Word: guatemala
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Under the Freedom of Information Act. Schlesinger applied to the State Department for materials on the events in Guatemala in 1954. Eight months later, he received 1200 pages of documents. They described, on a day-to-day, basis, what the U.S. ambassador had done during the 10 days of the coup. As Schlesinger remembers it. "Reading this factual account of the actions the U.S. took to overthrow a foreign government. I realized I had a potential book on my-hands...
...tragedy of the 1954 coup, says Schlesinger, is that left to its own devices. Guatemala would probably now be one of Central America's few democracies. "Some of the CIA people involved in the coup who we talked to look back integrate. Yes, they successfully overthrew a government for their country. But what was the result? Twenty-eight years of military dictatorship. And now, ironically, the threat of a communist takeover is, far more serious than it ever was in the 1950s...
...SURELY one of the most ironic footnotes to history. In his inagural in 1945, leftist Juan Jose Arevalo, the first popularly elected President of Guatemala., movingly cited Franklin Roosevelt. "He taught us," said Arevalo, "that there is no need to cancel the concept of freedom is the democratic system in order to breathe into it a socialist spirit...
...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...
...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...