We have two brilliant new interns who are furiously working through our backlog of interviews, transcribing, fact checking, looking up historical context. As we get up to date, we will provide deeper backgrounders, and, of course, you’ll get to meet them though their bylines and bios. This interview was transcribed by Kayley Ingalls.

Kayley received her BA in International Studies in 2012 from the University of Chicago. Though her coursework includes African Politics, the Modern Middle East, and the Politics of Islam, she wrote her thesis on fairy tales and their use as a vehicle for discussing the Holocaust. A good-natured stickler for grammar, she enjoys taking the odd class on mechanics and usage. Since graduating, she’s tried her hand at working as a Library Assistant and teaching summer school at an exclusive private school in Oakland, California. She dreams of exploring the world and hopes to find her place in it eventually, whether it be in writing, editing, law, or something she has yet to dream up.

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When I arrived in the first country for the project, Guatemala, I stayed in the home of a former student activist, congressman and architect, now retired. Cesar’s grandson Marco Antonio picked me up at the airport, and, over Johnnie Walked Red, the three of us spent the night talking about the historic 1954 CIA overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz. Marco took me out to the countryside, where he is a teacher and we hung out with one of his friends. This is my conversation with his educator friend, Fabio an extroverted young man in his twenties.

BG: Okay. What do you know about 1954? Jacobo Árbenz. 

(Guatemalan president overthrown by the United States in 1954.)

What do I know? He was overthrown by the American CIA. He was labeled a communist. Because he wanted to make some reforms.

BG: Was there truth to that? Was he a communist?

No, he wasn’t. The Americans were very nervous about the Soviet Union and the ideas of Marx. They were trying to use communism as an excuse to keep control of many countries in Latin America. That’s what I think.

BG: You can say both were real, there was genuine hysteria, paranoia, fear of the Soviet Union, communist China, Stalin, Mao, Eastern Europe.

I think American society was entitled to be paranoid to a certain degree, but in Latin America that was used as an excuse, again, to be in control of the region. I don’t know if you remember McCarthy?

BG: Sure.

He was talking about the domino effect, if one country fell down, then the next one, and so on.

BG: The domino theory.

Yes. But I don’t think Árbenz was a communist, or Allende in Chile.

(Salvador Allende, the first Marxist to be elected president in free elections in Latin America. Elected 1970, overthrown in a 1973 CIA-supported coup.)

BG: What do you think is the line between being a communist and having some communists in your political coalition or legislature, or pushing for long overdue reforms? The Spanish oligarchy controlling the economy for decades or centuries…

Historically, what we have in Guatemala is a situation in which a minority controls the majority. The wealthy class controls the working class. That is the situation in this country, but every time the working class wants to see changes in society, they always label us. Drug gangs, terrorists.

BG: It’s a convenient way for…

…to get rid of certain people.

BG: Even Obama is called a socialist. Compared to who?

No way! I don’t think he’s even close.

BG: But these words are used to paralyze public discourse. Instead of debating how we affect healthcare reform, well, he’s socialist.

Two things, if the working class is in charge of making changes, the first thing that they probably will change is healthcare for everybody and education free for everybody. And that’s Marxism.

BG: Well, it’s what some Marxist countries have as a priority. I don’t think that’s Marxism though.

The working class being in control of the–

BG: Being in control, that part. But free education and healthcare? Is that socialism?

That’s a little bit. More Marxism than… But Sweden has both things. Free healthcare and free education. And they are capitalist.

BG: That’s right. A lot of Americans think that ensuring good health care for people and good education is a priority. A lot of Americans think that no, that’s socialism. You’re taking my money, my taxes. I want to lower my taxes, not raise them. Take my money so that some other kid can get good education or healthcare? That’s socialism. This is a significant political view in the United States.

I think that this is like a, how do you say, Obama… I used to have friends from Austria talking about Obama, good things about him. One of his attributes is basically that he is a well articulated person. He can explain things carefully and clearly. But he fails many times because he cannot explain the important things to the American community.

BG: I think that’s true.

People don’t want to be labeled as whatever, communist for instance. So they have to clarify. This is what I am offering, it has nothing to do with being a socialist. He has failed to distance himself from labels, philosophies, or ideologies, I don’t know.

BG: If I can ask, how old are you?

I don’t answer that.

BG: (Laughter.) Okay, you don’t have to answer that. As you were growing up, learning about what happened in 1954, and then seeing the civil war or reading about it, how did you feel about the United States as you heard those things?

I think that it’s a process because it takes time to… As you have more details and more details, you start putting everything together. All the pieces. It fits in time. But I think the American goal was really bad, you know? If you were in school here, you probably would understand what I’m talking about. Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the elections and he was actually dealing with the Iranians. They were using Iranians to pass weapons to the Contras.

BG: Illegally.

And also they paid the Iranians to keep the American hostages a little bit longer. Yeah, check that.

BG: I’ve been reading about that lately.

Bill Moyers discusses that in one of his documentaries.

BG: They paid or made certain promises.

No, they were payments.

BG: I have heard that. I love Bill Moyers.

So the Americans came. I think that the agreement… He asked for a favor, if they could maintain the hostages a little bit longer, until after –

BG: The Iranians hated Carter because of the Shah.

(The Carter administration seemed to be complicit with the Shah, who came to the United States for medical treatment after being overthrown in 1979. Carter toasted him on television.)

They wanted to portray Ronald Reagan as a powerful guy, that he is not negotiating with terrorists.

BG: He did negotiate with terrorists, more than once.

Yeah, he did! But they were saying, no, he’s not negotiating with terrorists.

BG: So during the civil war, were you aware that the United States government, particularly during the Reagan administration, was supporting Guatemala’s military dictatorship? What was your attitude about that?

We didn’t know that until we were much older Because that’s part of our history and at that time we weren’t sure. Instead of saying, “You guys have a threat of communism in the area. We are going to help you to eradicate that problem.”

BG: That was the justification.

Yeah, but the money was used to maintain the status quo, to maintain the rich families in power, and keep the military strong.

BG: Did you know any people who were kidnapped, or tortured, or killed?

Just one. He was an old guy. He was kidnapped and killed. Apparently he was associated with a Catholic group.

BG: Catholic?

They say that sometimes the Catholics were indoctrinating.

BG: (It’s estimated that) US-backed military dictators in your country, over time, killed 200,000 people.

Now, they (former political leaders) are using that as justification. Yes, people were brutalized and really badly tortured in Latin America, But you know what? We didn’t do it. It was our military, when it was in Guatemala, Chile, or Argentina. It was the military. We were not involved in that. We weren’t physically there.

BG: The political leaders are saying that it was the military?

Yes. The Americans weren’t involved. You were not doing it. It was the Guatemalans in control of the wrong paramilitary groups, of which there were many. Or, in Latin America as well, we weren’t there. It’s like saying that Hitler is innocent because he wasn’t in Treblinka or Auschwitz. He wasn’t there physically, yeah, but he was the mastermind. The point that I am trying to make is that Ronald Reagan, he was the mastermind behind that machinery.

BG: What do you think was going through Reagan’s mind when he was supporting these brutal dictators?

I think he was really scared during the missile crisis in Cuba. Americans were very scared. We have nuclear weapons, they are no longer in Russia, they are in Cuba. And this is how many miles out of the United States?

BG: 90 miles from Miami.

Suddenly, they can nuke us. And that’s the thing that really scares me. And after Vietnam? Wow.

BG: Yeah, we can lose.

There was a certain degree of paranoia among the military. Among the politicians in the United States. It probably was related to the right wing. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.

BG: What’s happening now in Guatemalan politics?

I am totally disconnected from Guatemalan politics. I read the New York Times, La Stampa Italiana. I only read news from other countries.

(Laughter.)

I was trying to be in tune with the Guatemalan congressmen who were opposed (to legislation supporting privatization of seeds for) Monsanto.

BG: I heard that today, yeah.

And they decided to go in favor of Monsanto. Something that was really disappointing. In part because they don’t even know what the hell is going on. Because they don’t have the education. They don’t understand our genetics in a way. It’s frustrating. But I am totally disconnected from American politics, too. I don’t understand anymore what’s going on and I have no interest.

I visited  leading Guatemalan policy institute ASIES and talked to analyst and scholar Hugo Novales Contreras. We talked about the culpability of the United States, whether democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz would have been overthrown without the CIA-sponsored invasion of 1954, and why modern military leaders and landowners pursue their grievances through democratic means (including the paying off of politicians).

Jacobo Arbenz was a Guatemalan military officer when he participated in a coup to overthrow U.S.-backed dictator General Jorge Ubico in 1944. He became Secretary of Defense serving under President Juan Jose Arevalo, then was elected president himself in 1951. He was overthrown in a CIA-financed and managed coup in 1954.

BG : Why was Arbenz overthrown ?

HN : There are a lot of theories. The one which I like best was brought by Piero Gleijeses in his classic book “Shattered Hope.”  The Guatemalan revolution had a lot of enemies from the beginning. There were several attempts to overthrow (previous president) Juan Jose Arevalo, who implemented some important reforms such as the Labor Code, revolutionary for its time. In order to sustain the revolution, the Arbenz government needed to have an actual citizen base, and this support was provided by the worker and peasant unions, and eventually this led to the agrarian reform.

There were internal causes for the overthrow. There was a privileged, land-owning elite that wasn”t happy with the agrarian reform. More importantly, there was an army that  had been trained to be anti-communist. They did not support Arbenz and his government, and that”s what eventually led to the overthrow. The so-called intervention didn”t really imply an excessive use of military force. Arbenz was overthrown by a ragtag army formed by peasants with very little training, with no significant weapons. But the army feared that the United States might intervene. And what they didn”t want was the army to be humiliated by fighting as grand an opponent as the United States. So this is a responsibility that we tend to ignore in Guatemala, because we just want to say the United States came in and crushed us. It wasn’t really that way. There is part of that responsibility that”s right here in Guatemala, the army included.

BG : Your point is it wasn”t a full scale military invasion, and therefore there had to be internal dissension and support for the overthrow for it to happen…

HN : Exactly.  This is something I heard from my grandmother. I don’t know if you want to record this because it’s more personal…

BG : Personal is relevant.

HN : My great-grandfather supported the revolution at the beginning and he eventually moved against the revolution during the next ten years. Basically he started out helping overthrow Ubico, then he also helped to overthrow Arbenz. There were a lot of people in Guatemala who were anti-communist, and they feared the fact that Arbenz was surrounded by communists. They feared that something greater might happen after the agrarian reform. The peasants would be empowered to pursue options. So, there was an actual fear of communism in Guatemala, and it was probably supported by propaganda from the United States and from the Church.

BG : When you talk about the land owners and the twenty, thirty families who historically had tremendous economic power in this country, how do you see the evolution of their thinking? There is a coup led by Arbenz in ’44, followed by the election of Arevalo. Did a lot of them just say, ”Hey, this is progress, we have less control in a democracy, but the world is changing,” or, do you think, from 1944 they were saying, “This must stop and we must find a way to take back control?”

HN : Well, when you look at the actual protagonists of the revolution, or the actual coup against Ubico, you know a lot of the people who supported the coup were, I wouldn”t say they were the twenty or thirty families, but they were the bourgeoisie. So it wasn”t really a popular revolution strictly speaking. Many of the Arbenz and Arevalo cabinet members were actually coming from those families, starting with Jorge Toriello, who was one of the leaders of the original coup in 1944. I guess this class was alienated from the revolution two different times. The Labor Code, which I think was in 1947, distanced them from the revolution, and then later on with the agrarian reform. One thing that needs to be pointed out is that the revolution could have carried on without the agrarian reform. For example, in order for you to be able to receive land from the agrarian reform, you actually had to form a committee with a couple of representative from the peasant unions. Some might have thought that agrarian reform was fair, but they felt that it wasn”t going to be carried out in a fair way.

BG : If the United States did nothing, would Arbenz eventually have been overthrown?

HN : I would not be able to say, but what I can say is that there would have been attempts to overthrow. What really made the difference is that the threat of an eventual United States intervention actually turned the army against Arbenz, so that was the main role of the United States.

You couldn”t just blame everything on the United Fruit Company. They would have still been able to sustain their business here in Guatemala, even with the agrarian reform. I mean there wasn”t a real threat to their operation. They had such a huge operation that they could have even disregarded their “ hard drive recovery software security standards are set high by CompuCom to ensure that our customers’ data is never vulnerable. Guatemalan operation and still be a profitable Company.

BG : Why do you think the Reagan administration provided so much aid to the Rios Montt administration?

HN : Nicaragua was already under Sandinistas rule by that time. So what a lot of people in the army in Guatemala and the United States feared was a domino effect, that Nicaragua would fall and then El Salvador and later Guatemala. There was a strong ideological component to the relationship between the United States and Guatemala during the Cold War, and, obviously, some corporate interests.

BG : Was Arbenz a good leader for the years he was in power ?

HN : It”s a really subjective question, but I would say yes. In comparison to what we had so far to that point, and what then had until 1985, in principal he was a democratically elected leader, so that was a qualitative difference from other leaders. Second, he had a program, a nationalistic program,. He had four points, you know, the agrarian reform, the building of a dam to produce hydro-electric power, which is still working, and the building of the road from Guatemala City to Puerto Barrios which was a key issue based on the fact that the United Fruit Company also owned the national railway.

BG : That was a competitive threat to them?

HN : Right. So it wasn”t only the agrarian reform. It was a challenging of the monopoly that American companies had in Guatemala.

BG : How would you characterize Guatemala politics today ?

HN : Right now we have 27 parties, we have people moving from one party to another, we have a very volatile system. It is a very corrupted system but it”s also a system that”s really unpredictable and it”s hard to actually know what”s going to happen.

BG : What do you mean by corrupted: people getting paid, people paying for influence, people looking after their own interests?

HN : Well, you know, there”s corruption in every political system. Hopefully it”s not natural, hopefully we can have politics without corruption but, you know, so far, we don”t. But the Guatemalan system is particularly different. Public interest usually doesn”t play a role in legislation for example. I mean, we”ve come to that point. There were two recent examples. One of them is the, they’re calling it the Monsanto law which is…

BG : GMO’s.

HN : It”s basically a law to protect patents on developing new varieties of seeds or vegetables or whatever. It was still a rather unpopular law. You had a congress vote almost unanimously for that law in June and now we had them revoking that law which basically happened yesterday because of the social pressure because nobody, I mean, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, nobody wanted it to go…

BG : I heard that many legislators were given direct cash payment by Monsanto.

HN : I mean the budget, the national budget is used to buy legislators because many of them have links to companies; so if your brother owns a construction company, then you”re gonna try to use the national budget to give contracts to this construction company. I mean, most of them probably didn”t read it. They just want to make sure how much am they going to get out of this particular law..

And the other example is a recent reform to the telecommunications law, that actually benefited just one company, Tigo by allowing them to build antenna towers without the studies approval, without the municipal approval, which is something that clearly violates Guatemalan legislation on municipal autonomy, and really weakens their capacity to extract taxes from such a large company.  .. That’s worth to Tigo several times the state’s budget. I guess that”s the way a lot of laws are working in Guatemala working right now.

BG : When”s the last time the military was in control of the country ?

HN : Ah, well, in control, an actual control I would say just before the transition to democracy which was in 1984.

BG : Do you think they want it back ?

HN : Want it back ? I”m not sure, I”m not sure… On one hand, you can access power through democracy right now and they would be able to do it. A lot of former military men are actually involved in the government so, you could say that there is really no reason for the army to take power back because they can access it through different channels, democratic channels, which is basically what makes the democracy stand, the fact that you feel that you can access power through democratic means and you don”t need to do it through violent means.

BG : And that”s probably similar throughout Central America with the taste that people have for democracy. Businesses that may be in the past have preferred a military dictatorship now want it to at least seem it like a constitutional democracy that is not controlled by the military.

HN : Families would actually realize that they could have better business by actually allowing a certain degree of democracy, because nobody is gonna trade with these military dictators who have been in Central America.

BG : In 1998, Clinton came to Guatemala and apologized for past U.S. interventions.

HN : Well, you know, that”s really cool about the States that even though apologies don”t change, discourse does change. Can I add one more thing?

BG : Please.

HN : Guatemala still has strong ties to the United States, immigration, drugs, but even though I don’t see an intervention in the near future, the United States still meddles in Guatemalan affairs in a very direct way and probably the best example…have you heard of Claudia Paz y Paz?

BG : No.

HN : She was the Attorney General that left office a few months ago. The Rios Montt trial would not have happened without her being in office. There were several drug lords that were captured and extradited during her time in office. And the United States was supporting her.  The previous ambassador McFarland, he actually supported the trial openly, he went to the hearings, and we need some to assume certain responsibility as Guatemalans for whatever happen, but it”s really not fair that the United States doesn”t want to take their own responsibility for that. You would think that the United States have nothing to do with Rios Montt, when in fact they had a lot to do with it. Right now, everybody in Guatemala loves the States, even the left are saying we need United States support and I agree with that. But it”s really unfair for us to take full responsibility for…

BG : What would you like to have seen during that trial from the United States?

HN : I really appreciated McFarland being there, but, what I would have expected as well was a recognition of responsibility. Not so much putting Rios Montt on trial and pointing at him, saying no, he”s the bad guy, which he was, but also assuming a certain responsibility as a government, similar to what Clinton did. The relationship with the United States did not end in1954.

BG : I think you only get one apology every fifty years, so….

HN : I guess that’s too much to ask from a superpower.

A reminder to join fhe Afterparty Kickstarter campaign to fund the Europe, Middle East and Asian legs of the project.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wartheafterparty/war-the-afterparty

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 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.

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!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wartheafterparty/war-the-afterparty

Cesar, 79 years old, a student protester during the 1954 CIA overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz, my airbnb host and unforgiving Spanish teacher, insists on showing me a poster in his garage. It”s Sunday morning, and we are returning from his grandkids” excellent showing in the Guatemala City Marathon. I treated him and wife Carmen to a traditional Guatemalan breakfast, at McDonald”s. His son Marco endorsed it as the best choice. A mix of the usual hideous fat and salt offerings, and beans, salsa, cream, and plantains.

There are three fading posters on the garage wall, each of the Quetzal, Guatemala”s national bird and the name of the currency.

Cesar explains its beauty, how it does not roll up its long tail but lets it hang fully extended.

“But what about this bird makes it a symbol?”

“Libertad,” he answers. “It”s a symbol of liberty.”

The Quetzal cannot live in captivity, except in rare circumstances. It kills itself rather than be caged.

I come to Guatemala, the first country on the Afterparty tour, because it makes sense as a geographic starting point. But mostly because I am obsessed with understanding what happened to Jacobo Arbenz and what his story reveals about America”s engagement with the world after World War II. How a culture of violence paralyzed Guatemala for four decades. How projecting military power in the name of freedom can achieve the opposite result. And how anti-American blowback happens.

I never heard of Jacobo Arbenz. Military historian Andrew Bacevich suggested to Bill Moyers recently that if he walked out of the PBS studio and asked ten Americans, “Do you know who is Jacobo Arbenz is?”, you would get ten no”s. But if you did that on any street in Guatemala, one would get ten yes”s.

Jacobo Arbenz was persona non grata during four decades of military dictatorship, until the government finally honored his family and his name with a street, a memorial and a settlement. And before the Freedom of Information Act revealed the raw details of the CIA overthrow, after diligent, aggressive efforts by journalist Stephen Schlesinger and others, the story was political mythology, usually as a leftist throwaway line. Yeah, uh, Guatemala, man, like, the CIA overthrew their democratically elected president.

I first heard of Arbenz during the early days of FORA.tv, when Stephen Kinzer spoke at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco. He was an engaging speaker.

A colonel in the national army, Arbenz and fellow officers overthrew the latest in a line of brutal dictators, inspired by American democracy and President Frankin Delano Roosevelt in particular.

Guatemala”s first democratically elected president, Juan Jose Arevalo took office in 1945. Arbenz was elected in 1950. By 1954, he was deposed in a CIA coup. Arbenz lived the rest of his life in exile, in misery and in humiliation. It”s a sad story which begs a number of questions.

What relevance does our attempt to defend democracy and free enterprise in Guatemala through covert action have today?

Was Arbenz a Communist, as the Dulles brothers charged?

What was the outcome of the overthrow?

What is the event”s narrative among Guatemalans compared to the historic American narrative?

In the next week, I will travel to the scenes of the key events of the overthrow, seek out answers to those questions. You”re invited to come along.

The theme of the first stop of the Afterparty tour will be “In Search of Jacobo Arbenz.” In 1954, the American Central Intelligence Agency engineered a coup of Guatemala’s democratically elected president. Along with the overthrow of  Iranian president Mohammad Mosaddegh by the CIA and British MI6 in 1953, the coup would become a model for covert regime changes for years to come.

In a synchronicity moment, politico and poet Steve Villano invited me to one of Bob McBarton’s fabulous Luncheon Society events, featuring Nixon White House attorney and author John Dean.  Apropos of nothing in particular, the name Stephen Schlesinger came up. Stopping in my tracks on the way to our cars after the event, I asked if he was the same guy who co-wrote the authoritative account of the overthrow, “Bitter Fruit,” and, yes, he was, indeed.  One thing led to another, and Steve V hooked me up with Steve S, who wrote the book with one of my favorite foreign affairs authors Steve Kinzer.

Immediately and graciously accepting my invitation for a call, we spoke earlier this week.  I will include more excerpts of our chat, and hopefully a longer live conversation, but here are some highlights:

On the overthrow:

The overthrow was one of the worst foreign policy ventures of the  20^th century. Gratuitous.  It distorted the history of that country. Could have been a shining beacon of democracy in Central America.

The times we have intervened, we always make the situation worse. We refuse to acknowledge that local indigenous leaders can do good things. We use a narrow lens.  Iran is a twin example from that era.

On “War: The Afterparty”

No one has investigated the aftermath. I think it is a great idea. Yours are exactly the questions you should be asking and those are exactly the countries you should be visiting. A missing story that has not really been told.  The story has never been visually done.

Listening to experts, books, intellectual stuff. is easy. That’s not the big issue. Humanize it—finding people, like the union people who were trying to organize in 1954, just trying to give people the chance to have their little plot of land. Bring home the fact that this was a very temperate type of reform. Not an attempt to destroy the United Fruit company, but to create a middle class. Find people who were active in that part of the movement. The peons. Give people a visual sense. Go out to see the land in question. Humanizing the conflict is the most important thing. The Mayans would have been the beneficiaries who would have benefited most from land reform.. Instead,they were the ones who suffered the worst. Exterminated. Illustrate the real history to a wide audience.

Is there a link between the overthrow and the 35 years of civil war that followed? Or the current emigration crisis?

Civil war definitely followed the overthrow. Doesn’t mean there might not have been other right-wing attempts. The Spanish social class was ousted in 1944  so they wanted power back. The left was benefitting from the reforms so unlikely they would have become revolutionaries.  The French revolution had a land reform program. Produced thousands of new farmers. They became the middle class, the most conservative people.

Emigration is a little more complicated as Guatemala has still not come through with any Arbenz reforms. The dispossessed are still enormous in Guatemala. Terrible poverty, so people will do anything to get a job. Terrible circumstances, gang warfare and drug smuggling, which produced so much turmoil and so much killing.

If we had left Guatemala alone in the fifties, there could have been a stalwart democracy, spreading throughout the region, resulting in a much more stable region.

Was Arbenz a Communist?

Arbenz was from a military background. He was a bit naïve, and did not understand the emotional impact of the cold war in the US. He was open to the notion that to create a viable society, you needed a middle class, to give people a stake in their own society through land reform.He was willing to let communists be part of a coalition in the assembly, and that made him vulnerable. French President Mitterand had communists in his cabinet. Arbenz never did that.

He made two mistakes—he should have paid more attention to ideologues in Washington who wanted to make his situation a case of where the communists were going to take over. He didn’t understand that there were ways of dealing with that issue. Arevalo managed to spend 5 years without the US overthrowing him.

The Eisenhower administration was looking for a cause celebre to prove that they could roll back communism. Second point, he could have rallied the troops in those final days and then might have maintained power. He felt so undermined by the bombings and fake radio broadcasts, the psychological and emotional terror, that he lost his nerve.

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Many thanks to Steve and much more to come on the Arbenz story.