The land where terror won

Can you explain what the reform did?

Basically, it was dealing with extreme inequality in terms of property. It was creating a labor market. Before, there was a semi-feudal relationship where the owners of the plantations owned the homes that the workers lived in. The workers couldn't go work at another plantation. If they did, they'd be kicked out of their home. They're often paid in kind -- given food or a little land to farm. They couldn't demand minimum wage because the plantation owner has the ability to dispossess them.

The reform was giving the workers ownership of their houses and a little bit of land. But it wasn't touching any of the coffee. Now, the workers could sell their labor and once you had a labor market, wages would start to go up.

So this was all about free markets. We know from looking at declassified documents that the CIA, and the people analyzing this reform in the U.S., thought it was a good reform.

And they knew that the communists in Guatemala weren't directly tied to the Soviets, right?

Well, I wouldn't say that. In the lens of the time -- the 1950s, the height of the Cold War, McCarthyism -- maybe some of them actually believed that everything that was [called a] communist party was being directed by the Soviet Union. But the point is that the people from the U.S. who pursued this policy of overthrowing the government thought that the Agrarian Reform was sensible. In fact, the U.S. government advocated similar reforms in other countries. The reform itself wasn't the problem for the U.S. government.

The problem was that if the reform succeeded the people who were going to get the credit for the success were the members of the communist party who were then going to increase their influence.

And a few people say that this reform really would have worked.

Ultimately, it's a hypothetical. You never know. Before the reform, the development of a Guatemalan market economy was hindered. It seemed like a sensible reform. But it did produce political unrest and this reaction from the U.S.

Here's more to the point: I can't predict what would have happened had the U.S. not intervened, because the U.S. did. And it wasn't accidental. This was how the U.S. conducted its foreign policy in the region. What's very clear is that with this democratic reform process aborted in this very drastic way with intervention from abroad, the country was denied an alternative. That helped radicalize people politically. People knew what was taken away from them, and they blame that military regime that was put in place and they blame the U.S.

Where did the plantation owners stand? Once the war broke out and they realized how terrible things were, did they change their ideas about the reform?

The owners for the most part were opposed to the reform. They were generally with the government. This polarization in the Cold War played out locally. Guatemala had one of the most politically reactionary agricultural elites.

And the U.S. came in and created this Guatemalan army and taught them terror tactics. How did far did the CIA go in training them for this war? And what did they authorize them to do?

In 1954, when they carried out the coup, they relied on massive propaganda and bought off the Guatemalan military. There was a Plan B which involved the assassinations. We now have the declassified documents that show there was a list of 50-something political leaders to be assassinated if Plan A didn't work. There was a handbook teaching people the pros and cons of the different ways of killing people.

Basically, the U.S. government's policy in the region was seeing the world in terms of democracy vs. communism. In Guatemala, in the struggle against communism, they forgot about democracy. That produced a polarization. They overthrew this democratically elected government and [installed] a military regime that squashed all political opposition. After 1954, reformists who hadn't been communists joined the clandestine communist party because it was the only type of opposition available. A decade later you have this pattern repeat itself. You still have a military regime and now the opposition is divided into those who want to push for political reform to restore democracy and a group advocating guerrilla warfare.

The ironic thing is that the moderates who were pushing for political reform were in the communist party. Then, in a series of lightning strikes, the U.S.-trained security forces abducted the 28 leaders of the communist party and killed them all. So who was left? Those who believed that the only way to change Guatemala was through armed struggle -- a generation of Guatemalans who were convinced that the U.S. was the enemy.

The radicalization of Nayito that you describe in the book is this process in capsule.

Nayito's father had been a national peasant leader in the '50s but not a communist. After the 1954 coup, he joined the communists because his own organization had been outlawed. [Nayito's father] is one of these 28 people who gets abducted and killed. That helps convince Nayito and his peers that the only way to change the country is through armed struggle. Then two years later, in 1968, Nayito's girlfriend, who was a student activist and also Miss Guatemala, is abducted by the police. Her body is found in a ravine a few days later. This is too much for Nayito to handle. How does he seek revenge? By murdering the top two U.S. officers in the country. So you can see how this radicalization convinces the Guatemalans that the U.S. is their enemy.

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