MB Civic

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0107-27.htm

This is a good history lesson that you’ll never find taught in public schools…

A tragic vignette of American history flickers to life in the current film “The Good Shepherd” when Matt Damon as the CIA operations director succeeds in overthrowing Jacob Arbenz, the first Guatemalan president elected in a universal-suffrage vote.

The coup actually occurred, and the CIA’s role in it is well documented. It led to more than 30 years of violence in which some 200,000 people, mostly peasants, died.

Arbenz had to go because his government in 1952 sought to buy uncultivated land for redistribution to peasant farmers.

The country’s landowners, particularly U.S.-based United Fruit, reacted badly. Other American interests were equally alarmed by Guatemala’s determination to take over — also with compensation — the foreign owned electricity system and railways.

Two icons of American foreign policy had a direct interest in the issue. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, had both worked for United Fruit’s law firm and both had stock in the company.

Dulles’ clients at Sullivan & Cromwell were a “guide to the biggest multinational corporations” of early 20th century America, a historian notes.

The brothers engineered a campaign to unseat the president. To justify the coup, they inflated the threat of Arbenz’s political dealings with Guatemala’s Communists, who held four seats in the 58-seat governing party. Arbenz was forced to resign in 1954.

The Guatemalan coup followed the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of Iran’s prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. He had nationalized his nation’s oil industry, much to the dismay of the British, who refused to accept compensation and sought our help.

In both cases, the U.S. administration cloaked its interventions in a heavy fabric of lies and disinformation. Each “regime change” and others the United States organized in the 20th century disrupted nascent democratic movements.

History records the bloody consequences of these interventions.

The military dictatorships and authoritarian leaders who succeeded Arbenz presided over the endless civil war that erupted.

Happily, we Americans never suffered a disruption of our supply of cheap bananas.

And we all know what happened in Iran…
-MAB