The CIA's Secret Genocide in Guatemala

in 1951 the united states cia head had invested in a fruit company in guatemala but then the government did something that hurt their profits so he started a 36-year civil war that ended in genocide the rise of the banana republic is a story as old as agriculture itself it's as old as the first moment that those farming communities realized that it was now more valuable to enslave rather than simply to kill it's as old as all those ancient empires that those shackled masses raised up like atlas from the earth as hard as it is to swallow it's a cornerstone of why humans developed civilization at all it's the dual hope of finding someone else to give our toil to while protecting ourselves from those who would force theirs upon us and moral or not it underpins all post-agricultural society it's the temptation buried in our fields and the only thing that ever truly seems to change is who gets to be the us and in turn that hard truth will hang over our species until our very last breath because this was the trade we made for agriculture however for the purposes of keeping this episode under 9 hours long i'm going to start today's story in 1892 because the allegory i'm exploring today is the destruction of guatemala and in 1892 the military presidente of that then 40-year republic was making a decision that would all but guarantee it he was trying to sell some coffee which is to say he was going to build a port city name it after himself and then build a railroad halfway across the country to the steps of his farm and those of his personal version of us and because he had the power he wasn't going to pay a dime not that he was going to do any of the actual farming himself of course mr presidente was creole which sort of goes without saying he kind of had to be this was a society split into racially based classes if you weren't a full-blooded european you weren't allowed into politics in guatemala in the 19th century you could never be a general let alone a presidente and what's more he was a peninsulare a spaniard he was on top of the top not just in a socially nuanced sense either but in the actual practicable law of the country and yet every society needs workers we can't all be presidente so guatemala being a colony did what colonies are built to do it conquered people lumped them together under a single race voted itself their land and then either enslaved them or offered it back to them as sharecroppers it gave itself a virtual guaranteed national labor force and what's more it was one that you could spot with the naked eye they even went so far as to invent clothing styles to designate individual groups within the indigenous many still wear those clothes today yet the races themselves only made sense within the system that was imposing them they were a truly guatemalan form of identity because neither maya nor creole would have truly felt united in their original forms back home in spain an italian was seen as a them not in us and the same went for the various groups that were formed into the maya a thousand years before their ancestors would have seen each other as distinctly as any europeans and they would have fought their own wars of enslavement to get workers for the farms of their own kings they too felt the temptations in their fields just as much as any other but those days were dead they'd been conquered and to the spanish eye that built their new identity even the maya kings were just another field hand in 1892 the best this bottom rung of guatemalan society could ever hope for was a tiny plot on someone else's farm in exchange for a harvest's worth of work just enough to feed their families the less lucky among them had to settle for a day wage that couldn't possibly meet their bills these were known as the mosos which directly translates to servants but on a more colloquial level it just means the indigenous kings and all on paper the mozo had the freedom of movement but in practice most lived a life of near-abject servitude forced to exist within a system where their labor was never enough to pay off the debts that their employers constantly kept them under it was slavery with a good pr firm i suppose yet the harder they worked the more natural it seemed to everyone else that they always should be the ones to do it for the middle class ladinos the mixed race merchants and artisans who populated the cities their own survival meant playing along just as much as those above them in fact more they knew the struggle to stay out of the fields far more than any creolo ever could and they'd fight just as viciously to keep their place exactly as it was and so year after year generation after generation things settled into what was effectively considered the natural state of things and by 1892 it's simply how it was sos as they say but to call it settled would be a vast overstatement because as it was with all societies especially slave societies just because the government said that was the system doesn't mean it was in everybody's heart you might call people a race and then deem them united but that doesn't mean they actually see themselves that way especially when they're on top in the halls of power there is no us and for all the resistance against his military rule it wasn't the opposition who removed el presidente from power but his own people his us his railroad had driven that economy into ruin and what's worse he hadn't even been able to finish it their farms couldn't get to port and for the landowners who kept him in power that was a fate worse than death so they killed him with his corpse still hot in the ground the creole threw up a new presidente to manage their bankruptcy to salvage the country from the ruin that it had self-dealt but there was no turning it around unless they got some massive country size bailout they were going to default on their loans and for a new country surrounded by enemies this wasn't just an economic problem the republic had already lost land to british belize what's to say that the bank wouldn't take more what's to say that the country would survive at all so in that desperation and presumably with a lot of bribes that new presidente did what so many of his neighbors had done before him and made a decision that even then he knew would one day destroy him he opened the doors to el popo the railroad tycoon miner cooper keith and his famously abusive united fruit company and even though it was still 24 years before they would famously massacre their striking workers in colombia in 1904 the government of guatemala would have been fully aware of what this decision meant not just for them not just for the mozo but for everyone they wrote the laws for in countries all around the caribbean united fruit had built a banana empire on the land that governments had handed over completely when they defaulted on miners railroads and once he'd set up shop in those lands he'd turn around and use that empire to corrupt their lawmakers to gain more land all of it with the tacit understanding that american power would come to his aid if attacked after all he'd bribed them too in him was a tiny taste of the colonization that they'd inflict on those before them in him was that ancient temptation from those fields he was the new conquistador and at the turn of the 20th century he controlled the caribbean with an absolute iron fist so obviously letting him in was no small thing it was like letting in the mob it was like letting in cortez himself one foot on their land and he'd take the whole thing they knew it but that presidente signed the paper anyway he gave them exactly what they wanted right down to the penny by the time the new president's term ended the united fruit company had taken near total control of the country's infrastructure puerto barrios and the railway that cost them their freedom was handed over in its entirety they controlled the port and the transport to it not to mention over half the country's farmland if they thought something was valuable they made sure that the government voted to give it to them mostly for free after all who was going to stop them the creole 20 years after that assassination united fruit dominated that country so thoroughly that they even ran the post office this was the time of the gringo their control would span generations it would influence the lives of millions of mozos latinos and creolos now all simply guatemalan in the eyes of this new american other but in 1920 a new leader came to power and he disagreed it wasn't even that he was trying to protect the workers that wasn't the issue not really anyway the issue is that they weren't even using the land they'd been given they just wanted to hold it so that nobody else could so that by not using it they could have no reason to pay tax that by not using it they could increase the labor market's desperation to the point that they'd literally work on it for food and to the new presidente this wasn't just an attack on the mozo but the nation itself and he was entirely right as well they think it should be stated that country survived like all countries thanks to taxes and other than a couple bribes paid to the right people united fruit had done a very good job of avoiding paying those the only real investment they were putting back in the country was what it took away to farm so really the company was a drain a vampire and of course it was it was built to do that just as the colony had been built to do that before it they were stealing resources and using local labor for the benefit of a foreign power the only difference was what they meant when they said us which rattled guatemala as you might expect because they'd always felt that they should be on top and race and economics are twins so for many in the halls of power the worst thing that was happening the worst thing of all of it despite all of what they stole from the country was that this new paradigm shift had shattered their historic racial control of what they'd originally brought el pulpo in to protect even if only by coincidence rather than propping up what these creolo saw as their rightful place at the top of the pile by bringing in united fruit they'd been forced to see themselves as just another middle the us in the reflection of the american them said guatemalan not european and just like the spanish with the maya before them these gringos showed absolutely no respect for their kings the new power came from abroad so in 1920 when that new president decided to take back the unused land from the company his clock started ticking four months later in that octopus reached in with its little tentacle and plucked him back out flicked him off to exile in france a kindness that they didn't kill him the new presidente didn't hesitate to sign over everything that the company demanded because the creolo understood now times had changed but it wasn't just guatemala where they'd changed in america things had also started to take a turn and they had a new fear of fear that was growing like a cancer the company started to take a harder line with its workers it started to take more interest in the crackdowns of the government they replaced their dictator with a man who made him look like a mouse in comparison a man who was finally brutal enough to please both company and the cia alongside them a man who would go so far as to call himself the hitler of guatemala his name was general jorge ubiko and he ran the country like a prison he declared war on the mozo naturally believing them all to be communists because why wouldn't they be given what they were doing to them his world was a reflection of his own fears and the fears of the americans who controlled his fate anyone caught espousing anti-imperialism was called a terrorist and killed for actions against the state which wasn't really wrong because the state existed for imperialism that was the system so those who disagreed he shot on site anyone who questioned the rights of the creole as the natural rulers of the country or the rights of the company to the nation's land would quickly find themselves in a shallow grave it was everything the cia wanted and more it's just that he wouldn't stop calling himself hitler and this was the 1940s you can't really be an american ally and say that fascism is the future during the war well i suppose you can but only if you keep the country under control and by 1944 general lubico was having a bit more trouble with that than he wanted to admit labor power after the war was at a generational high and so even the latinos had started to demand their say in the government unrest was everywhere in the country so with the u.s media turning its great sauronic eye towards the oppressions of this openly fascist ally the cia decided his time was up but it wasn't like they wanted actual change this was their goal hell this was their guy fascism was fine for them as long as it didn't call itself that in public to the media and so with him out the door they just scooted in his number two he was supposed to do the exact same thing another general another generation of stagnation only this time the people of guatemala had had enough a coalition set up to depose a foreign colonizer created in the reflection of what they'd been told they were they united not around the idea of being latino or creole or mozo but guatemalan they saw these workers as their countrymen these servants citizens no different than them and what's more they saw the stranglehold that that monopolization had placed on their economy for generations in 1944 guatemala cast out that puppet government and demanded free elections free elections that they would get and with nearly the entire country united against him there was nothing that new hitler could do but allow it however his bosses in the united fruit company disagreed they wouldn't be so forgiving they didn't care what it took they and the cia would make sure that that country felt the weight of their decision to try democracy so the incoming president would survive 25 coup attempts in six years and even that was a low number his survival was mostly just because he never took the company head on he danced around what all the people demanded of him but his successor wouldn't be so lucky he couldn't escape it and he would attempt what they tried all those years ago in 1920. he was going to take back that unused land from the company and redistribute it to guatemalans who'd farm it it wouldn't technically be stealing because he was going to pay them he was just going to pay them exactly what they'd been claiming the land was worth on their tax returns so naturally there was no way they'd let him live the ceo did what any incredibly corrupt international businessman does and he called in a favor with his powerful friends he spoke to a man with a serious investment in his fruit company a stockholder a shareholder a man who'd already spent years tinkering with guatemala's democracy at his request a man with a great deal to lose if united fruit collapsed a man named alan dulles the head of the cia and in response to that conversation surely at some point allen would have driven over to the white house and had a chat with his brother who just so happened to be the secretary of state for president eisenhower a man whose law firm would coincidentally somehow find themselves with a massive new client in united fruit and they would have come to an agreement shirley planned a meeting and then together they would have told the president an evil little boogeyman story a story about the communist revolution of guatemala how an evil dictator in waiting was thinking of stealing american property and redistributing it to the peasants apparently the soviets were involved and what happens when they pull back the cover mr president what happens when they agree to let russian missiles in it was simply a risk that they just couldn't take when it comes to the halls of power there is no us dulles pushed the paper forward and eisenhower signed it a death notice for an entire nation in 1954 alan dulles head of the cia with the full backing of the united states government deliberately killed democracy in guatemala and just like that a new hitler in power under a new name in a new man he committed all the same horrors that had come before a genocide against the mozo coming back stronger than ever unshackled by the great temptation in those fields democracy was once again replaced by the terror at the hands of a general who ruled their society police returned to the untouchable murderers that they'd once been but it was all crueler somehow the cia's best plan for keeping the country in line was of violence and the more it slipped away the more violence they inflicted to keep it in line but identity's a funny thing and it tends to grow with pressure in the end the crackdown only served to create the very problem it pretended to be fighting the government they deposed wasn't communist they were simply left of center if that but by twinning anti-imperialist thoughts as no different than communist thoughts they convinced those peasants who hadn't even so much as heard a word of marx to believe him by 1960 guerilla bands had formed in the countryside and were striking back against the government with violence although they barely killed one for every hundred they lost they effectively shut the country down for business it's hard to grow bananas in a country in ruin so for all their years of terror and enslavement the company had no real response to a complete social collapse all they knew how to do was what they'd always done and so in response to this unprecedented threat to their power the puppet government took off whatever velvet they pretended to still have on those gloves and sent death squads roaming through the mayan villages breaking in doors and killing anyone they deemed a threat it didn't matter if the people they killed were communists or just happened to own some land that a local rich guy wanted to steal their obituary always said terrorist the civil war that followed would be the longest in the history of the americas it would last for the next 36 years only truly ending in 1996 although calling it a civil war implies that the country was divided fighting itself and for the most part that simply wasn't true this was the violence of imperialism being brought by a puppet government against its own people america's us but when the beatings didn't increase morale the system started to falter the dictatorship might have been stronger than ever with its new american freedom from consequence but the country beneath it was in ruins armed bans roaming the jungles death squads killing workers in lieu of pay it didn't matter that they'd win back their slaves a civil war is a hard place to make money it would be wrong to say that guatemala alone collapsed the united fruit company but it certainly didn't help and as the country fell into chaos their stock fell alongside in debt and unable to keep control over the lands they'd stolen united fruit fell on its sword their name was so tarnished in the public eye that they had little choice but to be broken up and redistributed under new brands but beyond that little really changed except who got to be the us today united fruit exists under the name chiquita they still sell bananas and they still grow them in guatemala i personally buy them all the time but the mozos are all still there they're working as they ever did it's just at least the death squads have stopped since 1996 guatemala has returned to a fledgling form of democracy it's just with the quiet understanding that things can only go so far before they're going to get toppled because things here never got returned to the peasants this country is still a banana republic the united states is still an empire we just stopped using those terms even the most imperialistic fight against slavery will always be a civil war a war internal to ourselves to every society we ever create and in turn it will be with us to our dying breath because this is the trade we made for agriculture this is the temptation in our fields so what's a banana worth serious question i'm not asking you to solve guatemala's problems in the grocery store i don't expect you to change the behavior of the cia but even if just for yourself just for the thought the next time you're in that fruit aisle ask yourself what's a banana worth this is rare earth

Channel: Rare Earth

Views: 957,237

Keywords: Chris Hadfield, Hadfield, YouTube Documentary, Documentary, History Documentary, History, Unique Places, Unique, Tom Scott, Smarter Every Day, Veritasium, Crash Course, Vsauce, Scishow, Evan Hadfield, Rare Earth, BBC, Natgeo, National Geographic, genocide, guatemala, guatemalan civil war, cia, john foster dulles, allen dulles, eisenhower, US imperialism, US empire, imperialism, colonization, colonialism, native history, history, history of guatemala, central america, banana republic

Id: -BIA4dgAJ9A

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 26 2022

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