Charlie Clements Reflects on Guatemala, Past and Present

Written by Charlie Clements, who is currently in Guatemala with a delegation from UUSC.

Yesterday, a Mayan professor named Jose Antonio Coq told us about the great hopes of his people, perhaps the greatest in five centuries of oppression, during this decade of reform. As Jose Antonio spoke to our UUSC delegation, I thought about Phil Roettinger, a retired U.S. Marine Corps Colonel who survived World War II and then responded to a call from the CIA.

It must have been sometime in 1985, because I had not yet come to work at UUSC as director of human rights education. A tall man walked into my office in Washington, D.C. The first words out of his mouth were, “I’m spoiling for another fight.” We couldn’t help but notice his large U.S. Marine Corps belt buckle.

I was an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in Central America, and I received a lot of crank phone calls and even occasional death threats. We had procedures to deal with guys like this, and my staff signaled there might be trouble in our midst.

It turns out the fight he was spoiling far was with the U.S. government. As he now explained, he wanted to change sides. Our jaws dropped as he told us that he was the man who led the CIA force that overthrew the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He said he felt guilty about the decades of bloody military rule that followed, and he sensed the same thing was happening in Nicaragua with the CIA-backed contras and he wanted to be on the right side of history this time.

My staff and I sat down with Phil Roettinger that day and helped him write an op-ed piece that was quickly published after the Washington Post verified his authenticity. Though Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger would later publish Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, which reinforced Phil’s saga with declassified documents, to my knowledge it was the first time anyone directly involved with that covert action had blown the CIA cover that this was a Guatemalan military insurrection.

Few North Americans, as we are called anywhere south of Texas, know much about the hopeful transformation in Guatemala from 1944 to 1954. It followed 14 years of tyrannical rule by a dictator named Jorge Ubico. Ubico fancied himself a reincarnation of Napoleon and used the military to unleash waves of repression, particularly when it was time to be reelected. He was allied with large landowners like the United Fruit Company, who complained to him that they couldn’t get sufficient Mayan peasants to work on the coffee, banana, and cotton plantations. So he passed a vagrancy law, which stipulated that all landless peasants were required to work 150 days a year on plantations, and if they weren’t needed there they could build roads or other public works projects.

Most Mayans had already lost their right to communally owned land under another dictator named Rufino Barrios. Barrios began taking over lands farmed communally by Mayan villages so that they could be planted in the new gold rush of coffee production. Land that had been communally owned for hundreds of years passed into the hands of agribusiness.

Following a popular revolt that forced Ubico to leave the country, a teacher named Juan Jose Arevalo was elected. He immediately established a wide-reaching literacy program. Then he not only abolished the vagrancy law, but established a labor code in 1947 that granted the rights of workers to organize unions and strike.

His successor, Jacobo Arbenz, who ran on a similar platform of reform, passed a land reform bill in 1952 that transferred almost 900,000 hectares (about 22 million acres) to 100,000 peasant families. It was the first time since the Spanish conquest that anyone had done anything but take from the indigenous population.

No wonder that in Guatemala this period of reform from 1944 to 1954 was called “spiritual socialism.” But, of course, Arevalo and Arbenz were direct threats to both big business interests and large landowners. The largest landowner in Guatemala was the United Fruit Company, which lost half of its property because only 15 percent of it was cultivated. Though by no means a communist, when Arbenz legalized the Communist Party and four of its members were elected to the legislature, that was the beginning of the end for Arbenz and the period of reform.

Allen Dulles, in addition to being new director of the CIA, also served on the board of directors of United Fruit. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was President Eisenhower’s secretary of state. The two soon convinced President Eisenhower to approve plans for the CIA to train a small force that would invade Guatemala and, with the support of U.S.-piloted aircraft strafing and bombing the capital, create enough chaos and fear to enable the Guatemalan military to seize control of the government. Phil Roettinger led that rag-tag group of exiles and mercenaries that would be called by Arbenz “the Fruit Company expeditionary force.”

Phil Roettinger believed them when he was told he would be saving the United States from a “communist beachhead in our own backyard.” Little did he know his actions would usher in four decades of mayhem and murder in which more than 200,000 Guatemalans would die, most of them Mayans, at the hands of the military and death squads. He held onto that bloody secret for 30 years, and finally his conscience demanded he break the silence.