Best guatemala history books according to redditors

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

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.

The video description has three 1 2 3

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.

They usually have access to materials that aren't available to anyone else, so often they produce excellent work (that's then not declassified for 30 years, in some cases). Mostly these folks serve different purposes than writing objective history for academic consumption, though. They're intended to serve as a sort of institutional memory for the unit, as well as produce material to sell the work of the agency to the current administration. They may also produce 'official history' type manuscripts, but that's often not a primary job responsibility. There are plenty of these histories that are pretty high quality, in any event. Examples:

http://www.amazon.com/Secret-History-Classified-Operations-Guatemala/dp/0804733112
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Summary_History.pdf

Relevant article: http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/stories/1059997283/print

There's probably some bias imposed by the circumstances, but then again everyone works from some perspective or another. I can't imagine an official agency historian being anything but upfront about that.

A bigger problem with military agencies' historians is probably that military history is currently something of an inbred field that's more than a little influenced by disconnect from the rest of the discipline through institutional issues like many of the positions being at service academies and other military-sponsored sites where there isn't necessarily the broader intellectual community. That's not 100% the case, obviously, but I'd suspect it imposes more bias on the questions that get asked, type of approaches to answering them, and quality of research than happens to official agency historians.

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

Essential in what sense? Are you looking for a more scientific book or just a good fun read? if you are looking for the latter "A forest of Kings" is pretty good.
http://www.amazon.com/Forest-Kings-Untold-Story-Ancient/dp/0688112048

here is the second one but they are all used

http://www.amazon.com/Nostalgia-guatemalteca-Guatemalan-Spanish/dp/9929801502/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407803475&sr=1-1&keywords=nostalgia+guatemalteca

> She also worked the fields until she died (96) and people thought her strength at that age was really odd.

I'd say it was because of diet and exercise :/

> It might seem silly but at that age, I really thought several women in our area possessed the 'power' or 'gahum'.

Where I lived, they said the same thing about the PBMA: people were afraid of them because of stories about human sacrifice or something that were never really proven, but they'd still send for a PBMA member if they had a toothache or needed a massage. The witch stories were mostly to scare little kids about staying out too late at night but I never really met anybody who was actually claimed to be one. I read this book in my Colonial Latin American history class last year. While it's about Guatemala and not the Philippines, I think it might interest you to see the comparisons it brings up about how witches and sorcerers were regarded in New Spain by locals, Spaniards and the Inquisition.

Sorry to hear about your grandma, though... It sounds like she was a pretty interesting lady.

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.

here you are! http://www.amazon.com/Forest-Kings-Untold-Story-Ancient/dp/0688112048

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

Unfinished Conquest by Victor Perera


The Battle for Guatemala by Susanne Jonas


Buried Secrets by Victoria Sanford


Guatemala: Never Again! by the REMHI Project


Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala by Daniel Wilkninson

Shattered Hope By Piero Gleijeses. This is the best history of the "Decade of Spring" period of 1944-54, and corrects some of the mistakes in Bitter Fruit.

Gift of the Devil Jim Handy

Wrong person and wrong language. The real commie machine behind Árbenz's policies were the product of [the communist party's leader] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Manuel_Fortuny) which was part of Árbenz's cabinet and advisors, and in this book, the whole presidency of Árbenz is examined. And most of his policies and laws were strongly influenced by the cabinet. We also get to know how the government started to buy weapons from the Czechs, as a way to enter the commie sphere (because buying them from France, the US, or any other western country would be as effective, or better).

Here, we can see an example of the theory of Árbenz being a tool (without him noticing). But this was because the policies were mainly anti imperialist, and the socialist ones had been done in Arévalo's presidency. Árbenz was mainly a continuation of this, and his close relationship with Fortuny (as far as having him writing Árbenz speeches) was what made him more socialist than he really was (albeit not that much, if much, Luxemburgist).

And the same cabinet that influenced Árbenz's commie tendencies were the same that got the commie parties banned (Nicolás Brol, a wealthy landowner was the minister of agriculture; and Roberto Fanjul, a businessman and notable anti-commie took part of this, and to moderate the 900 decree to take the UFCO's land).


But all of this is kaput, because the USSR never, never contacted Árbenz, and then we can not exactly know how that would turn out.

TL;DR: The cabinet was behind all of the desitions made in the government, either commie or anti commie. Add a very flexible Árbenz that wanted to continue with social policies but feared the US more than anyone. ^it^^was ^^^a ^^^^conspiracy

Pd. most links are in spanish.

I can't tell if you're pulling my leg or really just didn't realize you sent a magazine article...

• The company had powerful friends in the Eisenhower administration, including Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs John M. Cabot, whose brother Tom briefly was United’s president. It also hired Washington lobbyist Thomas G. “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s brain trusters, and two other public relations experts, John Clements, a powerful conservative, and Spruille Braden, Truman’s Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs
  
  The Assistant Secretary of State for LA brother's was United's President. For a single year.
  
  Then the company hired lobbyists, 2 of which have no bearing on United and 1 who was the Assistant Secret of State for LA who would be one of the few people in Washington deeply knowledge to have the qualifications for that job..
  
  People being paid by a company to lobby the government on its behalf. Well thats damning evidence for sure.
  
  
• But most analysts agree that United Fruit was the most important force in toppling Árbenz, and Bernays was the company’s most effective propagandist
  
  This is the most topical sentence in the article. And yet. Which analysts is he referring to?
  
  Thats as bad as Fox News saying "Some would say.." Its bad journalism without providing any sources so that it protects itself from being refuted
  
  If pasting editorialized generalizations is what you think is proving your point, It's not.
  
  I'm not even sure why you linked the article? To show that United was involved in lobbying the government and a public relations fight with Guatemala to protect their business interests?
  
  Yeah thats a good point. Maybe I should have included something in my original post about United Fruit being an element to it.
  
  Maybe something like
  
  >United Fruit added sticks to the fire for sure
  
  or
  
  >Now the business interests (not only United Fruit) being affected in Guatemala was definitely a factor
  
  So instead of a source. You provided a 2nd hand account that barely has any sources in it other than unnamed analysts.
  
  Heres a source. 1953 Declassified history of CIA actions in Guatemala
  
  
• Point 4 from the excerpt.
  
  >In November 1951 the first of many meetings was held between Agency officials to discuss Guatemala
  
  >In early 1952, after a careful survey of anti-communist Guatemalan revolutionary leaders, it was decided that RUFUS ( Carlos Castillo Armas) was the only one with sufficient prestige, character, and ability to organize and lead a successful revolution.
  
  
  Declassified Telegram from CIA January 1952
  
  >. It is requested that JULEP locate but not contact CARLOS CASTILLO ARMAS if in Salvador or Honduras. If located, headquarters should be continually advised of major movements. Reference gives reported permanent [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] address in Honduras.
  
  The United States and Guatemala 1952 - 1954. Declassified internal document
  
  > In 1952 State department officials welcomed Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza to Washington on his first state visit...[he] told state department officials that, if they provided arms, he and Castillo Armas would take care of Arbenz.
  
  >Truman instructed DCI Smith to follow up. Smith dispatched [redacted] a spanish speaking engineer who joined the Agency in 1951, to make contact with Castillo Armas and other dissidents in Honduras and Guatemala. [Redacted] arrived in Guatemala city on June 16th, the day before Arbenz enacted the agrarian reform.
  
  >The administration's concern about the Arbenz regime had increased
  in mid-1951, and there is evidence that the Truman administration en-
  couraoed the company to take a hard line. United Fruit's vast holdings and
  monopolies on communications and transit in Central America attracted the
  attention of lawyers in the Justice Department's antitrust division as early
  as 1919 In May 1951, they were preparing for court action to force United
  Fruit to divest itself of railroads and utilities in Guatemala when the State
  Department intervened. In a National Security Council session. Department
  representatives argued that a legal attack on United Fruit's Guatemalan
  holdings would have "serious foreign policy implications," weakening the
  company at a time when the United States needed it. The action was sus-
  pended until the situation in Guatemala had improved. It is often asserted
  that the United States acted at the company's behest in Guatemala, but this
  incident suggests the opposite may have been true: the administration
  wanted to use United Fruit to contain Communism in the hemisphere
  
  United Fruits lobbied the government for support after having their land appropriated by Guatemala by Decree 900 in June 1952
  
  8 months before Decree 900 was passed, the CIA was conducting meetings on actions to take in Guatemala. 6 months before the law was passed they already had Castillo Armas picked as the best candidate to replace Armenz. (and he did)
  
  Somewhere in your head you seem to think United Fruit time traveled and caused the coup when it was already starting months before they ever lost their land, and it wasn't until they lost their land that the propaganda campaign of Edward Bernays really took off.
  
  You really don't know what you're talking about. You should stop. The link you gave is literally the first result listed if you google "United Fruit propaganda". You're not even putting any effort into your point. You just wanted to spew your corporations are evil nonsense and get upvotes.