Freedom of Labor is the gauge by which one can measure the degree of freedom enjoyed by the people at large.
George Meany, Mexico City, 8 January 1951Footnote 1As has often been the case when the United States has intervened to engineer regime change, US objectives in Guatemala in 1954 were broader than disposing of its despised target government. Although the administration of Dwight Eisenhower ‘fawned over’ dictators and ‘effusively supported’ them throughout Latin America, US officials believed that the special circumstances following their covert overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz required that they now actively promote democratic change in Guatemala.Footnote 2 Many reform-minded Latin Americans admired the accomplishments of the ten years of progressive government in Guatemala and blamed the United States for its demise. Consequently, US officials needed ‘liberation’ in Guatemala to succeed. Furthermore, US officials believed that turning Guatemala into what they called a ‘showcase for democracy’ was the best prophylactic against a return of the perceived ‘communist threat’ that motivated their intervention in the first place.
This argument is at odds with the usual portrayal of the Eisenhower administration's policy toward Guatemala after the fall of Arbenz. It is true that the United States did actively work to overthrow an elected government and to ensure its replacement by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, the head of the small invading army it had organised. Castillo Armas did institute a repressive authoritarian regime, nonetheless still supported by the United States. Anti-communism certainly remained the centrepiece of US policy towards Guatemala. Most accounts of US policy stop there, but at the same time the United States actively sought to move the country in a more democratic direction. This was not a cynical façade to legitimate domination, but grew from the pragmatic reasons given above, perhaps reinforced by the intermittent humanitarian impulse of US foreign policy that is typically identified with Wilsonian idealism.Footnote 3
US policy towards Guatemala during this period, then, was a forerunner of the Alliance for Progress, the signature policy of the subsequent administration of John F. Kennedy towards Latin America.Footnote 4 And, as with the Alliance, to the extent that we accept stated intentions as sincere, we are left all the more with the task of explaining the policy's failure, which is the second purpose of this study. The importance of this goes far beyond this specific case. Guatemala was but the first of the interventions since the Second World War wherein the United States sought to promote what it saw as democratic stability. It was followed by the Dominican Republic in 1965, El Salvador in the 1980s, Haiti in the 1990s, and Afghanistan and Iraq under George W. Bush. Moving such countries in a more just and democratic direction was more challenging than officials expected, and the results were less than desired. Apparently little was remembered from similar frustrations in Nicaragua and Hispaniola in the first third of the twentieth century.Footnote 5
For the United States few areas were more important to the Guatemalan democratisation project than labour relations, especially since labour had gained so much during the previous progressive period. Few areas would be more frustrating for US officials than this effort to help Guatemalans create what they called a ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ labour movement, however. Permissive government policies towards the expansion of radical influence in labour served to increase US alarm about Arbenz and his predecessor, Juan José Arévalo, as they would later in British Guiana under Cheddi Jagan, Brazil under João Goulart and Chile under Salvador Allende.Footnote 6 The United States actively undermined each of these governments, often working closely with a complicit international arm of the US labour movement.
Similarly, US labour played an important role in post-1954 Guatemala, but now the intention was to build rather than to thwart. After the first highly repressive months following Arbenz's overthrow, space opened bit by bit for popular organising, often due to brave pushing by popular forces themselves, with labour frequently at the forefront.Footnote 7 After 1955 Guatemala was progressively less repressive than Chile following the military coup of 1973 or Brazil after the 1968 tightening of the dictatorship – until, that is, Guatemala's own military coup in 1963. Nonetheless, the challenges for labour organising during this period, whether ‘communist’ or ‘democratic’, were daunting. Activists and their supporters faced intransigent opposition from domestic elites and frequent meddling from client-seeking political leaders, including paternalistic presidents themselves.
An additional challenge was strong opposition from the major US-based companies operating in Guatemala, most notably the long-controversial United Fruit Company (UFCO). This was an immense problem, because UFCO was the largest employer in the country. To its great frustration, the US embassy soon found itself caught in the middle of what it experienced as ‘the unhappy spectacle of United States labor and management fighting it out’ in Guatemala.Footnote 8
The dominating presence of US business in Guatemala introduces a third analytical theme of this study: the influence of corporate interests over US foreign policy. Few countries are more relevant to this debate for their size than Guatemala. Notorious, of course, was the 1954 intervention itself – over a half-century later, debate still continues over US motivation for this action. One group of scholars provides impressive documentation for a national security interpretation, highlighting the Eisenhower administration's preoccupation with a perceived ‘communist’ threat in Guatemala at the height of the Cold War.Footnote 9 Others offer more of an economic interpretation, emphasising the overbearing presence of UFCO in Guatemala, the company's extensive personal connections to top administration officials, and the considerable efforts that it made to stimulate US action.Footnote 10
Even a cursory look at the relevant documents shows an abiding US interest in avoiding a resurgence of the ‘communist’ threat in Guatemala after the Arbenz overthrow. Even to the most hyper-concerned US official, however, that threat was certainly far less grave through the remainder of the 1950s. As national security concerns become less immediate and over-determining, are the protection of US business specifically and the promotion of its overall economic interests more generally the major drivers of US policy toward less developed countries? In his classic explanation of the gap between stated intentions and reality in the Alliance for Progress, Abraham Lowenthal demonstrates the substantial involvement of top administration officials in the formulation of policy but their progressive absence as implementation proceeded, with the result that they offered a diminishing check on business and its congressional allies.Footnote 11 Might the same process have operated in Guatemala as highest-level interest in the country quickly dissipated?
More generally, many of the leading scholars of the relationship between the United States and Central America emphasise that both material and security interests were inexorably linked, as the United States has long sought to ‘control’ or ‘dominate’ the region for its own purposes.Footnote 12 The following examination of US post-intervention efforts will show the limits of any such drive, as well as the extent to which such characterisations are justified in this case.
US policy concerns during this period, then, were different from those that led to the 1954 overthrow earlier, and to US acceptance of the 1963 coup later. Understanding the nine years following the coup through those two prisms gives a misleading view. During this period US objectives were more multidimensional, with national security and economic concerns joined by an imperative to advance the ‘democratic’ cause in Guatemala. From the US perspective this meant, in particular, promoting electoral democracy and a US-style labour movement. Priorities among these objectives, of course, varied among officials, as well as with circumstances both inside and outside Guatemala. Consequently, contradictions abound for the analyst.
US government documents provide the major primary source for this study. Given that these were the instruments by which government officials communicated with each other, I am untroubled in assuming the sincerity of what is written in these papers. Accurate reporting from the field is an essential job requirement for an embassy official and clear direction an imperative for those in Washington.
An assumption that US officials expressed themselves sincerely does not automatically place the analyst in the ‘liberal’ camp, however. There is no inherent conflict here with certain radical perspectives. For example, Morris Morley's study of US policy toward Cuba in the years immediately after 1959 finds corporate leaders usually pursuing ‘the narrower task of profit making’ for their own enterprises, sometimes in ways that jeopardised their industry's larger interests.Footnote 13 ‘The broader chore’ of preserving ‘the conditions for profit making’, Morley claims, is instead the preoccupation of the class-conscious capitalists who ‘coordinate policy at the imperial-state level’.Footnote 14 Indeed, at times the imperial state instrumentalises individual firms, perhaps even sacrificing them in pursuit of broader goals.
In contrast, this study does challenge radical models that would reverse the relationship and portray the state as more of an instrument of powerful corporations, such as UFCO in Guatemala – and in Washington DC. To do so does not deny the obvious point that business is often very influential in US politics, but so too can be countervailing interests and considerations.
The attempts of the US government to mediate conflicts between US-based business and labour in Guatemala are the primary subject of this study, as these parties sought to influence the development of the labour movement in a country not their own. Moreover, it is not likely that their varying understandings of what constituted labour's appropriate role corresponded to those prevailing among Guatemalans themselves. Shortly after the invasion, US officials imagined encouraging contending Guatemalan forces ‘to sit down together in the United States tradition, to seek to understand the problems of the other and to reach agreements’.Footnote 15 Yet for many Guatemalan employers it was axiomatic that ‘labor-management practices which work well in the United States’, as a labour advisor in the US embassy explained in 1957, ‘cannot and must not be applied in Guatemala’.Footnote 16 Meanwhile, a State Department intelligence report admitted in 1958 that Guatemalan ‘workers are cynical and distrustful, feeling that real unions disappeared with the Arbenz regime’.Footnote 17
Certainly the actions of Guatemalan actors, from labour activists to economic elites to public officials, are crucial to the full story. This study begins by highlighting these actors' contrasting roles in the development of the Guatemalan labour movement during the latter half of the 1950s, along with those of international actors. US officials were under no illusion that the task ahead would be anything other than difficult, but they had little idea of just how hard it would be.
Determining Labour's Role after the Intervention
In the mid-1950s the pre-eminent concern of the United States and the man whom it placed in the Guatemalan presidency, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, was to ‘liberate’ Guatemala from ‘communism’ following the overthrow of Arbenz. All ‘communists’ needed to be found and removed from Guatemala. Complicating US purposes, however, the new government and its rightist supporters interpreted this mandate and the meaning of ‘communism’ even more broadly than the expansive view prevailing among US officials. Nor did the two administrations see eye to eye on the role of labour, as events would repeatedly show.
In his inaugural speech on 12 July 1954, Castillo Armas had pledged to preserve the social conquests of workers achieved during the ten-year progressive period that he had just ended.Footnote 18 During the first months of the new ‘liberation’ government, however, trade union officials, both major and minor, were arrested unless they successfully sought asylum. An unknown number of them were killed.Footnote 19 The police searched and sealed the offices of the Confederación General de Trabajadores de Guatemala (General Confederation of Guatemalan Workers, CGTG), and ‘labor unions for all practical purposes ceased to exist for the time being in Guatemala’.Footnote 20 In early August some ceased formally as well, when all ‘communist-tainted’ organisations of the Arbenz period were dissolved by decree, including four major labour unions.
The decree constituted a ‘major political blunder’, Ambassador John Peurifoy complained to Washington, because three of the unions were at US companies. As a result the decree ‘would inevitably be taken here and abroad as [an] indication [of the] government's subservience [to] foreign interests’.Footnote 21 Castillo Armas, though, defended his action to Peurifoy as a security measure necessary to purge labour of ‘communists’ rather than an anti-labour one in itself. Other observers disagreed, placing the blame on ‘the insistent request of the management of the American companies’ themselves.Footnote 22
Whatever the motivation, the major effect of this counter-revolutionary campaign was to remove workers' protection as widespread anti-labour actions resulted from both private employers and the government, including wage reductions and mass firings without the required separation pay. Workers who complained, the Embassy noted, were ‘denounced as Communists and jailed’, with no attempt apparently ‘made to separate Communists or Communist sympathizers from non-Communist old line government employees’.Footnote 23 So excessive was this repression that five years later a different US ambassador called attention to the ‘intense distaste for the label of “anti-Communism”’ among many in the country, ‘primarily on the grounds that “anti-Communism” represents nothing more than a reactionary economic and political outlook’.Footnote 24
ORIT and its Guatemalan Federations
A new ‘democratic’ labour movement emerged from a strategy meeting held in Assistant Secretary Henry F. Holland's office in July 1954. The movement was placed at the top of the list of actions that ‘might be taken to encourage progress by the new Guatemalan regime along democratic lines’.Footnote 25 As subsequent events would show, this was understood from the US perspective, meaning trade unions that concentrated on representing their workers in negotiations with management, avoiding larger socio-economic issues. Of course it would be a movement free of ‘communist’ influence, very broadly understood. To assist this process, an experienced labour officer was soon assigned to Guatemala. Edward Vallon had held that post in Argentina for four years as the United States struggled with Juan Domingo Perón's populist labour policies, and before that he had served two years in the US Labor Department.Footnote 26 In addition, within days of the overthrow of Arbenz, Washington was discussing the need to work through US labour organisations ‘in order to insure [Guatemalan labour's] genuine and lasting adherence to the democratic labor movement’.Footnote 27
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) promoted democratic but anti-communist labour organisation in the region through its international alliance, the Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores (Inter-American Regional Organisation of Workers, ORIT). ORIT had vocally supported the overthrow of Arbenz but, at the same time, it had ‘repeatedly declared its firm support of the social and economic reforms adopted’ in the prior ten years, as it declared in a statement two days before Arbenz fell. This included the Arbenz agrarian reform, which ORIT called ‘a step forward in the interests of the people of Guatemala and against the feudalistic forces allied with the imperialistic policy of the United Fruit Co’.Footnote 28
Working through ORIT was the AFL's representative for Latin America, Serafino Romualdi, one of the key driving forces behind ORIT's creation in early 1951.Footnote 29 Romualdi arrived in the United States in 1923 as a socialist refugee from Italian fascism. After the Second World War he became the CIA's ‘most important Western Hemisphere labour agent’.Footnote 30 It would be incorrect, though, to see ORIT in the 1950s simply as an agent of the US government. Its general secretary, for example, was Luís Alberto Monge, a future president of Costa Rica (1982–6). Monge saw ORIT's major contribution in building labour movements to be its struggle against the many authoritarian regimes of the period. Sometimes these efforts were congruent with US policy, for example against Perón in Argentina, but at other times they were not, for example against Batista in Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua, and Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.Footnote 31
Romualdi spent substantial time in Guatemala in the middle of 1954 helping anti-communist Guatemalan labour leaders organise the Comité Nacional de Reorganización Sindical (National Committee for Trade Union Reorganisation, CNRS), then said to represent over 20 unions. Romualdi endorsed the CNRS leader, Rubén Villatoro, as someone ‘free of entanglements with reactionary pro-Fascist elements and United Fruit Company puppets who attempt[ed] to dominate the opposition to the Arbenz government’.Footnote 32
In the face of hostility from the Castillo Armas government, however, development of the US-backed ‘free democratic labor movement’ proved difficult. The embassy reported in late September that reorganisation of the anti-communist union movement had, ‘for all practical purposes, come to a halt’. Newspapers were full of stories reporting the discharge of urban and rural workers.Footnote 33 Meanwhile, the government had failed ‘to protect workers engaged in reorganization activities from unjust arrest, imprisonment, and discharge’.Footnote 34 Villatoro did meet with Castillo Armas, but the president ordered him to limit his union activities to the capital and threatened to have his tongue cut out if he talked too much.Footnote 35 While the government never went that far, it did jail Villatoro for 54 days in early January 1955 without bringing legal charges.Footnote 36 Later in the year attacks against Villatoro were renewed, and both he and the CNRS folded.
Nonetheless, there were important gains during this period. The first full legal recognition of a trade union occurred at the beginning of November 1954.Footnote 37 At the month's end legal standing was restored to the most important trade unions from the Arbenz period, each at US businesses: the railway union and two unions of UFCO workers. The first was the largest in the country, and one of the others the second-largest in membership and the best financed. The national government also instructed provincial governors to allow union reorganisation without obstacles.Footnote 38 Such contradictory swings in labour policy within short periods proved to be characteristic throughout the Castillo Armas years.
With Villatoro's CNRS gone, ORIT engineered the creation of a new federation in November 1955, the Consejo Sindical de Guatemala (Guatemalan Trade Union Council, CSG), under the leadership of Mario Mencos of the bank employees' union, picked for the position apparently by Romualdi.Footnote 39 In the beginning the CSG's activities were limited because it had no support staff and little money.Footnote 40 ORIT did not provide a subsidy until early 1957, when it funded an office and six staff members, and even then with the intention that the arrangement would be of short duration. At this point the federation only counted seven affiliates with an active membership of around 1,500.Footnote 41
In May 1956 a full-time ORIT organiser was appointed to split his time between Guatemala and Honduras. Andrew McLellan was a long-time AFL advisor in Latin America (he would later replace Romualdi as the AFL-CIO representative for Latin America).Footnote 42 From the beginning McLellan's reports about the Guatemalan government were critical. The Dirección Administrativa General de Trabajo (General Directorate for Labour Administration) was portrayed as ‘seriously impeding the establishment and development of a democratic trade labor movement’. Union leaders were being discharged daily and ‘virtually blacklisted’. Even though Castillo Armas still claimed that he wanted the support of a free trade labour movement, doubts about his sincerity were ‘arising in the minds of the labor leaders’.Footnote 43
Romualdi was upset as well, protesting against the government's ‘veritable emasculation of the Labor Code’.Footnote 44 Although encouraged by his talks with Castillo Armas, he believed that ‘the anti-union forces had, at least temporarily, gained the upper hand’.Footnote 45 Characteristic was the statement of the Minister of Economy, who called the elimination of the labour-management strife of the Arbenz period one of the best incentives for foreign investment and promised that the government intended to keep the situation that way.Footnote 46 Prior to becoming minister, Jorge Arenales Catalán had provided legal representation for many of the largest US firms located in Guatemala.Footnote 47 Later the US embassy would characterise the CSG as having been ‘on terms of scarcely dissimulated hostility with the Castillo Armas regime’.Footnote 48
There was some hope in October 1956 when a new Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare was created in response to domestic and international labour pressure. McLellan was encouraged too by the intensification of a government-instigated newspaper campaign, in response to his urging, directed against ‘employers and agricultural groups who have been exploiting the workers and the campesinos’.Footnote 49 The issue was important to ORIT and the CSG. They were trying to organise rural workers, especially at large commercial estates, as in the CSG's 1957 campaign at Finca El Baul.Footnote 50 This infuriated the rural elite, whose members expressed ‘great distrust of any efforts to organize farm workers who, they argue, are mostly illiterate Indians and easy prey for demagogs’.Footnote 51 Both their concerns and rhetoric were much the same as those they vociferously expressed throughout the earlier reform period.Footnote 52
Nonetheless, the labour minister made it clear to the Asociación General de Agricultores (General Farmers' Association, AGA), which represented large landowners, that the CSG was operating legally and that he would oppose AGA resistance to the CSG's union-organising campaign. The agriculturalists then initiated ‘a systematic campaign’ against both the minister and the CSG, but the minister and Castillo Armas held firm. It was at this point that the president was assassinated, on 27 July 1957, for motives that remain uncertain. The labour minister told McLellan that ‘his [own] official support had been killed, and his enemies were not only out to get him, but the Ministry as well’.Footnote 53 Two months later, McLellan himself was threatened.Footnote 54
Despite these many obstacles, the CSG succeeded in late 1957 in winning union contracts at Finca El Baul and Finca El Salto. These were the only two collective work contracts at the time covering rural workers employed by Guatemalan nationals. Since their owners were members of the AGA, to McLellan the contracts cracked ‘the solid front’ of the landowners' association in opposing unionisation and increased union interest among workers at neighbouring fincas.Footnote 55 With Castillo Armas and then the labour minister gone, however, the campaign faltered.
At the end of the decade the CSG's membership was still only 2,500 to 3,000, with nine affiliates (including two that existed mainly on paper). Yet among the country's labour federations, it was at this point the largest as well as the most active in union organising. At the end of the decade, however, the CSG was seriously debilitated by internal conflicts and continuing disappointment within the organisation that ORIT had not provided it with greater support.Footnote 56 Its leadership conflicts were, in part, over corruption opportunities. Both the government and an employer group offered the CSG covert monthly payments in 1959; Mencos insisted that they be rejected, to the intense disappointment of others on the executive committee, at least one of whom was suspected of selling out his own union during contract negotiations for company ‘bonuses’ and promotions.Footnote 57 Mencos certainly did not prosper at the CSG and by the early 1960s he was described by the embassy as quite bitter over his personal financial situation, a major reason for his growing resentment against ORIT.Footnote 58
FAS/FASGUA and the Return of the PGT
These two ORIT affiliates, the CNRS and then the CSG, were not the only labour federations in Guatemala during the 1950s. Within a month of the regime change, social Christian forces led by José García Bauer and Luis Felipe Balcárcel organised the Federación Autónoma Sindical (Autonomous Trade Union Federation, FAS, and by 1957, FASGUA), intended as a labour federation independent of both the United States and the communist Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo (Guatemalan Party of Labour, PGT). Beginning, by some accounts, with 25 unions representing some 50,000 workers, FAS played an important role during its first years in helping unions reorganise new leadership under the anti-communist constraints of the Castillo Armas government and in asserting the economic interests of labour.Footnote 59
Although few workers participated in traditional labour events such as those of May Day in 1955 (unsurprisingly, given the climate of fear still prevalent in the country), leaders from FAS used the occasion to denounce the persecution of labour and peasants. Speakers were described by the local press as moderate and certainly stayed within the boundaries of the expected anti-communist rhetoric. Nonetheless, they presented the government with a petition of 31 demands calling for the preservation of the rights of labour won under the prior regime.Footnote 60
The following year, with the climate feeling less repressive, more radical workers and students seized the stage from scheduled speakers, giving what the press described as ‘incendiary’ speeches emphasising the gains of the October 1944 Revolution and the need for workers to fight to restore rights and benefits. A few arrests did occur at the rally, with most detainees being released the next day, though one of them was beaten up several weeks later by four unidentified assailants.Footnote 61 The US embassy report on the event was to the point: ‘Most Guatemalan laborers believe that the Arbenz and Arévalo regimes, with which the agitators were identified, did more for them than the Castillo Administration has done’.Footnote 62 By the end of the Eisenhower administration, placards at the annual event, often carried by FASGUA members, attacked Castillo Armas for betraying the country and progressed from praising Arévalo to honouring Arbenz and Castro.Footnote 63 Indeed, the 1960 rally was characterised by the embassy as being dominated by a ‘well-known “professional” Communist agitator’.Footnote 64
The issue of ‘communist’ influence is a difficult one since the term was used so promiscuously by the Right to delegitimate opponents regardless of accuracy – not to mention the fact that it was the justification used by the United States in 1954 to overthrow an elected progressive government. Nonetheless, it is clear that there was substantial penetration of the labour movement by the communist PGT during the Arbenz period and that by 1955 it was official PGT policy to do so again, covertly, under the new conservative regime, especially through FAS.Footnote 65 By spring 1956 the CSG and Romualdi saw FAS as ‘hopelessly infiltrated with Communist or pro-Communist elements’.Footnote 66 McLellan reported in early 1957 that he had been able ‘to have three communists forced to resign from the FAS’, but he was struck by the irony: Castillo Armas' stridently anti-communist government continued to provide the PGT-infiltrated FAS with a monthly stipend in an effort to keep it controlled despite ‘full knowledge that these men are communists’.Footnote 67 The story soon made the New York Times in what reads like an ORIT-planted piece.Footnote 68
In a further irony, Castillo Armas' labour minister encouraged all of the labour organisations to make a good showing at the 1957 May Day parade, offering to subsidise their turnout. Only FASGUA accepted what turned out to be both ample government funds and, shortly afterwards, a scandal. The CSG decided to forgo not only the Labour Day subsidy but also any participation in the event, much to the concern of the US embassy.Footnote 69 Perhaps the embassy had good reason for this concern: from then on Castillo Armas regarded the CSG as ‘patently subversive’.Footnote 70
By this point FAS was down to five affiliates and was described by McLellan as ‘only a paper organization’, a characterisation that continued through the rest of the decade in the embassy's own reports.Footnote 71 FAS was particularly hurt in early 1957 when four unions left over the issue of leftist influence to form the Federación de Trabajadores de Guatemala (Guatemalan Workers' Federation, FTG).Footnote 72 FASGUA, though, continued to be of value to the PGT. In July 1957 the CIA reported that FASGUA's secretary of organisation was a member of the PGT, with a salary paid by the PGT so that ‘he may devote himself completely to his activities in the FAS on behalf of the PGT’. In addition, one other ‘communist’ was identified on the executive committee, along with two ‘communist sympathizers’ whom the PGT was trying to recruit.Footnote 73
PGT efforts were further facilitated when Castillo Armas was assassinated. Both the provisional government that replaced him and General Miguel Ydígoras, who was elected early in 1958, were far less anti-communist in practice than Castillo Armas, and both allowed many political exiles, including PGT members, to return to the country. Their return was of the deepest concern to US officials both in Washington and Guatemala, especially as the newly formed political party of the moderate Left, the Partido Revolucionario (Revolutionary Party, PR), provided another cover for PGT infiltration and activities. Neither the provisional government nor Ydígoras shared the United States' level of concern with these developments, much to the frustration of US officials.Footnote 74
Additional Challenges
In contrast, rightist forces in Guatemala certainly shared the alarm of the United States over the return of the Left.Footnote 75 This was little consolation to the United States, however, since the Right, and especially the economic elite, had been trouble for US objectives from the beginning. As the embassy pointed out in 1954, elements in ‘the small wealthy upper class … long[ed] for the good old days of “peace and discipline and work” under Ubico’, the dictator overthrown in 1944.Footnote 76 Three years after the ‘liberation’, the United States was still trying to figure out how to deal with ‘the strong, ultra-conservative forces in Guatemala [that] dislike the very existence of unions and have placed great pressure upon the Government’.Footnote 77 At the forefront was the AGA, which, according to a State Department intelligence report, had ‘expressed strong opposition to many of the social and economic measures advanced’ since 1954.Footnote 78 Similar intransigence was found among industrial and commercial interests.Footnote 79 To amplify their voice and effectiveness for ‘confronting a common enemy – the state’, these various elite sectors pulled together at the beginning of 1957, forming the Comité Coordinador de Asociaciones Agrícolas, Comerciales, Industriales y Financieras (Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations, CACIF).Footnote 80
When the United States pressured Castillo Armas on labour issues, for example, he responded that his problem was the reactionary Right. After a meeting with the president just before his death, Assistant Secretary of State R. Richard Rubottom reported that Castillo ‘said the big land owners and wealthy businessmen had urged that he take much stronger steps in repressing those who had been in any way involved in the previous government and that he had had great difficulty in refusing to go as far as they insisted that he go’.Footnote 81 A few years later the State Department itself, in a policy paper vetted throughout the government, concluded that ‘the Castillo Armas regime was excessively reactionary, destroying many worthwhile liberal social changes along with those patently Communist’.Footnote 82
The Castillo Armas administration also disappointed in its corruption. Although the president himself is often portrayed as honest, few have so described his government. ORIT's McLellan went further in early 1957, stating that corruption was rampant, the government was ‘about broke’, and the embassy was covering up the situation. Some US$ 57 million in US funds had been ‘spent in less than three years with not to[o] much to show for it’. It was time, McLellan argued, for the US labour movement to oppose any further economic assistance to Guatemala ‘until the Castillo Armas Administration is prepared to give complete syndical liberty to the labor movement of Guatemala’.Footnote 83
ORIT and Guatemalan labour, though, were facing a new problem: a less responsive embassy. The US labour attaché had changed and soon developed tensions with McLellan. A State Department official visiting from Washington sided with McLellan, writing back to Assistant Secretary Rubottom that the current embassy staff under Ambassador Edward Sparks ‘does not seem to be adequately concerned over the actions of the government in the labor field’, and adding that ‘this may explain why the Embassy has lost the confidence of the Consejo [CSG], ORIT and the AFL-CIO’.Footnote 84
Indeed, the next ambassador substantiated the charge, going even further than McLellan. Writing in mid-1959, Lester D. Mallory detailed the disappointing performance of the Castillo Armas administration, including ‘a general holding down of labor organization’. He then added that ‘those responsible for reporting activities during Castillo's time were completely enthused with the President and his program and could hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil’.Footnote 85 Ironically, though, the rest of Mallory's report was unduly uncritical of then President Ydígoras.
US Business and US Labour
Reactivation of the trade unions at the domineering US companies was critical to the objectives of the Guatemalan labour movement, US labour organisers at ORIT, and the US embassy. The anachronistic labour practices of UFCO and its subsidiaries, International Railways of Central America (IRCA) and the Tropical Radio Telegraph Company, were as much of a frustration for the US government as was the behaviour of the Castillo Armas government.Footnote 86 It should be noted, though, that UFCO disclaimed any influence over either subsidiary, a denial that ‘has never been believed by the Guatemalan public’.Footnote 87
Indeed, the story told by US business was quite different from the general understanding held by the populace at large. The businesses regarded their post-coup labour conflicts as a return to the strife of the Arbenz period, indeed led by many of the same actors, with the same objectives. The companies' position throughout the 1950s closely resembled that stated by an UFCO official back in 1952: ‘The problem here since 1948 … is Communism, supported by the Arévalo and Arbenz regimes, attacking all American companies, using the Marxist pattern of directing such attacks thru unions controlled by radicals’. The Left's objective was clear to the company official, W. L. Taillon: ‘to annihilate all American companies’.Footnote 88
The United Fruit Company
Intense conflict between UFCO and the Arbenz administration had been one of the defining features of the last years of that government, complicating the Eisenhower administration's efforts to portray its Guatemalan policy as driven by anti-communism rather than US big business. This remained true for the early post-coup years. Especially important for the larger objectives of the Eisenhower administration in its dealings with UFCO were an antitrust suit in the United States and both contract renegotiations and labour policy in Guatemala. The latter is the primary concern here; the first two will be only briefly sketched.
The US Justice Department's investigation of possible action against UFCO began in 1946, but its antitrust suit was put on hold as relations with Arbenz deteriorated (and after Arbenz undertook a massive expropriation of UFCO holdings in Guatemala). However, at a National Security Council meeting on 17 June 1954, less than two weeks before the fall of Arbenz, both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles supported going ahead with the suit because it seemed clear to them that UFCO had violated the law. Dulles also highlighted another reason: ‘Many of the Central American countries were convinced that the sole objective of United States foreign policy was to protect the fruit company. It might be a good idea to go ahead and show them that this was not the case by instituting the suit.’Footnote 89 Reports from Guatemala soon indicated that the announcement did have some of the desired effect.Footnote 90 The suit was based on UFCO's monopoly position and predatory practices. A consent decree was reached in 1958, setting in motion processes that significantly undermined UFCO's presence in Guatemala.Footnote 91 This change from direct production to contract purchases was reinforced by the declining profitability of UFCO Central American operations due to a less passive labour force and the rise of serious competition from Ecuador that drove down prices.Footnote 92
Soon after the coup against Arbenz, the State Department pushed UFCO to negotiate a new contract with the Castillo Armas government. The desire, in Ambassador John Peurifoy's words, was ‘a new generous contract’.Footnote 93 This would demonstrate that UFCO's past problems were ‘due only to Communist domination of [the] previous government’.Footnote 94 An additional motive for US officials was that a more favourable contract would provide greater (and much-needed) revenues to the Guatemalan treasury. UFCO initially countered that the antitrust suit made this too difficult, but by November negotiations were under way.Footnote 95 For its part, the Castillo Armas government was seen as driving a hard bargain to avoid ‘any charge that it was “selling out” to UFCO’.Footnote 96
Agreement was reached at the end of 1954, with the parties settling on a 30 per cent income tax on UFCO's net profits, modelled after agreements in Costa Rica and Panama. The agreement also settled the status of the large Tiquisate expropriation that had occurred under the Arbenz agrarian reform. The expropriation was declared void, but UFCO turned over about half of the land in question to the government.Footnote 97 The contract was not a clear political success, however, as a ‘near-revolt’ against ratification occurred in the Constituent Assembly.Footnote 98
Nor did the negotiations reinforce any bond between the Guatemalan president and the US government. At the beginning of 1955 the Guatemalan ambassador reported to the State Department that Castillo Armas was complaining to him that US embassy officials were ‘unfriendly’ to the president and ‘too close [to] large US companies, especially UFCO and IRCA’.Footnote 99 A few months later Castillo Armas made similar complaints to a US journalist, saying: ‘Your government is always more interested in the earnings of the United Fruit Company than in the welfare of the Guatemalan people’. The journalist characterised Castillo Armas as ‘bitterly disenchanted’ by the ‘“continued meddling” by the US embassy’.Footnote 100
In reality, the United States continued to prod UFCO to improve its labour policy. Through frequent meetings in both Guatemala and Washington, US officials attempted to persuade UFCO that many of its problems in Latin America were of its own making, including ‘an unwillingness to recognize labor unions, even when they are led by non-Communists … and a general lack of understanding of the aspirations or the political importance of Latin American labor today’.Footnote 101 For a time during the early ‘liberation’ period, the AFL's Romualdi was upbeat about the results. In March 1955, for example, he came from a meeting with the UFCO president, Kenneth H. Redmond, believing UFCO's professions of a new policy of labour relations and even sympathetic to Redmond's concerns about attacks on the company coming from both the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and ORIT.Footnote 102
UFCO's labour practices did improve somewhat.Footnote 103 The company was willing to suffer the organisation of its employees but wanted to deal only with an ‘independent’ union rather than any affiliated with national and international federations or confederations, and most especially not with ORIT. On this latter point UFCO was firm, believing that the State Department was ‘entirely misguided in its view that the answer to Communist infiltration is democratic unionism friendly to the United States’. Ben S. Stephansky, a labour advisor in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, reported that Almyr Bump, an UFCO official, had stated in an interview that ‘A democratic union will go Communist’ and that ‘It makes no difference whether the Company is killed by a red union or a white union’.Footnote 104
From its own perspective, ORIT saw a different reason for UFCO's position: ‘independent’ unions could be dominated by management much more easily than federated unions. McLellan characterised the UFCO union at the company's Pacific coast operation at Tiquisate as ‘a company union’, and claimed that UFCO literally ‘bought off the old leaders’ prior to a leadership change in late 1957.Footnote 105 Of particular concern to ORIT was a change in the union's constitution, apparently dictated by company officials, which prohibited the union from seeking affiliation with national or international labour organisations. Indeed, the key UFCO official, A. E. King, was overheard boasting at Guatemala City's American Club, in McLellan's words, ‘that as long as he controlled the Tiquisate union, there would be no alliances with organizations such as ORIT’.Footnote 106
There was an additional concern, one fully shared by the US embassy: US officials repeatedly warned UFCO that without the backing of ‘mature guidance’, an ‘independent’ union would be weak and vulnerable to influence from leftist political forces. As the embassy predicted, ‘one of the first acts of PR leaders after the party was legalized was to make a bid for Tiquisate workers’ support by promising them the moon'.Footnote 107 Later the embassy characterised the Tiquisate union as ‘a perfect example of how so-called “national, independent” unions develop neither leaders nor self-confidence and are easily taken over by left-wing politicians’.Footnote 108 Workers did not see things that way, voting out their old UFCO-dominated leaders in late 1957 and happily accepting the offer of free assistance from a group of PR-affiliated labour lawyers. The embassy was correct about the advisors' ideological orientation, however; several were known members of the underground communist PGT, as well as long-time antagonists of the ORIT-backed CSG.Footnote 109
This was a period of intense conflict over union efforts to negotiate a new labour contract with higher wages and UFCO efforts to lay off more than 100 workers following hurricane damage. Ironically, domestic politics probably complicated the dispute. While US labour saw UFCO as exploitative, Guatemalan domestic producers were upset because UFCO already paid higher wages than they did. According to embassy reports, ‘politically powerful agricultural groups … have the President's ear that UFCO should not again raise its agricultural wages, accentuating still further the great disparity between UFCO pay rates and those paid by even the most progressive other agriculturists’.Footnote 110
Apparently UFCO also saw the dispute in a larger context. The embassy reported (somewhat sympathetically) that a ‘do not budge’ decision on Tiquisate had been made at UFCO's Boston headquarters ‘to warn labor groups and politicians throughout its area of operations that UFCO is unwilling to continue to serve as an easy source of political capital and worker following’.Footnote 111 Then came the surprise ending: settlement on a three-year contract in September 1958, on easier terms for UFCO than expected. The embassy's best conjecture was that UFCO's ‘experiment in stand-pat policy toward politically inspired labor demands’ had been saved by national politics. President Ydígoras had been irritated by PR rejection of an earlier proposal that he personally had made for settlement of the conflict; consequently, he issued a stern ‘cease and desist’ warning to all political factions.Footnote 112
Less than a year after the settlement, about a thousand workers were fired following extensive hurricane damage to UFCO banana trees.Footnote 113 In 1964 UFCO's entire Tiquisate operation was shut down.Footnote 114 Perhaps some of the unemployed still remembered the greeting UFCO sent its workers on 1 May 1960: ‘Capital and Labor Shake Hands’.Footnote 115
International Railways of Central America
IRCA owned and operated the rail systems of both Guatemala and El Salvador, making it the largest single US investment in both countries. UFCO, which owned about 40 per cent of IRCA's stock, had always received preferential rates from the railway company, while the latter's common stockholders had never received a dividend.Footnote 116 Long criticised in Central America for the cosy nature of its UFCO connection, IRCA also received substantial critical attention for its hostility to trade unions in Guatemala. Certainly its labour relations had long been conflictual, as the Sindicato de Acción y Mejoramiento Ferrocarrilero (Railway Action and Improvement Union, SAMF) was Guatemala's largest and strongest labour union, representing in 1959, for example, 90 per cent of all railway workers, a membership of about 4,500.Footnote 117
Following the 1954 coup, IRCA's officials were ‘inflexibly opposed to the rebirth of any railway workers union for a period of at least six months’, according to the embassy, as they considered ‘the entire crop of current railway labor leaders [to be] dangerous agitators’. IRCA then proceeded ‘to institute a retaliatory policy against employees who have been strong union men, as distinguished from Communists or sympathizers’; US officials were alarmed at this ‘turn-back-the-clock operation’.Footnote 118 All of the union leadership was included when 129 workers were fired.Footnote 119 Reorganisation of what had historically been one of Guatemala's most militant unions took longer than with many others, as remaining employees, according to union leaders, were ‘very much afraid of losing their jobs by engaging in any sort of union activity’.Footnote 120
The State Department was so concerned that Assistant Secretary of State Henry F. Holland called the UFCO vice-president, Joseph Montgomery, over the ‘disturbing report’ he had received of mass firings of ‘everyone who had shown any connection with a union’. In response Montgomery claimed that the US labour attaché was moving too fast in promoting labour organising, perhaps ‘letting more Communists in the unions than they realized if great care were not exercised’.Footnote 121 Back in Guatemala City, the embassy characterised IRCA's position as ‘negative’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘unrealistic’.Footnote 122
Of particular concern to the United States was the idea that any delay in allowing reorganisation of railway workers ‘might give the Communists a dangerous opportunity of re-instating themselves in control of the sympathy and organization of the Guatemalan workers’. The US government argued instead for union reactivation, but with careful screening of all possible labour leaders to make sure that none would ‘have any Communist taint’. Indeed, the embassy had secured delay by the Guatemalan government of its approval ‘until the prospective labor leaders were properly cleared’. In the case of the railway reorganising committee, the embassy did work with management, investigating those individuals of concern to IRCA and promising to report back to IRCA with its findings.Footnote 123
Making intransigence easier for the railway company were divisions within SAMF, the railway union. In June 1956 it was described by McLellan as having ‘bitter divisions’, split between four factions: those wanting a company union, those wanting affiliation with ORIT's CSG, those wanting affiliation with the more left-leaning FAS, and an extreme left wing. Leadership tended to be dominated by the last two factions.Footnote 124 As contract negotiations approached in late 1956, McLellan saw no coincidence in the emergence of the pro-company-union faction. Despite categorical company denials, he had ‘no doubt but that certain company officials are lending considerable aid’ to it.
Further complicating the situation, McLellan also claimed that the current SAMF leader, despite being from the most radical of the union's four factions, had ‘practically sold out the SAMF to the official party’ of the Castillo Armas government.Footnote 125 In late 1956, with contract negotiations approaching, Rodolfo Madrid Salazar retained his position as secretary-general but four of his opponents were elected to the executive council. They were attacked by IRCA as ‘second string Communists who have moved up to first rank’. Furthermore, according to the IRCA vice-president, Harold W. Haase, the demands put forth by SAMF were ‘worse than any formulated by the Communists during the Arbenz regime’ and were ‘obviously dictated by the Communists’.Footnote 126
IRCA's ‘insolent’ attitude, as McLellan characterised it, carried over to its dealings with the Guatemalan government. When SAMF went on strike in late 1957, after salaries had not been raised for seven years while inflation had increased ‘at an alarming rate’, Haase met with the minister of labour. The minister later related to McLellan that he had ‘practically been insulted by Haase’, and that Haase had maintained an attitude of ‘open defiance’ of the wishes of the Guatemalan president for a settlement.Footnote 127 It was because of such behaviour that the US ambassador, Lester Mallory, later informed Washington that Haase ‘causes more difficulties with American policies than $10 million aid can cope with’.Footnote 128 Regardless, Haase was soon to be promoted to the IRCA presidency, continuing to cause problems from the perspective of the US embassy officials.
Although the embassy professed some sympathy for IRCA's financial situation, it continued to be troubled by the company's ‘belligerent inflexibility’.Footnote 129 At least some in Washington thought the best solution would be for Guatemala to buy out the company.Footnote 130 The Guatemalan ambassador to the United States did approach Washington about the possibility of a loan to do so, but the State Department briefing paper on the subject was cold, reading: ‘There is the question of the precedent which would be set if United States funds were thus used to “bail out” an American company from an operation which United States courts have twice ruled transgressed United States laws’.Footnote 131
Carrots were used as well as sticks. IRCA was said by the embassy to have at times ‘bought off’ both SAMF leaders and labour court judges.Footnote 132 Ydígoras was said to have done the same; in 1959, for example, the embassy reported that his administration was providing a monthly stipend to SAMF leaders.Footnote 133 Despite all these punishments and rewards, SAMF did gain back some of its old militancy, going on strike in both 1957 and 1959 – although in both cases the strike ended the same day when the government sent in the military to take over railway operations.Footnote 134
The Tropical Radio Telegraph Company
The labour dispute at the Tropical Radio Telegraph Company grew into a key campaign for international labour, giving it a significance far beyond the rights of the 54 employees who organised a union in 1957. A fully owned subsidiary of UFCO that handled all of Guatemala's overseas telegraph and telephone communications, it used its multinational operations to its advantage in fighting unionisation. According to McLellan, the company rerouted communications away from Guatemala and through Panama, most probably to justify a workforce reduction in Guatemala through which it could fire labour organisers.Footnote 135
Tropical Radio ‘used coercion in [its] efforts to break up’ the union, according to the embassy, and ‘systematically tore the union apart’.Footnote 136 William Doherty Jr. of the Postal Telegraph and Telephone International had helped to organise the union, and the organisation gave serious consideration to calling an international boycott of Tropical Radio.Footnote 137 After travelling to Guatemala, Romualdi too decided that the fate of the ORIT-affiliated union was of ‘paramount importance to the future of democratic unionism in Latin America’, and that therefore the AFL-CIO ‘must fight the local union's cause to a finish’.Footnote 138
When Romualdi raised the union's cause with Ydígoras, the president responded that the strongest pressures on him to ban AFL-CIO and ORIT activities in the country came from US companies, which accused the US embassy ‘of perpetuating communism by sponsoring those organizations’.Footnote 139 More specifically, the US manager of Tropical Radio repeatedly called Doherty ‘a Communist and Romualdi an agitator’, emphasising that he had ‘absolutely no use for unions in general and ORIT in particular’.Footnote 140 Meanwhile, ORIT's McLellan was tagged as an ‘unethical capitalist communist gangster’.Footnote 141 Despite the support of international labour and although it continued to be counted as a CSG affiliate, the company succeeded in decimating and effectively neutralising the union.Footnote 142
Ambassador Mallory complained to Washington in August 1958 that there had only been ‘negative results’ when the subject of the unions had been raised with the companies.Footnote 143 Three months later the embassy reported that the situation was reaching ‘the crisis stage’, threatening to undermine overall ‘U.S. labor policy objectives in Guatemala’.Footnote 144 The State Department was urged to appeal to UFCO officials in Boston to work for a settlement, but there was little hope of success. The briefing paper for Rubottom's July 1958 meeting with those same UFCO officials ends: ‘I suppose all that we can do at this point is go over the ground again and listen to how UFCO considers ORIT more dangerous than Communist unions.’Footnote 145
President Ydígoras appeared ambivalent on the subject. Although he had spoken of ORIT in sympathetic terms to the US ambassador, on other occasions he had complained of ‘Communist infiltration’ in the local ORIT affiliate. The US embassy perceived a number of anti-ORIT officials around the president, some of them ‘outspoken opponents of all forms of trade-unionism’ and others in favour of only ‘purely national’ unions.Footnote 146 Especially troubling to McLellan was Ydígoras' minister of labour, Ramiro Flores, who had no prior labour background. Indeed, before taking office ‘he operated a “sweat shop” shirt factory’ and, with his family, a coffee finca known for its bad working conditions. To McLellan, the minister clearly was ‘strongly anti-labor’.Footnote 147
It was obvious to McLellan by late 1958 that there was ‘an open campaign … to discredit ORIT and the CSG’, with the lead taken by the labour minister and the secretary-general of the presidency, Carlos González Sigui.Footnote 148 Unlike many in the president's entourage who were ‘openly unfriendly to or suspicious of labor, labor leaders, and unions’, Ydígoras was not necessarily anti-labour; rather, his interests were primarily political. According to the embassy, Ydígoras would be most interested in a labour movement ‘which offered reliable political support’. For such a labour movement ‘he could be expected to allow considerable freedom to pursue democratic social and economic aims’.Footnote 149
Of course, such paternalistic ties for short-term gain have usually been a trap for labour, leaving it too weak to defend its gains when the patron's preferences have shifted, as demonstrated so many times throughout Latin America. There was some wisdom, then, in McLellan's concern for instead strengthening the relevant government institutions and procedures. Though the CSG did not always accept his counsel, the big problem was FAS, he claimed, which ‘completely ignores the established procedures and uses its political connections to solve its many problems. I have insisted that by neglecting and ignoring the grievance procedure … FAS is in effect destroying the established legal system, and will eventually destroy the labor movement’.Footnote 150
Yet, given both the discouraging power structure faced by labour and the anti-communist limits enforced by the United States and its Guatemalan allies, it is certainly understandable that hard-pressed labour leaders would take up any opportunities presented, even if such opportunities were only short-term. Why rely, for example, on the labour courts, which had jurisdiction over many labour grievances, when ORIT itself portrayed the courts as making decisions that were ‘frequently openly supported [by] the employers’?Footnote 151
Regardless of what vision one might have had for a Guatemalan labour movement after the overthrow of the pro-labour Arbenz government, the decade ended with only little success. The ORIT-backed CSG was still a small force with 3,000 members at most, while FASGUA was dissipated as an organising force and dismissed by many as being PGT-dominated. Total union membership was only 3 per cent of the wage-earning labour force, having fallen to about one-seventh of its Arbenz peak.Footnote 152
Conclusion
Some scholars referring to US policy in Guatemala after the fall of Arbenz find different objectives from those described here. In an excellent account of Guatemalan labour, for example, Levenson-Estrada describes the ORIT project of ‘mild trade unionism’ as ‘a vital form of social control’.Footnote 153 In his thorough analysis of US policy toward Guatemala in the post-1954 period, Steven Streeter characterises ORIT activities, such as at Tropical Radio, as ‘efforts to subvert the Guatemalan labor movement’.Footnote 154 Henry Frundt describes ORIT's concern in Guatemala as the creation of ‘a government-oriented labor structure’.Footnote 155 Similarly, for Latin America more generally, Thomas O'Brien portrays the US labour movement as fostering ‘business-friendly unions’.Footnote 156
The most important businesses in Guatemala at this time were US-owned. It should be clear from this account that they would have strongly disagreed with these characterisations; to the contrary, to say that they were antagonised by US labour organisers greatly understates their reaction. George Meany and AFL-CIO representatives in Latin America had a different conception of ‘freedom of labour’ than the Guatemalan labour activists of the Arbenz period and their counterparts in subsequent years. Some readers might think the progressive Guatemalan position more legitimate, both strategically and because it was, after all, their country. From a progressive perspective, ORIT's approach, and certainly that of its successor the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), is fairly characterised as ‘mild trade unionism’. That does not make these groups organisers of ‘business-friendly unions’, however. Indeed, one of the ironies of the period examined is that the apolitical wages-and-workplace-oriented trade unionism sponsored by the United States often did well at avoiding subservience to management and presidents, sometimes better than its Guatemalan competitors on the Left.
Nor was the US government – and a Republican administration at that – doing the bidding of US business in Guatemala. After the overthrow of Arbenz, the US government promoted better behaviour from US businesses in Guatemala, hoping to save the companies from the adverse consequences of their unethical practices as an important part of the US government's larger project of creating a stable pro-US regime in the country. Working with and through the international wing of US labour to promote a ‘democratic’ labour movement, the US government often leaned toward US labour when it came up against US business in Guatemala. Indeed, it is very difficult to reconcile US government actions in post-intervention Guatemala with an instrumentalist radical perspective. The antitrust suit against UFCO was successfully pursued to the point of a consent decree. As part of that agreement, UFCO eventually divested both its banana holdings in Guatemala and its stake in IRCA; about a decade later IRCA was nationalised by the Guatemalan government, as Tropical Radio had been a few years before that. It is difficult to find a record of US government efforts to forestall these actions.
More broadly, the United States certainly strong-armed Guatemala in order to limit its development possibilities: ‘communism’, very loosely defined, was prohibited to Guatemala as an option. Some US officials went further, working against clearly non-communist movements and leaders whose efforts they feared might even inadvertently open the door to expanding ‘communist’ influence. Within this boundary and after the first months of the 1954 overthrow, there is little evidence that the United States sought ‘control’ over Guatemala and even less that it possessed such control. Even on the issue most central to the United States, preventing the return of Arbenz-era political and labour activists to the country, it faced increasing frustration as the decade progressed and especially once Ydígoras was elected to the presidency in 1958.Footnote 157
Writing not long before the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Jan Triska notes similarities in the motives and behaviour of the two superpowers relative to their spheres of influence, but important differences as well. ‘Both dominant powers want to maintain the status quo in their regions’, he points out, even though the people in those regions ‘want change’.Footnote 158 But, although ‘The United States values control over social change … with the exception of radical change to the left … it does not desperately try to prevent such change. The Soviet Union does.’Footnote 159
Furthermore, as Craig Arceneaux and David Pion-Berlin argue, ‘even hegemons may periodically recede from an arena, for reasons of resource constraints, threats elsewhere that capture its attention, or costs of involvement that seem to outweigh the benefits’.Footnote 160 They cite Central America in the 1990s as an example, but eventually the same could also be said of post-intervention Guatemala. Attention and power are limited. Once the national security crisis was handled, top-level interest diminished, and within a few years so did resources – and expectations.
Overthrowing a regime is the easier part, by far. Moving a highly unequal and polarised society like Guatemala's in a more just, more democratic direction afterwards would have been extraordinarily difficult even with an unfaltering commitment of will and resources. Furthermore, US officials shared an ideology that mitigated against any efforts to engineer structural change. The United States did actively promote what it called a ‘free trade labor movement’, not as an instrumental mechanism to further control of Guatemalan society but as a self-evident desirable goal to most US officials. Free democratic trade unions, however, were far from a desirable goal for most post-1954 Guatemalan political and economic elites. They certainly were not for the major US businesses operating in Guatemala.
The United States needed Guatemala to be a model to the rest of the region to show how much better off Guatemalans were with ‘their’ regime change. After the initial repression, what the United States needed to gain success in its terms was for moderate anti-communist democrats to take charge. Instead, the US intervention permitted ‘ultra-conservative forces’ that ‘dislike[d] the very existence of unions’ to strengthen their position, stifling the United States' ‘mild trade unionism’.Footnote 161 Had they examined such contradictions more closely, perhaps Edward Sparks, the US ambassador between 1955 and 1958, and the AFL-CIO's McLellan would not have been still complaining to each other three years after the overthrow that they had yet to find what they regarded as ‘strong potential leaders who could build up a strong free labour movement in Guatemala’.Footnote 162
