In “Murder as Policy” (April 24), Allan Nairn notes, accurately, that the “real role . . . of all U.S. ambassadors [to Guatemala] since 1954 [has been] to cover for and, in many ways, facilitate American support for a killer army.” Nairn’s report on the capers of one Thomas Stroock, a recent viceroy, is just another horror story in a long sequence which it was my . . . privilege? to see begin not in 1954 but even earlier, in 1946, when, at twenty, a first novel just published, I headed south of the border, ending up in Antigua, Guatemala, where I bought a ruined convent for $2,000 (the convent had been ruined, let me say in all fairness, by earthquake and not by the Guatemalan military or even by the U.S. embassy).
Guatemala was beginning to flourish. The old dictator, Ubico, an American client, had been driven out. A philosophy professor named Arévalo had been elected President in a free election. A democratic socialist or social democrat or whatever, he had brought young people into government, tamed the army, and behaved tactfully with the largest employer in the country, the American company United Fruit.
Easily the most interesting person in—and out—of the town was Mario Monteforte Toledo. Under thirty, he was a thin, energetic intellectual who wrote poetry. He had a wife in the capital and an Indian girlfriend in Antigua, and when he came to visit, he and I would meet and talk, and talk.
Mario was President of the Guatemalan Congress and was regarded by everyone as a future President of the republic. In politics he was vaguely socialist. I, of course, reflecting my family’s politics, was fiercely Tory. We had splendid rows.
Scene: patio of my house. Overhanging it the high wall of the adjacent church of El Carmen. Under a pepper tree, near an ugly square fountain like a horse trough, we would sit and drink beer. He told me the gossip. Then, after a ritual denunciation of the rich and the indifferent, Mario started to talk politics. “We may not last much longer.”
“We . . . who?”
“Our government. At some point we’re going to have to raise revenue. The only place where there is any money to be raised is el pulpo.” El pulpo meant the Octopus, also known as the United Fruit Company, whose annual revenues were twice that of the Guatemalan state. Recently workers had gone on strike; selfishly, they had wanted to be paid $1.50 a day for their interesting work.
“What’s going to stop you from taxing them?” I was naïve. This was long ago and the United States had just become the Leader of the Lucky Free World.
“Your government. Who else? They kept Ubico in power all those years. Now they’re getting ready to replace us.”
I was astonished. I had known vaguely about our numerous past interventions in Central America. But that was past. Why should we bother now? We controlled most of the world. “Why should we care what happens in a small country like this?”
Mario gave me a compassionate look—compassion for my stupidity. “Businessmen. Like the owners of United Fruit. They care. They used to pay for our politicians. They still pay for yours. Why, one of your big senators is on the board of el pulpo.”
I knew something about senators. Which one? Mario was vague. “He has three names. He’s from Boston, I think. . . .”
“Henry Cabot Lodge? I don’t believe it.” Lodge was a family friend; as a boy I had discussed poetry with him—he was a poet’s son. Years later, as Kennedy’s Ambassador to Vietnam, he would preside over the murder of the Diem brothers.
As we drank beer and the light faded, Mario described the trap that a small country like Guatemala was in. I can’t say that I took him very seriously. With all the world, except the satanic Soviet Union, under our control it was hardly in our national interest to overthrow a democratic neighbor, no matter how much its government irritated the board of directors of United Fruit. But in those days I was not aware to what extent big business controlled the government of our own rapidly expiring Republic. Now, of course, everyone knows to what extent our subsequent empire, with its militarized economy, controls business. The end result is much the same for the rest of the world, only the killing fields are more vast than before and we make mischief not just with weak neighbors but on every continent.
Mario had given me the idea for a novel. A dictator (like Ubico) returns from an American exile as the Octopus’s candidate to regain power. I would tell the story through the eyes of a young American war veteran (like myself) who joins the general out of friendship for his son. The more I brooded on the story, the more complexities were revealed. Dark Green, Bright Red. The Greens, father and son, were the Company, and dark figures indeed, haunting the green jungles. Bright Red was not only blood but the possibility of a communist taking power.
“No novel about—or from—Latin America has ever been a success in English.” As of 1950, my publisher was right.
Four years after the book was published, Senator Lodge denounced Arévalo’s popularly elected successor, Arbenz, as a communist because, in June 1952, Arévalo had ordered the expropriation of some of United Fruit’s unused land, which he gave to 100,000 Guatemalan families. Arévalo paid the company what he thought was a fair price, their own evaluation of the land for tax purposes. The American Empire went into action, and through the CIA, it put together an army and bombed Guatemala City. U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy behaved rather like Mr. Green in the novel. Arbenz resigned. Peurifoy wanted the Guatemalan army’s chief of staff to become President, and gave him a list of “communists” to be shot. The chief of staff declined: “It would be better,” he said, “that you actually sit in the presidential chair and that the Stars and Stripes fly over the palace.”
Puerifoy picked another military man to represent the interests of company and empire. Since then, Guatemala has been a slaughterground, very bright red indeed against the darkest imperial green. Later, it was discovered that Arbenz had no communist connections, but the “disinformation” had been so thorough that few Americans knew to what extent they had been lied to by a government that had now put itself above law and, rather worse, beyond reason.
Incidentally, I note that the disinformation still goes on. In the April 9 New York Times (a “recovering” newspaper in recent years), one Clifford Krauss airily says that Guatemala’s Indians have been regularly screwed for four hundred years, so what else is new? He gives a tendentious history of the country—purest Langley boilerplate, circa 1955—but omits the crucial 1931–44 dictatorship of Jorge Ubico.
I must say I find it disconcerting to read in 1995 that “by surrounding himself with Communist Party advisers, accepting arms from Czechoslovakia and building a port to compete with United Fruit’s facilities, Arbenz challenged the United States at the height of the cold war.” God, to think that such evil ever walked the Central American night! “President Eisenhower’s CIA organized a Guatemalan [sic] invasion force and bombed Guatemala City in 1954.”
Dark Green, Bright Red was just reissued in England. Reviewing it in the Evening Standard, the journalist Patrick Skene Catling writes, “I wish I had read this prophetic work of fiction before my first visit to Guatemala in 1954. Gore Vidal would have helped me to understand how John Peurifoy . . . was able to take me up to the roof of his embassy to watch . . . the air raids without anxiety, because he and the CIA knew exactly where the bombs were going to fall.
A final note—of bemusement, I suppose. I was at school with Nathaniel Davis, who was our ambassador in Chile at the time of Allende’s overthrow. A couple of years later Davis was Ambassador to Switzerland and we had lunch at the Berne embassy. I expressed outrage at our country’s role in the matter of Chile. Davis “explained” his role. Then he asked, “Do you take the line that the United States should never intervene in the affairs of another country?” I said that unless an invasion was being mounted against us in Mexico, no, we should never intervene. Davis, a thoughtful man, thought; then he said, “Well, it would be nice in diplomacy, or in life, if one could ever start from a point of innocence.” To which I suppose the only answer is to say—Go! Plunge ever deeper, commit more crimes to erase those already committed, and repeat with Macbeth, “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
The Nation
June 5, 1995