‘For the first time in the memory of Nicaraguans, the government in power, both President and Congress, is known to represent the freely manifested will of the Nicaraguan people.’ Such, at least, was the State Department's evaluation of the Marine-supervised 1932 election in Nicaragua that brought Juan Bautista Sacasa to power. Following the election, the marines withdrew from Nicaragua and the report announced victoriously that: ‘[t]he present generation of Nicaraguans are initiating what is to them a new experiment in self-government’. Although local rivalries still presented an obstacle to the ‘valiant and sincere attempt [of Nicaraguans] to govern themselves’, at least they had the benefit of the ‘impartial and restraining assistance of the American Legation’.
The report's optimistic tone reflects the Department's confidence that a decade of US intervention in support of constitutional government in Central America had produced political stability along nominally democratic lines. It enumerates other recent successes such as the election of Tiburcio Carías Andino, which represented ‘a tribute to the political progress which Honduras had made in the past decade’. It featured ‘the development of true institutions’ and ‘the elimination of the influence of the chronic revolutionary type’. In Guatemala, President Jorge Ubico y Castañeda had ‘fulfilled his promise to give Guatemala an improved administration’. Since Costa Rica continued its tradition of liberal politics, the only real concern in Central America was El Salvador, where a military coup had recently replaced the elected president, Arturo Araujo, with General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez.Footnote 1
Based on the assessments of US legations in the region, this report was produced for the benefit of the Department's delegation to the inter-American conference at Montevideo in 1933, where it approved (with reservations) the Convention on Rights and Duties of States, banning intervention in the affairs of other states. It is ironic that Washington associated its withdrawal from intervention with the presumed success of its pro-constitutional interventions of the previous decade. In 1936 Anastasio Somoza García, the chief of the US-trained Guardia Nacional, toppled Sacasa and established a military dictatorship in Nicaragua. This event echoed contemporary developments in neighbouring republics, where Ubico, Carías and Martínez also established authoritarian regimes. In contrast to the State Department's evaluation, therefore, the literature on US-Central American relations connects withdrawal from intervention with the emergence of dictatorship in the 1930s.
A significant body of work focuses on the relationship between US military occupation of Caribbean and Central American protectorates throughout the 1920s and early 1930s and the rise of dictatorship thereafter.Footnote 2 Michel Gobat shows that through the supervision of the 1932 Nicaraguan elections, praised so highly in the report quoted above, Washington sought ‘to safeguard its hegemony by having the U. S. military impose on Nicaragua its version of democratic order based on “free and fair elections”’. And while the United States was moderately successful at preventing fraud and stimulating voter turnout, the long-term effect of its reliance on the Marine Corps and the Guardia Nacional to organise elections and fight the ‘rebellion’ of Augusto Sandino was to militarise Nicaraguan society and, inadvertently, of ‘paving the way for [the] authoritarian rule’ of Anastasio Somoza.Footnote 3
But while the US role in the rise of Somoza may have been inadvertent, Washington ultimately accepted the rise of dictatorships in Central America and even established close working relationships with them, especially during World War II.Footnote 4 On this point, the literature does not offer a uniform picture. Some authors suggest that the dictators were straightforwardly adopted into the US system of dominance. Walter LaFeber argues that ‘[d]eals were easily struck’ between the State Department and Central American dictators, because the former desired stability while the latter needed political recognition and access to US money markets: ‘[t]he United States thus accepted, and soon welcomed, dictatorships in Central America because it turned out that such rulers could most cheaply uphold order’.Footnote 5 Others suggest that the United States only grudgingly accepted the emergent dictators. Thomas Leonard states that: ‘the United States had no alternative except to watch these events unfold. Having abandoned its interventionist practices, Washington could not support the political factions opposed to the dictators'.Footnote 6
The current article seeks to enhance our understanding of the process whereby the United States moved from an interventionist policy of promoting elections to a non-interventionist policy that eventually led to the acceptance of local dictatorships. While the literature focuses predominantly on military occupation and Nicaragua, this text focuses on US diplomatic involvement in the early 1930s presidential elections in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The significance of these elections is in their timing, as they occurred while the State Department was still supporting elections while it was reconsidering its reliance on military intervention. These policy preferences did not, in and of themselves, determine the outcome of the elections or Washington's embrace of the victors. Rather, this article will show how the policies of Washington enabled and constrained the role that the US Foreign Service officers played in the elections, while it offered opportunities to local actors to shape the impact of Washington's policies.Footnote 7 This complex interaction ultimately explains the apparent ambiguity in the US attitude toward the emergent dictators. As Washington withdrew from military intervention, US diplomats welcomed the social and political programmes of local allies while they maintained their confidence in the policy of promoting elections.
This article demonstrates that the outcomes of US policy were shaped not only by the plans of Washington policy-makers, but also by the culture of the Foreign Service and by the latter's encounter with foreign actors. As such, it is based mainly on Record Group 84, the records of the Foreign Service of the State Department at the National Archives in Maryland.Footnote 8 While these records are vast and rarely quoted in the literature, they present obvious limits: for the Central American side of the story this article relies mainly on secondary works. In the conclusion, the outcomes of archival and literature research are combined to argue that the 1930 election victory of Jorge Ubico, the new Guatemalan president, represents the practices, ambitions, and, yes, limits of US policy as its outcomes were shaped by different actors in multiple countries.
US Diplomacy and Central American Politics in the Early 1930s
President Hoover's State Department had two important policy objectives in Central America that would frame US involvement in elections in the early 1930s. First, it intended to maintain stability through its informal support for the Central American Treaty of Peace and Amity of 1923. Negotiated between the isthmian countries under the Department's supervision, the Treaty's main purpose was to prevent revolution by denying diplomatic recognition to governments that came to power through unconstitutional means. Secretary of State Henry Stimson explained his Department's view of the Treaty when he wrote to the US minister to Guatemala, Sheldon Whitehouse, that ‘[a]s a result of the 1907 and 1923 Treaties revolutions have decreased and not a single case of general Central American war has occurred since 1907. The positive gain for Central America in the way of progress has thus been indisputable’.Footnote 9 While the Department was not a signatory to the Treaty, it acted as its enforcer by employing the non-recognition strategy when the Treaty was violated.Footnote 10
The Department's second objective was to reduce US military intervention: only when US citizens were in immediate danger would it consider calling on the help of the Navy. Already in 1928, then president-elect Herbert Hoover had promised to halt the deployment of troops to Latin America. During the years following, incentives for US policy-makers to discontinue military intervention only became more compelling. As in the case of Nicaragua, intervention sometimes required costly occupation and police duty and was correspondingly unpopular with the budget-minded Congress of the Depression era. And while US public opinion turned against the interventions as part of the larger movement against imperialism, it also met with resistance from within the occupied territories and from other Latin American states. High officials in the State Department began to wonder whether it was worthwhile to maintain a costly interventionist policy in Central America that might endanger US relations with the entire hemisphere.Footnote 11
As the Department was considering its position on intervention, the Great Depression hit Central America. Guatemala and El Salvador, two major coffee exporters, had benefited from the high price of coffee throughout the 1920s, years of comparative wealth and social stability characterised by limited liberalisation of the political climate. However, when global markets contracted after the Wall Street crash of 1929, world demand for coffee plummeted and the consequent drop in prices severely affected the two nations. Decline in coffee exports and production affected imports, internal commerce, the transport sector, and government income, the latter being highly dependent on taxes on coffee. Unemployment and declining wages among coffee plantation workers led to social unrest while the governments' inability to meet payrolls caused dissatisfaction among its employees, including military officers. The contracting economy, unstable social situation, and decline in government budgets put great pressure on the liberal oligarchy: a network of coffee elites that justified its dominance of government and society through the assertion of racial superiority over the masses of indigenous workers and the wealth generated by export agriculture.Footnote 12
Since Honduras had no coffee industry to speak of at the time, the situation in that country was different from that of El Salvador or Guatemala. The Honduran economy was dominated by the production and export of bananas, which US companies in turn dominated. These companies managed to delay the effects of contracting world markets through their control of shipment to the United States: the companies administered the export prices of bananas. While Honduras did suffer from political turmoil throughout the 1920s, this was because control over the state was the only secure means of income to local elites, leading to decades of political battles and a full-scale civil war following the presidential elections of 1923. Rival banana companies aggravated the fighting by financially supporting opposing forces while their own plantations on the North Coast were generally insulated against the violence by the threat of US intervention. Near-constant warfare disrupted production and commerce in the non-banana producing regions and depleted public finances. By the early 1930s therefore, Hondurans were more concerned about peace and order than about the Great Depression.Footnote 13
Around 1930, then, Foreign Service officers in Central America had to deal with various pressures. On the one hand, they were under instruction from the State Department to promote political stability, as defined in the Treaty of 1923, without the support of military intervention (as will be seen, though, interference in local politics through informal forms of pressure was not a target of departmental censure).Footnote 14 On the other hand, the countries to which they were accredited were dealing with serious social and economic problems that had the potential of endangering political stability. Since the Department only interfered with legation business when it perceived a direct threat to its policy, US diplomats had to rely to some extent on their own judgement in creating an environment that would be beneficial to US interests. Those judgements were formed against the background of personal preferences, Foreign Service culture and careerism, and, of course, local conditions.
During the early 1930s, the US legations were staffed by Sheldon Whitehouse (Guatemala), Warren Delano Robbins (El Salvador) and Julius Gareche Lay (Honduras). All were career officers who had entered diplomatic life around the turn of the century and, by the late 1920s, were considered experienced enough to be appointed to the rank of minister. All three served their first tour as chief of mission in Central America: Robbins was appointed to El Salvador in 1929, Lay to Honduras in 1930 and Whitehouse to Guatemala in the same year. Patterns of appointment to the Central American missions suggest that the State Department regarded the region as a testing ground for its junior career ministers.Footnote 15 Indeed, the personal letters that US ministers in the region exchanged with each other clearly indicate that they were not impressed with the status or social milieu of their posts and hoped to be promoted to more prestigious positions quickly.Footnote 16
The missions the new ministers encountered upon their arrival were very small when compared to contemporary missions in the larger European nations. During the 1930s, the missions in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras consisted of a minister, a secretary and one or two clerks. These posts were at the centre of a network of information that tended to be limited to the capital and biased to the interests of US companies and local elites. There was the circle of US diplomatic officers that included consular officers and, in the case of Guatemala, a military and navy attaché. Beyond that, there was the so-called ‘American colony’ that was itself part of a larger community of expats from around the world. Outside the expat community, the US ministers relied on a fairly small circle of Central American acquaintances and contacts. Whenever the ministers discussed political matters with Central Americans, they tended to be their social or professional equals: high government officials and military officers and members of the local aristocracy.Footnote 17
The diplomatic reports produced by Whitehouse, Robbins and Lay's legations suggest that their worldview overlapped with that of local elites in significant ways. Stereotyped and racialised views of the predominantly Indian population of peasants and rural workers formed a structural element in the ideology of Central American ruling families.Footnote 18 US diplomats appear to have shared perceptions of the rural populations that tended to justify conservative social policies and elite rule. The legation in Guatemala reported, for example, that Guatemalans were a ‘very submissive people’. Indian peasants tended to be satisfied with their primitive living conditions unless incited by ‘strong men’ and, happily, such men did not currently exist in Guatemala. The legation in El Salvador confirmed that when left to his own devices, the so-called mozo (a disparaging term for indigenous peasants) did not desire change. The legation in Tegucigalpa regularly described the Honduran as mentally impaired, prone to drinking and vindictive. Lay himself opined that the Honduran Indian was a ‘very low type of Indian’.Footnote 19
The legations' perceptions of the Indian populations' passivity and lack of desire for change are especially remarkable since reports of rural unrest caused by economic dislocation did reach the legations throughout the early 1930s.Footnote 20 However, US diplomats took their cue from local elites in reporting that unemployment was unnecessary and that social unrest was incited by ‘professional troublemakers’. Secretary of legation in Guatemala William McCafferty, for example, agreed with ‘many people’ in the capital who believed that the newly founded Partido Cooperatista, which was making appeals to the agrarian population in ‘high sounding phrases’, was nothing more than an effort to ‘encourage radicalism and communism’. Robbins believed that work should always be obtainable in industrious El Salvador and that ‘nobody need go hungry for it is easily possible to live on the country without money’. The wealthy landowner James Hill further convinced him that there was really no excuse for the existing unemployment, since he had been unable to find 200 additional workers for his properties. Thus, the minister claimed, unemployment, hunger and poverty were caused by ‘a want of desire to work’.Footnote 21
Despite a shared interpretation of events on the countryside, US diplomats were highly critical of the local elite's handling of the economic crisis and they perceived a need for US guidance. Whitehouse felt that the president of Guatemala, Lázaro Chacón Gónzalez, had ‘none of the qualities of a president’, because his ‘intelligence is so limited that he is unable to understand anything of the problems of Government’. The president allowed cabinet ministers to intrigue against him and oppositionists to deadlock the work of the National Assembly. The only thing that could save the president, according to the minister, was ‘unexpected firmness’. In the context of Central Americans' own failings, Whitehouse emphasised that US policy of discouraging revolutions and promoting constitutional procedures definitely had a ‘moral benefit to Central America’. Lay felt that President Vicente Mejía Colindres was ‘amiable’ but ‘weak’ and believed that Hondurans needed and appreciated North American guidance, asserting that ‘Hondurans on the North Coast have the most pleasant and friendly recollections of the visits of our Marines to this country’.Footnote 22
Within a departmental policy framework based on the Treaty of 1923, US ministers would aggressively promote fair elections in Central America, because they believed that the current leadership was ineffective while North American guidance benefited the region. However, they would focus on the procedure rather than the substance of elections and on the letter rather than the spirit of local constitutions and relevant treaty obligations, because they accepted, or at least did not fundamentally challenge, existing class and race relations. As will be further developed below, their very pro-active attitude toward the success of local elections was further inspired by their desire to advertise themselves to the State Department. However, since Washington was slowly but surely moving toward a policy of military non-intervention, Foreign Service officers in Central America were forced to seek local allies who shared their elitist view of politics and benign estimate of US influence.
The Elections of Ubico, Carías and Araujo
The presidential elections that took place in El Salvador (1931) and Honduras (1932) are recognised as some of the fairest that those countries ever witnessed.Footnote 23 The election of Jorge Ubico in Guatemala (1931), however, was unusual because he was the only candidate.Footnote 24 While US involvement in the election of Ubico has been described in some detail elsewhere, a brief overview of the main events will serve to illustrate important similarities with contemporary developments in Honduras and El Salvador and will also form the basis of a further discussion of Minister Whitehouse's actions. The run-up to the presidential elections in Guatemala was interrupted in December 1930 when General Manuel Orellana used the temporary incapacity of President Chacón to lead a coup d’état. The US legation and the State Department quickly agreed that Orellana's presidency could not be recognised in the light of the 1923 Treaty. It was up to Minister Whitehouse hastily to put together a plan to have a new provisional government organise elections. He told Orellana that Washington's decision not to recognise him was ‘final’ and that further discussions were ‘futile’. Orellana decided to go along because he was short of money and possibly feared US intervention. In reality, however, the Department had rejected the legation's calls for navy assistance: chargé d'affaires William McCafferty had requested the presence of a war vessel during the revolution and Minister Whitehouse later issued a similar request to ‘strengthen the provisional government’ that had been put together through his interference. However, Secretary Stimson was not convinced that the lives of US citizens were endangered and could not perceive any other ‘compelling reason’ to grant the legation's requests.
Despite the Department's rebuff, Whitehouse applied such informal influence as he had in favour of elections. He believed the US should not content itself with ‘a sham’ of an election, but conformity to democratic form was the best that could be achieved during the 1931 elections. In the eyes of many Guatemalans, former collaborators of Chacón were discredited by the corruption of that regime. Whitehouse told members of the revolutionary forces under Orellana that they were barred from the elections because of the 1923 Treaty. Of the remaining political factions, only one managed to field a candidate in time. The latter was Jorge Ubico whose election, in the absence of real opponents, was a foregone conclusion. Ubico did seem to fear illegal interference from his enemies, because he cultivated the legation's interest in constitutional procedures. In a personal conversation, Ubico told chargé McCafferty that, in his opinion, the only remedy to corrupt and unpopular government was ‘the supervising of elections in Guatemala by the United States as has been done in Nicaragua’. It seems that Whitehouse did not seriously consider the proposal. Despite the lack of competition in the elections, he was satisfied that Ubico was the choice of ‘the great majority’ anyway.Footnote 25
While Ubico ran for the presidency unopposed, the situation in El Salvador was becoming critical. President Pío Romero Bosque, who was supposedly a puppet of the Quiñónez-Meléndez dynasty, turned against his former protectors and announced that free elections would be organised when his term ended in 1931.Footnote 26 The impact of the Great Depression ensured that ‘social unrest, hunger, desperation, strikes, communist propaganda, and the apparent collapse of law and order’ framed the elections on the countryside.Footnote 27 Minister Robbins, however, focused on the presidential palace and he was carefully optimistic that El Salvador might indeed have a ‘semblance’ of free elections. Since he believed that each presidential hopeful was equally bad, he decided on a policy of not ‘showing favouritism for any candidate’, although he would exert himself to eliminate what he believed would be the major obstacles to fair elections: a change of heart in Romero Bosque or a military revolt.Footnote 28
Robbins requested navy assistance to prevent a military rebellion in El Salvador, but was quickly disappointed by his superiors. Undaunted, he changed tactics, now opting for diplomacy over gunboats. The minister made the most of the situation in Guatemala, where Whitehouse was elbowing out Orellana, by publicising Washington's adherence to the 1923 Treaty in the neighbouring republic, hoping that this would discourage plots against the government. In January, Robbins surmised that the example of Washington's policy toward Guatemala was indeed of great help, since the Salvadorean military clique would doubtlessly have undertaken a coup if Orellana had been recognised. Robbins's remaining concern was that Romero Bosque would reverse course and ‘railroad through’ his own candidate at the last moment. One week before the elections, therefore, Robbins got involved personally ‘and in very strong terms urged [Romero Bosque] to do his utmost to have constitutional elections’.Footnote 29 Robbins had obviously underestimated Romero Bosque. Together with a group of loyal bureaucrats, the president had worked relentlessly for some years to change elections from ‘objects of patronage to expressions of popular will’. The 1931 election was to be his crowning achievement.Footnote 30
In the end, Arturo Araujo won a plurality of votes in a race that was dominated by the candidatures of wealthy landowners and military leaders.Footnote 31 Araujo was a wealthy landowner too, but his politics were very different from those of the liberal oligarchy. He had developed a sincere admiration for the British Labour Party during his education in England and in El Salvador he established a reputation as a progressive through his opposition to President Jorge Meléndez. During his presidential campaign in 1931, he was the candidate for the ad hoc Partido Laborista Salvadoreño and was supported by leftist unions and intellectuals, including Alberto Masferrer, El Salvador's foremost reformer and intellectual. Members of El Salvador's oligarchy accused Masferrer of promoting Bolshevism, but, in fact, his ideas were more closely related to Fabian and utopian socialism. In their political manifestations, his ideas proposed a ‘vital minimum’ of honest work, free primary education and safe food and drinking water (among others) for vulnerable groups such as workers, peasants and women. Masferrer's political ideas were an integral part of Araujo's campaign platform.Footnote 32
Araujo's plurality is an indication of the popularity of this platform, but it did not seal the election. The Salvadorean constitution established that when no candidate could garner a majority, the National Assembly would choose a winner from the top three candidates. Happily, Araujo and his allies also secured 39 out of 42 seats in El Salvador's Assembly (the elections for national deputies had occurred at the same time as the presidential elections). But the number two candidate, Alberto Gómez Zarate, who had the support of the wealthiest families in El Salvador, was not ready to surrender. He and his financial backers gathered an army more fearsome than El Salvador's military forces: a team of lawyers who would dispute the procedures of the election.Footnote 33
Faced with this challenge to his imminent victory, Araujo anxiously told Minister Robbins that he could not vouch for the behaviour of his supporters if the outcome of the elections was contested. Even though Robbins disliked Araujo's implied threats, he was concerned that El Salvador's first truly popular elections would end in civil strife. Thus the minister stepped in and made it clear to the Zaratistas that he would regard their intervention as a ‘disaster’ and that they should ‘try and get together with Araujo’. Robbins was convinced that his intervention was effective and he reported that, on 12 February, the National Assembly unanimously elected Araujo president without interference from his opponents.Footnote 34
Meanwhile, in Honduras, President Mejía Colindres was under pressure from both the National Party and a rival group in his own Liberal Party to organise free elections in 1932. Minister Julius Lay was determined to make sure that whoever won the elections did so by means of ‘votes rather than bullets’. This was a fair representation of the State Department's policy of abiding by the 1923 Treaty. However, Lay's view of his role in bringing about a peaceful election was an activists' one. In Lay's opinion, Mejía Colindres was unable to control the parties during the campaign. Thus, the minister decided that the legation should be guarantor of untrammelled elections.Footnote 35
Angel Zúñiga Huete, the Liberal candidate, and Tiburcio Carías Andino, the National contender, were regular guests of the legation. Doubtlessly, they wanted to manipulate its interpretation of the race, but they were in no position to ignore Lay's counsel. Gaining the legation's support (or at least neutrality) must have been especially important to these Honduran politicians due their personal experience of US intervention. In 1923, when Zúñiga Huete was minister of government and Carías a candidate for the presidency, an undecided election had escalated into full-scale civil war. Washington sent marines to Honduras to protect US interests and end the fighting. Special envoy Sumner Welles brokered a deal between the warring parties that included new elections. The problem for Carías was that the deal also barred participants in the civil war, such as himself, from running in the elections. He accepted the deal, however, and during the 1932 race, both he and his Liberal opponent seemed to regard the US legation and the State Department as a valuable constituency. According to Lay, Zúñiga Huete worked hard to ingratiate himself with the legation and Carías even asked the minister to forward a statement on his foreign policies to the State Department.Footnote 36 Such concerns on the Honduran side gave Lay some of the leverage he needed to realise his vision of fair elections.
Lay's involvement in the elections ranged from his insistence that the candidates publish a statement on their peaceful intentions to an active role in the containment of a North Coast uprising. Legation secretary Laurence Higgins also believed that he played an ‘instrumental’ role in the elections because he prevented, according to his own reports, the establishment of general martial law, which Mejía Colindres thought necessary to fight the North Coast uprising. Also, the secretary cajoled the president into decreeing a general disarmament of the population, which, in Higgins's terms, would have a benign effect on the country's stability. As the campaigning season neared its climax and both parties seemed ready for a fight, Lay managed to convince both Carías and Zúñiga Huete to instruct their followers to ensure a free election. To Lay's regret, however, neither candidate included a call to also accept the outcome of the election.Footnote 37
In the end, the elections proceeded smoothly and to Lay's considerable astonishment, Carías won by a large margin. The latter led an efficient patronage network from his farm in Zambrano; was supported by the United Fruit Company; and dominated the municipalities and Congress through his National Party, which had enjoyed majorities in both institutions since the 1928 election. The Liberal Party, on the other hand, was still recuperating from losses sustained during the civil war of 1923. With the National Party in control of Congress, there was no (legal) way that the Liberals could prevent the inauguration of Carías as the new president. Faced with utter defeat in the elections, Zúñiga Huete had no choice but to accept the outcome and, to Lay's relief, he told his followers to do likewise.Footnote 38
What role Zúñiga Huete played in the following events is not entirely clear, but it is certain that Liberal military leaders refused to submit and started a nationwide revolt two weeks after the elections. Feeling betrayed, Minister Lay got to work to prevent the Liberals from snatching defeat from the jaws of his recent democratic victory. The legation immediately instructed the president to work with the National militias and may have been instrumental in brokering a deal between Carías and Mejía Colindres to fight the rebels. Also, Lay pressed the State Department to send weapons to Honduras to protect the constitutional government, arguing that ‘timely foreign aid (such as supplying arms to the Government) in suppressing the rebellion would be greatly preferable to letting things drift until the presence of foreign armed forces on Honduran soil might become necessary’. The State Department, however, thought it ‘much sounder on the whole that we should keep out of such transactions’.Footnote 39
Aside from his unsuccessful lobby for arms, Lay was deeply involved in the coordination of the military campaign against the Liberals. Apparently without the State Department's knowledge or concurrence, Lay urged his colleagues in Guatemala City and Managua to negotiate a deal whereby the Honduran government would intern political exiles from Guatemala and Nicaragua if the governments in those countries would control the movements of Honduran revolutionaries within their borders in return (Honduran insurgent troops made free use of the uncontrolled borderlands between Honduras and its neighbours). Acting in line with general US policy, Lay also asked Whitehouse to make sure that Ubico did not provide his Liberal brethren in Honduras with arms. While Lay never explicitly admitted that he was in any way involved in the defence of the constituted authorities in Honduras, his reports during the revolt suggest that the leaders of the National militias, Carías and his running-mate Abraham Williams, regularly visited the legation and received advice from the minister. In the end, Lay's efforts were rewarded: after a month and a half of fighting, the National militias defeated the Liberals. Although President Mejía Colindres was completely dependent on Carías' troops throughout the ordeal, he was kept in power until 1 February 1933, when he duly handed over the presidential sash to Carías.Footnote 40
Establishing a Relationship
All of these ‘free and fair’ elections were followed by long-term dictatorships. Having risen to power through nominally free elections, Ubico had the constitution altered in 1935 to be able to continue in office beyond his legal term. Eventually, he established a 13-year dictatorship. Some North American and European authors have portrayed him as a moderniser and nation builder who strengthened the institutions of the central government and improved the country's economic infrastructures.Footnote 41 More recent contributions from Central American scholars, however, complicate that image by relating the liberal oligarchic project of ‘nation building’ to the ongoing and structural exclusion of indigenous people. Marta Elena Casaús Arzú characterises Ubico's government as one of the most repressive in the country's history and stresses Ubico's close ties of class and family to the more recalcitrant sections of Guatemala's oligarchy. Ubico strengthened the state's control over the indigenous labour force through the Vagrancy Law, obliging landless rural workers to provide 150 days of labour to the big fincas every year. Sergio Tischler Visquerra also argues that Ubico's government should be understood within the context of an exclusionary liberal oligarchic system. Unable to manage the discontent of the indigenous working classes with its traditional paternalism and equally unable to integrate the demands for democratisation by the middle class, the ruling elite responded to the Great Depression by supporting Ubico's authoritarianism.Footnote 42
Much like Ubico, Carías would adapt the national constitution so that he could remain in power beyond his legal term, which ended in 1936. He stepped down in favour of one of his government ministers in 1948. During his government, the Honduran economy outside the banana enclave slowly recuperated from the political upheaval and civil war of the 1920s, but the price of greater economic security was political repression. Carías would spend most of his government's resources on expanding tools of control, especially the new air force, which would form the nucleus of a new military order.Footnote 43 In contrast to Ubico and Carías, Araujo would stay in power for only 11 months. Araujo inherited massive debts from the previous administration and he faced ongoing rural unrest that was made worse by the perception on the countryside that he refused to live up to his campaign promises. The coffee elite, meanwhile, refused to come to the aid of the reform administration. Dissatisfied by the government's inability to pay their salaries, a group of young officers committed a coup in December 1931 and put Vice-President Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in power. Araujo's reformist campaign platform heightened rural demands for change and elite fears of indigenous radicalisation. Only weeks after the 1931 coup, the Salvadorean army violently put down a rural uprising in the west of the country, killing thousands. The massacre, known as the Matanza, was one of the most extreme acts of state violence in the history of the Americas.Footnote 44
US diplomats established close relations with Ubico and Carías (as well as with Araujo) immediately following the elections of the early 1930s. It is important to note, however, that they did not perceive them as dictators, but as presidents who had been honestly elected under the legations' supervision. Ministers Whitehouse, Robbins and Lay presented the elections to the Department as among the fairest ever witnessed in Central America and, in turn, the new presidents sold themselves to the legations as pro-United States and reform-minded. In the general atmosphere of optimism after the elections of the early 1930s, US diplomats were convinced that the new governments were beholden to constitutional procedures, honest, financially and socially conservative, and appreciative of US guidance. The new presidents managed to convince the diplomats that their respect for democratic procedure, together with their nominally reformist programmes represented the paternalistic, socially conservative type of ‘progress’ that the ministers liked to see in these ‘backward’ countries.
One of the first things that Whitehouse, Robbins and Lay did after the elections was to advertise to the State Department their personal role in bringing them about. Although the elections in Guatemala seemed suspect, with only one candidate, Whitehouse was confident that Ubico would have been the winner in a contested campaign anyway: ‘[i]n spite of the fact that he is the only candidate, there is little doubt but that General Ubico is the choice of the large majority of the people of Guatemala’. While the legation did not, in fact, have any instruments to measure the will of the people, it reported on a public demonstration of thousands of people that had been convened at Ubico's home in honour of his birthday and, according to ‘reliable witnesses’, had included ‘people of all classes of society’. The legation was also familiar with the favourable opinion that most of the ‘better elements’, its closest contacts in the capital's society, held of the general. According to Whitehouse, Ubico's supposed popularity was in part a reaction to the ‘utter incapacity and widespread dishonesty’ of the Chacón administration. In contrast to earlier presidents, the minister regarded Ubico as a man of ‘absolute honesty, of intelligence and ability’ and the only one capable of ‘bringing order out of chaos’.Footnote 45
Minister Robbins wrote a personal letter to the assistant secretary of state to stress that free elections had ‘literally […] not happened before in the history of Central America’. Emphasising his personal involvement in these events, he claimed that he took ‘a little pride’ in making the elections happen. If this recent exercise of the vote were given some publicity, he told his chief, it would show the people of the United States that El Salvador was ‘progressing’ while it would give Salvadoreans some ‘confidence in themselves’. Likewise, Minister Lay made sure that his superiors in Washington understood the central role he played in this local victory for democracy. Lay forwarded articles from the local press lauding his actions in favour of Honduran democracy and some effusive congratulations from the consulates. ‘It is pleasing for me to hear’, Lay wrote to the Department in a faux-humble tone, ‘that my efforts to secure peaceful elections are considered fruitful’. The minister optimistically reported that the latest elections represented ‘an extension of democracy in Honduras’ and would secure ‘another four years of peace’.Footnote 46
In the meantime, the new presidents presented their plans for the future to the legations in a way that would be attractive to the diplomats. They adopted the language of progress and linked it to pro-US rhetoric, as Ubico did when he told Whitehouse that ‘it was impossible to ignore the fact that Guatemala needs the cooperation of North Americans to solve satisfactorily the many problems which are essential for the progress of the country’. Ubico, Carías and Araujo all visited the legations in their respective countries with some regularity and seemed to appreciate North American advice. Immediately following his election, Carías even made a point of visiting the US legation before he went to the presidential palace to confer with his predecessor.Footnote 47 These leaders actively sought out the US diplomatic service to get it on their side, much as they had done during the election campaigns themselves.
In seeking the support of the ministers, both Ubico and Araujo were fortunate that the legation chiefs recognised them as cultured gentlemen and part of the wealthy establishment of their respective countries. This was decidedly not the case with Carías. The new president's dark eyes and rustic appearance convinced the minister that the former was ‘powerfully influenced by the ignorant prejudices of his race, nationality and class, viz. Honduran Indian campesino [peasant]’. While Lay recognised that Carías was a great popular figure, ‘trusted and venerated by hundreds of thousands of peons who have never seen him’, he thought that the new president was just a figurehead. But even in Honduras, the legation was pleased to report that the new cabinet was ‘conspicuously superior’ to that of Mejía Colindres and formed a ‘more progressive and enterprising government than the last’. Lay's most important ally in the new cabinet was the ‘especially competent’ minister of finance, Julio Lozano, who formed the link between the regime and the legation.Footnote 48
Aside from the new leaders' elitism and outspoken pro-US attitude, their broader political programmes appealed to the ministers' conservative reformism. US ministers allowed themselves to be convinced that the supposed victories for democracy that the recent elections represented would be institutionalised by the new regimes. Whitehouse, for example, claimed that Ubico would end ‘the old abuses’ by which former governments had remained in power illegally and against the will of the people, thus removing, according to the minister, ‘one of the principal causes of revolution’ in the country. Likewise, Robbins reported that Araujo promised to make his country's electoral law ‘more conscientious, more peaceful in its functioning, easier to apply, less open to evil influence’. Implicitly, both diplomats and politicians agreed that repairing minor defects in the existing situation would be sufficient. More fundamental reforms, an extension of the electorate for example, were never considered.Footnote 49
The ministers also ascribed considerable importance to financial policy. Central American and Caribbean governments had often defaulted on their debts in the past, leading to political chaos when salaries of government employees or military officers went unpaid, or provoking foreign intervention when US and European creditors were involved. US legations tended to blame the supposed lack of probity and financial responsibility of Central American politicians rather than fluctuations of the international market for these troubles. Minister Lay was especially concerned about the financial health of Honduras. He believed that Carías was personally honest, but he obsessed over the prevalence of fraud among his subordinates. Lay placed all his trust in Julio Lozano. To his credit, in Lay's perception, Lozano had been an accountant for the United Fruit Company and was himself a wealthy businessman: someone that the minister could relate to. Although later research has established that Carías maintained a firm hold over his government's policy, Lay and his legation were convinced that without Lozano's integrity and very strict financial conservatism, the Honduran government would ‘go to the dogs’.Footnote 50
Social policy was a problematic issue. Generally speaking, US ministers recognised the disparity in wealth between Central American elites and lower classes and worried about the destabilising effects that it could entail. But what should be done remained a contentious issue. The legation in Honduras regretted the tendency of Central Americans to apply ‘political remedies [to] economic ills’. As indicated above, Whitehouse and Robbins took their cue from local elites in their belief that rural populations were passive and basically satisfied with their circumstances. In other words, social problems were not of a fundamental nature and could be overcome without recourse to radical policies. Real problems only developed when ‘foreign agitators’ or ‘professional troublemakers’ incited the peasants with unrealistic communist schemes.Footnote 51
The Foreign Service thus preferred top-down, conservative solutions for social inequities. No problems existed, in this regard, with Carías and Ubico, who were both committed to the status quo and fiercely opposed to any supposedly ‘communistic’ influences. Politicians with a pro-labour bend, like Zúñiga Huete and Araujo, had a harder time convincing the North Americans of the merits of their programmes. Zúñiga Huete was known among US diplomats for his ‘wooing’ of the labour vote and his ‘diatribes’ against the fruit companies. US Secretary of Legation William Schott, who may have misinterpreted Masferrer's ideas, initially reported his alarm that Araujo ‘persisted in an absurd and dangerous campaign to draw the masses. He spreads the doctrine of division of property, and he is reported to have offered cabinet positions to laborers'.Footnote 52
Both politicians eventually managed to convince the US legations that their plans did not venture beyond establishment politics. Zúñiga Huete probably attempted to neutralise possible opposition from Lay's legation during the elections by toning down his radical rhetoric and by visiting the legation frequently to advertise his peaceful intentions. He was evidently successful: ‘there are many here who fear [Zúñiga Huete's] radical and dictatorial methods if he should become president’, Lay confided in a personal letter to Whitehouse, ‘but he is an intelligent and forceful character and has learned much in the last few years and I am not so sure that he would not be an excellent president for Honduras and treat American interests with consideration’. Minister Robbins admitted that Araujo was unpopular with most of the legation's ‘friends’, but he knew that the government of the new president would be one for the people (not by the people) and that it would favour equal distribution of work (not of property). Due to the new leader's attitude, the friendship he demonstrated to the legation, and his paternalistic brand of reformism, Robbins was eventually able to profess ‘considerable satisfaction in seeing Araujo elected’.Footnote 53
But it was not Julio Lozano, Arturo Araujo or even Juan Bautista Sacasa in Nicaragua who was most respected by US observers. That honour went to Jorge Ubico, whose government, in the words of the local US military attaché, represented a ‘truly […] radical innovation for Guatemala’. Personally dedicated to a state-centred programme of economic development, Ubico managed to convince the North Americans that he shared their concern for the modernisation of Guatemala. In time, the general became fast friends with the minister and the military attaché, who proudly reported that he was a member of Ubico's ‘tennis cabinet’. In their frequent meetings, Ubico and Whitehouse soon discovered that they were both concerned about the limited reach of the central government in the provinces; ‘disgusted’ by the prevalence of government corruption in Guatemala; and convinced that active reform should replace the perceived lethargy of the Chacón administration. Thus, Whitehouse was a great admirer of Ubico's Law of Honesty (Ley de Probidad), enabling the government to fight corruption; his inspection trips to the countryside, which allowed the president to ‘correct the abuses’ of local governments; and his dominance of the executive and legislative branches, enabling him to enact ‘good legislation’, balance the budget, fight corruption, and negotiate favourable contracts with the United Fruit Company. If Ubico could finish his term in peace, Whitehouse believed, his pro-United States and conservative government would turn Guatemala into ‘a prosperous little country’.Footnote 54
It is remarkable that US ministers easily combined their demand for electoral politics with respect for what should be regarded as authoritarian practices. While Whitehouse argued that Ubico was the choice of the ‘great majority’ of Guatemalans, he also admired the general's ‘forcefulness’ and complete command over the country's legislature and judiciary. Robbins was also relieved to report that the new president could ‘break some heads’ if the need arose. The ministers perceived a need for ‘forceful’ and ‘effective’ government because they felt that Central Americans needed a stern hand to guide them toward progress. Chacón, Romero Bosque and Mejía Colindres were considered too weak to deal with the economic and social problems of the Great Depression. In Lay's words, the advantage of a strong-armed government at that point was that ‘what Hondurans will lose in their personal liberties (liberties that degenerated into license under Mejía Colindres) they will gain in greater protection to life and property, more efficiency and honesty in the public services’.Footnote 55
US diplomats were not naïve: they knew that the newly elected presidents of Central America were not afraid to use heavy-handed tactics. It may seem odd that they were confident that Ubico and Carías would submit to honest elections toward the end of their legal tenures. Others seem to have been less optimistic, as Whitehouse admitted when he reported that ‘the fear is expressed that in time he [Ubico] will become a dictator’.Footnote 56 The important thing here is to realise that the ministers would most probably have expected the next round of elections to be supervised by a paternalistic and actively involved legation. While it may have become clear to them, considering the Department's rejection of their requests for naval support, that military intervention was a thing of the past, they looked back upon their informal interference in the past election with considerable satisfaction.
Not until 1936 did the State Department instruct its legations in Central America to ‘abstain from offering advice on any domestic issue’.Footnote 57 Around that same time, Ubico and Carías reneged on their promises to respect electoral procedures and illegally extended their terms in office. Araujo had already been replaced by Martínez and Somoza was about to force Sacasa to resign. Minister Arthur Bliss Lane's resistance to Somoza is well-documented, but the ministers in Guatemala and Honduras would also come to voice their disappointment in the regimes of Ubico and Carías with unfavourable comparisons to the dictators of Europe. Frank Corrigan, minister to El Salvador, lamented the legations' loss of influence over local politics when he reported to the Department that ‘[c]ynical disregard of constitutional guarantees, first by General Ubico in Guatemala, second by General Carías in Honduras, and now imminently by General Somoza in Nicaragua, […] will have destroyed the result of a generation of patient diplomatic effort to advance these countries (some of them still embryonic) on the road to become constitutional democratic republics’.Footnote 58
Conclusions
Ubico's 1931 election can be considered representative of State Department policy, Foreign Service meddling, and Central American ambition around 1930. Asserting its preference for legal procedures, the State Department blocked the rise of General Orellana, in turn enabling Whitehouse to assume a central role in the organisation of Guatemalan elections. Finding that the winner of the election was an honest and progressive ‘gentleman’, Whitehouse found common ground with Ubico on the path that should be taken in Guatemala. Advertising both the achievements of his legation and of the new regime to the State Department, the latter was satisfied that Central Americans were making progress toward self-government when it announced its adherence to the principle of non-intervention. However, it was also Ubico who was the first to forget his promises to the US legation and to cancel the next presidential election.
This sequence of interaction between US diplomats and between US diplomats and Central American leaders made for a tumultuous relationship, which explains why the literature variously quotes the United States' ‘welcoming’ or ‘grudging acceptance’ of the new dictatorships. On the one hand, US Foreign Service officers were deeply committed to the social status quo and welcomed the conservative reformism that the new regimes represented. On the other hand, the elections of Ubico and Carías, the future dictators, were seen in conjuncture with the elections of Arturo Araujo in El Salvador and Juan Sacasa in Nicaragua and were interpreted as victories for constitutionalism and electoral politics. This interpretation also provides an important context for the response of US diplomats to the manoeuvrings of Somoza during the early 1930s, an issue that is often studied in isolation.Footnote 59 US minister Arthur Bliss Lane's resistance against the Nicaraguan general was by no means exceptional. The Foreign Service looked back on the recent elections with satisfaction and only grudgingly accepted the demise of constitutionalism in Central America.
There is no real paradox here, no clash between naïve Wilsonianism and cynical Realpolitik. Diplomats were guided by a consistent worldview that combined US promotion of limited democracy with social conservatism. Foreign Service elitism ensured a narrow conception of local politics that only included such actors as were thought to represent the capital's ‘society’. By extension, US ministers believed that democracy was safe as long as the ruling classes went through the motions of elections under legation supervision; at no point did they seek the expansion of political participation or political rights. Likewise, conservative solutions for political, social or economic problems were preferred over fundamental reforms. So even if neither Washington nor its legations foresaw the dictatorships of Ubico, Carías and many similarly inclined leaders of the Caribbean, it is difficult or even impossible to imagine that non-elite Central Americans would have been better off if US diplomats had continued to interfere in their politics throughout the 1930s. The final result would have been very similar: deeply conservative financial and social policy combined with an elitist political culture.
But surely, allowance must be made for the ways in which Central Americans themselves shaped their nations' destinies, even if the results are unattractive. After the Roosevelt administration shelved the 1923 Treaty and denounced intervention, Ubico and Carías and Araujo's successor Martínez openly did away with elections. Coming to the aid of a struggling liberal oligarchy, they built governments and societies that were not just conservative and elitist, but deeply militarised, autocratic and violent. The ultimate conclusion should be clear, though: during the early 1930s, US diplomats attempted to impose their own, highly paternalistic, vision of good government upon Central American politicians, but proved unable to maintain that position as policy-makers reined in intervention and local actors unfolded their own plans of good government. Thus, the ambitions and limits of US foreign policy must be understood as a dynamic interplay between several layers of the US policy apparatus and the ambitions of foreign actors.
