Acquire Today Bitter Fruit: The Story Of The American Coup In Guatemala Originated By Stephen C. Schlesinger Disseminated As EReader Version

ordered this book because I had to give a conference in Guatemala and was confused about the beginning of the country's long armed conflict, I figured this was a good place to start, and it was, It helped me understand better not only the American role in Guatemala, but also a lot of the current attitudes and opinions in Latin America about work, big international companies and America.


Unlike some reviewers, I don't find it biased at all, in fact I read it without much knowledge of the conflict and understood clearly both sides of it.
This isn't a story about good innocent guys suffering from the hands of bad gringos, it's a story about wrong incentives both among Guatemalans and owners of the United Fruit Company.


I currently work in a Mexican company started by one of the,Guatemalan immigrants of thes, I had never given much thought on this before, but now I can even relate better to the history of my own job and the nature of some cultural traits I find both in Mexicans and Guatemalans.
more soon. For now: I will repeat my belief that everyone should read this book,

back soon
Did you know that the American coup in Guatemala inland reform, United Fruit Company, etc, was what drove Che Guevara to join the Cuban Revolution

Fun fact: United Fruit hired a prominent P, R. guy who wrote a book called Propaganda to create the impression Guatemala was filled with Communists so that the Eisenhower administration etc, etc.
Book that introduced me to Central American history and politics, Reads like a John le Carre thriller and will get your blood boiling, Que viva Arbenz! MUST READ, I think I've decided I prefer my history written by journalists far easier to read, This text reads like a blueprint for current US foreign policy, There's so much here that serves to illustrate US government relationship to corporations and the reality of intervention, In many ways the US orchestrated coup in Guatemala set the stage for future US operations while simultaneously plunging the majority of Central America into thirty years of civil war.




One of my biggest take aways was people's beliefs in media and government, According to the heavily footnoted and archived evidence presented by the authors, the majority of the Guatemalan Left believed the CIA media campaign and gave up.
Despite current examples of disinformation WMDs! I still hear overwhelming denial that the US government would lie or be capable of such atrocities, These beliefs often quell urges to resist, As Mumia stated, "It's suicide not to, " I learned that part of the reason we have a "socalled immigration" problem is due to the good old greed of American capitalism, We get involved in Latin America and train people for coups and put in dictators in order to keep the status quo and then people wonder why people flock to the States from Latin America! An amazing and eyeopening read! The classic liberal exposé of the US coup in Guatemala.
This does a good job relaying the story of the coup, the history leading up to it, and the immediate aftermath, Where it stumbles is it's political analysis, where the authors liberalism really holds it back,

The Bitter Fruit's authors point out the differences between the revolutions in Nicaragua and Cuba, that these were actual overturnings of the entire politico economic power structure and an installation of a new one, and the Guatemalan bourgeois democratic "revolution".
They show how the refusal to engage fully in working class politics and the strident devotion to liberalism hamstrung Arbenz and led to his downfall, Yet the authors laud him for this, endlessly attacking the "corrupt, authoritarian, unfree" governments in Cuba and Nicaragua for not playing by rules the authors themselves spendpages exhaustively demonstrating are set up to permanently keep the rich in power and aren't even followed by the bourgeoisie.
Kinzer has, in recent years, become a leading oped columnist for the Boston Globe, happily doing the US state departments work of demonizing Daniel Ortega as a Latin American Hitler and openly calling for the kind of CIA coup against him that this book spends so much time and effort critiquing.


As a piece of journalism, going through the primary sources and exposing the machinations of US empire, this is a good book, I just wish the authors could have learned from the history they were covering rather than being stuck in their backwards elitist ideology, Schlesinger and Kinzers work is a well done account of theGuatemala coup, though some of its chronology is confusingly organized, Chapters are ordered to some extent by topic, though take on a vague lurch towards the event of Armas seizure of power with the backing of the US and United Fruit.
Though the foreword and introduction imply this book places greater onus for the event on the United Fruit Company, the blame is split fairly evenly between the US state and its various bumbling departments, United Fruit and local rightist factions such as Armas.
The book leans fully into the intrigue angle as well perhaps unfairly depicting Arbenz as rather naïve in particular, The atmosphere of uncertainty as American bombs drop is fully captured in the last few chapters, and the brutality of demands from American overseers is very clear.
The last chapter discusses the aftermath of the coup, as well as the succeeding decades up to the earlys the book was originally released then, a time

which actually was defined by even greater political violence due to unwavering Reagan support.
Admittedly some of the prose can be awkward, and sometimes certain editorial opinions and choices are clear, though it is to be expected with a topic which requires this many FOIA requests.
“nothing will make you sound crazier in your day to day life than knowing about likethings the CIA has done and fully admitted to” a tweet i saw
abolish the cia fr This book published in the earlys but its still more relevant to the current political climate today especially when it comes to issues like Venezuela and immigration.
I highly recommend this book for those who really want to understand the United States' relationship with Latin America, It's written by academics but it's read as a novel needless to say it was hard to put it down, Can't recommend this book enough, The term banana republic seems odd in thest century, They must be small, odd places tucking into strange corners of the world, perhaps something like the republic of Fredonia Duck Soup or the Grand Duchy of Fenwick The Mouse that Roared.
Sixty years ago “banana republic” meant most of the countries of Central America and the Caribbean basin Guatemala was the best/worst example,

Formerly a colony of Spain, Guatemala became the property of the United Fruit Company, In addition to millions of acres of farmland threefourths of which were kept fallow United Fruit owned the only port on Guatemalas Atlantic coast, every mile of railway in the country and controlled the postal, telephone and telegraph services.
The company used the unpaid labor of indigenous peopleIndians “owed” large landownersdays of debt labor each year in lieu of taxes, A peasant could be jailed if his labor card didnt show he had contributed the proper amount of days of forced labor to the plantation he was tied to.


The numbers are striking but dont tell the whole tale, Company policy required “all persons of color to give right of way to whites and to remove their hats when talking to them”, Labor and peasant unions were essentially outlawed the company decided who would work and for how longan attempted strike at a company banana plantation when a seven day a week work week was announced was broken up by the national police.
Workers were paid in company scripindeed, one of the reforms of theconstitution was that workers be paid in legal currency,

The images of democratic states defeating fascism and militarism in World War II resonated throughout Central America and particularly in Guatemala, Juan Jose Arevalo, a philosophy professor returned from exile to great acclaim and was elected president in, The new constitution, which attempted to create the legal structure for capitalist democracy was passed, It was based on Franklin Roosevelts Four Freedoms and referred specifically to the Declaration of Independence of the United States and the preamble of the Constitution.
Arvelo considered himself a “spiritual socialist” with a sense of cooperation and concern for the common welfare as opposed to doctrinaire Marxists who emphasized class war and the triumph of the proletariat.
Guatemala had a tiny urban working class and a mass of illiterate, landless peasants ruled by an oligarchy of plantation ownersclearly not a base for a revolution.
The planters, particularly United Fruit, felt threatened by the social and economic reforms Arevalo championedthere were several coup attempts during his six years in office,

He was succeeded inby Jacobo Arbenz Guzman whose land reform plans struck at the very heart of the political and financial power of the elites.
Government owned land was ceded in small plots of peasants and land held by the largest landowners that had been fallow was seized, In a sharp piece of economic judo the plantation owners were compensated for the value of the land they had declared for tax purposes, almost always far below its actual value.


“Bitter Fruit” begins with a finely detailed description of thecoup against Arbenz then recounts the history of Guatemala and United Fruit including the corporate history of the company.
It is a polemical book, narrowly focused on the role of the CIA and the State Department, The authors have United Fruit at the center of the action, pulling strings with policy makers in Washington Allen Dulles and Boston Henry Cabot Lodge, It is beyond dispute that the elected government of Guatemala was overthrown by a group of military officers that was funded, equipped, encouraged and managed from the United States.
American ambassador John Peuifoy was indispensable in Guatemala City keeping Arbenz loyalists off balance while making sure the coup plotters knew they had the support of the United States.


However there was much more involved that the lobbying of United Fruit, It was during the height of the Cold War when it was believed that the Soviet Union, either directly or through front organizations, was behind organized opposition to American corporate interests.
The world was divided into good and evil, for us or against us, This attitude made it easy to confuse nationalism with communism and a middle class reformer like Arbenz with a Soviet sponsor revolutionary, A year earlier the CIA's success in toppling the nationalist regime of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran influenced the Eisenhower administrations approach, "Quick fix crisis management" was the hammer and false analogy the rationale against Arbenz,

This is an important book but its tight focus on United Fruit obscures the greater truth of entire nations that were ancillary casualties of the Cold War.

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