Isadora Nieman\'s Worksheet for Bitter Fruit Part I PDF

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Name: Isadora Nieman Worksheet for the First Half of Bitter Fruit: The Story of an American Coup in Guatemala Introduction the 2005 Howard Edition This introduction considers the legacy of the book Bitter Fruit and provides a short historiographical essay about the nature of U.S. Intervention in Guatemala. In this essay, John Coatsworth presents two major interpretations of US involvement in Guatemala. Summarize each. 1) When something happens to shock Washington, it would shock its imprecise notion of status quo, or does threaten American interests, we would reach for our gun, where Wilson had done it when he had sent “Black Jack” Pershing into Mexico chasing Villa and when the Navy bombed Veracruz, Harding and Coolidge had sent the Marines into Latin America like unrest squads and they stayed in Nicaragua so long they grew stubbles. 2) In the light, it is that this presumed U.S. Policy that the case that Guatemalan history assumes such striking importance, because Guatemala bears a special distinction that was one of the two countries where the CIA boasts that it carried out a successful underground military operation where the other was Iran. Indeed, it was in the aftermath of Iran that the CIA was certified by John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower to carry out the strategy that remove Jacobo Arbenz, the valid elected President of Guatemala, then replaced him with a regime that was headed by a little-known military man named Castillo Armas, whose friends regarded him as a well-meaning, rather stupid little man that were not inevitably seen as negatives by the CIA workers. Chapter 1 In the days leading up to the overthrow of Arbenz, the “National Liberation Forces” developed a multi-pronged approach for their coup. At the same time, Jacobo Arbenz devised his own strategy to limit tensions in the country. Summarize each strategy using specific examples. In both summaries you should identify multiple facets of each group’s plan.  What the National Liberation forces had done first against Arbenz had produced leaflets saying that Arbenz must resign, basically threatening that if Arbenz did not do that right away, that they would blow up the city’s main arsenal to assure his departure. If he had not quit by then, the circulars added, the aircraft would bomb the Palace, and this happened for every eleven days for a month, and the aircraft was usually a U.S. made Beechcraft that had made similar raids, first on May 26th, next on the night of June 6th and then June 18th, 1954. Each time that this happened, the ghost aircraft would descend like a hawk from the sky, scattered its leaflets, and vanish, while the messages grew more ominous with every call. In the earlier trips, the circulars had addressed the Guatemalan army, warning its officers about a supposed secret plan by President Arbenz to replace the military with a citizen’s force and had urged soldiers to rise up against Arbenz, and on June 18th, this leaflet was the first to demand that Arbenz surrender.  On May day of 1954, that was traditionally a festive workers’ celebration in Guatemala, a new radio station had suddenly appeared on the air broadcasting from “somewhere in Guatemala”; it had demanded Arbenz’s downfall, and most Guatemalans already knew enough to connect that the “voice of Liberation” with the exile forces of Carlos Castillo Armas, an almost forty-year old former army colonel and longtime enemy of President Arbenz who had been plotting against the government from neighboring Honduras. In recent days, Castillo Armas had grown bolder and issued appeals, that declared that everyone of Guatemala had been ready to rise up against the government and fight for their civil liberties.

How accurate do you find Arbenz’s speech on pages 19-20? Why? What do you think he hoped to accomplish by giving this speech?  I think that when Arbenz had hoped for his speech, is that he had wanted to appeal to the country. He had been shaken up by the formal statement that the U.S. state department had made on the Guatemalan situation, especially with the air assaults and border trips that had been happening for those days before his speech. His speech was not accurate because the U.S. had no idea what was happening in Guatemala at the time. They had only known that there were members of the U.S. community in Guatemala had made strong representations to local authorities about their safety, but otherwise that, the State Department had reports about what was going on, but what they knew is that the Guatemalan people were only revolting against the government. Chapter 2 In some ways, the US rhetoric and policy was instrumental in creating Guatemalan’s hope for change in the 1940s. How?  Because of Ubico’s merciless hostility towards democracy, it had helped create immense nuisances among the new middle class that had been created by the educators, merchants, expert laborers and scholars. For fifteen hundred days of global warfare, it had exposed Guatemalans the promises of democracy that they heard over the short radio-waves. Because of President Franklin D Roosevelt’s, “Four Freedoms,” – the declaration that all humanity had been entitled to freedom of speech, religion, and freedoms from want and fear – that it had motivated a new generation of Guatemalans to be aware of the injustices in their own communities and made Roosevelt a hero in Guatemala. With his advocacy of the trade unions had also struck a responsive harmony in a country where labor was just beginning to think about organizing. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” had convinced many Guatemalans that they had deserved a government actively devoted to the public virtuous. Describe the political situation in Guatemala before the overthrow of General Ubico. What was his power base and how did he design his rule? How successful were his policies?  Ubico’s political base was the powerful aristocracy; the Guatemalan traditional governing elite. His wealthy supporters expected him to suppress conflict and prevent social change. He fulfilled this expectation with brutal pleasure. In the pattern of his predecessors, he had routinely used his army to intimidate poor Guatemalans to solidify his power. He massacred rebellious Indians, killed labor leaders and intellectuals that enriched his friends. Who began the protests against Ubico? What was their cause?  Now that the dictatorship was crumbling, a few days after the massive demonstration in Guatemala City, 311 teachers, lawyers, doctors, small businessman and other citizens handed Ubico a petition of protest. This influential statement “Petition of the 311,” expressed the “full unity” of the signers with the legal goals of the protestors. This had shocked Ubico because it had more so had been presented to him personally by men he knew as friends and prominent citizens. Describe Juan José Arévalo Bermejo rise to power in Guatemala? How “Revolutionary” was this assent?  The revolutionaries found their ideal candidate in Dr. Juan José Arévalo Bermejo who was himself a teacher, who had been living in exile for the past fourteen years in Argentina as a professor of philosophy at the University of Tucumán. He had a special combination of assets and had written several patriotic and uplifting textbooks on history, geography and civics that were in use throughout Guatemala, so his name was familiar to teachers who formed the backbone of the revolutionary movement. He was a visionary and a serious

thinker whose heroes included Simón Bolívar, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. His objective was to spread the principles of the New Deal throughout Latin America. On what documents did Guatemala base Constitution of 1945? What changes did the constitution make? (politically, socially, in terms of gender relations, economically, etc.?  This liberal constitution that was written with the help of the Guatemalan Bar Association, embodied the objectives of the 1944 revolutionaries, along with the mass of Guatemalans and the idealistic young President-elect. Though some provisions were based on the progressive constitution that Justo Rufino Barrios had enacted in 1871, the document marked for Guatemala a dramatic break with the past, drawing mainly from the constitutions of revolutionary Mexico and republican Spain. It divided power among executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Individual rights were guaranteed in no less than thirtyfour separate articles and the Jeffersonian principle of widespread authority was prevailing. One remarkable feature was it commitment to a fair, honest political system that was a novelty in Central America. Congressmen were limited to two four-year terms; the President could not be re-elected after a single six-year term (expect after a twelve-year lapse); and military men were forbidden to run for office. Just as noble were the constitution’s social guarantees, there was equal pay for men and women that was required in private as well as public employment, and husbands along with their wives were declared equal before the law. Racial discrimination was made a crime, and the constitution banned private trusts and gave the government the power to expropriate certain private property, then the workers were assured one day off during a maximum forty-hour workweek and responsible social security was made a requirement along with other requirements that workers were granted. He called his political doctrine a “spiritual collectivism” defining the term as an all turning point toward everyone that was immersed in the social objectives. Chapter 3 When Arévalo began his presidency, Guatemala faced a number of social and economic problems. Describe some.  Arévalo had been confronted by a Guatemala that had hardly changed at all in the 124 years since independence. Living ethics for most of the population of 3 million were actually in decline. In the city, bank tellers would take home money a month, and the largest labor pools were in foreign-owned enterprises; some 40,000 Guatemalans depended directly or indirectly on the United Fruit Company and its firms. The small but rising employed and middle classes had no place in the outdated makeup. In the countryside, population growth forced increasing amounts of people to live off the same quantity of existing properties. The peasant wage was scaled from five to twenty cents a day and two percent of the landowners held 72 percent of the land, and 90 percent of the people that together owned just 15 percent of the productive acreage. Indians in the countryside were tied to large plantations by an oldage system which exacted at least 150 days each year of the debt labor in favor of taxes. Though the nation’s first constitution adopted in 1824 abolished slavery, rural labor outlines still prevailed in 1945 that were only barely noticeable from involuntary servitude. Describe three programs he developed to address these problems? (Remember both the urban and rural sector.)  In October of 1946, the Guatemalan congress approved the nation’s first social security law that revolutionized the relationship among workers, employers, and government. The bill, that was largely modeled by the New Deal measures had was enacted in the United States, had guaranteed workers the right to safe working conditions, compensation for injuries, maternity benefits and basic education and health care. This had help newly create the Social Security Institute that had launched a twenty-year program that aimed at erecting sixty-

seven new hospitals to bring medical facilities to peasants and others living outside of the hub. Even more profound in its impact was the Arévalo administration’s 1947 Labor Code that farmers looked to the American Wagner Act as a model. The new code, that would become a major factor leading to American involvements had equalized the organization's power over work. The concept was that the government should no longer automatically support large farm owners and other employers. The provisions of the code had guaranteed with some expectations with the right of urban workers to organize unions, to bargain together and to raid which Special Labor courts had shaped in such a way as to guarantee a sympathetic hearing for workers, were to resolve disputes. Minimum pay scales were fixed that child and female labor was regulated that later amendments would extend protection to some rural workers and had required managers to withhold union dues from paychecks, and in the context of Guatemalan history, these were truly revolutionary actions. Explain how the land holding patterns (described on pages 40 and 41) limited modernization in Guatemala?  Limiting modernization in Guatemala thus required an attack on the concentration of land in a few hands that would naturally be vigorously resisted by those who had benefited from land ownership for so long that the need for reform the system of ownership was universally recognized because of the first steps towards rationalizing the nation’s land policy that Arévalo passed were that farm resources had been vastly underutilized, and much fertile land had been laid untilled while production beyond the thin local market centered on bananas, that was entirely in American hands and coffee that was the major sources of wealth for the Guatemalan aristocracy. When the Minnesota professor had reported in 1940 about the reform system, the professor explained that large landowners had often felt that if a careful distribution of land that was given to the Indians had been carried through cheap labor that might’ve been no longer available for use and the economic foundation of the life of the nation would be damaged. Note the centrality of land titles in both the Mexican Revolution and Guatemala’s Decade of Spring: Chapter 4 Describe the role of Maria Cristina Villanova Castro in shaping the Decade of Spring.  Maria Cristina Villanova Castro’s role in molding the Decade of Spring was that she had been the daughter of a wealthy Salvadoran coffee-growing family. She became infatuated with Arbenz that they kept in touch and the two were soon married but under her influence, Arbenz slowly learned new social ideas because Maria was an even more complex and fascinating judge of character than her husband. She never had accepted her assigned role as a member of Salvadoran high society, and she attended exclusive religious schools that was expected to her work as a secretary in the plantation company of her estate-owning relatives until she had found another member of the local aristocracy to marry. Social inequality worried her but being scolded by her parents she learned to never questioned it, and secretly she had read books on politics that while being in Mexico she bought material on socialism and other ideologies. After her marriage, she expanded her horizons that met leftists and Communists in Guatemala. Arbenz and her argued about her political ideas since Arbenz still avoided ideology. She had led him to recognize injustice in Guatemalan life, however in 1944 it had urged him into the revolution from which he and Colonel Arana would emerge as heroes. In life, she had sometimes been compared to Argentina’s Eva Perón, that skillfully maneuvered her on behalf of her husband’s career, though often others saw her more as Eleanor Roosevelt in her compassion and compulsive activism. After her husband’s appointment as Arévalo’s Minister of Defense, she had grown bitter over the refusal of Guatemalan society to accept her and her husband because of their progressive views.

According to Arbenz’s inaugural speech, what were his goals for Guatemala?  According to Arbenz’s inaugural speech, his goals for Guatemala were that he had wished to move Guatemala forward by developing a new economy, and he proposed three fundamental goals towards new economic growth is that he wanted to convert Guatemala over from a dependent nation with a semi-colonial economy to an economically independent country and to further Guatemala from a backward country with a predominately medieval economy into a modern entrepreneurial state and to make this transformation in a way that would raise the standard of the great active mass of Guatemalan people to the highest level. Describe the role of the Communist Party(s) in Guatemala as well as Arbenz’s relationship to them.  Arbenz was caught in a bind, because since his first days in office, the redistribution of land had defined his friends and enemies, but now he was reluctant to crack down on the Communists with the harshness the situation demanded. Communists, oddly, had never been very successful in Guatemala. The extent of the Communist influence that it had on Arbenz after his election is the subject though, because the President himself never joined any political party, he did turn increasingly toward the Communists who had helped him in his campaign and had formed the smallest component of his four-party coalition in Congress because with their control of some urban-based unions, they could mobilize popular support of his programs, where in addition, a small number of Communists entered the bureaucracy and became especially visible in the land reform program, they had pushed through Congress while after that, Arbenz had accepted the PGT as a legit part of his ruling coalition, that represented working people. In the lengthy and detailed analysis of the Communist role in Guatemala during the Arbenz years, the evidence proves no doubt that Guatemalan Communists had made substantial political benefits in a half dozen year. They dominated the Guatemalan labor movement and had relatively free access to the influence with the president where influence is one thing, then control is another. It would be difficult to determine by measurable manners whether the Communists “controlled” or “dominated” the Guatemalan government. Chapter 5 Who was Samuel Zemurray?  Samuel Zemurray was the most flamboyant figure in United Fruit’s long history, where he came from a poor farmer family from Bessarabia in Russia that brought him to the United States in 1892, who had worked in 1905 to buy land, build a railroad to the coast and strike a bargain with local authorities that would grant him protection against tax increases and permission to import building materials without paying duty. He was horrified to learn that the Honduran President Miguel Dávila was looking for money to bail his country out of its chronic financial mess and was already in negotiations with a New York bank. Zemurray realized that no New York banker would grant him the one-sided concessions he was pursuing, so he made a deal with one of Dávila’s enemies, a former Honduran leader named Manuel Bonilla who was had been living in exile in the United States. After helping Bonilla by buying a surplus navy ship, Zemurray he personally ferried Bonilla out of New Orleans harbor, slipping past Secret Service boats that tried to prevent such expeditions, and sent the adventurers on their way. Within weeks, Honduras had yet another revolution that made Bonilla President and Zemurray “the Banana Man” that he was holding an agreement that granted him every concession he sought and made it possible with his own courage, together with the extremely favorable conditions he had made it responsible for the rapid growth of his own banana production and export business based around the Honduran town of Cuyamel.

In some ways, the rise of the Unite Fruit Company epitomizes both Latin America’s history during its neocolonial period 1880-1930 and U.S. in the Gilded Age 1870-1910. Explain the how the United Fruit company proves emblematic of both.  United Fruit had for years been the largest employer in Guatemala as well as the largest landowner and exporter, that during the 1930’s, its holdings and power increased even further, that in 1936, the firm signed a ninety-nine-year agreement with General Ubico to open a second plantation, this time on the Pacific coast at Tiqusate. Ubico had granted the company the kind of concessions to which it had become accustomed: total exemption from internal taxation, duty-free importation of all necessary goods and a guarantee of low wages. Ubico had in fact insisted that laborers be paid a daily wage of no more than fifty cents in order to keep other Guatemalan workers from demanding better pay and with...