how are things in Guatemala? Trump wants to know, and learn…
Politically, there are two kinds, or wings, of extremism, left and right, or communist and fascist, though they both trend toward dictatorship. It’s always been obvious to me that the USA, if it ever went awry, would do it on the right side of that see-saw. Remember that McCarthy bloke and the anti-Red witch-hunts of the 50s? Remember the Vietnam war with its half-million civilian death toll, all about halting the ‘red menace’? Today it isn’t communism, it’s wokeism, feminism and even liberalism that have become terms of abuse in that faraway land.
I love its faraway-ness, from my more or less impoverished Australian perspective. It allows me to indulge in oodles of schadenfreude. After all, don’t United Staters deserve everything they’re now experiencing, having elected Old Shitmouth for a second time? And I’m actually grateful for their mess, as it was likely the principal reason for Australia’s centre-left government being returned with a much-increased majority in recent elections.
I have to say, I feel cynical about everything USA these days. Did Old Shitmouth really win that last election? Could any other democratic country allow someone who fomented a bloody insurrection after losing an election escape imprisonment, let alone regain the kind of absolute power afforded US Presidents, a power that no other democratic country on the planet bestows upon its leaders? I recently heard – I don’t always follow the US scene closely – that Old Shitmouth was allowed to pardon all those insurrectionists on returning to power. What kind of unutterably worthless and shit system this is, and the worst thing about it is that United-Staters don’t even seem to notice!
And so far, this term, only a few months in, looks far worse than the last, and my worry is more about the global consequences of this race to the bottom – though of course there are plenty of good people in the USA who don’t deserve this.
It’s typical of the USA that the thing that’s hurting Trump most is his associating with a very dodgy character who spent years sexually exploiting under-age girls. This doesn’t sit well with a country that has a greater percentage of Christian puritanical sects and obsessives than any other WEIRD nation. Never mind the travesty of putting RFK in charge of the nation’s health system, and so many other deplorable hacks in charge of the various agencies that should never be allowed to be politicised, but obviously can be under the US system. No wonder they have ‘no kings’ marches – it’s because they do have an elected monarchy – and dodgy, wealth-dominated elections for their monarch to boot.
Where will it end? We’ve all become pretty certain it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I’m kind of fascinated – schadenfreude again – but also disturbed and angered. At how Putin is taking advantage of all this. At how many overseas politicians are still kowtowing to this absurd US leader. At how good people are losing their jobs or being thrown out of the country. At the speed of this race to the bottom.
The overseas repercussions, though, are of great concern. Putin, who I suspect is getting desperate over this endless war he started, and its domestic effects, seems to be attacking NATO nations, hoping that Trumps’s lust for dictators like himself will keep him sidelined. Or maybe he, Putin, just wants to go out in a blaze of glory. However, it may be that the recent Putinland drone incursion into Poland will meet with virtually no NATO response, or more likely an inadequate one. It does seem, however, that Trump has begun to see that his support of Putin has been bad for his own business, and he has recently acknowledged that Putin is ‘the aggressor’ in the European situation. Hopefully he, and NATO generally, will become more aggressive in combatting him in the future.
But on the US domestic front, the cruelty and inhumanity of the Trump administration has been horrific.
So, how are things in Guatemala, as the song almost goes? While the liberal media in the US have been incensed by the treatment of some 500 Guatemalan children being rounded up and put on planes to be sent back to their country and an uncertain future, precious little has been said about the mind-boggling fact that these children were sent to the hellhole that is the USA – by their own families – in the first place. What could they have been thinking – or, to repeat myself, how are things in Guatemala?
It will come as no surprise to find that the country or region’s recent history, really since Spanish colonisation, has been tragically brutal, and successive US governments have contributed to that brutality, being behind a number of coup d’états and political killings. In 1931 Jorge Ubico was swept into power by the land-owning elites keen to maintain dominance in a region devastated by the Great Depression. Wikipedia gives a taste of Ubico’s version of fascism:
He replaced the system of debt peonage with a brutally enforced vagrancy law, requiring all men of working age who did not own land to work a minimum of 100 days of hard labor.[84] His government used unpaid Indian labor to build roads and railways. Ubico also froze wages at very low levels, and passed a law allowing land-owners complete immunity from prosecution for any action they took to defend their property,[84] an action described by historians as legalizing murder.[85] He greatly strengthened the police force, turning it into one of the most efficient and ruthless in Latin America.[86] He gave them greater authority to shoot and imprison people suspected of breaking the labor laws.
Thought I should leave the links intact.
All very unwell, but what does it have to do with the USA? After all, FDR’s response to the Great Depression was quite different, to put it mildly. However, though Ubico was certainly an admirer of European fascism, he was well aware of the need for US support in his region, and was happy to round up any Guatemalans of German descent, and to provide land for a US base there when the USA entered WW2.
And then there’s the interesting story of the United Fruit Company (UFCO), a benign-sounding name for a US multinational company which became infamous in the early 20th century for monopolising trade, transportation and labour in the so-called banana republics of Central America – Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala among them. Exploitative neocolonialism, as earlier practiced in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, was the term used by its critics. These profiteering ventures and tactics, often barely distinguishable from slavery, left much of Central America almost as devastated as the ‘Belgian Congo’ after Leo Victor’s depredations.
And US interference and culpability continued. As usual it was about the exaggerated, indeed ridiculous threat of ‘commies’. Guatemala held its first fully democratic election in 1945, and successive governments instituted land, labour, health and education reforms, during a period thereafter known as the ‘Guatemalan Revolution’. It was all too much for profoundly anti-communist US governments under both Truman and Eisenhower. Truman tried to organise a coup in 1952, much influenced by the afore-mentioned UFCO, whose massive profits had been cut by the Guatemalan government’s actions, and supported by the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Garcia, one of several brutal scumbags that dominated Nicaraguan politics for decades, fully supported and promoted by the USA in its delusory battle against ‘communism’. Presumably it’s much better, according to US leadership, to have by far the biggest rich-poor gap in the WEIRD world, than to have any kind of state support for the less well-off. And they won’t even allow neighbouring governments to express this kind of humanity!
Excuse my indignation.
Truman’s attempted coup was aborted, but his successor, Eisenhower, was, of course, even more anti-commie, and some of his team had financial interests in the corrupt UFCO, so the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz just had to go. Good old Wikipedia describes the outcome:
Eisenhower authorized the CIA to carry out Operation PBSuccess in August 1953. The CIA armed, funded, and trained a force of 480 men led by Carlos Castillo Armas.[120][121] The force invaded Guatemala on 18 June 1954, backed by a heavy campaign of psychological warfare, including bombings of Guatemala City and an anti-Árbenz radio station claiming to be genuine news.[120] The invasion force fared poorly militarily, but the psychological warfare and the possibility of a US invasion intimidated the Guatemalan army, which refused to fight. Árbenz resigned on 27 June.[122][123]
So US-fuelled corruption had become the new order. Armas, mentioned above, a militant right-wing extremist, became the next President, fully backed by the Eisenhower regime. He was murdered in 1957, and of course the CIA was heavily involved in deciding his successor, Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, a somewhat unstable figure who was finally toppled in 1963, after another coup d’état organised by his defence minister. His excuse was predictable – the regime was becoming ‘overrun by communists’ – always an essential line for keeping the Yanks onside. This was a very unstable time for the struggling nation – in fact the period between 1960 and 1966 has been described, perhaps retrospectively, as the Guatemalan Civil War. Ydigoras’ successor, Enrique Peralta Azurdia, funded death squads to deal with leftist unrest, and Wikipedia describes one of many low points:
Another notable event occurred on March 3 and 5, 1966, when the G-2 (military intelligence) and the Judicial Police raided three houses in Guatemala City, capturing twenty-eight trade unionists and members of the PGT [the Communist Party]. The twenty-eight “disappeared” while in the custody of the security force, marking it one of the largest forced disappearances in Latin American history.[7]
In 1966, the country elected it first ever civilian President, against all odds. However, backed financially and militarily by the US, extreme anti-communist repression continued. The new President, Julio César Méndez Montenegro, is described by Wikipedia as ‘left-of-centre’, but its description of events during his tenure hardly supports this. Civil war, of course, had hardened positions on both sides, with the left always suffering most. Wikipedia makes it clear:
the United States expanded training within Guatemala’s 5,000-man army and outfitted the Guatemalan security forces with the most modern counterinsurgency equipment available.[3] The United States also assisted the Guatemalan security forces in the implementation and use of counter-terrorism, and the establishment of counter-terror units under the supervision of U.S. police advisors.[4] With increased US military support, the Guatemalan Army launched a counter-insurgency campaign that successfully combated and dispersed the left-wing guerrilla organizations fighting in the mountains and country.
Clearly both sides were now engaging in all-or-nothing fighting, bent on revenge for the suffering the other side was causing, but with US-subsidised might always on the side of the right. The story of militias and atrocities continued through the 70s and 80s. During the early years of the Reagan Administration, Guatemala was regarded as a pariah state, ruled by a murderous military junta, but Reagan was fully supportive. The ruthlessness of the Right led, unsurprisingly, to a greater integration of leftist resistance, with growing support from Mexico and other neighbours. The indigenous population was also under threat throughout these decades. In 1992 Rigoberta Menchú, a Mayan Kʼicheʼ human rights activist, was awarded the Nobel Peace prize ‘for her efforts to bring international attention to the government-sponsored genocide against the indigenous population‘, described as ‘a longstanding policy of the U.S.-backed military regimes’.
In 1996 the Guatemalan civil war, or series of civil wars, supposedly came to an end. Again, from Wikipedia,
According to the U.N.-sponsored truth commission (the Commission for Historical Clarification), government forces and state-sponsored, CIA-trained paramilitaries were responsible for over 93% of the human rights violations during the war.
More than 450 Mayan villages were destroyed, and over a million Guatemalans displaced.
I would hope, of course, that things are much better now in Guatemala, but the fact that parents are sending their own children off to the USA, of all places, unaccompanied, surely suggests otherwise. So, what’s the story? I’ve been trying to research this but it’s difficult – all I’m getting is the fulsome coverage of the Trump administration’s treatment of these kids. I have learned that the country has one of the highest violent crime rates in Central America, and that, since 2017, there has been ‘democratic backsliding’. So perhaps parents are imagining that, on balance, their children would have a better chance in the USA. Of course, few people there or elsewhere would have imagined that United Staters would’ve been so imbecilic as to re-elect Trump, if that’s what they did…
So, I’ve found a Washington Post piece, from July 2018, entitled ‘Why are so many children coming to the U.S. from Central America in the first place?’ Its author, Rachel Schwartz, reports:
Experts tend to divide the things driving Central Americans to flee into two groups: economic factors and violence and insecurity. The first group includes the lack of economic opportunity, including a lack of jobs or inadequate opportunities for education. The second group includes violence and victimization, not just by gangs, other criminal groups and state security forces but at home as well.
It seems that targeted victims of crime are mostly wanting to migrate, but these motives aren’t easy to separate from seeking greater economic opportunity. Also gang violence is hard to separate from gang recruitment. However, Guatemala’s flights to the US seem to be differently motivated than those from the two other affected Central American nations, Honduras and El Salvador. People/children from these two nations are around 4 times more likely to cite gang violence as the reason for their flight, compared to Guatemalans. This aligns with Guatemala’s significantly lower homicide rate, which has been trending downward now since 2009. Almost 25% of Guatemalans claimed domestic abuse as a reason, a similar percentage to that of the other two nations.
But that was a summary of a 2018 essay. A 2024 Human Rights Watch report begins thus:
Guatemala’s democratic backsliding accelerated during 2023 with corruption weakening the country’s democracy and justice system. Authorities undermined institutional checks on the abuse of power to prevent accountability. Independent journalists, prosecutors, and judges who had investigated and exposed corruption, human rights violations, and abuse of power faced increased harassment and criminal prosecution.
The rest of the report makes for extremely depressing reading. Clearly today’s Guatemala is a disaster zone. And the Trump administration is clearly doing its best to send children back there, while perhaps learning a few lessons about how to increase corruption and create a more permanent neo-fascist state domestically.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/guatemala
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