Guatemala, 1954

Jacobo Árbenz was elected president of Guatemala in 1950. In June 1952 he signed Decree 900.

The decree expropriated uncultivated land above a threshold and redistributed it to peasant families. It was not confiscation: owners were compensated in government bonds. The compensation was calculated at the value the owner had themselves declared for tax purposes.

That formula is the reason this chapter exists, and it is close to perfect as a piece of legislative design.

The United Fruit Company held roughly six hundred thousand acres in Guatemala, most of it unused, and had declared a very low value for it. The company now faced a choice with no good branch: accept compensation at the figure it had given the tax office, or argue in public that the figure had been false. There was no third option available inside Guatemala, so the argument was moved to Washington, where a different vocabulary was available.

United Fruit's access in Washington was real and is well documented. So was the Cold War lens through which the Eisenhower administration read a Latin American government that included communists, though the intelligence assessments at the time put that influence at a modest level. The most defensible reading is that the company supplied the motive and the Cold War supplied the permission, and that neither alone would have produced what followed.

Eisenhower authorised Operation PBSUCCESS in August 1953. The force assembled under Carlos Castillo Armas numbered around 480 men.

Four hundred and eighty men cannot take a country, and the operation was never designed to. It was designed to convince the Guatemalan officer corps that resistance was pointless. A clandestine radio station broadcast reports of an advance that was not happening. Aircraft bombed with more theatre than effect. The target of the whole exercise was the nerve of a few hundred officers, and it worked: the army declined to fight, and Árbenz resigned on 27 June 1954.

The aftermath is what makes this the heaviest chapter in the book.

Guatemala's civil war ran from 1960 to 1996. The Commission for Historical Clarification, established under United Nations auspices, reported in 1999 that around two hundred thousand people had died or disappeared, that state forces were responsible for the overwhelming majority of documented violations, and that acts of genocide had been committed against Maya communities. In March 1999, President Clinton said that American support for military forces engaged in violent repression had been wrong.

There is a reasonable objection to placing the thirty-six years at the door of 1954, and it should be stated. Guatemala had deep structural conflicts before Árbenz, over land, race and labour, and they would not have dissolved had he served his term. The counterfactual in which the reform succeeds and the country stabilises is a guess, not a finding.

What can be said without guessing is narrower and still substantial. A constitutional government attempting a land reform by legal means was removed by an external operation, the reform was reversed, and the constitutional route was closed. What follows the closing of a constitutional route is not usually a calmer politics, and it was not here.