FAREWELL, MONROE DOCTRINE Three dates of change in Latin America IN I960, C. Wright Mills visited the 1 newly created school of political science at the National University of Mexico. For most of the students and teachers of government of my generation, this was their first contact with the intelligentsia of the United States. The residue of good feeling left by the Roosevelt era had died in Guatemala; the majority of universities and scientific and cultural organizations in Latin America had sided with the Guatemalan revolutionaries and had decided to shun their U.S. counterparts after the invasion of 1954. This was the result of disillusionment, of outrage, and even of a certain confusion. In 1954 an invasion of Guatemala had taken place. It was nominally headed by a putschist colonel, Carlos Castillo Armas. It had been carefully planned by the American ambassador, John Peurifoy. It was armed, launched, and then consolidated in power by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. It permitted the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to gloat over what he called "a glorious victory." A "glorious victory" over what? According to the U.S. government it was communist influence in Guatemala, the communist-inspired government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. A "glorious victory" for what? For the unilaterally proclaimed Monroe Doctrine—this Monroe Doctrine that periodically and conveniently pops out of the ghost-closet of the U.S. government until it meets its special sibling, the Brezhnev Doctrine; this Monroe Doctrine that would ban extracontinental interventions in this hemisphere but not extracontinental interventions by the United States in other hemispheres and most assuredly not in this one, its backyard, its most immediate sphere of influence, Latin America; this Monroe Doctrine that ironically and conveniently forgets that if a Monroe Doctrine had been in effect in 1776, the United States would not exist. There was more evidence of French intervention in the North American War of Independence than there is or, I fear, ever shall be, of Soviet intervention in the Salvadoran civil war. 1954: a glorious victory against democracy in the name of democracy. The ■victory of that extraordinary mixture of malice and innocence, arrogance and ignorance that has, as a rule, characterized Washington’s politics in Latin America. HOW MANY people in this country, except a few special ists (certainly not the policy-makers A mother and her child bound for the annual fiesta of Santa Caterina Nauhala, Guatemala ( CT 1 tellgringos that when they come to Mexico they should keep awayfrom the stones. There are too many beautifulstones in Mexico and they distract you from the people. Stick to the people.'' Women gather at the pila for washday conversation (Highland Guatemala) themselves), knew the political traditions and cultural realities of Guatemala in 1954 or know those of El Salvador in 1981? How many were aware of Guatemala’s troubled history, the background it shared with Latin America: conquest and coloniBy Carlos Fuentes zation in the sixteenth century, legal independence and economic dependency since the nineteenth century, the heritage of our perennial struggle between civilization and barbarism—the basic dilemma of our nations, far beyond ideological nitpicking and strategic posturing— this demand that we choose between civilization, the respect due to a man's hands, a woman's sex, or a child’s eyes, or barbarism and the brutality that humiliates, tortures, and then murders us all? How many citizehs of this country were aware, in 1954 or today, of the dramatic struggles in Guatemala, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, between the liberalism of Francisco Morazan and the return to colonial privilege and exploitation under the military chieftain and lifetime president, Rafael Carrera; of the liberal reforms introduced by Justo Rufino Barrios after Carrera's death; of the fight against aristocratic privileges, for the separation of church and state, and for universal education? And if these realities were ignored, how dare the faraway government or the United States rush in as if it knew them intimately and were capable of acting in the best interests of a people who alone understood the dynamics of their own history, their own contradictions, their family affairs? How many people in the United States, as Dulles celebrated the "glorious victory," could recall the twenty-two-year-long dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, built on repression and the piecemeal surrender of the country to the United Fruit Company—until in 1920 Congress declared the president insane? Huw many could remember the founeen-year-long dictatorship of Jorge Ubico, the gerontocratic "easy rider" whr> militarized Guatemala on Mussolini’s model, right down to the elementary schools? How many, finally, knew and understood that the general strike of 1944, the Central American "Solidarity" movement of its day, gave birth to iho first twentiethcentury democracy in Guatemala, the successive governments nf Juan Jose Arevalo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the creation of a labor code, social security, a free school system, and agrarian reform? Democracy in Guatemala in the 18 Clinton St. Quarterly Photographs from the Milholland Archive
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