The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  “The pressure was unlike anything that had been seen there before,” Truman wrote in his memoirs. “I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders—actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats—disturbed and annoyed me.”

  Weizmann promised that no such pressure was coming from the Zionist leadership. “[While] generally accurate in what he said,” wrote Ignacio Klich, “Weizmann passed over in silence the more important activities of the supporters of Jewish statehood who were not part of the Jewish Agency leadership, including his own approach to UFCO’s Samuel Zemurray.”

  The president of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, later claimed he’d been offered money, “a bribe of millions,” by a powerful businessman associated with the Zionist cause, to vote in favor of partition. (India voted against.)

  By the time of the final tally, enough countries had changed their vote—Haiti from no to abstain; Nicaragua from abstain to yes—to pass Resolution 181. Knowing about the work of Zemurray, certain yes votes that might otherwise seem mysterious—Costa Rica, Guatemala, Ecuador, Panama—suddenly make perfect sense. Behind them, behind the creation of the Jewish state, was the Gringo pushing his cart piled high with stinking ripes.

  * * *

  Walking through 2 Audubon Place, Marjorie Cowen, the wife of the president of Tulane, stopped in the window-filled room on the third floor. “This is where Mr. Zemurray made the calls,” she told me. “He sat in a chair right here, calling every leader in Central and South America, talking and explaining until he got enough of them to change their vote to make modern Israel a reality.”

  * * *

  The vote for partition did not assure the existence of the Jewish state. (As Zemurray knew, you get nothing without fighting for it.) Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of independence was in fact followed by calls for war across the Arab world. In the summer of 1949, armies streamed over the Israeli frontiers from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. Israel would be at a huge disadvantage in the coming battle—surrounded, outnumbered, and challenged by an arms embargo that had been declared on the region. No weapons could be sent to any party in the conflict. As the Arab countries were already well armed—the Jordanian army was commanded by British officers—the embargo fell disproportionately on Israel.

  You name it, they did not have enough: bullets, rifles, pistols, grenades, trucks, tanks. The Israeli Air Force consisted of a single plane, a decrepit German Messerschmitt. Israel survived on the smuggled weapon, the clandestine arrival, the box hidden behind the false panel on the container ship—it says vegetables, but it smells like gunpowder. In the first days of the war, the majority of these boxes arrived from only three places, sent by three types of interested parties: Czechoslovakia, where Communists shipped trucks, guns, and planes with the consent of the Soviets, who believed a prolonged Middle Eastern conflict would embarrass the British; New York and New Jersey, where, at the urging of Meyer Lansky and Longy Zwillman, dock bosses like Socks Lanza looked the other way as ships bound for Haifa or Tel Aviv were filled with weapons; and Central America, where banana men filled ship after ship with boxes marked FOOD or SUPPLIES, carried weapons to the Israeli Defense Force.

  Much help came from Anastasio Somoza García, known as “Tacho,” who ruled Nicaragua from 1936 until 1956, when he was assassinated. According to Ignacio Klich, Somoza smuggled weapons to Israel throughout the 1948 war. Years later, when world opinion turned against Somoza’s grandson Tachito, who ruled Nicaragua from 1967 until he was assassinated in 1980, only Israel continued to ship arms to the dictator. When asked about this, Prime Minister Menachem Begin spoke of an old debt that needed to be honored.

  Israel’s War of Independence ended in victory for Israel in January 1949. Sam returned to United Fruit soon after, reclaiming his place at the center of the banana world. He was relatively young when the Second World War began—now he was old. He was already showing signs of the disease that would kill him. Thomas McCann, who was introduced to Zemurray in these years, described the meeting this way: “The old man put out his hand and took mine, and I could feel the tremor of Parkinson’s disease, a palsy that seemed to start in his feet or under the ground we stood on.”

  Zemurray had considered retiring altogether, letting his leave lapse into forever. He was seventy-three, much older than most other top executives in America. A new generation had come to power in the business world, men who had fought in the Second World War. Zemurray was an ancient among them, Methuselah himself, a relic of a time when mercenaries ruled the isthmus. Minor Keith, Lee Christmas, Jake the Parrot King—the pirates were gone, replaced by Ivy League managers. High times had given way to the corporation. In truth, Sam returned only because the future of the company seemed to depend on it. The top job had been given to Thomas Cabot, and Thomas Cabot had failed. The division heads were bickering, the provinces were restive, the leadership was uncertain. Zemurray, who walked the earth when the world was new, was the only man with the requisite authority to make the moves and right the ship. He planned to stay no more than a year or two, just long enough to set things in order, train a successor, move on. But two years turned into five, seven. It’s the one problem he could never solve: having designed a uniquely powerful position for himself at the top of the company, tailored to his character and style, Zemurray could not find anyone else to fill it. United Fruit had been on the verge of collapse when he took control in 1932. He gave the company twenty extra years of life, but it was far from clear it could survive his retirement.

  18

  Operation Success

  Back to the isthmus! Back to the sandy loam! Back to the land of United Fruit camps, each with its swimming pool and golf course, each with its Quonset huts and its electric green fields and Los Pericos blue from poison! Back to port towns and jungle towns and railroads, where machete men doze in the shade of the ceiba, and the palm trees applaud when the wind blows! Back to the preserve of the banana cowboy, with his mule and pistola! Back to the land dominated by one crop, one corporation, one will! Back to the slender neck of continent south of Mexico and north of Colombia, where you can swim in the Atlantic Ocean in the morning and the Pacific that same afternoon! Back to the Mayan ruins and the Mosquito Coast and the coffee plantations where the pickers make a penny a pound and every meal is beans! Back to the land where the banana is king and the Gringo gives the orders!

  The isthmus had changed greatly in the course of the Second World War. There were physical changes, all the exotic crops imported by Zemurray, for example, but there were metaphysical changes, too—the appearance of a new mood characterized by hope. The people of Latin America were profoundly affected by the language America had used during the struggle: the calls to end oppression, colonialism, racism, tyranny. Asked to name a hero, most South American liberals of that era would mention FDR, specifically citing his four freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. In short, the Central Americans heard our words and actually believed them.

  For those on the isthmus who dreamed of the new world suggested by Franklin Roosevelt, but still lived in the old one ruled by Sam Zemurray, a terrible gap yawned open: between expectation and reality. This is where revolutions are born. The call for increased rights and freedoms was a challenge to United Fruit, which depended on compliant governments and cheap labor. What’s more, with the start of the cold war, the struggle on the isthmus got tangled up with the global battle between capitalism and communism, which turned even the smallest feud into a test of ideologies. The region was flooded with fears of implication and precedent. If you wanted to open the gates of hell, all you had to do was point and say, “Communist.”

  Take Guatemala, where United Fruit prospered, and where the dream of United Fruit would end. The country was perfect for bananas: lush jungle, poor workers, lots of rain, accommodating dictators. General Jorge
Ubico, who had assumed power in 1931, was the banana republic strongman in concentrated form, kicking down, kissing up. He looked like Buster Keaton in the silents, dreamily imagining a cavalry charge. Do I need to say he considered himself the reincarnation of Napoléon? Or that he was tiny, with delicate gloved fingers? Or that he carried a sword and wore medals all over his chest? Or that he was obsessed with astrology and bewitched by numbers? Eccentric at the beginning, mad by the end, he had a hatred of Communists so pure it burned blue. The general banned the words “trade union,” “strike,” “petition,” and “worker.” There were no workers, he told his people, only employees.

  At times, it seemed the general had just one constituent: United Fruit. Peasant workers—excuse me, peasant employees—were required to work a minimum of one hundred days a year for landowners, which usually meant United Fruit. Anyone who failed to follow the order could be legally killed. (Not good for the bargaining position.) United Fruit had acquired an obscene amount of property in the country to stay ahead of Panama disease. By 1942, the company owned 70 percent of all private land in Guatemala, controlled 75 percent of all trade, and owned most of the roads, power stations and phone lines, the only Pacific seaport, and every mile of railroad. The contract that drove people especially crazy, perhaps the most lopsided deal in the history of Guatemala—it gave U.F. unprecedented rights on the Pacific—had been negotiated by John Foster Dulles, then a lawyer with the white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

  Anger was the inevitable result, resentment, frustration, rage. The pressure built until the lid was rattling on the pot, the stove was straining against the wall. In 1944, the whole country blew. It started with a massive demonstration. Workers filled the main plaza in Guatemala City, demanding that the dictator step down; they wanted a new system with decent wages and the sort of social security system Franklin Roosevelt had championed in the United States. (Life expectancy in Guatemala was forty-seven years and most people made less than $300 a year.) General Ubico told his army to clear the plaza. Some soldiers opened fire on the demonstrators, but others stripped off their uniforms and joined the crowd, which swelled until it was the only thing that mattered. The masses stormed through the city, looting and burning. They marched to a military base on the outskirts of the capital. There was a brief fight, a civil war, black smoke rising from the slums.

  Hundreds of Guatemalans were killed. The general mumbled through a resignation speech, turned control over to his lieutenant, General Federico Ponce, then went into exile. As the first demonstration had been organized by educators, the upheaval came to be known as “The Schoolteachers’ Revolt.”

  General Ponce called for elections. Some of the people who led the revolt invited Juan José Arévalo, a college professor who had spent the previous fourteen years in exile, to return to lead the movement. Arévalo had written essays that inspired the revolution, as well as textbooks standard in the country. Everyone knew his name. He was forty-two when he returned, slender to the point of being sickly, with an intellectual’s myopic stare. A crowd met him at the airport. Men and women threw flowers and shouted his name. General Ponce tried to have Arévalo arrested, but a clique of leftist military officers prevented this. I say “prevented” as if it were a simple matter—a traffic cop preventing a car from entering a one-way street—but it was, in fact, bloody. On October 20, 1944, a group of junior officers killed over a hundred of their superiors, securing the revolution.

  Juan Arévalo won the presidency with 85 percent of the vote, the first popularly elected leader in the history of Guatemala. He took the oath of office on March 15, 1945, a clear, spring afternoon. He wore a business suit because he was a civilian, not a general. His inaugural address promised a new age. He had three audiences in mind: Guatemalans, the government of the United States, and the president of United Fruit. He spoke of his past—a childhood of poverty. He spoke of the future—a vision of big landowners forced to reform and share. And he spoke of his heroes, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who “taught us there is no need to cancel the concept of freedom in the democratic system in order to breathe into it a socialist spirit.” He said he would govern by a philosophy of his own invention, which he called “spiritual socialism.”

  To Zemurray, who had agents scattered in the crowd, every word of the speech would have sounded like a threat. It was Huey Long all over again. The call to strengthen the unions, spread the wealth, break up the large holdings of land.… There were some U.F. executives who worried that Guatemala would go Communist from the beginning. Zemurray rejected such talk. He did not believe that the people of Guatemala, most of them poor Indians, were sophisticated enough to embrace an ideology associated with European intellectuals.

  Arévalo, a smart man who understood the limits of his power, was exceedingly careful in dealing with United Fruit. Though he passed land reform legislation, he left it unenforced. He focused instead on crowd-pleasing issues that Zemurray could hardly oppose. A forty-hour workweek, social security guarantees, rights of the unions to organize—all based on the New Deal legislation that Zemurray himself championed in the United States. In 1947, the Guatemalan congress enacted the Labor Code, which, for the first time ever, permitted banana workers to join trade unions. In the past, force had been used to break strikes. Labor leaders were now free to organize on U.F. plantations. The company filed protests against the code and even threatened to withdraw from Guatemala altogether. But in the end, business continued as usual.

  I’m not saying that it was a frictionless time. (There were twenty-five coup attempts in the Arévalo years.) Nor am I saying Zemurray stood by calmly as this college professor made Guatemala less hospitable to the company. (In 1948, Guatemalan agents discovered grenades and guns hidden in a United Fruit train bound for Puerto Barrios.) I’m just saying, compared to what followed, the Arévalo years were boringly peaceful.

  In 1951, Arévalo was succeeded by his vice president, Jacobo Arbenz, one of the young officers who had purged the old regime.

  Jacobo Arbenz was born in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, in 1913, when U.F. was already monstrously powerful. His father was from Switzerland, blond haired, blue eyed, as pale as a stalk of wheat. He stood out amid the dark crowds of Quetzaltenango, which was populated mostly by Indians. Why his father moved to Guatemala, I don’t know. He married a Guatemalan of European descent, her skin as white as ivory, hair as black as coal. He settled on the outskirts of the mountainous city and opened an apothecary. He was a licensed pharmacist, a man of prescriptions and containers filled with potions. He did what the kingpin tells the drug dealer he must never do: got high on his own supply. He became addicted first to one kind of pill, then to several kinds, then to narcotics in general. They filled his days with epiphanies: shadows of the trees, hills in the distance, faces in the market—everything became profound, a manifestation of the divine. He made poor decisions under the influence, gave away what he should have kept. To his son, he was a good man broken on the wheel of capitalism. Then the drugs stopped working, or began working in a terrible new way—revealed devils where they had once revealed angels. He turned sullen, depressed. No one could talk to him. One day, he went into the back room of his apothecary and shot himself in the head.

  These details were compiled for a CIA file years later, when Jacobo Arbenz was classified an enemy of the United States. E. Howard Hunt, the American spy later famous for his role in the Watergate break-in, elaborated on the death of the elder Arbenz in Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent. According to Hunt, the elder Arbenz, wanting to be certain his suicide was successful, filled his mouth with water before shooting himself, which made his “head explode like a bomb.”

  The Arbenz family lived a vagabond life after the tragedy. Jacobo, who was still a boy, moved from house to house, uncle to uncle. He grew taciturn and sad. He radiated that peculiar melancholy that comes across as depth. He was as blond as his father, very handsome. Everyone said he looked like Alan Ladd. That does not mean m
uch now, but Alan Ladd was one of the biggest movie stars in the world back then. Alan Ladd played Shane, the gunman who tried to lay down his weapons only to discover a fighter must fight until he dies. At the end of the movie, Shane, shot in the gut, rides into the mountains as if ascending to heaven. When Jacobo was fourteen, his mother sent him to military school, and a good thing she did, because that’s where he finally found a sense of belonging. He loved order and rules, knowing who was above him and who was below. He went on to the nation’s elite military academy, where he amassed one of the best academic records in the history of the country.

  Arbenz was a man when he graduated, tall and elegant, laughing with fellow officers, as enviable as a soldier in a story by Tolstoy, drinking vodka, gambling and whoring, believing this life will last forever. If he had an ideology, it was personal: the world as seen by the young man who believes his father was killed by the system, which is another name for the banana company. The sophisticated ideas that he later expressed in speeches and rants came from his wife, María Cristina Villanova Castro, a Nancy Reagan or Lady Macbeth who recognized in the officer a perfect vehicle. María Castro grew up in El Salvador, the daughter of a wealthy coffee grower who claimed she had been turned against her class by Steinbeck, Marx, and Bartolomé de Las Casas. Her father banned her from his library, but she read in secret. He cast her into the outer darkness of children who have disappointed their parents. Ideas for which Jacobo Arbenz was later condemned—redistribution of wealth, seizing the means of production, etc.—came from his wife. Arbenz was more instinctual, with convictions that derived less from books than his own experience. You don’t need a book to understand injustice. Just look at the electric fence that surrounds the banana plantation.