The purpose of the “War:The Afterparty” global walkabout is to visit the scenes of our last half century of military and covert incursions for lessons learned. It’s been particularly fascinating in week one to hear the stories of the people who were on the other end of the gun barrel, the people for whom we spent blood and treasure so that they might enjoy freedom, democracy and free enterprise. I expect the narrative will be different from Guatemala to Nicaragua, from Kosovo to Vietnam.

And now…what’s this? If George W. Bush liked thinking of himself as The War President, Barack Obama surely likes thinking of himself as The Peace President. Last night’s address, which I caught this morning after a late night arrival in Managua, promises a new multi-year conflict:

My fellow Americans, tonight I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and allies to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL.

The President then laid out a four point strategy. You can read it here. In short, the plan involves air support, training, intelligence and equipment to the Iraqis doing the fighting on the ground, a broad sweep of counterterrorism actions, and humanitarian assistance to the victims of the murderous IS rampage.

And it will be done with an insistence on aggressive and urgent reform in the Iraqi government–Maliki is already gone–and the involvement of Arab and other allies.

There are hints of a new, escalating conflict, but the speech goes to great lengths to describe strategy, limits and motives.

Stephen Kinzer, whose thick books on Nicaragua and Guatemala are nestled in my backpack, noted Obama’s avoidance of hysterical paranoia and overreach in this morning’s Boston Globe in a piece called “Obama’s calm approach on ISIS will keep America safer.”

“Perhaps he would mobilize the nation more fully and win bigger headlines if he warned, like Governor Rick Perry of Texas, that ISIS terrorists might be sneaking across the Mexican border at this very moment…

“He called not for a massive attack but a steady, relentless effort’ to ‘degrade and ultimately destroy’ the militant group.

“It is difficult to hear our President gently remind us, ‘We cannot erase every trace of evil from the world.’ It challenges ideas of American power that are part of our collective psyche. Yet too many of our interventions in the Middle East have been aimed largely at fixing the messes left by our previous interventions. Obama signaled that he wants to pull the United States out of that cycle.”

Is there any difference between the Obama and Bush approaches? I think so.

Obama resists talk of a divine or providential mission to spread American values around the world, violently and unilaterally if necessary.

He resists saber rattling, militarist language threatening that you are either with us or against us.

He is consulting Congress, without the manipulative, deceitful political machinations used by Cheney and Rice, in evoking stark fears of an imminent apocalyptic threat.

He is doing this only with allies involved and supporting the mission.

He is doing it in support of a sovereign country, Iraq, whose people are being terrorized and whose vital resources such as dams and oil fields are at risk.

And he is disappointing the people who got us into this mess in the first place, via a nonstop attack on his approach as weak, feckless and adrift. People like Brookings analyst Robert Kagan, whose call, with Bill Kristol, for benevolent global hegemony in Foreign Affairs magazine provided the intellectual foundation for the disastrous Iraq invasion. Peter Beinart dissects Kagan’s position in The Atlantic.

“If American policymakers are truly “yearning for an escape from the burdens of power” and “com[ing] close to concluding … that war … is ineffective,” they have a strange way of showing it. Near the end of his first year in office, President Obama sent 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. That same year, he began an expansion of America’s drone program that would lead him to authorize eight times as many strikes (so far) as George W. Bush did. In 2011, the Obama administration helped militarily depose Muammar al-Qaddafi. Over the last month, it has launched 130 airstrikes in Iraq, with more almost certainly to come, perhaps in Syria as well.”

The speech outlines difficult decisions that are measured, justified, collaborative and legal. For now, that seems about right.

A reminder to join fhe Afterparty Kickstarter campaign to fund the Europe, Middle East and Asian legs of the project.
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I visited the storied campus of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and spoke with prominent professor and historian Dr. Oscar Pelaez Almengor. The campus, the fourth founded in the Americas, was the scene of intense and sometimes violent protests against both the 1954 CIA overthrow and the subsequent civil war. Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies, Almengor organized a historic conference on the Arbenz coup last year.

Why was Jacobo Arbenz overthrown?

There were four principal causes. He was promoting the industrialization of the country, and the highway to the north, to the Atlantic. He was intent on doing his best for the common people. The people who opposed him were the people from Guatemala, not the U.S. The U.S. participation was three million dollars. They created the mercenary force. They wasted that money. It was nothing. What was really important was the people who opposed him here in Guatemala.

If the U.S. did not intervene, would they have overthrown him anyway?

I think so. The army coming from Honduras was defeated. We as Guatemalans like to blame the U.S. But it wasn”t true. The people who overthrew him were the Guatemalans. That is my point of view after studying the issue for many years. We want to see sins and culpability in people other than Guatemalans. The U.S. paid the salaries of the military officers who were close to Arbenz. Two thousand dollars each for three or four years. They immediately took power. They started that with the U.S. ambassador. He went with the junta to San Salvador, flying there and making a deal with Castillo Armas.

I asked whether the same 25-30 families have been in control since the Spanish conquest.

It”s a myth. The economic forces of the country are constantly changing in terms of political and economic elites. You can”t say that nothing has changed from the conquest to today. The elite are changing. If you look at the statistics, you will see that the landowners are no longer the most important people in the country. You have industrialists fighting against them. The landowners are now the third or fourth. We have people in (other forms of) commerce who are the most important. And they are not necessarily former landowners. The country is changing constantly.

I asked about the political evolution of the Catholic casino online Church during the civil war.

The church became more left wing. You had one kind of church in 1954, another kind of church in the 60″s. The communists were not so important in 1954. They were a small group of people.

But somehow threatening to the United States?

In what way? What happens is you have to justify your actions.

You”re saying the Dulleses really didn”t care about communism but just wanted to support United Fruit and American economic interests.

They didn”t care about the communists. They used to say there were ten politically important people on the left in Guatemala. They said they were dangerous people. But in what way? They (Arbenz government) were working with the mass organizations, student and women”s organizations, things that happen in any democracy. They were dangerous to Guatemalan power. They used a word to describe what they wanted to do with those people. Disposal. They don”t say we are going to kill them.

You said Arbenz may have been overthrown anyway. U.S. Author Stephen Schlesinger suggests that if Arbenz continued, there could have been the first modern capitalist liberal democracy in Central America. Which would have created more regional stability and less cause for guerrilla activity.

The agrarian reform program was solving one of the huge, more dangerous problems in the country. The land is a problem even today. There are a lot of people asking for land. In Guatemala, El Salvador. Nicaragua. The way they proposed agrarian reform is the way Mexico did it. If you look at Mexico, you will see Guatemala if it did agrarian reform. Cardenas did it in the 1930″s. It happened in Taiwan, Mexico, Ecuador, Cuba.

Could a deal have been made with United Fruit?

I think there were some radicals in the Arbenz government who said the law is the law. During WWII, many Germans lived in Guatemala and the government took over their land. The biggest pieces of land to be redistributed came from the Germans.

Guatemala was asked to do that by the United States government during the war.

That is where the agrarian reform started. In WWI and WWII, both, they took the German citizens” land and they started the agrarian reform with this land.

On anti-communism as the reason for the coup.

It”s mostly fantasy. They used that as a justification. “I am fighting against the communists”. But who were the communists? University students, high school students, professors. They didn”t represent a real problem, a real power to take over the government of Arbenz. After the overthrow of Arbenz, many took to the mountains and became guerrillas.

Everyone talks about social justice but then, it was cause to be called a communist. You have to justify what you are doing. In the case of Central American governments, the military became rich controlling the government. On the other side, you have people looking for human rights, justice, agrarian reform. And you start looking at them as a collection of communists. You don”t make any distinction between a social democrat, a Christian democrat, you have only communists. You see the social democratic people in Costa Rica, they built a strong state, schools, education for everyone, social security. They are linked with social democrats in Europe.

On the state of Guatemala today.

The loss of the hegemony of the land owners is changing Guatemala. You have social democratic people, Christian democrats, center left, center right, right people. The radical left is no more. It is a very small group of people. The same in the U.S. I saw them in Boston, giving papers and selling socialist literature, (laughing) all 2 or 3 of them.

What is the reason for the mass migration of young Guatemalans to the United States?

The lack of opportunities here in Guatemala. There is not enough economic growth to give jobs to these people. But on the other side, when you do work in Guatemala, your salary is low. If you are going to find a job here, you will get a very small amount of money, but if you go to the United States you are going to get much more.

Asked about the charge that young Guatemalans are coming to the U.S. due to proposed change in immigration policy.

No, I don”t think so. I think it is the American dream to become rich, very soon. To have enough money to buy a car, to buy things, a house.

Part Two of my conversation with Guatemalan political veteran Julio Gonzalez. Part One can be read here.

And find out the latest on the Afterparty project here:
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“Why do you think, as a seasoned political veteran, that the United States needed to maintain the justification that the action was needed to defend the freedom and security of the Guatemalan people, and keep out communism?”

He considers my question, then responds.

“The first reason was the economic interests they had in Central America. Guatemala was the most important. Shell, all the gas companies, car companies…we only had American cars, Chevrolet, Ford. Also because of the business that they had with the politicians. And because of the wood that they took out of the country. Everything was sold in the United States. After the English left the region, then all the wood went to the United States through Belize.

“You have agricultural products produced with poorly paid laborers. They right now buy a hundred pounds of coffee for a hundred dollars. They sell a cup of coffee in your country at four dollars. You can get fifty cups from one pound. So there would be two hundred dollars revenue for one pound. And then the people with the crops have to pay poor wages to their workers. So the war was between the owners of the land and the workers, because they were not paying good salaries. And, then, anyone who protested was called a communist.”

Gonzalez pauses. “Some people say 250,000 people were killed. I know of 175,000, and from that 6,000 were killed by the guerrillas, and the rest by the Army.

“People were not allowed to organize themselves. They were trying to form unions. The military started killing the students from the national university, San Carlos, the one you were at yesterday, and that’s why the students joined the guerrillas. While they talked about freedom of the press, in one year, nine radio journalists were killed.

“Rios Montt killed 16,000 in one year. That’s why they supported him. He wiped out small villages.”

I mentioned that I talked to someone who said that Rios Montt was innocent, that he had no blood on his hands. The former General and President was convicted last year of genocide and crimes against humanity. His conviction was overturned by a Guatemalan court.

Gonzalez laughed grimly. “Even though he was being judged in Spain. By a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Instead of being in jail, he is at home, but he cannot go out of the country. There is another case involving the killing of 280 adults and kids.”

I ask, “It sounds like there may be two interpretations of the communism issue. One was that the Soviet Union was going to come into our backyard, that there might be another Cuban missile crisis. But you are saying that the real issue regarding communism is the resistance to any changes in the economic environment that would affect profits of domestic and multinational companies.”

Gonzales explains, “Communism did not prosper in Guatemala. What matters here is money, capital.”

I mention that, after a US arms sales embargo to Guatemala, Arbenz bought weapons from communist Czechoslovakia. Gonzales responds, that, when he was a child, all the weapons he saw were made in the U.S.

I ask, “Am I to understand if this is all about money, that all the talk about ideology is bullshit?”

“It is because of the power the U.S. had on all of our countries. When you opened the archives, you could find the history there.”

I respond, “The Freedom of Information Act. Yes, ‘Bitter Fruit’ co-author Stephen Schlesinger forced the United States government to open many of those archives.

“Your father was very close to Arbenz. If it’s not too sensitive to ask, can you tell me about your father and brother? What stories do you remember your father telling you about Arbenz at that time?”

“That Jacobo Arbenz was a righteous person. My father was a loved leader, loved by a lot of people. There are a lot of people that say he was more loved than Jacobo Arbenz. And they were afraid that he was going to be in politics and again in the government. There was a list of politicians at that time and they started killing them. That way, they killed the leaders. My brother joined a strong man, Manuel Colon Marietta, the uncle of the last president, Colon. Manuel Colon Marietta went against the military directly. The military government killed my father and killed Marietta. When Arana was president, a colonel, they say that he killed 25,000 people during his government.”

“When you look today at United States actions in the Middle East, does any of that look familiar to you?”

“It’s the same tactic, but now they are at war for petroleum. It’s not the U.S., but the individual politicians. Because that’s the way they control the world, with oil, and that can take us to a Third World War. But now the countries have atomic bombs. And the one that throws the first one will be followed by others.”

“So the George W. Bush claim that it is freedom and democracy which motivated the US in Iraq is not persuasive to you?”

He laughs heartily.

“Iraqis tell me there is so much oil in Iraq, you can see it seep from the ground.”

“If you were President of the United States, how would you change the way the country behaves on the world stage?”

“They have to defend the position they have as being the most powerful country. In that way, they need to have their people inside our countries. They won two world wars. The Cold War was in order to remove all the leaders that they didn’t want, who were opposing them.”

I ask, “American thinkers like Kagan and Wolfowitz and Kristol say America has a moral obligation to bring freedom to the people of the world. Therefore we need a large military, and we need to be aggressive, with preemptive wars if necessary. What do you think of that idea?”

Gonzalez answers, “Look what they did with Saddam Hussein. They didn’t find any WMD. There is no excuse. They are focused on being the owners of the land. Of the whole world.”

“But I asked YOU if YOU were the President of the U.S., with all the knowledge and wisdom and experience that you have, what would you do differently?”

“In the first place, I’m not American.”

I smiled and exclaimed, “We can change the law! I’m speaking from a moral point of view, obviously.”

Julio smiles. “You can conquer the world with love and not by force.”

I laugh. “That’s a good way to close.”

Julio Gonzalez Gamarra, Vice President and Deputy of the Parlamento Centroamericano, head of the monetary and finance committee, former president of the Parliament, settles into his seat at the head of the conference table. Carmen Aida, daughter of Cesar, will translate for us.

“Why do you think Arbenz was overthrown?”

Julio is dressed formally, in a brown suit and matching tie. He considers the question, sizing me up. He is a statesman, and a seasoned veteran of both Guatemalan and Central American politics. He measures his words carefully.

Carmen Aida, says, “OK, he is going to tell you.”

“I’m going to tell you first who I am.”

I ask him to tell me if any of the questions are too sensitive, if he would rather not answer.

He answers, “No, for me, it is fine. First, I am going to show you this picture. This is Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, ex-president of Guatemala. And this on the right is Juan Jose Arevalo and this in the center is my father. My father was the second most important person in Guatemala at this time. Humberto Gonzalez Juarez. He started the first radio station in Guatemala. At this moment, we have 65 radio stations. My father started the station that became the large group that exists today. Then, my father was the secretary, at this time the only secretary to the president.

“When I was in the Congress in 1994, we made a resolution saying these men were heroes in Guatemala. My family was exiled and went to Uruguay and Mexico for five years. My father had permission from the next president to return, but with the condition that he not get into politics. In the seventies, they killed my father. In the nineties, they killed my brother. That’s why I started in politics. If somebody knows the real truth, it is me.”

Julio looks again at the picture.

“The United States conducted a coup. And for three reasons.

“One was because of the agrarian land reform. With the land that was unused from the United Fruit Company.

“The only road that we had was the road to the Pacific. And all the Pacific coast was controlled by the United Fruit Company. One of its associates was the Secretary of State under Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and his brother was CIA head Allen Dulles.”

I mention the Stephen Kinzer book, “The Brothers.” He is familiar with it but has not read it. I tell him he must read it and it is likely available in Spanish.

“There was an ambassador here, Peurifoy, and he was the contact with Foster Dulles. That’s one reason.

“Second. The railroad. Owned by the same group. United Fruit. When Arbenz was going to build the road to the Atlantic, then people were not going to use the railroad anymore. United Fruit didn’t want the road to the Atlantic built.

“And the third was the hydroelectric dam project. They were in opposition to the project. For the agrarian reform, there were like 25-30 rich families in Guatemala, very strong and allied with U.S capital. The government didn’t touch their land. Only the land that was not being used, which they offered to pay for. That land was to be distributed to 100,000 families.

“There was a group of Guatemalans who were not happy with the U.S. invasion. The U.S. had people in Honduras prepared to attack Guatemala, and they came every night with guns and bombs. The driver of the invasion was Foster Dulles supported by the President of the United States. The Arbenz government provided education with no cost and opened schools in the mountains and all over Guatemala. That was the more aggressive effort, education. But people, and especially the U.S., wanted to continue having slaves.”

I press the issue further. “With respect, the U.S. narrative in 1954 was that the CIA invaded to keep out godless Soviet communism. You’ve not mentioned this as a reason thus far, only economic reasons.”

He laughs.

“Guatemala already had a communist party that never had been in the government. It was very small.

I ask if he heard that Dulles sent a message through Peurifoy to Arbenz that the U.S. wanted no communists in the national life of the country, not the government, not the party.

“We already had a democracy in Guatemala because we had thrown out a dictator that we had for 23 years. Jorge Ubico. When they threw out Ubico, they gave participation to all the sectors. That was in 1945, when they came into the government. The revolution was in October of 1944.”

I ask, is there a link from the overthrow of Arbenz to the thirty-five years of civil war?

He gestures, “Definitely. The Army colonels were paid by the United States with ten thousand dollars per month. They were very well paid so they wouldn’t let in any communists.”

Each? (I had heard it was two thousand per month). Ten thousand per month? Yes, he answers. I exclaim, “Very nice!” We laugh.

“That is a secret. But everybody knows it. And they did that in all of Central America. They put a base in Honduras.

“After Arbenz, they went to the Dominican Republic to throw out their president. In Guatemala, the civil war was for thirty-six years. Then they started killing people who didn’t think the same as them. The guerrillas started because a group of young military officers went to the mountains.”

I ask, “So these are not communists, these are military men who were upset at the takeover of their country?”

“Yeah, that’s it. They were patriots who didn’t like what was going on.”

Part Two of the interview will be posted tomorrow.

Week One in Guatemala. A big success on a few fronts. Extraordinary encounters with prominent and everyday witnesses to the overthrow and civil war. Getting the recording tools and publishing process down. Making the travel process more efficient.

Traveling by bus across Guatemala to Livingston today, a 5-6 hour trip. I’ll be reviewing and transcribing the hours of interviews on the bus. Week one is on-budget, with travel, lodging, food and incidentals coming in under $60 per day. I am adjusting to the joys and challenges of near constant travel. My biggest adjustments so far are balancing time spent on logistics versus hunting down interviews versus writing, editing and posting. I’ve focused on gathering the content and now need to focus on pushing out a consistent volume and quality of posts.

Some of the week’s highlights:

Creating a spontaneous social network here via introductions from my airbnb hosts. Intros beget more contacts beget encounters with remarkable people.

Speaking to classes in the rural town of Santa Lucia, getting stories and political perspectives from middle schoolers. Experiencing both the frightening innocence with which they relate tales of horror from the civil war, and the passion with which they question the motives of American intervention. Going to the market to buy provisions for a spontaneous BBQ and sharing food and drink with teachers and neighbors.

Visiting the Universidade de San Carlos, scenes of student protests through the coup and civil war years. Successive military governments invaded the school and shot teachers and students on campus. The military and the campus were primary sources of guerrillas who left their lives behind and moved to the mountains to oppose the government. Talking to prominent historian and professor Dr. Oscar Pelaez Almengor about the conflicts and the killing of three of his faculty. The mural honors the victims. Cesar, my host, a former congressman and architect, was friends with the fellow painted on the left. Almengor organized the first ever conference on the Arbenz overthrow last year and gifted me with a program.

Visiting the Parliamento Centro Americano to meet with Julio Gonzalez Gamarra, former head and current deputy of the EU-like regional assembly. The picture we are holding is of Jacobo Arbenz on the left, the president deposed in the 1954 CIA coup, Juan Jose Arevalo, the first democratically elected president on the right, and his father in the middle. Humberto Gonzalez Juarez was Arbenz’ secretary, his right hand man. A widely loved national figure who had to escape the country with his family when Arbenz was overthrown. When he returned in the sixties, he was assassinated by the government. Humberto’s son, Julio’s brother, entered politics and was killed by the military in the seventies. Julio entered politics to honor and continue the legacy of his family. The two hour conversation took a dramatic change in tone when the conversation shifted to his father’s story. At the end, when I asked for other contacts, he paused for a long while and began to instruct his secretary and peruse his phone. There will be a meeting of past and present Central American presidents in the Parliamento later this month and he said he would invite me to attend and get more interviews.

Visiting the ASIES policy institute and getting fresh historical insights from Hugo Novales, who wrote his thesis on the life of Arevalo. Hugo was the only interview in English, and as a younger man, provided a more contemporary perspective.

A surreal, amusing and poignant evening chat with politician, preacher and businessman Jorge Fuentes, who swept things off the table and leapt out of his chair for dramatic effect, waved his arms to make key points and diagrammed Guatemalan politics in my notebook. He also wrote down the personal email and cell phone number of his uncle, a former president, who I will contact for an interview.

Coming back from Santa Lucia, teacher Marco Antonio had his mother’s friend Wilma meet me in a dirt lot at 6:45am to catch a bus to Guate (Guatemalan City). She led me around like a little boy with a backpack, holding my hand, sharing treats out of her bag, paying for my bus ticket and wiping away seeds spilled on my book. The bus, a brightly painted, decades old blue Bird school bus, broke down on the highway en route. And we were entertained by a preacher who spontaneously got up in front of my seat, pulled out a bible, then closed his eyes and recited verses for us.

LiAnne is on my case for not posting regularly. Consider me chastened! I have reams of notes and recordings and intend to use this first regional tour to lock down process and style.

Thanks to all the Kickstarter pledgers. We are approaching 40% of the way there after the first 10 days. The Europe, Middle East and Southeast Asia legs of the trip will rely on funding the $10,000 goal. Pledge now!
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