However, and regardless of how just retribution may seem, I have dire misgivings about rewriting history. Things do not happen in an isolated manner but, rather, are part of a whole set and system of circumstances and cannot be extricated without damaging them or even twisting them, perhaps unwittingly and innocently, into something other than what they were.
A couple of weeks ago one of my daughters in law was saying: Imagine, in Franco’s time, homosexuals were considered to be outside the law, illegal. It is true. But it is also true that at that time, happened in England and in the US too. Sometimes what happens is the fruit of the time and situation. Like the Tennessee Williams plays. Do you really think they are scandalous now – in 2011? Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned for years, and so was The Tropic of Cancer, Ulyses, etc. What does that show? That the times change. You can’t judge today what was done 50 years ago, and judge fairly. Circumstances 50 years ago were different. Re-reading might bring new facts up, but I sincerely doubt our reading today is any more accurate than what was read originally.
When you rethink history, it is very hard to get a balance view. I have a friend who is constantly harping about how the Spanish murdered the Indians in America. I’m not saying they didn’t. But truth is they did not do anything in America that they (and the English, Dutch, Italian, Germans, etc.) were already doing and having done to themselves in Europe. What is more, the American Indians had their own wars against the Aztecs, the Mayan tribes, the Incas… and that is why the Spanish found allies.
Did you know that there were such bizarre sentences in Europe such as boiling wrongdoers in oil? This in a civilized country like Germany in the 16th century.
That the CIA has had a finger in every pie in Latin America (and Africa and Asia) from way back when. America’s “manifest destiny” was not just something we heard of at school. People – many people, good, well-meaning Americans – believed it. We all tend to think our way is best, that we know better than you what is good or could be good for the other. Why should democracy be rammed down anyone’s throat? Maybe they don’t want that kind of responsibility.
Which brings us to Jacobo Arbenz, deposed president of Guatemala and his restitution to honour.
Arbenz succeeded as president Arévalo, nicknamed “chilacayote” (pumpkin head) – who was born in Argentina, and was an Argentine citizen until voted president. If Arévalo was not a communist, he worked hard at seeming one. Arbenz followed suit. He might not have been a communist, but from what I have heard, if you walk like a duck and you quack like a duck and you hang around with ducks, chances are that you are a duck.
My father left Guatemala January 1953 because he was outspoken and unfriendly with the Arbenz government – In in the tightly bound Guatemalan society, his legal practice was being pushed into a corner. My father said he decided to leave the country when a close friend and a client of many years had come by to say: “We are friends, and I still think you are the finest lawyer about, but I have a couple of affairs now in hand that I will entrust to other hands. It is not a matter of what is right, or what is just, not even of who is the most clever displays more brilliance or wiser strategy. It is now a matter of affinity with the government, and we both know you are not.”
I have an anecdote for you. This was told by my mother, not once, but many times. It was practically a family joke. I am not certain if the President at that time was Arévalo or Arbez.
My mother’s first cousin, married to a wealthy man, was an actress, would-be-star, self-styled intellectual and eternal exhibitionist – anything but to go un-noticed. She was a communist. You see, all the communists I have ever known have been wealthy people that spout well-meaning phrases and continue to live in the lap of luxury even if they occasionally organize a garage sale to raise money for this or that cause.
She went to a reception at the Presidential Palace and wore her best mink coat (show-off, as you see, willing to wear a full length fur coat in the mild Guatemalan weather). She checked her coat in at the cloakroom and went on to enjoy the party. When she left, handed in her token at the cloakroom, and received a green woolen coat. When she specified that hers was a fur coat, she was told that the fur coats had all been taken before 10 in the evening. You see, in a communist environment, a coat is a coat, and all coats are equal. And all coat owners are equal too.
I always remember my mother saying she got a dose of her own medicine and that it served her right for flounting her wealth when communism says wealth is only acquired through exploitation of the poor!
Concerning land redistribution, I have another family tale for you.
My mother’s brother and his wife, worked at the United Fruit plantation in Tiquisate, Escuintla. They were administrative staff working with the forerunners of computers using perforated cards. I don’t know what they actually did, accounting or production control, or any other task. They lived in a United Fruit house, like the other staff members. The bungalows were built around a 9-hole golf course, which was a garden and playground for all the children – and there were lots.
Tiquisate had a bilingual school where my cousins went. There was something like a hangar which had at least 6 bowling lanes on one side and on the other one a company store where you could buy everything from Cheerios to peanut butter when all this was unknown in Guatemala. There was a drugstore which had a soda fountain counter that served malted milks, milkshakes and sundaes… And all this was not only for Americans. White collar workers, like my uncle, enjoyed them too, as far as I remember, on equal basis as the Americans.
The peones, laborers, did not live round the golf course and although they could shop at the company store and bowl, and sit at the soda counter, but seldom did. Still, the town they lived in was nicer than most towns in Escuintla.
When Arbez expropriated Tiquisate, the plantation was parceled out to the people who had worked the land. When we returned to Guatemala my uncle was still working for United Fruit, but in another plantation – Bananera, in Izabal. Tiquisate had disappeared.
I started working for AID the summer of 1960. I remember reading, and seeing photos, about ex-Tiquisate. It had been abandoned and the jungle had reclaimed it. Arbenz had redistributed the land, and typical of socialism, he had not bothered to study if the plots handed out could be profitably farmed, or train people to manage a community of plots to make them profitable, or even sustainable, and there was no provision made for up keep of the buildings which had originally been kept as “social centers”. When the farmers found they could not make a living from the land they got, they abandoned them to nature. This was documented, I am not making it up. The only profitably farmed plot grew marihuana or whatever. Profitable it was, and illegal too. Police closed down the operation.
Tiquisate just sank down into the jungle again. I don’t know what has happened since then.
In the article I read Arbenz grandson says that people automatically choose sides when his name is mentioned. I don’t choose sides. I have heard too many things about Arbenz to be his fan. I have heard them at home and have no good reason to doubt them. I agree that the CIA’s dirty work probably turned the scales, but I am certain that the CIA’s work alone could not have accomplished anything had there been no basis for it.
Furthermore, I think he and Arévalo before him lay the foundation for the quicksands Guatemalan politics have been since then. Not that it is all his fault, of course not, but he was not St. Gabriel either.
This goes for Allende also. The other day I spoke to a friend just back from South America, and he was shocked that good feelings for Allende were much more common in Europe than in his country, Sometimes you need to step back to get some perspective, but you can’t ignore the view the people who actually suffered whatever happenings have of them.
So, does history have to be re-written every fortnight? Who are we to judge, from the present, what was done in the past? I say we have enough on our hands trying to cope with the present in our intent of getting to the future, to meddle with the past.