John Foster Dulles Doing Cocaine off Chiquita Bananas in a Mudslide

[Warning: this post may contain sweeping causal claims of historical events!]

Former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (yes, the namesake of DC's eyesore of an airport) was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1954. That was the same year he successfully orchestrated a coup against Jacobo Árbenz, democratically elected President of Guatemala.

"He reinforced the outposts"

Dulles and his brother Allen (the CIA Director!) both had interest in United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Banana) – Johnnie D. was a major shareholder and former legal counsel for United, and Allen sat on the company’s Board of Directors.

In the 1950's, UFC was the largest owner of private land in Guate. So it was pretty inconvenient for Los Hermanos Dulles that Árbenz won the presidency on a promise of land reform, which meant taking some of United’s uncultivated acreage and giving small parcels of it to the indigenous people who lived nearby.

Sounds pretty innocuous, but in Cold War ‘54, all the Dulles brothers had to do was cry Commie, and popular support quickly accumulated to take down Árbenz. The whole charade is narrated in chillingly simple terms in this short 5-part documentary.

Like many of its Central American neighbors, Guate quite literally fell back into a pattern characteristic of a Banana Republic, that is to say a perennial basket case where government officials are bought and sold by a plutocracy of elites, a revolving door of corruption with little capacity to govern. Guatemala’s case was one of the worst - during the decades that followed Árbenz's ouster, the country descended into a 36-year civil war with over 200,000 losing their lives at the hands of the army. The vast majority of the victims were the same landless indigenous peoples that Árbenz was trying to protect when he reclaimed land from United Fruit.

Diego Rivera’s “Glorious Victory”

It’s far from a clean causal link of history, but it’s not crazy to suggest that weakened states such as Guate are fertile ground for gangs and violence. While hard to estimate exactly, there is consensus that a large proportion of the gang activity in Central America, particularly the Northern Triangle (Guate, Honduras and El Salvador) relies on drug trafficking to the US via Mexico.  Many of the Central American gangs (e.g., Mara Salvatrucha, Barrio 18) also reportedly have ties to some of the biggest cartels in MX (Sinaloa, etc). And there's plenty of evidence to suggest that politicians find it hard to resist lining their pockets with drug money.

And when drugs are astronomically profitable, it's tough to convince poor campesinos that they should stay away from the business. Two weeks ago I went up to the Western Highlands region for work, and spent a couple days in San Marcos, a Department which borders Mexico. CRS is involved in several different USAID-funded "value chain" projects in the area, mostly training farmers on improved techniques for coffee production. This is no doubt important training, but the motivation is definitely 2-fold - improve livelihoods, sure, but also create an alternative to trafficking drugs into Mexico and a disincentive from engaging in the region’s newest agricultural activity, poppy farming. Guate is now among the world’s largest producers of poppy, and it ain't being used for bagels (though interestingly, there has been some discussion of legalizing and taxing the production of poppy in Guate).

Which war was/ is dumber - the war on communism or the war on drugs? Both were pretty worthless - both ideologically and in terms of measurable results - and both had disastrous consequences on the lives of poor Central Americans. Sure, legalizing drugs might not be a panacea (see Hamsterdam), and while plenty of smart people make arguments against it (also here), it's also hard to claim that legalization of pot would no effect whatsoever on cartel activity or violence.

Last summer’s immigrant influx at the US-Mexico border was notable for the throngs of unaccompanied minors from Centroamérica, many of whom had traveled in desperation at the behest of their parents worried about the effects of violence in their communities. It’s possible that the US response to this wave, $1 billion in aid to the region (the so-called “Biden Billion,” though still not approved in full by our quagmire of a congress), will help reverse the trend of military aid to stem the drug trade, and actually focus on education, youth vocational training, small business assistance and other programs.

Did John Foster Dulles cause Guatemala's civil war? Is he complicit in the deaths of 200,000 Guatemalans who just wanted a little bit of land to farm on? Subsequently, is failed US drug policy among the root causes of gang violence in Central America? And to what extent is American intervention responsible for its downstream effects, as manifested in weakened Guatemalan institutions today?  Examples are tragically abundant, like the municipal governments who continued accepting poor people’s money to issue building permits in villages they knew were susceptible to mudslides. Some might call this symptoms of a weak state, others might call it structural violence. Which happens to be the legacy of actual violence.

Next episode: light-hearted dog blog, I promise!

Kat + dogs = Fun!