The
award-winning documentary Harvest
of Empire unveils a moving
human story that is largely unknown to the great majority of citizens
in the US. “They never teach us in school that the huge Latino
presence here is a direct result of our own government’s actions in
Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America over many decades - actions
that forced millions from that region to leave their homeland and
journey north,” says Juan
González, award-winning
journalist and author of the book upon which the documentary is
based.
The 1954
CIA-orchestrated coup in Guatemala
Robert
White, former US ambassador to El Salvador reveals that “If you
had to pick one date where US foreign policy towards Latin America
went wrong, the date would be 1954 and the place: Guatemala. That was
the beginning of this terrible, terrible attitude that the United
States developed towards Latin America and, particularly, towards
Central America, where change became our enemy.”
From the
documentary we also learn that Guatemala was one of the few countries
in Latin America that, after World War ll, actually experienced a
period of democratic rule. President Jacobo Arbenz was determined to
reduce widespread poverty by effecting major land reform in
Guatemala. Only 2% of the owners controlled 75% of the arable land.
Out of all of those, the United Fruit Company was the largest, with
some 600,000 acres of property.
In the US
Government, John Foster Dulles, who was the Secretary of State under
president Eisenhower; his brother Allen Dulles, who was the head of
the CIA - had both been law partners in the main law firm that
represented United Fruit Company. Melvin Goodman, former CIA division
chief says that “The feeling was we could very easily overthrow
this progressive government and make it a lot easier for the United
Fruit Company and other American businesses to operate in Central
America.”
The CIA got
heavily involved in managing public opinion. It created the image of
Arbenz as a crazy radical. And it was a systematic effort,
mobilization and financing of opposition forces, until the Arbenz
government was overthrown.
A vicious
repression of all progressives and supporters of the Arbenz
government ensued. Guatemala really began to establish a new pattern
whereby the United States government used covert operations, employed
local proxies to destabilize and overthrow governments in the region.
A civil war erupted in the county that lasted 20 years. The brutality
of the US-backed regimes forced many people to flee to the United
States. That common US policy nearly to all the Latin America, in
order to promote the interests of the US big capital, created massive
waves of immigrants towards the US soil.
How the
coup was designed with anti-Communist propaganda as basic tool
Adam
Curtis, through his
documentary The
Century of the Self, goes
deeper inside that story, exploring the method and the man who
actually designed the coup for the CIA and the United Fruit. The man
was Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda, or, public
relations, if you prefer.
In 1953, the
Soviet Union exploded it's first hydrogen bomb and the fear of
nuclear war and Communism gripped the United States. Those in power
became concerned about how to reassure the population. Committees
were set up and public information films made appealing for calm in
the face of new threats like nuclear fallout.
At this
point, Edward Bernays was living in New York. In the 1920s he had
invented the profession of Public Relations and was now one of the
most powerful PR men in America. He worked for most of the major
corporations and advised politicians, including President Eisenhower.
Like his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays was convinced that human
beings were driven by irrational forces. The only way to deal with
the public was to connect with their unconscious desires and fears.
Bernays
argued that instead of trying to reduce people's fear of Communism,
one should actually encourage and manipulate the fear. And in such a
way that it became a weapon in the cold war. Rational argument was
fruitless.
One of
Bernays' main clients was the giant United Fruit Company. They owned
vast banana plantations in Guatemala and Central America. For
decades, United Fruit had controlled the company through pliable
dictators. It was known as a 'banana republic'. But in 1950,
a young officer, Colonel Arbenz was elected president. He promised to
remove United Fruits' control over the country, and in 1953 he
announced the government would take over much of their land. It was a
massively popular move but a disaster for United Fruit, and they
turned to Bernays to help get rid of Arbenz.
In reality,
Arbenz was a Democratic Socialist with no links to Moscow, but
Bernays set out to turn him into a Communist threat to America. He
organized a trip to Guatemala for influential American journalists.
Few of them knew anything about the country, or its politics. Bernays
arranged for them to be entertained and to meet selected Guatemalan
politicians who told them that Arbenz was a Communist controlled by
Moscow.
During the
trip, there was also a violent anti-American demonstration in the
capital. Many of those who worked for United Fruit were convinced it
had been organized by Bernays himself. He also created a fake
independent news agency in America called the Middle America
Information Bureau. It bombarded the American media with press
releases saying that Moscow was planning to use Guatemala as a
beachhead to attack America. All of this had the desired effect.
But what
Bernays was doing was not just trying to blacken the Arbenz regime.
He was part of a secret plot. President Eisenhower had agreed that
America should topple the Arbenz government, but secretly. The CIA
were instructed to organize a coup. Working with the United Fruit
Company the CIA trained and armed a rebel army and found a new leader
for the country called Colonel Armas. The CIA agent in charge was
Howard Hunt, later one of the Watergate burglars.
As planes
flown by CIA pilots dropped bombs on Guatemala City, Edward Bernays
carried on his propaganda campaign in the American press. He was
preparing the American population to see this as the liberation of
Guatemala by freedom fighters for Democracy. He totally understood
that the coup would happen when conditions on the public and the
press allowed for a coup to happen and he created those conditions.
He was totally savvy in terms of just what he was helping create
there in terms of the overthrow. But ultimately he was reshaping
reality, and reshaping public opinion in a way that is undemocratic
and manipulative.
On June
27th, 1954, Colonel Arbenz fled the country and Armas arrived as the
new leader. Within months, Vice President Nixon visited Guatemala. In
an event staged by United Fruit's PR department, he was shown piles
of Marxist literature that had been found it was said in the
presidential palace.
Bernays had
manipulated the American people but he had done so because he, like
many others at the time, believed that the interests of business and
the interests of America were indivisible. Especially when faced with
the threat of Communism. But Bernays was convinced that to explain
this rationally to the American people was impossible. Because they
were not rational. Instead, one had to touch on their inner fears and
manipulate them in the interest of a higher truth. He called it The
Engineering of Consent. He was
doing it for the American way of life to which he was sincerely
devoted. And yet, he felt that the people were really pretty stupid.
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