon thus served in capitalism’s frontline as a simple door-to-door salesman.
Guevara had applied to go to the Guatemalan ‘front’ as the 1954 coup unfolded and the CIA’s dead mule brigade had begun its march on the capital. He had access to Arbenz, who turned down the request, suggesting that the appearance of Guevara and other irregular-looking fighters from Guatemala City would panic the regular army into thinking all was lost. Near the end Guevara urged Arbenz to ‘take to the hills’ and carry on the fight from the Indian Highlands. Guevara helped organise battalions to guard the capital. Their efforts came to nothing and he sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy before being granted passage out of the country.
His first wife, Hilda, later recounted that the coup in Guatemala had convinced Guevara that the only way forward for Latin America was the ‘armed struggle’. Guevara was already coming to this conclusion, having observed the working conditions in Chile’s copper mines. After the deeds of United Fruit in Guatemala, Guevara set off north to Mexico to join Fidel Castro’s forces preparing for their assault on Cuba.
For some months United Fruit had heard rumours that the US Department of Justice was preparing an anti-trust case against the company, to curb its ‘monopolistic practices’ in Guatemala. The State Department had ordered the Justice Department’s lawyers to hold off from formally beginning legal action during preparations for the Guatemalan coup.
In United Fruit’s mind such a case was almost too absurd to credit. If the company monopolised anything it was in doing things the right way. In Guatemala it had just fought the battle for the West against the forces of evil and won. United Fruit ruled the world.
Amid the present uncertainty, the company felt reassured by the attitude of the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. Al Bump, the company’s divisional chief in Guatemala, had heard that normality would soon be restored. Bump had risen from being the company’s tyro engineer in the 1930s, with a bright airy house on the new Tiquisate plantation, to the battle-worn frontline manager of the company during the recent Guatemalan crisis. Dulles had instructed the US ambassador that United Fruit was to get back its lands confiscated by Arbenz. The secretary of state didn’t mention that, as things would work out, the company would have far more taken away by Washington.
CIA agents descended on Guatemala in number, openly this time. The rationale for the coup had been that Guatemala was a ‘bridgehead for Communism’. Now the evidence of Russian involvement could be uncovered. Many thousands of documents had fallen into the CIA’s hands. Its operatives would unearth the secret links and reveal, as it were, where the bodies were buried. Here was the agency’s chance to expose Soviet intentions to turn Guatemala into a military base. The CIA set about searching through the documents.
As time dragged on, nothing substantial emerged. There was some indication that Moscow had attempted to build a bridgehead into the minds of the nation’s young. The Russians had sent teaching materials like schoolbooks. Even some of the most pliant journalists covering the story shook their heads and ignored such evidence in their reports or suggested it might have been planted. Mrs María Arbenz’s well stocked library attracted a good deal of attention. There was a biography of Stalin and works on Mao Tse-Tung’s agrarian reform in China. The CIA kept hunting, looking for the signs of nascent hemispheric conspiracy: transfers of funds, networks of couriers and correspondence with Moscow.
Finally some evidence was discovered of clearly sympathetic communication between Guatemala and the Kremlin. The Russians had written requesting a shipload of bananas. The Guatemalans wrote back saying sorry, that United Fruit ran the banana business and the government had no powers to get the fruit to Russia. Guatemala evidently toed United Fruit’s line, not Moscow’s.
United Fruit had experienced tremors in the past but the real earthquake came as the Department of Justice was allowed to go ahead with its case against the company. Previously United Fruit had avoided such assaults one way or another, by being out of sight and mind or beyond jurisdiction, by political manoeuvering or string pulling, or by stamping its feet. For the first time, the company was unable to get its own way. The Justice Department had always been called off in the past and this time someone had waved it through.
John Foster Dulles greatly regretted the judicial move. It was against all his instincts but, after consideration, he had reluctantly agreed to it. United Fruit had gone too far. It was not any company deed in particular, more the context of the desperate times. There were too many Castros and others as yet undiscovered, like Guevara, using United Fruit to justify their cause. The US had observed the widespread protests across Latin America after the Guatemalan coup. Though most of those taking part in such demonstrations might be gullible and misled, it would still be necessary to educate them and lead them along the right path. This would be easier if United Fruit, in its manifestation as ‘octopus’, was not blocking the way.
The extent of this ‘betrayal’ was staggering to United Fruit. A crusader in the Western cause, it was being treated as little better than a Communist, and possibly worse. The implication was that it was a traitor and was losing America the Cold War. The company’s problem was, however, similar to those it had suffered in the past. United Fruit had often strayed across the line between what was officially regarded as right and wrong. Generally it had managed to retreat in time and to rejoin those who controlled society’s ‘unseen mechanism’, as Edward Bernays, the company’s venerable propaganda adviser, had put it. United Fruit was being characterised again as a ‘nasty trust’, though not because anyone on high had suddenly discovered it had been mistreating the poor and dispossessed. It had wandered out of the realm of normal business, where it could get away with an awful lot, into an area where its actions were more likely to be noticed and cause offence to those who could retaliate.
