Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Paperback)

~ Stephen E. Schlesinger (Author), Stephen Kinzer (Author), John H. Coatsworth (Introduction, Foreword)

Editorial Reviews

Review

The reappearance of this small classic is most welcome and important. It helps us understand the disasters that misshaped U.S. and Central American relations after 1954, especially into the 1980s and 1990s.
--Walter LaFeber, Cornell University

Product Description

Bitter Fruit recounts in telling detail the CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. The 1982 book has become a classic, a textbook case study of Cold War meddling that succeeded only to condemn Guatemala to decades of military dictatorship. The authors make extensive use of U.S. government publications and documents, as well as interviews with former CIA and other officials. The Harvard edition includes a powerful new introduction by historian John Coatsworth, Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; an insightful prologue by Richard Nuccio, former State Department official who revealed recent evidence of CIA misconduct in Guatemala to Congress; and a compelling afterword by coauthor Stephen Kinzer, now Istanbul bureau chief for the New York Times, summarizing developments that led from the 1954 coup to the peace accords that ended Guatemala's civil strife forty years later.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 374 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; Expanded edition (August 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674075900
• ISBN-13: 978-0674075900
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #162,492 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

65 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Triggered an Erosion of Faith, March 20, 2001

By	Elderbear (Loma Linda, Aztlan) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Well, OK, Watergate actually triggered the erosion of my faith in the US government. But I was barely a teenager as that story broke. I was in my early 20's when I read Bitter Fruit, prior to meeting Stephen Schlesinger at a university function.

This is the story of how the United States Government plotted against and overthrew the first democratically elected government in Guatemala. It clearly demonstrates how our government became an instrument, not of Democracy, but of oppression for the benefit of the wealthy. The right-wing coup, planned and supported by the CIA, led to other covert operations, many of which succeeded in enriching American corporations at the expense of Democracy.

Jacobo Arbenz, elected to the presidency of Guatemala was faced with a crisis of poverty. Most of the nation's land belonged to a very few rich, and to United Fruit Company. Much of that land lay fallow. Arbenz instituted a land reform package which called for turning over fallow land to the country's impoverished campesinos. Land would be purchased by the government from the owners at the value THE OWNERS had declared for property tax purposes. Sounds fair enough, right? Honest landowners would receive fair recompense for unused land. Dishonest landowners would get their just desserts.

Nevertheless, United Fruit Company, using its pull with John Foster & Allen Dulles, Secretary of State & CIA Director, respectively, managed to have their own revolution created and funded by the US Government, wrapped in a shroud of anti-communism. The dictator they instated continued the tradition of repression that Guatemala had known for decades before.

The only real winners of in this story were the stockholders of United Fruit. Today, in the "New World Order," we're more subtle, using international development loans and free trade agreements to undermine Democracy in third world nations. The tools may have changed, but the goal remains the same: Corporate wealth continues to supersede and destroy Democracy worldwide.

38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an area studies and foreign policy classic..and a good read!, May 21, 1999

By A Customer

Reading Bitter Fruit several years after the last time was like picking up a great but long neglected novel and discovering its richness all over again. When I first read Bitter Fruit, not long after its initial publication, it was as riveting as any Dick Francis mystery--not my usual reaction to books I had to read for course preparation!

The Kinzer-Schlesinger book is one of those rarities--in two sub-disciplines: an area studies and a foreign policy classic. The rigor of the research that undergirds the book is clear from the early pages; the story is compelling;and the moral is timeless. Both as an examination of politics in Guatemala in the early 1950s AND as a study of U.S. foreign policy in that period, the book is almost without peer. As John Coatsworth notes in his introduction, "Now that the Cold War ... has ended, the lessons Bitter Fruit sought to convey are just as relevant [as] they were" when it was written.

John Coatsworth's fine Introduction is very useful in placing the book in historical perspective. Particularly for students for whom the Vietnam war is as ancient a history as World War II is for the authors and me, and for whom the Cold War is primarily memories of people breaking down the Berlin Wall with hammers, Coatsworth's introduction reminds the reader that history CAN repeat itself--if under different guises. As Walter Lefeber (whom Coatsworth cites) argues in Inevitable Revolutions, the U.S. goal in Central America from the nineteenth century forward was control of the region; only the rationale changed from era to era. This introduction reminds us of that reality; my only comment in this context is that the latest means of control is (as it was for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) economic--this time neo- liberal economic policies.

Kinzer's Afterword is an appropriate and useful reflection on Guatemala in recent years. Reading Coatsworth and Kinzer together was a good exercise; the two essays are excellent "bookends" for the original manuscript.

Tommie Sue Montgomery, Ph.D.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fast-paced and balanced account of American foreign policy, May 30, 2004

By	Brandon Wilkening (Bloomington, IN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I had wanted to read this book ever since reading Mr. Kinzer's account of the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, entitled "All the Shah's Men," which I would also heartily endorse. Like that book, "Bitter Fruit" is an intricately detailed yet fast-paced account of an American-sponsored overthrow of a popularly-elected foreign leader. Perhaps the most unique aspect of the book is the attention that the authors give to providing biographical sketches of all the participants. These portraits serve to contextualize the situation and render the actors' motives more understandable.

As a graduate student in political science, I have been trained to explain political phenomena as functions of identifiable and measurable independent factors. While the parsimony afforded by the academic approach has its advantages, Schlesinger and Kinzer's account reminds us that political reality is shaped by fallibe individuals often guided by imperfect information and their own ideological commitments. Indeed, the most vexing question that came to my mind was how men like the American Ambassador to Guatemaula in '54 and the dogmatic Dulles brothers ever attained positions of such prominence. Their belief that the social reforms being enacted in Guatemala represented the initial stage of a Communist revolution that would spread through all of Latin America seems ludicrous in hindsight, and Schlesinger and Kinzer's account makes clear that the evidence upon which this domino theory rested was shaky to begin with. The role that the "liberal" media played in reproducing the American accusations against Arbenz's government is one of the most interesting aspects of this book.

In conclusion, the authors are clearly antagonistic to the neoconservative ideology that justified American intervention around the world in the name of "anti-communism." Advocates of this view will naturally find weaknesses in their account. That said, Schlesinger and Kinzer are not apologists of the Guatemalan revolution of 1944. They devote ample space to detailing the weaknesses of the economic and social reforms enacted in the name of the revolution. All in all, their tone and their evidence permit the reader to form his or her own conclusions regarding the sagacity of America's interference in Guatemala's political and social evolution.