News from Amerika
1953 was the end of the Jakarta Axiom; independent countries were no longer tolerated just because they had left-wing forces in check. With the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, the new rule under Eisenhower was that neutral governments were potential enemies, and Washington could decide if and when an independent Third World nation was insufficiently anticommunist. Wiz and his boys, emboldened by the success in Tehran, turned their attention to Central America, where they would score the victory that would serve as a template for future covert interventions into the next decade.
A decade before, the Guatemalans had a small revolution. A series of strikes led to the overthrow of Jorge Ubico, a pro-Nazi dictator who had worked hand in hand with the landed aristocracy and foreign corporations for two decades to keep peasants in a system of forced labor—in other words, slavery. The left, including the Guatemalan communist party, called the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo, or PGT, had long been involved organizing workers in opposition to him. The revolution arrived in 1944, when the United States under FDR was in an alliance with the Soviet Union, and very busy fighting World War II. Perhaps for that reason, the new government didn’t ring many alarm bells for US politicians.25
From 1944 to 1951, popular schoolteacher Juan José Arévalo took control of the very young democracy in Central America’s largest country. But it was the election of Jacobo Árbenz, who took power in 1951, that really turned heads up North.
Árbenz was a middle-class soldier who became a large landowner himself, and to the extent that he ever held any radical ideas, they were probably due to the influence of his California-educated Salvadoran wife, María Vilanova, a more complex and fascinating figure than he. A polyglot social campaigner shocked by inequality, she rejected Central American high society, read intensely and widely, and formed links with leftist figures from around Latin America. Árbenz accepted the small but well-organized PGT as a part of his ruling coalition. But Guatemala voted against the Soviet Union’s actions at the UN, and the new president made it clear in his inaugural speech that his goal was to “convert Guatemala with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.”26
This was no small task. When his government passed a 1952 land reform, this effort ran up against very powerful interests. The government began to buy back large, unused land holdings and distribute them to indigenous people and peasants. Processes of these kind were seen by economists around the world as not only a way of benefiting regular people, but of putting the whole country to productive use and unleashing the forces of market enterprise. But the law stipulated that Guatemala would make payments based on the land’s official value, and the United Fruit Company—a US firm that basically controlled the country’s economy for decades—had been criminally undervaluing its holdings to avoid paying taxes.
The powerful company howled in protest. United Fruit was extremely well connected in the Eisenhower administration, and started a public relations campaign denouncing Árbenz as a communist in the US, and brought US journalists on press junkets, which were successful in getting deeply critical stories published in outlets like Time, U.S. News & World Report, and Newsweek.27 The CIA again asked Kermit Roosevelt to oversee operations. He refused this time, telling his superiors that future coups wouldn’t work unless the people and the army in the country “want what we want.”28 Frank Wisner chose Tracy Barnes instead.
Washington made three coup attempts, and it was the third one that worked.29 In November 1953, Eisenhower removed the ambassador in Guatemala City and sent in John Peurifoy, who had been in Athens since 1950 and had thrown together a right-wing government favorable to both Washington and the Greek monarchy. Leftists there called him the “Butcher of Greece.”30
In Guatemala, the North Americans did their best to create a pretext for intervention. The CIA planted boxes of rifles marked with communist hammers and sickles so they could be “discovered” as proof of Soviet infiltration. When the Guatemalan military, unable to find any other suppliers, did actually buy some weapons (that turned out to be worthless) from Czechoslovakia, Wisner’s boys were relieved. Now they had their excuse. Árbenz uncovered plans for the third coup attempt in January 1954, and had them published in the Guatemalan press. The CIA men were so confident that they kept going anyway, issuing denials to the US press. They organized a tiny rebel force around General Carlos Castillo Armas, an unimpressive man despised even by the conservative officers in the Guatemalan military. They began broadcasting false reports, on US-controlled radio stations, of a military rebellion marching toward victory, and dropped bombs on Guatemala City. This was psychological warfare, not a real invasion—the ragtag group over the border in Honduras and El Salvador had no chance of actually entering and defeating the real military, and the bombs that US pilots dropped on the capital became nicknamed sulfatos, or sulfate laxatives, because their job was not to do damage, but to make Árbenz and everyone around him so afraid they would fill their pants.31
Miguel Ángel Albizures, nine years old, heard the bombs explode near him, and the shock seared a feeling of fear deep into his brain. He was having breakfast before school in the capital, at one of the public eateries set up by Árbenz, when it started. He was terrified—yes, so shocked, so afraid he felt like he could shit himself, exactly as intended—and ran to take cover under the pews in the closest Catholic church.32
Árbenz, realizing that the US was determined to oust him, began to contemplate giving in. His government frantically offered to give United Fruit what it wanted. But it was too late for concessions. The communists and a few others urged Árbenz not to hand over power. In vain, a twenty-five-year-old Argentine doctor living in Guatemala City at the time, named Ernesto “Che” Guevara, volunteered to go to the front, then tried to organize civilian militias to defend the capital.
Instead, the president resigned on June 27, 1954, and handed over power to Colonel Díaz, head of the Armed Forces. Díaz had met with Ambassador Peurifoy, and believed he would be an acceptable replacement to the United States. He told Árbenz he had an understanding with the North Americans, and that if he took power, at least they could avoid losing the country to the hated Castillo Armas, which helped persuade the president to step down.33
That deal didn’t last long. Just a few days after Díaz took power, CIA station chief John Doherty and his deputy, Enno Hobbing—former Time bureau chief in Paris—sat him down. “Let me explain something to you,” said Hobbing. “You made a big mistake when you took over the government.” Hobbing paused, then made himself very clear. “Colonel, you’re just not convenient for the requirements of American foreign policy.”
Díaz was shocked. He asked to hear it from Peurifoy himself. According to Díaz, when Peurifoy came over, at four in the morning, he backed up Doherty and Hobbing. He also showed Díaz a long list of Guatemalans who would need to be shot immediately.
“But why?” Díaz asked. “Because they’re communists,” Peurifoy responded.34
Castillo Armas, the US favorite, took over. Slavery returned to Guatemala. In the first few months of his government, Castillo Armas established Anticommunism Day, and rounded up and executed between three thousand and five thousand supporters of Árbenz.35
Eisenhower was elated. Even though Wisner had been anxious throughout the operation, this was another triumph for his approach. After he and Barnes met with the president, they burst back into Barnes’s living room in Georgetown and “did a little scuffling dance.”36
The People’s Daily paid very close attention to the events in the small country, half a world away. Day after day, the situation in Guatemala was at the top of the front page, and the headlines were clear and precise: “Amerika Menjerang Guatemala” (America threatens Guatemala), and then a long explanatory article, “This Is Guatemala,” featuring a map of the faraway region, and then referring to “American aggression.”37
The US press covered it differently. The New York Times referred to the coup plotters as
“rebels,” while calling the Árbenz government “reds” or a “Communist threat,” and saying that the US government was “helping” mediate peace talks, rather than organizing the whole thing. Most historians today would quickly recognize that this small Indonesian communist newspaper reported the events more accurately than the New York Times.38
There is a reason for that. Sydney Gruson, an enterprising Times correspondent, was planning to launch an investigation of the “rebel” forces. Frank Wisner wanted him stopped. He asked his boss, Allen Dulles, to speak with the New York Times higher-ups, which he did. Believing he was performing a patriotic act, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger ordered Gruson to stay away.39
There’s also a reason that Zain and his colleagues paid so much attention to Guatemala. A front-page story in The People’s Daily on June 26 said that what was happening in Guatemala “threatens world peace, and could threaten Indonesia as well.”40
An internal State Department document, now publicly available, should dispel the notion that Washington thought Guatemala was an immediate “communist threat.” According to Louis J. Halle in a note to the director of the policy planning staff, the risk was not that Guatemala would act aggressively. The risk was that Árbenz would provide an example that inspired his neighbors to copy him. The note reads, “The evidence indicates no present military danger to us at all. Although we read public references to the facts that Guatemala is three hours’ flying time from the oil-fields of Texas and two hours’ flying time from the Panama Canal, we may console ourselves that Guatemala’s capability for bombing either is nil. The recent shipment of arms makes no difference to this conclusion, nor would repeated shipments…”
The real risk, Halle said quite clearly, was that communist “infection” could
spread through the example of independence of the U.S. that Guatemala might offer to nationalists throughout Latin America. It might spread through the example of nationalism and social reform. Finally and above all, it might spread through the disposition the Latin Americans would have to identify themselves with little Guatemala if the issue should be drawn for them (as it is being drawn for them), not as that of their own security but as a contest between David Guatemala and Uncle Sam Goliath. This latter, I think, is the danger we have most to fear and to guard against.41
The question of land reform was an exemplary and recurring case of “Do as I say, not as I do.” When General MacArthur was running Japan immediately after World War II, he pushed through an ambitious land reform program, and US authorities oversaw redistribution in South Korea in these years as well. In strategic, US-controlled nations, they saw the necessity of breaking up feudal land control in order to build dynamic capitalist economies. But when carried out by leftists or perceived geopolitical rivals—or when threatening US economic interests—land reform was more often than not treated as communist infiltration or dangerous radicalism.
The Dulles brothers had worked on Wall Street, and both had actually done work for the United Fruit Company. To this day, there is a debate as to whether or not the CIA engineered the coups in Iran and Guatemala for cynical economic reasons—to help business buddies and American capitalism more generally—or if the Agency really felt threatened by “communism.” There can be more than one explanation. The leader of the PGT, Guatemala’s communist party, said that “they would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas.”42 Wisner’s discussions at home, with his family, indicated he really felt that the Iranian Tudeh and Guatemalan PGT were somehow a danger to his country.43
But the motivation didn’t matter much to the millions of people reading about the events back in Asia, nor to the Latin Americans watching up close. Whatever their reasons, the United States established a reputation as a frequent and violent intruder into the affairs of independent nations.
That young doctor, Che Guevara, believed he learned an important lesson in 1954. He came to the conclusion that Washington would never allow mild social reform, let alone democratic socialism, to flower in its backyard, and that any movement for change would have to be armed, disciplined, and prepared for imperialist aggression. Then twenty-six years old, he wrote to his mother that Árbenz “did not know how to rise to the occasion.” The Guatemalan president, Che said, “did not think to himself that a people in arms is an invincible power. He could have given arms to the people, but he did not want to—and now we see the result.” Che took off to Mexico City, and began to formulate a more radical revolutionary strategy based on what he had seen in Guatemala.44
Back in Indonesia Francisca, though not following the news as closely as Zain, felt that the Indonesian revolution was far from complete. They had only been free from white colonialism for five years, she thought, and there was no guarantee the freedom would last. But she was usually busy working at the library and caring for their first daughter. Zain would come home late, and they would mostly sit around and talk about the books they were reading, mostly European literature, rather than discuss international news. Zain had enough of that at work. But she knew that their situation was fragile, and that the Western powers were not inclined to simply cede freedom to the peoples of the Third World. The brutal French invasion in Vietnam was more proof of that. President Sukarno was always on the radio, putting his considerable rhetorical skills to use to drive home the point that Indonesians still had to fight. The way it looked from Indonesia was that in both Iran and Guatemala, nascent democratic movements had tried to assert new independence in the global economy, and the new Western power had reacted violently, and crushed them back into the subservient role they had always played. Sukarno liked to call this “neocolonialism,” or the enforced conditions of imperial control without formal rule. Thoroughly modern, he loved neologisms and acronyms, and later coined NEKOLIM—that is, neocolonialism, colonialism, and imperialism—to name the enemy he believed they all faced.
In 1954, after Ho Chi Minh’s surprisingly well-organized forces emerged victorious at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French finally gave up in Vietnam. In Geneva, the US was helping to hammer out the division of that country, under the stipulation that a national referendum would take place to reunite its two halves by 1956. In Jakarta, Sukarno was about to meet one of the West’s new representatives. Always sunny-faced and eager, Howard Palfrey Jones landed in July.
Presiden Sukarno
When Smiling Jones arrived in Jakarta for the first time, he was enchanted. A “teeming, steaming metropolis,” he called it. He also recognized, very quickly, that America’s supposed enemies operated here. He was sent to be chief of the Economic Aid Mission, and saw that in Independence Square, where Sukarno had made his famous 1945 proclamation, now across from the US Chancery, every tree was plastered with a poster bearing the hammer and sickle. The same was true in front of his house, and when he got a chance to drive around the island of Java, he often found his car passing under arches of hammer-and-sickle streamers.
Even though Sukarno, Indonesia’s charismatic first president, was friendly with Washington and had always operated in varying degrees of opposition to the PKI, a minority party among many, the apparent boldness of the Communist Party—just advertising openly like that, rather than hiding in the shadows—was worrying to the US.
A few days after he got there, Pepper Martin, a senior foreign correspondent at U.S. News & World Report gestured toward the communist symbols, turned to Jones, and said, “It looks as if it’s all over but the shouting, doesn’t it?”45 Jones would learn soon that it was far from over. And when he met Sukarno for the first time, he was blown away by just how complicated things were. Jones himself, like everyone else in the US government, was an anticommunist, and thought it was his job to fight that system. But he thought the major failure of US diplomacy at the time was a persistent inability to understand the differences between Third World nations, and the nature of Asian nationalism. He believed that after World War II, the US was “too involved in the complexities of intimate relations with our allies
of that war, to hear the cry of peoples halfway around the word.” He wrote, “We didn’t understand and made little attempt to comprehend the political, economic and social revolution that was sweeping Asia.”46
Unlike many other Americans, Jones refused to dismiss the beliefs and practices of the locals, a priori, as backward. He paid close attention. Of course, he lived a very different life from the Indonesians. State Department officials lived in colonial mansions, and had maids and cooks and drivers. Almost any US citizen in the Third World would have been considered incredibly rich, even if they were not working for Uncle Sam.
Once, one of the pools began to leak constantly. The local embassy staff knew what to do. They called a hadji, a Muslim who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, who came and meditated. He told the Americans the premises had not been ritually consecrated. Jones recounted, without hesitation or skepticism, that they held a slametan ceremony, appeasing the surrounding spirits by planting a rooster head on each corner of the pool. It never leaked again. Jones, a Christian Scientist who himself had watched his mother recover miraculously after bouts of prayer, never questioned there may be forces at work in Indonesia most Americans didn’t fully comprehend.47
When interacting with other US government officials, Jones would proudly correct them when they would mislabel Asians or their political affiliations. Most crucially, he thought Americans failed to understand what nationalism was in the context of emerging countries, and its difference from communism. Nationalism in the Third World meant something very different from what it had meant in Germany a decade prior. It was not about race, or religion, or even borders. It was built in opposition to centuries of colonialism. Exasperated, Jones often stressed that to Americans, this might look like an instinctive anti-Western disposition, and that young nations might make early mistakes when forming a government. But wouldn’t Americans feel the same way, and demand the right to make their own mistakes?
The Jakarta Method Page 6