322 ChaPter^6
companies now, incredibly, cried that they were the ones being cheated. The
Americans immediately began to plot ways to get rid of Arbenz, and UFCO
was particularly well-placed to assist in eliminating him, as it had power and
contacts throughout the U.S. government. John Cabot was an assistant sec-
retary of state who had previously been ambassador to Guatemala and was
a major UFCO stockholder; his brother, Thomas, had been a director and
president of the company and its banking affiliate. Sinclair Weeks, the sec-
retary of commerce, was also a director of the bank. Robert Cutler was a
presidential assistant for national security affairs, and he had been chair of
UFCO’s transfer bank board. John McCloy, a longtime Washington insider,
had been president of the World Bank and was a United Fruit director.
Edward Whitman, ex-husband of Eisenhower’s secretary Ann, and Walter
Bedell Smith, ex-CIA director, were directors as well. The secretary of state
and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, were both partners in the law
firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which had extensive experience representing
American corporations in Latin America. It was only natural, then, that the
government would view the land reform program as a threat to American
interests and an example of Arbenz’s radical and anti-American leanings.
Helping make that argument was a well-tuned public relations team head-
ed by Edward Bernays, the famous propaganda expert discussed in chapter 3.
Bernays conducted a highly effective campaign to publicize the “Communist
threat,” bringing journalists to Guatemala on “fact finding” junkets and pre-
senting them with UFCO’s version of political reality there. The New York
Times was particularly receptive, and its coverage and editorials about Arbenz
and his alleged subversive views were important in developing public opposi-
tion to the Guatemalan government. The fact that Arbenz was not a
Communist, in the end, was not even relevant. There were just about 4000
Communists in the country, and they held only 4 of 56 seats in Congress. Still,
Arbenz’s land reform program qualified him as a pawn of Russia in American
eyes, even though he explicitly rejected the Soviet Union as a political model.
As the American ambassador, Richard Patterson, explained it, Arbenz did not
have to admit to being a communist in order to be identified as one. He then
put forth the infamous “duck test” to prove Arbenz’s political philosophy. If a
bird looked, swam, and quacked like a duck, then it did not have to be wear-
ing a label that said “duck” to prove what it was. In the same way, to the U.S.,
Arbenz was a Communist because of his land and labor policies, even though
he wore no name tag referring to himself as such. Such logic may have been