Guatemala, the tale of an intervention

Although the purpose of the exercise is to write the first thing that comes to one’s mind after doing the readings I have waited a few days to see if that will allow the anger to settle and something else will come to light. Bu that anger has not receded. The readings about Guatemala are not necessarily different from Chile or countless other places where in the name of democracy and anti-communism, democratic regimes where brought down in allegiance with the military institutions and the Catholic Church. It did not matter that there was not evidence of links between the Soviets and the emergent democracies of –in this case- Central America. A good for nothing bunch of rifles from Cechoslovaquia were in themselves good reasons to intervene against a democratically elected government. The will of the people of Guatemala was of no use, because the people that mattered needed to get bananas at an affordable price. The will of the workers of United Fruit Company did not matter, because better working conditions was a legitimate demand for some people, but not for others. Perhaps Jose Saramago was right, when he argued that one of the problems with democracy was that people choose their political representatives, but those were simply “political commisars” of the economic power. Perhaps Ranciere is right when he argues that politics is the staging of a dissensus and that is precisely what continues to happen, the dissensus continues being staged.

Many times when people talk about the possibilities of development for Latin America, they go on and on about the rich natural resources of the region, but perhaps those natural resources have been a blessing, which became a curse.
Many other times when people talk about the corrupt governments of the region they make it sound like it is an incapacity of the people to differentiate the good from the bad apples, but too often, far too often, even when the sovereign will of the people have chosen the best that they can, it is the foreign intervention that brings back to power those who have been ousted by the people. The latter could be demonstrated in the case of Guatemala when the people that had worked under the Urbico government went back to power with the CIA backed government that ousted the Arbenz government.

Perhaps the most troubling fact is not so much what happened, as horrid as it was, but that the same trickeries are being used, the same grandiose words, are being invoked in order to subdue and oppress peoples, the same old and tired concepts like liberty, democracy and security continue being placed as masquerades for economic interests whose only concern is the maintenance of the status quo.

The greatest error of Arbenz and many others after him was to think that the people of Guatemala were being exploited by unequal political and economical arrangements, to thin that he could change that and that the populace followed him.

After readings like this week’s reading, it is so hard to continue believing that a better world is possible. Perhaps it will never be. The only alternative will be to become cynics, give up the idealism and comprehend that democracy is an idea that is rotten in its modern use.