The Growth of American Power Through Cold and Hot Wars 321in 1950 had a population of around 3 million. It was a poor, agricultural
country with extreme class differences. Much of the land in Guatemala, at
least half, was owned by a U.S. corporation–the United Fruit Company, or
UFCO, and it let much of that land remain fallow, or unplanted, so that
Guatemalan peasants could not use it to grow crops to feed themselves and
thus had to work for UFCO at low wages. In the 1930s and early 1940s, the
country was led by the dictator Jorge Ubico, who brutally suppressed union-
ists, leftists and anyone else he deemed to be a “Communist.” In 1932, in fact,
Ubico had essentially legalized murder, exempting landowners from any con-
sequences of actions taken to protect their land and possessions. For the
wealthy, especially those who had business connections with UFCO, this was
a blank check to kill peasants demanding land or movements seeking a fair
distribution of resources. In 1944, however, a movement of the middle class,
students, and young army officers ousted Ubico and, in the freest elections in
the country’s history, elected Juan José Arévalo president the next year.
Arévalo was a reformist and a non-Communist, but he raised suspicions in
American eyes when he got laws passed to allow workers to organize and
increase minimum wages.
The changes, however, were mild as UFCO remained the largest land-
holder in the country with powerful connections in Washington D.C. [again,
think of Halliburton in recent years] and its directors continued to resist any
meaningful land reform. To American leaders, land reform–redistributing land
by taking property from the wealthy to give to the poor or peasants–was sim-
ply unacceptable; it had been in the aftermath of the Civil War in the United
States when the Freedmen’s Bureau’s attempt to give ex-slaves “40 acres and
a mule” ended after just a few years, and it was the basis for opposing the
Bolsheviks, Chinese Communists and other liberation movements. So, when
Arévalo’s successor, Jacobo Arbenz, began a land reform program that direct-
ly affected UFCO holdings, the United States deemed him a threat to its
interests. Arbenz’s reform program was directed at large landholders. Any
holding over 300 hectares [about 740 acres] that was not fully cultivated, that
was fallow, was subject to the land reform plan. Worse for the companies, the
land taken from them to give to peasants would be compensated at the value
that they declared on their tax records.
Since UFCO and the others had, for years, been cheating on their taxes by
declaring land values far below their real worth to avoid full payments, the