Lessons of Guatemala

...It is hoped that no one will now take lightly the possibility of still greater clashes, over substantially the same issue, in other parts of Latin America...

...In Central and South America are other budding Guatemalas...

...Communism has lost the Battle of Guatemala but not the Battle of the Hemisphere...

...They would say that the United States has lost its "touch," that it no longer knows how to deal with small-time Caribbean revolutions, that it is weak...

...The fact is that our highest officials had no inkling of what was happening in Guatemala until matters had gotten out of hand, and to this day they have only a superficial understanding of the forces which gave rise to Communism in Guatemala...

...Lessons of Guatemala By Daniel James The battle for the Western Hemisphere has just begun and the Guatemalan experience has shown how the Communists are using methods specially adapted to Latin America The battle of Guatemala is over...

...That was the outbreak of proGuatemala demonstrations in at least half of Latin America in Mexico, Cuba, Honduras, Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay...

...What attracted so many of them to Guatemalan Communism was that the party promised them land, cradle-to-grave security, destruction of "imperialism," and, above all, "national liberation...

...The problem begins with Guatemala herself...

...Thus, the Guatemalan events have heightened, not lessened, the danger of Communism...

...Perhaps more than anything else, the issue is, at bottom, psychological...

...Nationalism, not Communism a nationalism molded to Communist purposes is what the Guatemalan party preached...

...Guatemala has ushered in a new era in inter-American relations an era of protracted struggle against Maoist Communism which may be marked by more wars and revolutions, and will almost certainly confront us with situations comparable to those in the non-Communist portions of Asia...

...Shall we await the emergence of new Guatemalas before we look again to the south...

...Latin Americans have in common a feeling of inferiority toward the United States...

...Their reasoning, which is still prevalent in official circles, is summed up in the disdainful expressions used by the would-be Hemingways who covered the civil war and thought it characteristic of the Latins that there was so little bloodshed...

...If Guatemalan anti-Communism fails to tackle with vigor and intelligence the fundamental political, economic and social problems of Guatemala if the United States permits it to fail then our cause in the Hemisphere is doomed...

...A country of only 3,000,000 inhabitants and totally lacking in basic industry, Guatemala herself endangered no one...

...Guatemala, as we said, is only the beginning of the problem...

...The slogan of "national liberation" which has caught on like wildfire a century and a quarter after Latin America's liberation from colonialism and which is Communism's chief stock-in-trade expresses consummately the general resentment over Latin America's dependence upon the United States...

...They informed us that many Latin Americans regard as their main enemy not Communism, but "Yankee imperialism...

...But to imagine that these developments, welcome as they are, dispose of the problem of Communism in the Americas is to return to that state of mind which helped Communism establish its first American beachhead...

...we gave Castillo Armas tacit encouragement, at least, to start his revolution...

...When, at the eleventh hour, we finally awakened to what had been happening in Guatemala for a decade, we reached for a sledgehammer...

...Have we learned how to deal with this danger on our doorstep...

...Next door to the unhappy land of the Mayas lies a country rotten-ripe for Communist plucking: Honduras...

...Doubtless, Communism had a hand in them, but there was about them a spontaneity which cannot be explained away as a Red creation...

...Maoism has given Communism a new face in Latin America, one which makes infinitely difficult the detection and exposure of Communist machinations...

...We rammed through the Tenth InterAmerican Conference an anti-Communist resolution which the others supported without conviction...

...Just as Guatemala was formerly the hemispheric experimental ground for Communism, so today it is the first test of anti-Communism...

...Still in progress at this writing, for example, is a stage of the first general strike in Honduran history...

...Guatemala, as such, was never an object of concern...

...It is doubtful whether the average North American is aware of the nature of that challenge...

...And shall we then try to fell them with the same old sledgehammer...

...we proclaimed before the UN the doctrine of "America for the Americans" (thus enabling Peking to proclaim back: "Asia for the Asians"), and we passed Congressional resolutions to "block" Communism in the Hemisphere...

...No amount of military pacts or anti-Communist resolutions will then avail us...

...The most significant event of the civil war, one that overshadows the victory of the anti-Communist forces, did not take place on Guatemalan soil...

...If it could be so explained, then it appears that Communist strength is far greater than we had imagined, for not only did great masses of ordinary citizens pour into the streets but many national legislatures adopted pro-Guatemala resolutions...

...The Honduran Reds have been thrown back by the defeat of their Guatemalan comrades, but to suppose that Honduran Communism is dead is to underestimate the resilience of the enemy and to ignore the underlying social-revolutionary forces at work...

...If we are to avoid such clashes, now is the time...

...Maoism must not be confused with Titoism...

...And U. S. prestige would have dropped accordingly...

...But their victory will be cause for real rejoicing only if it marks the commencement of a truly democratic and progressive era in Guatemala, and of a reappraisal, before it needs to become agonizing, of our whole policy toward Latin America...

...Castillo Armas and his army have fought the good fight ours as well as theirs and we should not begrudge them our praise...

...The succession of regimes which followed Arbenz's overthrow only enhanced their feeling that it was all an "opera-bouffe" affair...

...Latin America is not a police problem but a political one...

...We are obligated, from this point on, to pursue a policy toward Guatemala that will insure her development in the direction of democracy...

...Paradoxically, if we could convince the Latin Americans that we did not actively intervene on the side of Castillo Armas, they would react with scorn...

...The pro-Guatemala manifestations betray that belief, for they were not so much outpourings of sympathy for Arbenz as antipathy toward "Yankee interventionism...

...Next time, "victory" may not be as easy, or even possible...

...To many, the possibility of civil and international strife over Guatemala seemed a joking matter not so long ago...

...Having been fastened, willy-nilly, with the responsibility for the overthrow of Arbenz, we must henceforth proceed upon the assumption that we do indeed have a responsibility toward Guatemala...

...His authoritative new book on Guatemala will be published next month by the John Day Company...

...Daniel James, former Managing Editor of THE NEW LEADER, has written on Latin American affairs for the N.Y...

...Guatemala shows that we have not...

...It cannot be dealt with by economic means alone, vital as they are, but requires a many-sided effort on our part predicated upon a basic change in attitude toward Latin America...

...Next lime, we may have to pay with more than an alarming rise in anliyanquismo the cost may have to be reckoned in terms of our own blood...

...Out of the shambles they created in Guatemala, the Communists have emerged with something more lasting, perhaps, than a beachhead: an ideology specially adapted to Latin America...

...Other republics are affected only to a somewhat lesser degree...

...Rather, it has been embraced by Moscow as the doctrine to be employed in the underdeveloped countries, which comprise two-thirds of the earth's surface and include the entire region south of the Rio Grande...

...But first we must put the sledgehammer away and put our minds to work...

...In death, the Guatemalan party may prove to be a bigger asset to the Kremlin than in life...

...the second is likely to continue for the duration of the global struggle against Communism...

...Within the context of the Hemisphere, in short, the United States could not "win" in Guatemala no matter what it did at the last moment...

...the battle of the Western Hemisphere has just begun...

...what happened in Guatemala further intensified it...

...One wonders whether U. S. policy-makers are fully cognizant of it...

...The meaning of these manifestations is clear: They expressed a universal conviction that Guatemala was fighting for her national independence against the "Colossus of the North...

...The first was short-lived...

...But they were measures of desperation that cannot be efficacious in the long run and may turn out to be very costly...

...The Communist cause in those countries has not been harmed one iota by the defeat of Guatemalan Communism...

...This ideology was not overthrown with the Guatemalan Communist party by the Liberation Army of Lieutenant-Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, hut remains a challenge of the first order...

...They revealed that the new and virulent nationalism which is sweeping over Latin America is highly susceptible to manipulation by Communism in its Maoist form...

...Our victory over Guatemalan Communism is not as cheap, quick or complete as it looks in the headlines...

...And that is the essence of Maoism...

...The rise and fall of Communism in Guatemala was a process which lasted ten years...

...Our security will not be served by bludgeoning others into supporting anti-Communist resolutions, but by giving them a slake in the struggle against Communism, by helping them to solve problems more pressing to them than Communism: inflation, poverty, economic unbalance, and underdeveloped political as well as economic institutions...

...Herald Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post and other publications...

...The danger lay in the Red beachhead that had been established there, which posed a threat to Hemisphere defense and security, attempted to undermine and subvert Guatemala's neighbors, and established a pattern by which Communism could conquer other Latin American republics...

...Few Guatemalans ever knew anything about such concepts as the dictatorship of the proletariat...

...The writer has pointed out elsewhere the rapidly mounting menace of Communism in Brazil the Hemisphere's second largest country and in Chile and Bolivia...

...This highlights the complexity of the problem we must now face, and suggests that it cannot be resolved with a sledgehammer...

...Fear of U. S. intervention in Latin American affairs is an obsession...

...Most of these measures, in view of the lateness of the hour, were necessary...

...It is not national Communism and not in conflict with Moscow...

...We are compelled to show by deeds, not resolutions, that the victory of antiCommunism in Guatemala will not spell a return to pre-1944 semifeudalism...

...The Red beachhead has now been washed away, and with it the palpable threat to hemispheric security and Guatemala's neighbors...

...For antiCommunism will inevitably become identified in other Latin American republics, as it was for a decade in Guatemala, with everything the Latins loathe: reaction, imperialism, interventionism, suppression of the popular will...

...For what we think we have been fighting is classic Leninist Stalinist Communism, whereas what we really had to contend with in Guatemala, and must now face throughout the Hemisphere, is the more formidable doctrine of Maoism...

...on the contrary, it has been provided with new nourishment "Yankee interventionism" in Guatemala...

...for a people regimented and kept landless for four centuries by semi-feudal statism, the prospect of collectivization under a soviet state would scarcely have been inspiring...

...we rushed to sign military pacts with Nicaragua and Honduras and ship them arms before the ink had dried...

...Whether or not we had anything to do with the Castillo Armas revolution, the cold truth is that the Latins believe we did...