From the perspective of United Fruit, the new unions were bad enough. An overwhelming majority backed Juan José Arévalo, an academic who was a bit of a windbag but fully committed to what came to be known as the Guatemalan Spring or October Revolution – legalising unions, expanding the vote and breaking diplomatic ties with Franco’s Spain.
Why Guatemala? After overthrowing General Ubico – with his secret police, footsie with fascism and backing for conditions of near slavery for Indigenous people on coffee and banana plantations – Guatemalans had voted in free elections for the first time in 1944. At the agency, they persuaded themselves that no one did. In Latin America, everyone knew it was the CIA. Never mind those effigies of President Eisenhower and the stars and stripes burned after the coup in Havana, Santiago, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. Never mind that the details of US involvement were leaked and shouted out across the front pages of Guatemalan newspapers well before the mercenaries dropped a single bomb.
Never mind that the government’s overthrow was enabled by a series of accidents that fell the CIA’s way. And on the cheap! Got out and didn’t leave fingerprints on anything. For decades afterwards, the agency believed its own propaganda – that it had successfully and secretly brought down the regime in Guatemala. What’s so funny about the coup? The CIA thought it was being sneaky. The political argument he is now trying to advance is that in 1954 the Latin American right aligned itself with murderous dictators, but that the Latin American left lost its way too, by embracing armed struggle rather than reform.
This echoes the second line of Conversation in the Cathedral (1969): ‘At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?’ The CIA coup, Vargas Llosa said, ‘led many, myself included, to think that democracy was not possible and that we had to look for a communist paradise.’ He had studied Marxist thought at university and was enthusiastic about the Cuban Revolution before he turned to the right. He has said in interviews that he wrote the novel to explain when politics went off the rails in Latin America. This story of early regime change surprised the left with its warm appraisal of the left-leaning president overthrown by the CIA, and made Vargas Llosa a few new enemies among his usual friends on the right throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Harsh Times is a novel, not a historical tract, but anything Vargas Llosa writes is received across Latin America as a political statement. It even helps explain the course of the Cuban Revolution, if you like – and Vargas Llosa does like. The coup could be argued to have set in train the US anti-communist crusade of subversion, threats and invasion that played out over the next half-century. The CIA equipped and paid Central American rebels, and hired US mercenaries to fly bombers over Guatemala City, dropping first leaflets then bombs, while the US navy blockaded the coast. This was the second (acknowledged) US covert operation aimed at regime change, after Iran – a joint operation with MI6 – the previous year. Harsh Times, an understatement of a title, rehearses the coup in Guatemala and its muddled aftermath, the first years of blowback. All he had to do was lift them out and plop them down in his latest book, without bothering to do much by way of embellishment. They already seem cribbed from a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa. There is the adman making a pitch to get involved in international relations, the nervy Central American president pouring out his whisky, the US ambassador with a feather in his fedora and a revolver in his shoulder holster, the Dominican hitman, the rat-eyed leader of a CIA-funded ‘liberation’ army. The players are exaggerated, almost parodic, even in the history books. Washington was convinced that the tiny republic was a threat, a reflection of growing anti-communist paranoia, and – in particular – of the ministrations of Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, who was on the payroll of United Fruit, one of the US’s largest corporations. The year was 1954, and the CIA, still young and enthusiastic, had decided to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala.
T he coup is almost funny, if you squint.