Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
What we're up against (lessons from Guatemala)
In a landslide victory, Jacobo Arbenz was freely and fairly elected president of Guatemala in 1951. Wishing to transform his country, Arbenz’ modest reforms and his legalizing of the Communist Party were frowned upon in American business circles. The Arbenz government became the target of a U.S. public relations campaign. Two years after Arbenz became president, Life magazine featured a piece on his “Red” land reforms, claiming that a nation just “two hours bombing time from the Panama Canal” was “openly and diligently toiling to create a Communist state.” It matters little that the USSR didn’t even maintain diplomatic relations with Guatemala; the Cold War was in full effect.
Ever on the lookout for that invaluable pretext, the U.S. business class scored a public relations coup when Arbenz expropriated some unused land controlled by United Fruit Company. His payment offer was predictably deemed inappropriate. “If they gave a gold piece for every banana,” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles clarified, “the problem would still be Communist infiltration.”
The CIA put Operation Success into action. “A legally elected government was overthrown by an invasion force of mercenaries trained by the CIA at military bases in Honduras and Nicaragua and supported by four American fighter planes flown by American pilots,” explains Howard Zinn. Operation Success ushered in 40 years of repression, more than 200,000 deaths, and what William Blum calls “indisputably one of the most inhumane chapters of the 20th century.” These chapters could never have been written without permission from the United States and its proxies, e.g. Israel.
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Henry David Thoreau sez: “If… the machine of government… is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.”
Copyright © 2005-2007 Mickey Z.
