Reddit reviews Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Revised and Expanded (Series on Latin American Studies)

It was more complicated than that, you're correct. But economic questions weren't irrelevant. Rather than talk out of school (my specialization), I thought I should point you at titles that may help and which I don't have to hand because I'm not in my office:

I don't know if this is too long in the tooth now, but Immerman's The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention may have some insights. Bear in mind it's 1983 so the situation became substantially more complicated in the following 7-10 years. But this may tell you a lot about that early period. Walter LaFeber's Inevitable Revolutions (1993) may also be worth a perusal.

But for more recent studies of US policy relative to the Guatemalan coup and its aftermath, I think Bitter Fruit (new edition, 2005) may still be at the top of the heap. Nick Cullather assembled the official CIA history of the 1950s coup in 1999, but I have never laid eyes on that book. I've read bits of Immerman and all of LaFeber, but a long time ago. Hopefully this will give you someplace to start!

and if you want to focus on guatemala, try Bitter Fruit

The video description has three 1 2 3

Thanks for your detailed reply and inquiry. I have not read "The Father of Spin" or "The Century of Self," though I now look to pick up those titles for I am incredibly interested in thought control in democratic societies, as Bernays described in great detail in his book, Propaganda (Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2005), where he begins by saying something like "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society."

Stephen Schlesinger's Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala goes into detail about the UFC involvement and mentions Bernays, though less is clear about his fear-mongering about communism. Certainly Cold War ideology played an intricate part coming from Washington, but that's a very pre-Westad view (please read "The Global Cold War"). Guatemala has a long, long, history that is often overlooked because other great powers like the US come along. But local factors are arguably much more important. We need to consider the deep ideological divides found within Guatemala, K'iche' elites and Creole elites and their relationship between Indian and non-Indian populations, the changing economic policies before the 1950s, , shifting political alliances, United Fruit Company, Arbenz, and the doomed land reforms. A question one might ponder: Why would Eisenhower be afraid of Arbenz? He was from the military. He wasn't a communist. But land reform, just like most progressive movements anywhere in the world during the cold war was often used as by states to attack internal threats. Bernays most likely contributed to the fear of communism in American media, and within the Eisenhower administration (one Dulles brother was a shareholder of UFC while the other worked for the admin). It may have encouraged the CIA to get involved. But as Grandin points out, there's a lot going on in Latin America, and specifically Guatemala that Bernays did not foresee, and even CIA personal did not fully grasp. The psychological warfare is still considered a "success" by CIA standards.

https://www.amazon.com/Bitter-Fruit-American-Guatemala-Expanded/dp/067401930X

Before I read that book I wanted to be an army officer and eventually go into politics. That book grew me up.

Bitter Fruit has a great account of The United Fruit Co.'s involvment & povokation in the CIA'S war in Guatemala. Written by to Harvard professors, the non-fictional historical account reads like a thriller novel. Listed here on Amazon, 4.8 out of 5 stars, From $11.48 used

Jacobo Arbenz had ties to ALL political parties in Guatemala... in fact, the minority of his government was composed of people of communist ideology. Socialists, capitalists, etc. were represented in his government. Saying he had anti-U.S. views is an exaggeration, he just disliked anyone that threatened the sovereignty of Guatemalan democracy. This is a fairly comprehensive read on the whole affair: http://www.amazon.com/Bitter-Fruit-American-Guatemala-Rockefeller/dp/067401930X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374707829&sr=8-1&keywords=bitter+fruit

Empire's Workshop by Greg Grandin covers the problem in some depth, but in relation to broader problems of US foreign policy and intervention in Latin America.

It's a great piece of scholarship and academic history that's accessible to a lay audience as well.


And I've never read it, but apparently Bitter Fruit is a classic on the subject.

Well, arguing that you “should” have a moral compunction to do anything is a virtually impossible task, because morals are internal motivation. I can try to appeal to those morals through guilt (which you don’t like), though calculating marginal utility and appealing to your sense of community (the EA approach, which you don’t like), or by demonstrating that you did benefit from other people (which I will continue to try). But if you truly believe that you are entitled to everything you have and not only owe nothing to people to whom you profited from (because that’s the way the world works) and do not wish to address disparities even though the cost to you is much less than the benefit to someone else (because it’s yours and you worked for it), then you are free of moral compunction and I can’t change your mind. That’s why this is usually the provenance of religion, which promises a punishment from a higher being to encourage what many societies have defined as “the right thing to do.”

First, I would like to agree with you about capitalism as a force for good. The expansion of globalized trade and capitalist economies has made the people on this planet healthier and wealthier than at any other time in human history. Those gains have been distributed, but they have not been equally distributed, and as a result, there is massive global inequality both between and within nations. And actually, the OECD suggests economic strategies by which lessened inequality promotes more growth, growing the pie for everyone (so the pursuit of maximizing only profits at the expense of other developments is not necessarily the greatest global good).

That being said, I will address your three points.

The most important is #2. The idea of “business-friendly values” is a very popular one, but values alone cannot make an economy thrive (or a government or a society) without institutions that protect and promote those values. It is not at all clear that implementing “western values” create prosperity in any kind of automatic way, and certainly not without protective institutions. In addition, it is rare for people in positions of power to voluntarily give up that power, and so disenfranchised people tend to remain disenfranchised. I would say that in your example of immigrants that come to the “Western world” and prosper can do so not because of their values, but because of the institutions that allow that to happen. I suggest Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail and Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion as further reading.

It’s also part of the reason that innovation tends to come from a subset of economies. Countries that innovate, have good institutions, and invest in education tend to have more innovators, find a balance between protection of profit and distribution, and make more innovators. There is also an incentive to oppress innovation on discoveries outside of the original innovation centers, which is why we have overzealous patent protection and unequal business agreements that use proprietary tech (Point #1).

Which brings me to the idea that international business can perpetuate disenfranchisement. Many companies use economic power to subvert the power of the people in order to protect their profits, whether through appropriating the use of force or through lobbying elected officials. BP lobbied the US and the UK to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Iran to prevent oil fields from being nationalized (and resource profits sent overseas) in 1953. The United Fruit Company convinced the Eisenhower administration to overthrow the government of Guatemala in 1954 to avoid agrarian reform policies. In 2007, Chiquita banana admitted to funding a terrorist organization in Colombia to protect their interests. Domino Sugar today refuses to comply with labor protections in the CAFTA agreements, using disenfranchised Haitian-Dominicans to harvest sugarcane (part 1) (part 2). Conflict minerals in the DRC and Zimbabwe are still used in a large proportion of electronics. Nestle still uses child labor to harvest cacao in the Ivory Coast.

Rich countries are not immune. Fossil fuel lobbying in the US is a real and problematic thing that is bad for the earth and bad for the green energy industry.

So though it’s true that you did not personally oppress any Tanzanians or Iranians or Koreans (or Guatemalans or Colombians or Haitian-Americans or Congolese or Zimbabweans or Cote-d’Ivorians) (Point #1), if you made money as a shareholder of those companies (or consumed their products), then you profited from the unethical behavior of those companies. As a direct result of those business decisions, people in other countries received less money and you received more. Period. I don’t think that this necessarily makes you a perpetrator, but I think that it does make you complicit.

If you consider this kind of capitalistic profiteering ethical (or “the way the world works”), I can agree that you do not have a moral compunction to support disenfranchised people and reject these company behaviors. However, if you think that any of these actions are morally wrong, then you should feel guilty from profiting off of them. (And I am speaking explicitly about investment income here).

Even if you do not profit from stocks in those companies, you may profit as a consumer – when you buy cheap gas or bananas. Taxes that the companies paid may have supported your elementary school. Benefits from medical protections may have been reinvested in new therapies that cured your grandmother’s cancer. The global economy is complex. But generally, the people who are already rich are those who reap a larger share of the benefits.

If you believe that this is morally acceptable (or “the way the world works”), then you do not have a moral compunction to donate to charity.

However, if you do have a problem with these behaviors and you feel morally uncomfortable with the results, you have two routes to address the issues, and both routes should be followed at the same time: to ameliorate the effects through global giving AND to pursue system reform to make it stop happening.

I've heard House of Leaves is really bizarre and cool.

My current deck is Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875-2002, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Blood Meridian, and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

It's a really depressing list.

I read American Gods a couple years ago and hated it enough to not pick up another fiction book for like over a year.

You're in luck, there are entire books written about this very subject