Communism Below the Rio Grande:
BOWERS, CLAUDE G.
Communism Below the Rio Grande Red Design for the Americas: Guatemalan Prelude. By Daniel James. John Day. 347 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Claude G. Bowers Former Ambassador to Chile and Spain;...
...That strategy reached full flower in Guatemala, where Moscow sought to create a center for propaganda throughout the continent...
...It is true --and understandably so--that we propagandized against the Communist-dominated Arbenz Government, which was circulating the most atrocious lies about us throughout Latin America...
...It may shock us into a realization that the teeming millions to the south are as wide open to Communist conquest as the peoples of Asia, and that the best way to halt the march of Communism and anti-yanqui nationalism is to show the Latin Americans that we regard them as equals and want to help them better their lot...
...Land-hunger, foreign exploitation, domestic tyranny, and along with them widespread poverty, disease, inflation, illiteracy, and in general an abysmal political and economic backwardness--all these phenomena are present to a greater or lesser degree in all twenty Latin American republics even as they were in China...
...Unfortunately, we have done far too little to allay this distrust...
...He writes: "What we think we have been fighting in Guatemala and other Latin American countries is Communism in its classic Leninist-Stalinist form...
...The legacy of good will left by Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy has been largely exhausted in the years since World War II, when we have shown our lack of interest in Latin America by concentrating economic aid almost exclusively in Europe and Asia...
...The author clearly shows how the Communists, though numerically not very strong, have succeeded in whipping this resentment into a frenzy of hatred...
...They offer Communism a unique opportunity which it is not slow in seizing...
...But far more important than Communism as such was the intense nationalism which has become a kind of religion south of the Rio Grande...
...He describes how a handful of Communists gradually took over the Guatemalan Government after the 1944 revolution which overthrew the right-wing dictatorship of General Jorge Ubico: how Communists infiltrated and won control of the labor movement, how the agrarian-reform program was turned into a weapon for tying the peasants to the Communist party, and how a few key Communist advisers were able to keep President Arbenz moving in the direction sought by the party...
...However, we have a record of past intervention which it will take many more years to live down, and the charges of current intervention against the Arbenz regime were enough to inflame all the underlying distrust of the United States...
...James's analysis of the peasant base of Guatemalan Communism leads him to say that the Chinese brand of Communism rather than the proletarian-based European variety is being applied in Latin America today...
...Writes Mr...
...This is an illuminating, thought-provoking book, full of facts and figures which Americans would do well to ponder...
...Perhaps the most significant feature of this excellent book is the stress it lays on the role of nationalism in creating anti-U...
...What the Reds did was to exploit this prejudice, to turn it into their unwitting ally, to use it as a stepping-stone to power...
...James, whose book is based on two recent trips to Latin America as well as extensive research, has drawn a powerful indictment of the Arbenz regime, with its arbitrary arrests and its torture of political opponents...
...Moscow has been pushing the doctrine and strategy created by the Chinese Communist dictator, Mao Tse-tung....The same conditions that existed in China existed also in Guatemala, and exist today everywhere in Latin America...
...James: "The anti-United States outbreaks had about them a spontaneity which could not be attributed altogether to Red agitation, but fundamentally to a rooted prejudice against the Colossus of the North which antedates Communism...
...There is not a scintilla of evidence to hack the Communist charge of United States intervention in Guatemala: that we instigated the Castillo Armas revolution and supplied the revolutionists with planes...
...But that is not so...
...The author accurately describes the means by which they hoped to achieve this: dominating the labor unions, fomenting discontent among the peasants, arousing nationalistic passions, and creating the impression that the United States was intervening in Guatemalan affairs in support of vested Yankee interests...
...The author goes on to analyze the larger Communist pattern, the "Red design for the Americas...
...The abject poverty and ignorance of the Guatemalan masses, of course, produced a situation made to order for the Communists...
...A particularly valuable chapter describes the activities of a "Little Comin-form" operating throughout the Caribbean and Central American region—a conspiracy which is still dangerous even though its Guatemalan fountainhead has been eliminated...
...author, "The Tragic Era," "The Young Jefferson" IN THIS BOOK, Daniel James, former Managing Editor of The New Leader, has impressively set forth the Communist strategy in Latin America, which is so little understood and so foolishly underrated in this country...
...Worse yet, we have seemed often to forget that our neighbors to the south are sovereign, independent nations and insist on being treated as such...
...The feeling has grown alarmingly in the Latin American countries that we regard them as virtual satellites, as pawns to be moved about at our will...
...S. feeling in Latin America...
...This is the essence of Communist strategy in Latin America...
...The great danger in Latin America is thus not Communism as such, which is not yet a major force, but an alliance between it and native nationalism, which is rampant...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 45
