Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

By 1952, the president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, only the second democratically elected president in the country’s history, was trying to get United Fruit to pay taxes on its vast holdings. Not only had the company been exempt for decades; it had also secured a guarantee to pay its employees no more than fifty cents a day. In response, United Fruit unleashed a relentless lobbying campaign to persuade journalists, lawmakers, and the US government that Árbenz was a Communist sympathizer who needed to be overthrown. It didn’t matter that in a country of some three million people, the Communist Party had only about four thousand members. The start of the Cold War made American officials into easy marks. “We should regard Guatemala as a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism,” a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s National Security Council said, in 1953.