Harsh Times

by Mario Vargas Llosa

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country … it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically.” Bernays would apply this thesis, which certain critics considered the very negation of democracy itself, with great effectiveness in Guatemala a decade after beginning work as public relations consultant for United Fruit.

“Few people in Guatemala know what Marxism or communism are, even among the stray elements calling themselves communists who founded the Escuela Claridad to disseminate revolutionary ideas. The danger isn’t real, but it is convenient for us that people believe it exists, above all in the United States. The real danger is another one. I have spoken with President Arévalo and his closest advisers in person. He is as anticommunist as you and I. Proof is that the president and his supporters have insisted that the new Constitution of Guatemala forbid the existence of political parties with international connections. They’ve declared on numerous occasions that ‘communism is the greatest threat faced by democracy,’ and they closed down the aforementioned Escuela Claridad and deported its founders. And yet, contradictory as it may seem to you, Arévalo’s boundless love for democracy represents a serious threat for United Fruit. This, gentlemen, is something good for you to know, but not to say aloud.”

“Arévalo would like to make Guatemala a democracy like the United States, a country he admires and considers a model. Dreamers are dangerous, and it is in this sense that Dr. Arévalo is dangerous. His project has not the least chance of being realized. How can you turn a country of three million inhabitants, most of them illiterate Indians who have just emerged from paganism or are still in the grips of it, where there must be three or four shamans for every doctor—how can you turn such a place into a modern democracy? A place where, moreover, a white minority made up of racist landowners and speculators detests the Indians and treats them like slaves.

“Let me give you a few examples. Arévalo has approved a labor law that permits the formation of unions in businesses and farms and allows workers and peasants to join. And he has drafted an antimonopoly law based on already existing legislation in the United States. You can imagine what a measure to ensure equal competition would mean for United Fruit: if it didn’t ruin us completely, at the least we’d be looking at a major decline in revenues. Our profits are not just the result of our hard work, our commitment, the money we spend to prevent diseases, or the forest we clear to plant more banana trees. They also come from our monopoly, which keeps competitors away from our territories, and the privileged conditions we work under, with no taxes, no unions, none of the risks and dangers those things imply.

It is the contagion spreading to other countries in Central America and to Colombia if this idea of becoming a ‘modern democracy’ were to catch on there. United Fruit would be forced to deal with unions and international competition, to pay taxes, to guarantee health insurance and offer retirement plans for workers and their families, and it would be subject to the hatred and envy prosperous, well-run companies inevitably arouse in poor countries—especially if they’re American. The danger, gentlemen, lies in setting a bad example. Not so much communism as democracy in Guatemala.

General Jorge Ubico Castañeda remained thirteen years in power, until 1944. Prior to the Second World War, he had shown clear sympathy for Hitler and the Nazis. He recognized Franco’s government in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, and more than once he had attended gatherings held by the Falangists in their blue uniforms, throwing up the fascist salute, in front of the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala.

With Truman in power, it had been impossible to convince the gringos that military action alone—action of the kind that the CIA had undertaken in Iran not long before, to liquidate Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh’s regime—would put an end to the communists’ growing influence in Guatemala. But at last, thanks largely to the new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and his brother, the new CIA head, Allen Dulles, both former representatives of United Fruit, the North Americans had decided to give the armed invasion the support Castillo Armas had sought ever since he’d escaped from the dank, decrepit Central Penitentiary of Guatemala into exile in Honduras.

But Washington! Was this the democracy the gringos wanted for Latin America? Was this the democracy Roosevelt had imagined with his Good Neighbor Policy for Latin America? A military dictatorship at the service of a handful of greedy, racist latifundistas and a big Yankee conglomerate? Was that why the sulfates had bombed Guatemala City, killing and wounding dozens of innocents?

Dr. García Ardiles had a clipping of the speech Nixon had delivered at a state dinner saluting the brave soldier who had led his country’s uprising against a corrupt and mendacious communist dictatorship. What uprising? Who were the people who had risen up? Castillo Armas had appeared before Congress in Washington, and the senators and representatives had applauded him uproariously in a joint session.

Was history nothing more than this fantastical repudiation of reality? The conversion into myth and fiction of real, concrete events? Was that the history we read and studied? The heroes we admired? A mass of lies made truth through vast conspiracies of the powerful against poor devils like him and Hatchet Face? Was that band of masqueraders the heroes the people revered?

The closures of the union halls and Agrarian Reform offices that had opened in all the villages were carried out in a hail of bullets, with the imprisonment of whoever was found inside at the time; there were blacklists with names supplied by anonymous informants. Many of those arrested, humble persons without influence or allies, were tortured, often to death, their bodies buried or burned and their families never told of their end. Panic seeped into every crack in Guatemalan society, particularly among those without means, and violent excesses went beyond any horror ever before seen.

Not since the era of the Inquisition had political repression in Guatemala taken the form of burnings of pernicious and subversive documents, which occurred now on the military bases and in the public squares. Pamphlets, flyers, newspapers, magazines, and books—from an inscrutable selection of authors that included Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky—smoldered on bonfires around which children danced as if celebrating Saint John’s Eve.