Banana

by Dan Koeppel

  The Arévalo regime came under near-constant attack. Arbenz helped put down a coup against the leader in 1949, and, facing constant opposition—over two dozen plots against Arévalo were foiled—the president’s term expired without major land reform. That left Guatemala’s big problem unsolved, according to Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger, authors of Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala.

  In 1950 Arévalo was the first president of Guatemala ever to finish a term—and leave, as the law dictated. Though he was viewed as a hero by the Guatemalan people, his own self-critique was more pessimistic: “When I ascended to the presidency of the nation,” he said, “I was possessed by a romantic fire…I still believed…that the government of Guatemala could rule itself, without submission to external forces.” He blamed his disappointment directly on United Fruit and the United States: “The banana magnates, co-nationals of Roosevelt, rebelled against the audacity of a Central American president who gave his fellow citizens a legal equality with the honorable families of exporters.”

  Whatever Arévalo couldn’t, or didn’t, accomplish was left to his successor, Jacobo Arbenz. The former junior officer would go on to become the biggest enemy in United Fruit’s history.

  What bothered Arbenz most wasn’t even that the banana companies owned so much land in the country—4 million acres, or 70 percent of the nation’s arable territory—but that they weren’t using it. More than three-fourths of it was fallow. In his inaugural speech, Arbenz, according to Kinzer and Schlesinger, said he wanted to convert Guatemala from a “dependent nation with a semi-colonial economy to an economically independent country.” The new president had been warned to temper his remarks, so he chose not to mention specific targets by name when he called for land reform, saying only that his goal was only to rid the nation of its latifundios.

  The term means “private farms.” Nobody could mistake who the thirty-eight-year-old president was talking about.

  THERE WERE COMMUNISTS IN GUATEMALA. The party was active, and Arbenz saw them as part of his coalition. Many of the country’s workers supported the party. Arbenz was eager to listen to their ideas. Some party members were appointed to cabinet posts. Arbenz knew that he had to rule by coalition, and though he saw the party as a valuable ally—and even had Communist advisors as he planned land reform—his partner in rebellion, Francisco Arana, maintained control over the military, where there were no Communist influences, and expanded the press freedoms originally enacted by Arévalo. Arbenz may not have possessed entirely clean hands. Arana was murdered in 1949. The theory, never confirmed and often disputed, is that Arbenz, frustrated by his compatriot’s failure to fully support the new policies, engineered the killing.

  IN OCTOBER 1951, Arbenz had his first hostile encounter with United Fruit. A company official had arrived at the presidential palace with a series of dictates: The banana giant’s current contracts would be extended. Taxes would not be raised. As Sam Zemurray had once done from the other side of the table, Arbenz, according to Schlesinger and Kinzer, “replied…in a manner to which the Boston executive was not accustomed.” The Guatemalan asked for payment of export duties; he asked that the company offer fair prices for land it acquired; and, most audaciously, he asked that United Fruit obey the Guatemalan constitution.

  It was the beginning of the end for Jacobo Arbenz.

  United Fruit had taken a two-prong approach during the first five years of La Primavera. It didn’t absolutely oppose improving workers’ conditions—it was willing to negotiate—but it was dead set against any reform that would cost it territory. The company’s image-making machine campaigned, in both overt and subtle ways, against Arévalo, but initially did little resembling the ugly tactics that had led to the killing of thousands in Colombia less than two decades earlier. But Arbenz’s election, and his rhetoric, alarmed Sam Zemurray. A similar democratic transformation in Iran earlier that year had resulted in the nationalization of that country’s American-owned oilfields. That wasn’t going to happen in the bananalands Zemurray pioneered. He asked one of his closest advisors what to do. Edward Bernays is considered by many to be “the father of public relations.” He was a nephew of Sigmund Freud and was more than just a spin doctor—he perfected the modern art of information management, authoring scientific papers on how influence could be gained and how public opinion could be manipulated. In his 1928 book, Propaganda, Bernays spelled out his methods: “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?” Bernays’s favorite means of accomplishing this was not to attempt to influence the masses directly but by “engineering of consent,” finding a key group of leaders involved in a certain issue, changing their opinions, and letting them do the rest of the work. (Bernays famously conducted a survey of five thousand doctors, who almost unanimously agreed that people should eat a “hearty breakfast.” He then took the results to newspapers around the country, adding as an aside that bacon and eggs were just such a morning meal. His client was the pork industry.) According to former United Fruit executive Thomas P. McCann, writing in An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit, Bernays recommended, and Zemurray agreed to, an aggressive campaign. It was, in a way, just like bacon and eggs: the goal was to convince America’s elite that Arbenz was a Communist. The result would not be well-fed families. Instead, Zemurray hoped, showing the “truth” about Arbenz would lead to strong government action.

  Bernays flew journalists into Guatemala, taking them on luxurious “fact-finding” junkets. Over two years, the media advisor managed to get dozens of articles published—in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Miami Herald, and in local papers across the United States—that portrayed the rulers of the Central American country as a dangerous threat. One wire service report stated that the goal of the new Guatemalan regime was to “engender hatred” of American business. As told by Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bernays planted stories that implied that Russia was training Latin American revolutionaries somewhere behind the Iron Curtain.

  Arbenz was undeterred.

  In 1952 he issued Decree 900. The law would redistribute land to local peasants; it allowed the government to confiscate any farm over 223 acres, with a key condition: The land had to be unused. Many of United Fruit’s plantations had been abandoned because of Panama disease. That made them seemingly useless to the fruit giant, but it remained hostile to the idea of giving up the property, since it was still believed that flooding or some as-yet-undiscovered technique could restore the soil.

  The result of the Arbenz decree was a spectacular change in Guatemala’s balance of power: Nearly a quarter million acres were divided among 100,000 families. The new rule mandated that the former landholders receive compensation based on the declared worth of the confiscated territory. According to the formula, United Fruit was to receive $600,000. When the company protested that the sum was just a fraction of the true value of its holdings, which was true, Arbenz countered that the amount was based on tax returns submitted by the banana company itself. The company had been cheating on its taxes, and Guatemalan authorities simply chose to take United Fruit at its word. In 1954 a demand for the actual value of the land, about $16 million, was made. The appeal was not delivered by United Fruit, even though the company’s executives had maintained contact with the Guatemalan government. Instead, it arrived via the U.S. State Department. It was an ominous sign: Guatemala wasn’t just fighting a fruit company. It was fighting America.

  United Fruit launched a second public relations campaign—this one aimed directly at the U.S. government. Zemurray hired a newspaperman named John Clements to write a study that would “investigate” the links between Arbenz and the Soviet Union. The “Report on Guatemala—1952” was sent to eight hundred influential Washington lawmakers and staffers. The “hastily written study,” Schlesinger and Kinzer explain, “came up with a panorama of scheming Gua
temalan communists…the document’s account of a supposed Soviet intrusion in the small nation was full of unsubstantiated ‘facts,’ exaggerations, scurrilous descriptions and bizarre historical theories.”

  It wasn’t difficult, in a Washington deep in the throes of McCarthyism, to sell the idea that Arbenz was a Soviet dupe. But at the highest levels, the company didn’t even need pretense. The U.S. secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had been a partner in United Fruit’s New York law firm. Dulles’s brother, Allen, was head of the CIA and a former member of the banana company’s board. Ed Whitman, United Fruit’s internal PR head, was married to President Eisenhower’s private secretary. Whitman’s contribution to the effort was a film equating the fate of United Fruit with that of the free world. It was called Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas.

  In mid-1953, President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to oust Arbenz.

  THAT DECEMBER, the team that would execute Operation PB Success—the first two letters of the code name stand for Presidential Board—was assembled. The plan involved several CIA field agents, including E. Howard Hunt, who would later be jailed for his role in the 1972 Watergate scandal. The operation was multifaceted. Psychological warfare would weaken the resolve of Arbenz and his army. U.S. military advisors would train and arm a force of Guatemalan “liberators,” led by an exiled former Arbenz colleague, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. The template for the action came from an operation in Iran four months earlier. There, American-backed forces had successfully overthrown that country’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, returning the oil companies to U.S. control and installing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the country’s monarch.

  Arbenz knew what had happened in Iran and, according to Schlesinger and Kinzer, panicked, making what would prove to be a fatal mistake. His undersupplied army would be no match for a U.S. invasion, so Arbenz contracted to buy a load of decade-old German weapons—captured during World War II—from Czechoslovakia. The CIA learned of the deal and tracked the Swedish-flagged ship carrying the arms across the Atlantic, allowing it to arrive in Guatemala. When the news was released in the United States, it was seen as proof of Arbenz’s Soviet connection. (In fact, the deal was more of a quick purchase, through several middlemen, rather than a high-level operation. Prior to contacting the Czechs, Arbenz had attempted to purchase weapons from Denmark, Mexico, Argentina, and Switzerland.)

  A naval blockade was imposed on Guatemala. The Arbenz government appealed to both the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations, with no success. In neighboring Honduras—where United Fruit–friendly governments had ruled for nearly fifty years—U.S. intelligence operatives set up a training camp for Castillo-Armas’s invasion force. Four hundred fighters were transported to Central America from the United States aboard a United Fruit cargo vessel. A radio station called La Voz de la Revolución featured music, comedies, and propaganda from “deep in the jungle,” according to its broadcasts. The station was actually beamed from Miami along United Fruit’s tropical radio network. Fake obituaries claiming that Arbenz had committed suicide were published in banana-friendly newspapers. Rebel planes flew low over the capital.

  The Guatemalan army numbered nearly five thousand men. It seemed impossible that it could be defeated by the few hundred fighters who crossed the border on the night of June 18. The rebel radio stations began reports that “thousands” of soldiers and citizens were joining the liberators as they marched toward Guatemala City.

  In fact, the lopsided battle was having the expected result. In Zacapa, 30 members of the Guatemalan military encountered 122 rebels. Only 28 insurgents survived the battle. The remaining 170 rebels were sent to take Puerto Barrios, United Fruit’s primary export point, and were defeated by local dock workers. The surviving members of Castillo-Armas’s forces retreated back to Honduras.

  Arbenz lost the war anyway. It didn’t matter that the rebels had failed. In fact, it was the failure that ultimately defeated the Guatemalan president.

  Rumors began to spread. Now that the Guatemalan army had proved itself more capable than the usurpers, Eisenhower was preparing an all-out invasion. Even Arbenz believed the stories. The rumors were encouraged by the United States, which sent air force bombers to fly over Guatemala City. The Miami radio broadcasts began issuing accounts of Guatemalan soldiers being defeated in the jungles. The American news media was kept away from the sites of the “battles.” Instead, they were given accounts, provided by U.S. ambassador to Guatemala John Peurifoy, of atrocities committed by Arbenz loyalists, backed up, Schlesinger and Kinzer say, with photographs of mutilated corpses thrown into mass graves (a former United Fruit public-relations executive later admitted that the pictures were of earthquake victims).

  FOR THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS, Arbenz remained in the presidential palace, unable to sleep, drinking constantly. Rebel radio began reporting that thousands of Guatemalan citizens were taking refuge across the border. The Miami studios even produced accounts of inch-by-inch battles, complete with sound effects. Those broadcasts were followed with news that Guatemalan army regulars were switching sides. When Arbenz ordered the military to open its arsenals and arm peasants, the field commanders—unable to tell what was real and what was propaganda—refused.

  Arbenz had lost the army. They weren’t against him—but they weren’t with him. Like him, they’d been paralyzed and confused by the covert campaign. One witness to the events was a twenty-six-year-old former medical student named Che Guevara. The future revolutionary, living in Guatemala at the time (and making a living selling religious paintings), was dismayed by what he saw. When “the U.S. invasion took place,” he recalled, “I tried to muster a group of young men like me to fight against the United Fruit adventurers. In Guatemala it was necessary to fight but hardly anybody fought. It was necessary to resist and hardly anybody wanted to do that.”

  On June 27, 1954, Arbenz resigned. At the airport, he was stripped to his underwear and paraded before the press as he boarded a plane to Mexico. For the rest of his life, he’d wander, stateless. The Americans had won; United Fruit too. But this time, victory for the banana company would be short-lived.

  PART V

  GOOD-BYE,

  MICHEL

  CHAPTER 24

  Cavendish

  CHARLES EDWARD TELFAIR probably didn’t recognize how important his bananas would become. But the British physician and amateur explorer certainly understood how easy the fruit was to grow. Telfair, born around 1777 (no exact record of his birth exists), was about three decades older than Darwin and one of many explorers who preceded the father of evolution into the tropics. Like many of his contemporaries, Telfair had collecting fever. As a surgeon with the British navy, he gathered hundreds of different animals and plants while traveling with the nation’s colonial fleet. In 1810 Telfair was part of the force that conquered the island of Mauritius, centrally located along the Indian Ocean banana complex, 560 miles east of Madagascar. Since 1638 the island had been occupied by the Dutch, whose East India Company controlled much of the Pacific (and whose hold later would be compared to United Fruit’s twentieth-century grip on Latin America). The most notable and sad achievement of the Dutch tenure on Mauritius was the elimination of the dodo. The island was uninhabited until westerners arrived. As on the Galápagos Islands, the animals on Mauritius possessed no protective instincts against human predators. The dodo was among the easiest to catch: With nowhere to go, and no natural enemies, it was not only tragically fearless but also flightless—and nutritious.

  The dodo, along with many of the island’s endemic species, was long gone by the time Telfair arrived. Upon taking control of Mauritius, the naval officer resigned his commission and became a state official, helping to orchestrate the island’s role as part of the British realm. (Mauritius became independent in 1868 and has since become one of the richest African nations, with a stable democracy and a pro-business climate.)

  British control over vast portions of the globe g
ave Telfair the ability to pursue his primary passion. The naturalist’s wife, Annabelle, became his cataloging partner, painting the species her husband gathered (just as Dorothy Popenoe would fifty years later). Telfair purchased several parcels of land and began populating them with samples that he accumulated through an empire-wide tangle of zoos, horticulturists, and collectors in every corner of the earth.

  Telfair was, in particular, a prodigious horticulturist, and not just for show: Since Dutch times the island had been used for sugar production, but Telfair industrialized the plantations, turning cane into Mauritius’s most valuable export. Many of the chimneys from the mills Telfair designed still dot the island, though just eleven of the three hundred facilities that operated through the nineteenth century still function. On his private estates, Telfair built elaborately landscaped botanical gardens. In one of them, he developed the plant that earned him topiary immortality: The ornamental hibiscus, more commonly known (to fanatic growers of the plant, and there are many of them) as the tropical variety of the plant, made by crossing an ordinary hibiscus with an older line of rosa-sinensis, or Chinese rose. Tropical hibiscus is ideal for topiary.