Word: arbenz
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Just nine year later, Arevalo's involution, which had made real progress in relieving the poor from grinding poverty, came to its unnatural end. The CIA, with the full support of President Eisenhower, deposed Arevalo's successor Jacob Arbenz and installed a military government. Since that day, Roosevelt's freedom has disappeared, reforms have been obliterated, and thousands of Guatemalans have died at the hands of rightist death squads. Guatemala, which for a brief decade was a source of hope for moderate progressives the world over, is now a human-rights disaster area...
That a popularly elected government in a distant nation should be deposed for the sake of a bunch of banana salesmen may seem absurd and even comical. Mostly though, it is terrifying. Arbenz's policies--essentially the legalization of labor unions and a modest land reform that expropriated only unused fields, including much of United Fruits holdings--were hardly those of a Marxist revolutionary Nor did they pose a lethal threat to United Fruit's interests, its fruit-producing lands remained untouched But America, caught up in the hysteria of McCarthysim and the Cold War, flinched. The reflex to react...
...their engrossing book Bitter Fruit, Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer tell the previously untold tale of the American coup in Guatemala. Using government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the authors recount in a straight forward but not simplistic manner the details of Arbenz's overthrow For an American. Bitter Fruit makes agonizing reading: the arrogance. Callousness and stupidity of our countrymen is hard to swallow...
...than just the haphazard act of a virulently anti-communist administration. As Schlesinger and Kinzer tell it, the United Fruit Company, which had been well-entrenched in Guatemala since the turn of the century and profited enormously from a succession of anti-labor right wing dictators, felt threatened by Arbenz's reforms. So United Fruit called on its many friends in Washington--including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, director of the CIA--to take action. Thanks to an impressive public relations campaign, the company managed to paint Arbenz as an anti-U.S. communist bent...
...violence is reaching new levels even for Guatemala, where left and right have been at bloody odds since a CIA-sponsored coup overthrew the left-leaning government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954. For 27 years, the country has been dominated by a coalition of conservative politicians and military figures who have been backed by the army. Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, the current president, is an army general himself. Despite Washington's support for the 1954 coup, relations between the two countries have been severely strained in recent years by Guatemala's appalling human rights record...