GUATEMALA: Battle of the Backyard

(See Cover) In Guatemala, a lush, green little country only 1,000 miles from the U.S.. anti-Communist and pro-Communist forces were locked in battle this week. What kind of war was it? Guatemala’s Communist-line government called it “aggression” and “invasion,” and shrilled accusations against its neighbors, including the U.S. The lightly armed insurgents who moved in over the eastern border from Honduras called themselves the Army of Liberation, took for their motto “God and Honor,” and urged all true Guatemalans to join them against the government and its Red friends. The first actual shooting came as insurgent aircraft strafed fuel tanks and airfields and dropped a few homemade bombs. Days later, two infantry task forces of a few hundred men each fumbled their way toward each other in the bush near a sleepy town called Zacapa and opened the ground fighting. The battle picture was obscure, but the government claimed that it had 3,000 men in “a general offensive” against 2,000 rebels along a line north and south of Zacapa.

Neither side had rushed headlong into combat. Both knew that the outcome would almost certainly depend on whether the regular Guatemalan army, some 6,000 strong and not at all Communist, stuck by the government or swung over to the anti-Communist cause. But whether the Guatemalan clash swelled into bitter and prolonged civil bloodshed or petered out in anticlimax and frustration, the issue was nonetheless clearly drawn. Guatemala, in its special way, was a small-scale sequel to Korea and Indo-China. and the world knew it. Even the United Nations Security Council stirred into action; it held its first Sunday emergency meeting since the June 1950 session on Korea.

“Supreme Chief.” The invading anti-Communist rebels were mainly Guatemalans who had been driven into exile in recent years. Their leader, emerging from almost total obscurity, was Carlos Castillo Armas, 40, sometime colonel in the Guatemalan army, who had been jailed in Guatemala City in 1950 after an attempted revolt, but tunneled spectacularly out of prison and fled. Living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, he made himself a symbol of the exiled right-wing opposition to Guatemala’s Communists. He also began quietly collecting arms, money and men.

No one had given his plans for “liberating” Guatemala much chance. But suddenly last week he was calling himself “Supreme Chief of the Movement of National Liberation,” and doing his best to look like it. From his Tegucigalpa house, boxes of arms appeared and were loaded into trucks. Soldiers were recruited, and promised pay of $2.50 a day. The force thus swiftly mobilized was uniformed in fresh suntans, and airlifted (in commercial DC-3s, at $400 a flight) to Macuelizo, Copan and Nueva Ocotepeque. Honduran hamlets on the Guatemalan frontier.

The way of the campaign’s beginning was certainly unlike any hot-war fighting of recent times. There were no tanks or artillery, and for that matter, no roads for such luxurious military equipment to move on. The army that gathered along the unpatrolled jungle border that first afternoon could have made no sense except against the background of Central America, where history has been made before by a handful of angry men with rusty Mausers and machetes.

“I shall be with you very soon,” Castillo Armas radioed to the Guatemalan people. Then he strapped a string of hand grenades around his waist and clapped a steel helmet on his head. Unopposed, his men quickly crossed the border, seized Esquipulas with its famed old church.

The Other Colonel. In Guatemala City, that day, another colonel strode tight-lipped along the underground tunnel that leads from the executive mansion via an elevator to the presidential office on the second floor of the city’s avocado-green National Palace. President Jacobo Arbenz, the stubborn, enigmatic career soldier who had started the trouble in the first place by flinging wide the palace doors and welcoming Communists into his government, had plenty to think about. But he may have taken a moment to recall that Castillo Armas had once been a school mate, a fellow graduate of the country’s West Point, the Escuela Politecnica.

For the first day or two, Arbenz seemed curiously unwilling to move his troops or put his army officers to the test. Reports indicated that officers and men alike were being confined to barracks. Finally Arbenz made his decision, announced that he was taking personal command of the armed forces. He cautiously organized a picked force of 500 men from the three forts within the capital, put a trusted colonel in command, and started them off in slowly crawling trucks toward Zacapa, 70 miles away. With that spearhead force on the way, he gave command of his field force to a St. Cyr-educated officer, and hoped for the best.

Once off the road, the army forces might have trouble keeping contact with the rebels. This would be particularly true if the rebels tried to avoid combat and play for time in the hope that throngs of Guatemalans within the country might be won over to them. As a hedge against that, the government passed out guns to some of its Red-led unions of workers and peasants, and sent them to police roads and villages in the interior.

Grenades & Thunderbolts. In the air, meanwhile, Castillo Armas’ pilots were scoring successes. His air force was tiny but effective. It took only a small Cessna plane, carrying hand grenades and a light machine gun, to blow up the gasoline tanks at the Pacific port of San Jose, thus forcing Arbenz into immediate and drastic gas rationing. F47 Thunderbolts —Castillo Armas would not say where they were flying from—strafed Guatemala City and Puerto Barrios. Arbenz was embarrassingly unable to fight back. His air force, made up of a few lightly armed trainers, was no match for F-47s, even if he could trust his pilots. But four of them, at least, had defected, taking refuge in the Salvadoran Embassy.

“Somewhere over the border” Castillo Armas this week proclaimed a “provisional government” and issued his first fiery statement. “The dawn of liberation illuminates our land,” it said. “The glorious struggle has begun against tyranny, treason, deceit and shame . . . Assault the garrisons of the Communists and capture them. They are cowards!” A certain amount of hyperbole is doubtless permissible in a manifesto issued on such an emotional occasion; Castillo Armas probably knows quite well that some Communists are cowards and some are nothing of the sort. And while he may regard Fellow Traveler Arbenz as a tyrant or a traitor, he could scarcely consider him a coward. On the contrary, military attaches, diplomats and journalists who have met the Guatemalan President are in striking agreement that the mainspring of his character is dogged, stubborn, self-willed courage. If there is any kind of bravery he lacks, it is perhaps the higher degree of courage that could enable a man to look into his own heart and see what his reckless flirtation with Communism has done—and may yet do—to his country and his people.

The Smart Subaltern. Jacobo (pronounced Ha-coe-boe) Arbenz was born in Quezaltenango in 1913 of a Ladino mother and a moody Swiss immigrant druggist who failed in business, walked out on his family and later killed himself. Another Swiss in the town intervened with General Jorge Ubico, the country’s all-powerful ruler, to get the blond youth a scholarship at the national military school. Quickwitted and lithely muscular, Arbenz played polo and boxed while pulling down the highest grades in the academy’s history. But when school triumphs were over, he was just another impoverished subaltern with no special prospects.

In 1939 he met and married pretty Maria Cristina Vilanova, vacationing daughter of a wealthy El Salvador coffee-planting family that bitterly opposed her marriage to a foreign nobody. Arbenz brooded because his aristocratic young wife had to do her own housework and even tint photographs (at $1 each) to eke out his $60-a-month lieutenant’s pay. He seethed at social injustices—especially his own—and whetted up a sharp hatred for Ubico, who despised most of his officers and carefully confined them to quarters whenever he left the capital. “You can’t imagine what it is like to live under a dictatorship,” recalls Arbenz, whose police last week were freely murdering and jailing his political opponents. In 1944, sick of Ubico, Arbenz resigned his captain’s Commission, took to plotting in desultory fashion, and soon found it expedient to retire for a time to El Salvador. A nonviolent general strike finally eased Ubico out, but equally tyrannical General Federico Ponce replaced him.

“You Guatemalans have no spunk!” gibed Señora Arbenz. Four months later, by way of answer, Arbenz and 13 others shot down the commander of Guatemala City’s Guardia de Honor fort, won over the garrison and began shelling the capital’s other two forts. A lucky hit on a powder magazine won the day spectacularly for Arbenz & friends. He and Colonel Francisco Javier Arana got a democratic constitution written and ran off a free election. It was won handily by Juan José Arévalo, a Guatemalan intellectual just back from exile in Argentina.

Reds & Riches. Arévalo’s role, as it turned out, was to usher into dictator-ridden Guatemala such innovations as free speech, a free press, political parties and trade unions—in effect, to consolidate the revolution. Fighting off 29 plots and counterrevolutions, suspending constitutional liberties 13 times, Arévalo barely managed to hang on through six years. He never had time or energy to do much about his pet political theory, “Spiritual Socialism,” a kind of fuzzy, nonmaterialistic revision of Communism.

In his regime, for the first time, Communist propaganda began to circulate freely in Guatemala. Young Ladino intellectuals—notably such present-day government advisers as Josè Manuel Fortuny, Victor Manuel Gutierrez, Carlos Manuel Pellecer and Alfredo Guerra Borges—soaked up Marxian ideas. U.S.-educated Maria Arbenz became interested, and she and Fortuny guided Arbenz, no heavyweight thinker, to read some popularized explanations of Communist theory.

This exposure to anti-capitalist propaganda did not stop Arbenz from piling up capitalist wealth for himself. As Arèvalo’s Defense Minister, he could borrow and invest money from state banks, acquire businesses, land, and homes. Soon he was rich enough to invite Costa Rica’s leading Communist to dinner at a luxurious villa and well enough briefed to discuss Marxist ideas with his guest. If Arbenz had been a widely traveled or broadly educated man, he might have been more skeptical, but in Guatemala there were actually rigid social stratifications and reactionary landlords, just as the books said. At some point his tidy, army-trained mind closed around the rudimentary theory and snapped shut with an approving click. He made no attempt to delve deeper, but took to reading La Union Sovietica. He once showed a friend an illustration of a perfectly ordinary automatic bakery oven and exclaimed, “What wonders the Soviets have accomplished!” At the Bridge. By 1948 Arbenz had plenty of money, a smattering of political theory and a firm ambition to be Arevalo’s successor. Squarely blocking him was his old revolutionary comrade, Colonel Arana, also a presidential candidate.

As Chief of the Armed Forces, Arana shared authority over the army with Defense Minister Arbenz. Feeling ran high; once the two men, both drunk, faced each other in Guatemala City’s Palace Hotel bar with hot words and drawn .455, and only a friend’s intervention prevented gunfire. Affable, conservative Arana stood well with the army, and was in the lead for the presidency, when in July 1949 he was decoyed into making an inspection trip that took his Mercury station wagon over a little arched bridge near Lake Ama-titlán. There he and his aide were ambushed and Tommy-gunned to death by four young officers. All were intimates of handsome Jacobo Arbenz. Arana’s army friends rose in revolt, but Defense Minister Arbenz, after a scary 36 hours, crushed the rising at a cost of 200 lives. “No more than an incident in the revolutionary life,” he commented when the dust settled.

From that day Arbenz was as good as President, and from that day Communism’s influence bounded upward; an organized party was set up within two months. In November 1950 Arévalo put down his 30th and last attempted revolution, this one led by Carlos Castillo Armas (17 dead), and conducted the election in which Arbenz “defeated” a conservative candidate. It was quite easy. The conservative candidate had been thoughtfully terrorized and run out of the country.

President Arbenz was 37, the youngest chief of state in the Americas.

Agrarian Reformer. Arbenz took office, mildly contemptuous of his predecessor Arevalo as a limited bourgeois who had exhausted himself just trying to stay where he was. Arbenz, as army boss, had no such worries; he was determined to ram through some real reforms. One was redistribution of Guatemala’s land, then held half by 22 great feudal families and half by 301,132 poverty-stricken peasants. The second was the creation of a powerful, unified labor movement. To get such projects rolling, he needed advice, fast planning and energetic help; he got it, of course, from his Communist friends.

Communist Fortuny, who makes a fetish of wearing the same seedy jacket he had three years ago, masterminded the land-reform bill. Pellecer, who proclaims, “I am a Communist! I am a Communist! I am doing everything I can for Guatemala and Communism!” worked day and night to put over the land split-up among the peasants. Gutierrez, after getting expert advice from French Communist Labor Leader Louis Saillant (who was brought in for the purpose by the party), put together and ruled a 100,000-member labor confederation. It was a tidy deal, in a setup made to order for the Communists.

Communists did not occupy Cabinet posts or hold more than a few seats in Congress. But the Guatemalan Labor Party (i.e., Communist; the euphemism is a gesture of cynical courtesy to Article 32 of the constitution, which bans parties of a “foreign or international nature”) became the country’s dominant political force. Though his luncheon companions openly made trips behind the Iron Curtain for indoctrination, Arbenz refused to admit that the international cold war had anything to do with Guatemala or with the Western Hemisphere. When his old army friends worried about Red influence, Arbenz assured them that he could dump the Communists whenever he wanted—but he never wanted to. Perhaps he never realized how much he was coming to depend on them. Perhaps he did.

Arbenz had always been dry, chilly headstrong. He totally lacked humor or small talk, and his pained social smile was famous. Presidential power somewhat remodeled his personality. He stopped his moody drinking, started getting up early. He bought 400 Countess Mara ties and a wardrobe of tailor-made suits, mainly in shades of grey. Upper-crust Guatemalans love to gamble, and Arbenz learned to drop up to $1,000 at a friendly session of poker or chemin de fer and laugh it off. His delivery of speeches, mostly ghostwritten by Communist ‘Guerra Borges, became notably confident and easy.

The Turning Point. In such a sure-of-himself mood, Arbenz and his wife spent a sociable evening last December 18 with the newly arrived U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy and his wife. The President, articulate and outspoken, set forth his views and aims in full detail. Peurifoy listened until 2 a.m., covering up his increasing amazement. Next day he wrote an urgent report to the State Department. It was never made public, but later events plainly indicate that it must have boiled down to something like this: “Maybe this man doesn’t actually think of himself as a Communist, but he’ll sure do until one comes along.” Career Man Peurifoy, who helped hold postwar Greece for the West, was in Guatemala as a troubleshooter. Earlier U.S. ambassadors had had simpler tasks; in the ’30s, they simply kept contact with Dictator Ubico, who, as a great & good friend of the U.S.-owned United Fruit Co., once marched troops into Guatemala’s Congress to force the Deputies to pass a bill giving the firm a concession to its present-Tiquisate banana plantation. Even under Arévalo, the notion of a Communist capture of the government was still farfetched; if Arana had shot Arbenz (as he may have intended), the Reds would have been stopped.

As it was, they were neither stopped nor stopping, and Peurifoy’s report, bucked right up to President Eisenhower, signaled a sharp turn in U.S. policy toward Guatemala. Hand-wringing stopped and action started. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles himself formed the plan, and carried out its first step at the Caracas Conference of the Organization of American States: a resolution that Communist domination of a Western Hemisphere republic would call for consultation by OAS foreign ministers on moves to head off Red penetration. Guatemala’s startling answer, in mid-May, was to import—under false manifests, on a Swedish freighter out of Stettin in Red Poland—2,000 tons of arms and munitions from Red Czechoslovakia. The shipment added up to more than all the arms received in all Central America in the previous 30 years; it completely upset the military balance of the area, and made some kind of blowoff inevitable.

Tampering Fingers. A depressing number of Latin Americans (and North Americans), refusing to take Guatemalan Communism seriously, have long insisted that the State Department’s alarm was only a pretext for some kind of intervention on behalf of the banana-growing United Fruit Co. Arbenz’ Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello has made shrewd propaganda use of this. But Guatemala’s explosive purchase of Red arms in such quantity made the Kremlin’s tampering fingers visible to the most myopic. Dulles further stressed that Communism, not the banana business, is the U.S.’s main concern in Guatemala. Said he: “If they gave a gold piece for every banana, the problem would still be Communist infiltration.” The State Department brought up to date a 56-page documentary report on Communism in Guatemala, sent it to the hemisphere’s chancelleries, and got hemisphere backing (except, of course, from Guatemala) for a consultative meeting of foreign ministers to be held in Montevideo around July 1.

Inside Guatemala, tension rose to the boil. Labor and peasants presented with farms of their own under the land-reform program pledged loyalty to Arbenz and the Communists; the remote Indians, as ever, were mute and apart. But in the capital, which had elected an anti-Communist mayor in 1951, the government discovered “plot” after “plot”—and across the border in Honduras, Castillo Armas was almost ready.

By the dozens, the regime’s opponents fled to asylum in foreign embassies; the Salvadorans had barely put 18 such guests on a departing airliner when twelve more showed up. Arbenz clamped on a state of emergency, drastically censored the press and cables. Secret police in black berets drifted everywhere; cops with rifles slung over their backs patrolled the streets on bicycles. The jails filled up with prisoners.

Terrorist killings followed. The body of Alfredo Abularach Sabagg, a salesman who had been inexplicably arrested and jailed a few days before, was returned to his family with the curt explanation: “Suicide.” A post-mortem showed one arm broken, the sole of one foot burned, general bruises, and a bullet hole in the back of his head. Secretary of State Dulles spoke out bluntly against this “reign of terror” in a press conference. President Eisenhower added the weight of his disapproval and deep regret.

Quiet Question. All Arbenz’ Communist support might do him little good, in a showdown, if his army deserted him. How stood the army? Arbenz had fattened it with increased pay and had given his officers elegant clubs and low-price commissaries. He had trimmed out the despised “line” (i.e., up from the ranks) officers and replaced them with fellow military-school men. The officers were glad to get new equipment, even Red arms —but they had little use for Communism.

Early last week a group of them came to Arbenz’ mahogany-paneled office, and their spokesman, Colonel Ruben Gonzalez Sigui, posed a quiet, pregnant question.

“Señor Presidents ” he asked, “to what extent is Communist support indispensable to the regime’s stability?” He also wanted assurance that the new arms would not be handed out to unions and peasants. Arbenz looked up, pleasantly asked the officers to put their questions in writing, then asked Sigui: “By the way, colonel, what is your position in this matter?” Said Sigui: “I am anti-Communist.” Next day Arbenz dismissed him from command. The other officers elaborately denied that they had given Arbenz anything like an ultimatum to break with the Reds.

Arbenz turned next to the diplomatic front, instructing Foreign Minister Tori-ello to demand an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council. Under this month’s president, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the council met this week for a tense, five-hour session.

Friendly Veto. To many laymen the clash in Guatemala seemed a civil conflict with some international overtones; the original staging area was certainly Honduras, and the first planes came from somewhere outside Guatemala. In the council, what it was became a legal question. Brazil and Colombia, terming it a “dispute,” proposed to turn its solution over to the U.N.’s regional organization, the OAS. Guatemala, which had seen the OAS vote 17-1 against it at Caracas, howled no.. The issue, it cried, was “criminal aggression,” initiated by the United Fruit Co. and “fomented by the State Department of the United States.” Only the U.N., it argued, could properly deal with the matter.

Russia’s Semyon Tsarapkin agreed, probably in the hope that a Security Council investigation into Central American affairs would offer Soviet diplomats endless chances for fishing in troubled waters. Lodge flared right back: “I say to the representative of the Soviet Union.

stay out of this hemisphere and don’t try to start your plans and your conspiracies over here.” The galleries cheered. When the other ten members voted for the Brazil-Colombia proposal, Tsarapkin cast the U.S.S.R.’s 60th Security Council veto — another shock to Guatemala’s apologists in Latin America. The council agreed only on a call for the “immediate termination of any action likely to cause bloodshed.” That bound no one, least of all the enemies maneuvering for good bloodshedding positions in Guatemala.

Because the veto paralyzed the council, the OAS Inter-American Peace Commission held itself in readiness to take up the Guatemalan question. But events in the narrow streets and bush trails of Guatemala could move faster than any commission ; the Arbenz regime could be shattered — or it could emerge victorious and cockier than ever. Jacobo Arbenz, stubborn as ever, clapped on a tougher form of martial law, tightened up on blackouts, authorized his cops to shoot motorists caught with headlights on during a night alert.

Then he waited, poker-faced, to see how his big gamble — with his army — would turn out.