Stephen Schlesinger, a co-author of Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, published an Op-ed in this weekend's New York Times.
In it, he rightfully criticizes the US government for its orchestration of the 1954 coup that deposed Jacobo Arbenz and put an end to the Guatemala's "ten years of spring." The years spanning the governments' of Juan Jose Arevalo and Jacobo Arbenz were one of the most progressive period's in Guatemala's history.
Schlesinger is responding to the recent news in Guatemala where the government stated that it intends to recognize Arbenz's legacy. Schlesinger's written a quite entertaining book on the subject of the coup but I guess I don't agree with everything he writes in the Op-ed.
Washington feared Arbenz because he tried to institute agrarian reforms that would hand over fallow land to dispossessed peasants, thereby creating a middle class in a country where 2 percent of the population owned 72 percent of the land. Unfortunately for him, most of that territory belonged to the largest landowner and most powerful body in the state: the American-owned United Fruit Company. Though Arbenz was willing to compensate United Fruit for its losses, it tried to persuade Washington that Arbenz was a crypto-communist who must be ousted.
Yes, the US feared Arbenz's agrarian reform. However, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to say that the US feared that it might create a middle class. I guess if you believe that US foreign policy towards Guatemala is and/or was designed to keep the people poor so that they would continue to produce goods cheaply in order to benefit US consumers, then it does make sense.
However from my reading of the time, the US feared that a successful land reform would strengthen the communist party and give them a leg up in the upcoming elections. We didn't think that Arbenz was a communist, but members of his government were and the communist party was going to benefit from the reforms. That was the main reason the US government intervened to remove Arbenz - not to prevent the emergence of a middle class.
But there was no evidence that Arbenz himself was anything more than a European-style democratic socialist. And Arbenz’s land reform program was less generous to peasants than a similar venture pushed by the Reagan administration in El Salvador several decades later.
It's true, the United States has promoted land reform in Latin America, including the 1980 reform in El Salvador. However, I have a difficult time comparing US antagonism towards the 1952 agrarian reform in Guatemala carried out while Eisenhower was president and US support for the the 1980 land reform while Carter was president. The Salvadoran reform was designed to stave off revolution by preventing the communists from coming to power and benefiting the moderate right.
The Carter administration was also the stronger land reform proponent, not the Reagan administration. The Reagan administration's ambivalence (?) towards the reform as well as the ferocious reaction of the right doomed any chance that the reform had. It's no surprise that the US supports land reform when it suits its interests and calls it communist when it does not. The US isn't against land reform in principle.
The coup and its aftermath were obviously a dark period in Guatemala history. Inside Costa Rica posted a story today about the exhumation of four people killed by the army in 1966 during the presidency of Julio Cesar Mendez. The exhumations were carried out in Chiquimula, a department that borders Honduras and El Salvador, and are the first to occur in eastern Guatemala.
In Argentina, a court charged three former police officers with killing five women (a French-born nun and four women of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) during the country's dirty war. They are accused of taking part in some 20 "death flights" where victims were thrown in the Atlantic alive. The judge ordered the former officers, along with a former military official and lawyer, assets frozen and taken into custody.Human rights trials have been ongoing in Argentina ever since President Nestor Kirchner overturned an amnesty that was protecting those allegedly involved in dirty war era crimes.
Continuing on in Argentina, an appellate court ruled that
Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera must submit "blood, saliva, skin, hair or other biological samples ... with or without their consent" for analysis in the National Genetics Databank, which has collected thousands of DNA samples from relatives of people who were killed or "disappeared" during the 1976-83 junta.
Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera are the adopted children of one of Latin America's largest newspaper publishers, Grupo Clarin. The court seeks to determine if they were stolen as babies during the country's dirty war.
The two Noble Herrera adoptees, now in their 30s, have fiercely defended their adoptive mother and say they have no desire to know their birth families.
Argentina's Supreme Court ruled in 2009 against the forced extraction of blood from such adoptees, but said DNA evidence can still be obtained against their will by searching their homes for clothing and other personal objects.
In the case of the Noble Herreras, a controversial attempt to obtain DNA from their underwear last year failed to produce usable samples.
Finally, in Chile, a judge ordered an investigation into the death of Nobel laureate, Pablo Neruda. Neruda died shortly after the CIA coup that killed President Salvador Allende and Chilean democracy. According to his family and official reports, Neruda died of natural causes - advanced prostate cancer.
However, Neruda was also a Communist and a friend of President Salvador Allende who was very critical of General Pinochet and the military government that came to power. Neruda's former driver claims that state security agents poisoned him. The investigation into Neruda's death follows the recent exhumation of Salvador Allende's remains.
The investigations and human rights trials underway in Guatemala, Argentina and Chile give me hope that one day we shall see the same in El Salvador. That is unless President Funes' recent actions put an end to repealing the amnesty law.
No comments:
Post a Comment