Customer Reviews

The Battle For Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, And U.s. Power (Latin American Perspectives Series)

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I have not read this book yet, but after reading the review "ideological scholarship" I plan on it. I have read almost all of the books that reviewer paulsrb uses to support his case that Susanne Jonas has misconstrued the truth, and he misrepresents all of them.Piero Gleijeses gives a compelling argument against Arbenz' involvement in Arana's death, and states on page 84 that Arbenz "would have won even had the elections been copmpletely free."

From reading the works of Immerman and Gleijeses, I believe they would agree with Jonas that Guatemala's direction under Arbenz was towards a Nationalist, Capitalist government. They both state in their books that the CIA coup was, at least in part, in the interests of United Fruit, who's president of PR was married to Eisenhower's personal secretary, and on which's Board of Directors had sat the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. Dulles' brother, Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA who instituted the coup, worked for a law firm who represented the interests of United Fruit.

Clearly the reviewer paulsrb has a political agenda of his own. I can only guess that Immerman, Gleijeses, and I'm sure Jonas, would take offense to his gross misinterpretations of their work. I know I did. I look forward to reading...

I WAS REALLY SATISFIED WITH MY PURCHASE, ON TIME AND THE BOOK IS AN ALMOST PERFECT CONDITION. FOR THE PRICE I PAID, IM A 1OOO TIMES GREATFUL. WILL USE A AGAIN

Susanne Jonas is widely respected as a leading expert on Guatemala. Her book is interesting and informative, but in places it distorts the truth. Although Guatemala was ruled by military or civilian dictators for most of the 20th century, she blames its problems on America. Hence the chapter on the CIA-backed coup against Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. Discussing the elections which brought him to power, she admits that his main opponent, Francisco Arana, had been assassinated and his supporters crushed by armed workers (pp25-6). But she insists that the campaign was honest (p26), even though other academic defenders of Arbenz stress that the vote "could not be genuinely free" because the impoverished majority, denied a secret ballot, would not dare to oppose any candidate backed by the government (Piero Gleijeses, "Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954," p84).

Maintaining that Arbenz sought a "modern capitalist economy" (p26), she suppresses the fact that he was a doctrinaire Marxist who became an official Communist Party member in 1957 (Gleijeses, p147). Applauding his confiscatory land reform - the "brainchild" of the Communist Party (ibid., p145) - she does not mention that it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which was then purged (ibid., p155). She does accept that Arbenz legalised the Communist Party, which subsequently took control of the unions; that he allowed communists to occupy key government positions; that he relied on the communists as his principal allies; and that he was receiving massive arms shipments from Eastern Europe (pp29, 31). Yet she dismisses fears of a communist takeover as paranoid (p32). The fate of Cuba suggests otherwise.

To her credit, the author questions the myth that the coup was induced by the United Fruit Company (UFCO), a fiction which has been demolished by historians (Gleijeses, ibid.; Richard H. Immerman, "The CIA in Guatemala"). Since the first edition of her book, government documents have been released proving that it was the CIA - not UFCO - which raised concerns about Guatemala, fearing a communist dictatorship in the Western hemisphere (Nicholas Cullather, "Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of its Operation in Guatemala, 1952-1954," pp24-7). But she should have mentioned that immediately after the coup, the Eisenhower Administration started an antitrust suit which caused UFCO's disintegration (Stephen M. Streeter, "Interpreting the 1954 US Intervention in Guatemala," The History Teacher, November 2000).

More impressive are the chapters on military repression, which exploded from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The author accurately chronicles the army's scorched-earth tactics, which left scores of thousands dead and were clearly a major war crime. But she should have noted that even this outrage pales in comparison with the millions who were being slaughtered at the same time by Marxist regimes in Cambodia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique. Moreover, she does not even discuss the atrocities of the Marxist guerrillas who butchered thousands of innocent people in Guatemala.

Then there is the contemptuous treatment of democratic reforms, mocked as "reactionary pluralism" merely because the socialists had to renounce violence, hardly an unreasonable demand (pp154-5). Examining the parliamentary election of 1984, she admits that it was free of open fraud and military intervention, but dismisses the result (p155). She attacks the constitution of 1985 - which established "standard political rights on paper" - because it failed to ban the civil defence patrols and because it "enshrined private property as an absolute right" (p155). Turning to the presidential election of that year, she accepts that "it was not fraudulent and was procedurally correct," but still questions the outcome, citing the pro-communist Washington Office on Latin America (pp156-7). By use of such evasions, she is able to rationalise the fact that her "popular/revolutionary" forces have yet to win the popular vote.

America is portrayed as the fountainhead of evil. The author admits that both the Carter and Reagan Administrations observed an arms embargo throughout the major repression and that the Guatemalan army had "to look elsewhere" for its weapons (p199). But she still tries to blame the murders on Washington, her only evidence being the provision of budgetary bailouts, which began when the massacres were ending (p204-5). Clutching at straws, she berates the Americans for helping the army decades earlier, before lapsing into absurdity by protesting the renewal of aid after the return to democracy (p205-6)!

The author does not hide her allegiances. Without embarrassment, she praises the "Latin American revolutionaries" who combined "a renovated and flexible Marxism" with "religious/humanitarian values" (p214) - as expressed, perhaps, in the hundreds of thousands of needless deaths which these saintly figures have caused. She applauds the Sandinista junta in Nicaragua for its "positive example," its "unique experiment in revolutionary pluralism," based on a "multiparty system" as well as "popular/participatory democracy" (p215) - insights which would have surprised the Sandinistas, who thought that they were building a communist dictatorship (Roger Miranda and William Ratliff, "The Civil War in Nicaragua: Inside the Sandinistas"). She even compliments the genocidal Soviet regime for its willingness to "advance peace" (p220). It is difficult to comment on such open support for a totalitarian ideology which has killed tens of millions of people. How many innocent victims have to die before left-wing scholars renounce the politics of Kim Il-Sung and Pol Pot?