The Fish That Ate the Whale (25 page)

The isthmus had changed greatly in the course of the Second World War. There were physical changes, all the exotic crops imported by Zemurray, for example, but there were metaphysical changes, too—the appearance of a new mood characterized by hope. The people of Latin America were profoundly affected by the language America had used during the struggle: the calls to end oppression, colonialism, racism, tyranny. Asked to name a hero, most South American liberals of that era would mention FDR, specifically citing his four freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. In short, the Central Americans heard our words and actually believed them.

For those on the isthmus who dreamed of the new world suggested by Franklin Roosevelt, but still lived in the old one ruled by Sam Zemurray, a terrible gap yawned open: between expectation and reality. This is where revolutions are born. The call for increased rights and freedoms was a challenge to United Fruit, which depended on compliant governments and cheap labor. What's more, with the start of the cold war, the struggle on the isthmus got tangled up with the global battle between capitalism and communism, which turned even the smallest feud into a test of ideologies. The region was flooded with fears of implication and precedent. If you wanted to open the gates of hell, all you had to do was point and say, “Communist.”

Take Guatemala, where United Fruit prospered, and where the dream of United Fruit would end. The country was perfect for bananas: lush jungle, poor workers, lots of rain, accommodating dictators. General Jorge Ubico, who had assumed power in 1931, was the banana republic strongman in concentrated form, kicking down, kissing up. He looked like Buster Keaton in the silents, dreamily imagining a cavalry charge. Do I need to say he considered himself the reincarnation of Napoléon? Or that he was tiny, with delicate gloved fingers? Or that he carried a sword and wore medals all over his chest? Or that he was obsessed with astrology and bewitched by numbers? Eccentric at the beginning, mad by the end, he had a hatred of Communists so pure it burned blue. The general banned the words “trade union,” “strike,” “petition,” and “worker.” There were no workers, he told his people, only employees.

At times, it seemed the general had just one constituent: United Fruit. Peasant workers—excuse me, peasant employees—were required to work a minimum of one hundred days a year for landowners, which usually meant United Fruit. Anyone who failed to follow the order could be legally killed. (Not good for the bargaining position.) United Fruit had acquired an obscene amount of property in the country to stay ahead of Panama disease. By 1942, the company owned 70 percent of all private land in Guatemala, controlled 75 percent of all trade, and owned most of the roads, power stations and phone lines, the only Pacific seaport, and every mile of railroad. The contract that drove people especially crazy, perhaps the most lopsided deal in the history of Guatemala—it gave U.F. unprecedented rights on the Pacific—had been negotiated by John Foster Dulles, then a lawyer with the white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

Anger was the inevitable result, resentment, frustration, rage. The pressure built until the lid was rattling on the pot, the stove was straining against the wall. In 1944, the whole country blew. It started with a massive demonstration. Workers filled the main plaza in Guatemala City, demanding that the dictator step down; they wanted a new system with decent wages and the sort of social security system Franklin Roosevelt had championed in the United States. (Life expectancy in Guatemala was forty-seven years and most people made less than $300 a year.) General Ubico told his army to clear the plaza. Some soldiers opened fire on the demonstrators, but others stripped off their uniforms and joined the crowd, which swelled until it was the only thing that mattered. The masses stormed through the city, looting and burning. They marched to a military base on the outskirts of the capital. There was a brief fight, a civil war, black smoke rising from the slums.

Hundreds of Guatemalans were killed. The general mumbled through a resignation speech, turned control over to his lieutenant, General Federico Ponce, then went into exile. As the first demonstration had been organized by educators, the upheaval came to be known as “The Schoolteachers' Revolt.”

General Ponce called for elections. Some of the people who led the revolt invited Juan José Arévalo, a college professor who had spent the previous fourteen years in exile, to return to lead the movement. Arévalo had written essays that inspired the revolution, as well as textbooks standard in the country. Everyone knew his name. He was forty-two when he returned, slender to the point of being sickly, with an intellectual's myopic stare. A crowd met him at the airport. Men and women threw flowers and shouted his name. General Ponce tried to have Arévalo arrested, but a clique of leftist military officers prevented this. I say “prevented” as if it were a simple matter—a traffic cop preventing a car from entering a one-way street—but it was, in fact, bloody. On October 20, 1944, a group of junior officers killed over a hundred of their superiors, securing the revolution.

Juan Arévalo won the presidency with 85 percent of the vote, the first popularly elected leader in the history of Guatemala. He took the oath of office on March 15, 1945, a clear, spring afternoon. He wore a business suit because he was a civilian, not a general. His inaugural address promised a new age. He had three audiences in mind: Guatemalans, the government of the United States, and the president of United Fruit. He spoke of his past—a childhood of poverty. He spoke of the future—a vision of big landowners forced to reform and share. And he spoke of his heroes, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who “taught us there is no need to cancel the concept of freedom in the democratic system in order to breathe into it a socialist spirit.” He said he would govern by a philosophy of his own invention, which he called “spiritual socialism.”

To Zemurray, who had agents scattered in the crowd, every word of the speech would have sounded like a threat. It was Huey Long all over again. The call to strengthen the unions, spread the wealth, break up the large holdings of land.… There were some U.F. executives who worried that Guatemala would go Communist from the beginning. Zemurray rejected such talk. He did not believe that the people of Guatemala, most of them poor Indians, were sophisticated enough to embrace an ideology associated with European intellectuals.

Arévalo, a smart man who understood the limits of his power, was exceedingly careful in dealing with United Fruit. Though he passed land reform legislation, he left it unenforced. He focused instead on crowd-pleasing issues that Zemurray could hardly oppose. A forty-hour workweek, social security guarantees, rights of the unions to organize—all based on the New Deal legislation that Zemurray himself championed in the United States. In 1947, the Guatemalan congress enacted the Labor Code, which, for the first time ever, permitted banana workers to join trade unions. In the past, force had been used to break strikes. Labor leaders were now free to organize on U.F. plantations. The company filed protests against the code and even threatened to withdraw from Guatemala altogether. But in the end, business continued as usual.

I'm not saying that it was a frictionless time. (There were twenty-five coup attempts in the Arévalo years.) Nor am I saying Zemurray stood by calmly as this college professor made Guatemala less hospitable to the company. (In 1948, Guatemalan agents discovered grenades and guns hidden in a United Fruit train bound for Puerto Barrios.) I'm just saying, compared to what followed, the Arévalo years were boringly peaceful.

In 1951, Arévalo was succeeded by his vice president, Jacobo Arbenz, one of the young officers who had purged the old regime.

Jacobo Arbenz was born in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, in 1913, when U.F. was already monstrously powerful. His father was from Switzerland, blond haired, blue eyed, as pale as a stalk of wheat. He stood out amid the dark crowds of Quetzaltenango, which was populated mostly by Indians. Why his father moved to Guatemala, I don't know. He married a Guatemalan of European descent, her skin as white as ivory, hair as black as coal. He settled on the outskirts of the mountainous city and opened an apothecary. He was a licensed pharmacist, a man of prescriptions and containers filled with potions. He did what the kingpin tells the drug dealer he must never do: got high on his own supply. He became addicted first to one kind of pill, then to several kinds, then to narcotics in general. They filled his days with epiphanies: shadows of the trees, hills in the distance, faces in the market—everything became profound, a manifestation of the divine. He made poor decisions under the influence, gave away what he should have kept. To his son, he was a good man broken on the wheel of capitalism. Then the drugs stopped working, or began working in a terrible new way—revealed devils where they had once revealed angels. He turned sullen, depressed. No one could talk to him. One day, he went into the back room of his apothecary and shot himself in the head.

These details were compiled for a CIA file years later, when Jacobo Arbenz was classified an enemy of the United States. E. Howard Hunt, the American spy later famous for his role in the Watergate break-in, elaborated on the death of the elder Arbenz in
Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent
. According to Hunt, the elder Arbenz, wanting to be certain his suicide was successful, filled his mouth with water before shooting himself, which made his “head explode like a bomb.”

The Arbenz family lived a vagabond life after the tragedy. Jacobo, who was still a boy, moved from house to house, uncle to uncle. He grew taciturn and sad. He radiated that peculiar melancholy that comes across as depth. He was as blond as his father, very handsome. Everyone said he looked like Alan Ladd. That does not mean much now, but Alan Ladd was one of the biggest movie stars in the world back then. Alan Ladd played Shane, the gunman who tried to lay down his weapons only to discover a fighter must fight until he dies. At the end of the movie, Shane, shot in the gut, rides into the mountains as if ascending to heaven. When Jacobo was fourteen, his mother sent him to military school, and a good thing she did, because that's where he finally found a sense of belonging. He loved order and rules, knowing who was above him and who was below. He went on to the nation's elite military academy, where he amassed one of the best academic records in the history of the country.

Arbenz was a man when he graduated, tall and elegant, laughing with fellow officers, as enviable as a soldier in a story by Tolstoy, drinking vodka, gambling and whoring, believing this life will last forever. If he had an ideology, it was personal: the world as seen by the young man who believes his father was killed by the system, which is another name for the banana company. The sophisticated ideas that he later expressed in speeches and rants came from his wife, María Cristina Villanova Castro, a Nancy Reagan or Lady Macbeth who recognized in the officer a perfect vehicle. María Castro grew up in El Salvador, the daughter of a wealthy coffee grower who claimed she had been turned against her class by Steinbeck, Marx, and Bartolomé de Las Casas. Her father banned her from his library, but she read in secret. He cast her into the outer darkness of children who have disappointed their parents. Ideas for which Jacobo Arbenz was later condemned—redistribution of wealth, seizing the means of production, etc.—came from his wife. Arbenz was more instinctual, with convictions that derived less from books than his own experience. You don't need a book to understand injustice. Just look at the electric fence that surrounds the banana plantation.

When Arévalo formed his cabinet, he named Arbenz minister of defense. He did this to secure the loyalty of the military, where Arbenz was wildly popular. He then tapped Arbenz to succeed him as president, to pursue and complete the goals of the revolution. After winning the election, Arbenz formed a coalition government made of factions, including members of the small Communist Party of Guatemala. (As far as American officials were concerned, the presence of these Communists suggested Arbenz was probably a Communist himself.) He took the oath of office in the spring of 1951, with the departing president at his side. It was the first peaceful transition of power in the history of the country. In his farewell address, Arévalo ominously warned of the power of the banana company. “The revolution will have to be pushed forward,” he said, “or it will be lost.”

Arbenz was a different sort of president than his predecessor. Arévalo condemned United Fruit but never undermined the company or challenged Zemurray directly. He was cautious, deliberate. Arbenz advanced soldier-style, by quick, decisive strokes. He was a man aware of time, who wanted to push through his program before the weather changed. He did not fear Zemurray. In fact, it seemed he wanted to infuriate the bosses of United Fruit, make a display of his independence and defiance. He wanted to remind the banana moguls who the elected leader of the country really was. In his inaugural speech, Arbenz promised to make Guatemala “a dependent nation with a semi-colonial economy, [into] an economically independent country.” He said achieving this would mean ridding the nation of the latifundios, large private estates and farms, once and for all.

A new urgency was evident from the first days of his rule. It could be detected in the tone of informal diplomatic dialogue, as well as in the tenor of official communication. Whereas previous Guatemalan leaders seemed to accept U.F.'s view of its history—an enlightened company that had mastered nature (the conquest of the tropics)—the new government sought to undermine the founding myths of El Pulpo. (A company, like a nation, cannot survive without its mythology.) “All the achievements of the Company were made at the expense of the impoverishment of the country and by acquisitive practices,” said a government minister, Alfonso Bauer Paiz. “To protect its authority [United Fruit] had recourse to every method: political intervention, economic compulsion, contractual imposition, bribery, [and] tendentious propaganda, as suited its purposes of domination. The United Fruit Company is the principal enemy of progress of Guatemala, of its democracy, and of every effort at its economic liberation.”