The Fifties

by David Halberstam

“his idealism coincided with the revolutionary fervor so prevalent in his country.” If his orientation was essentially liberal, the results of his administration were somewhat mixed. There was so far to go: 70 percent of the country (and 90 percent of the Indians) was illiterate when he took office. Yet every move he had made on behalf of ending ignorance and injustice was viewed with growing uneasiness by powerful interests by United Fruit. Particularly suspect were the labor laws borrowed from the New Deal, which sought to improve working conditions and provide some kind of compensation for work-related injuries. Even worse, the new laws gave workers the right to form unions and, if necessary, to strike. To the top executives of United Fruit, accustomed to having their every whim turned into law in Guatemala (and unhappy with Roosevelt’s domestic reforms anyway), the idea of sharing economic power in Central America was unthinkable. Their resistance to reforms, and their belief that the people of Guatemala were not entitled to the same freedoms as the citizens of the United States, eventually embittered Arevalo. In his valedictory speech in March 1951, he had noted with no small amount of scorn the irony of this opposition from “the banana magnates, co-nationals of Roosevelt, [who] rebelled against the audacity of a Central American president who gave to his fellow citizens a legal equality with the honorable families of the exporters ...”