Hard Red Spring (71 page)

August 31, 1900—
The Central American Improvement Company (CAICO) signs a contract with the Guatemalan government to complete the Northern Railway. The railway, built by the government with forced labor drafts, is mostly complete, but for a sixty-mile section infested with swamp and disease. The contract stipulates that the section must be finished in thirty-three months. Once completed, it will connect Guatemala's coffee-rich Pacific coast to its Caribbean ports. CAICO, an American company, was formed earlier that same year by the founder and vice president of the Boston-based United Fruit Company. According to the contract, CAICO will retain all profits from the line for ten years, before selling it back to the government.

October 1902—
The problematic section of railroad is far from finished, proving much more difficult than predicted. On the west coast, the coffee bust is decimating the entire economy as planters move to Brazil, which offers both stability and easier shipping. On October 24, the Santa María volcano erupts outside Xela, while foreign investors are visiting President Manuel Estrada Cabrera. The town crier reads a proclamation from the President: No volcano is erupting in Guatemala. The military band plays over the noise of the continuing eruption. Within a week, the forced labor drafts are instituted to help the coffee plantations recover.

January 12, 1904—
With the economy struggling more than ever, CAICO—soon to be renamed the Guatemalan Railway Company—demands a new contract to complete the Northern Railway. This contract gives CAICO complete control of the line for ninety-nine years, rights to 168,000 acres of prime banana land, and exempts it from local taxes or export duties on bananas for thirty-five years. It also acquires the docks at Puerto Barrios, along with all stations, telegraph lines, and buildings at the main Caribbean port. CAICO gains authorization to build and acquire railroads throughout Guatemala and the government also guarantees CAICO a 5 percent annual profit on its investment for fifteen years. For all this, the government will have no legal right to intervene in CAICO's affairs: no audits, regulations, taxes, or duties. More contracts like this will be signed over the next forty years, allowing the company to consolidate and expand its power over the entire infrastructure, economy, and population of Guatemala. In return for this exploitative contract worth over $58 million, President Estrada Cabrera receives shares of CAICO amounting to $50,000.

September 1904—
Of the 168,000 acres given to the Guatemalan Railway Company (GRC) in its second contract, the company gives 50,000 of those acres to United Fruit to make its first banana plantings in Guatemala. It also negotiates preferential terms with the legally “separate” company. The agreement subordinates the railroad to United Fruit, requiring GRC to haul all freight according to the timetables and needs of Fruit. Additionally, all trains carrying United Fruit bananas receive right-of-way over all other rail traffic. They also receive a steep discount on shipping. Other banana companies will have to pay double the rates United Fruit pays. Over the next decade, as granted in its contract, GRC buys up existing railroads and docks throughout the country. By 1912, the company will be called International Railways of Central America (IRCA), and will have a complete monopoly of Guatemalan railroads.

January 19, 1908—
President Estrada Cabrera drives the golden spike into the completed Northern Railway. But it is too little, too late for the west coast coffee planters, who do not utilize the Caribbean port as hoped. The government, however, must make up for the shortfall by paying IRCA the 5 percent annual profits guaranteed in its contract for fifteen years. With Guatemala's railroad problem now solved and coffee not cooperating, IRCA's future profits will depend solely on an expanding banana industry, mostly contained on the Caribbean coast.

April 8, 1920—
Estrada Cabrera is declared insane by the Guatemalan legislature and relieved of the presidency.

February 14, 1931—
A former
jefe politico
in the highlands, Jorge Ubico, is inaugurated as President of Guatemala, having won the election by a vote of 305,841 to 0.

May 1931—
Ubico signs a contract with United Fruit to expand business from the exhausted soil of the Caribbean coast to the Pacific coast. Fruit gains a fifty-year monopoly on the Pacific port system, preferential treatment for all Fruit ships at the port, and a one-cent export tax. By this time, the company controls five hundred thousand acres in Guatemala, for which it paid the government less than $1.48 per acre. Maya in the countryside are forced to work on plantations for at least 150 days a year to pay their taxes. By 1936, United Fruit will own controlling stock in IRCA.

June 1944—
Using Franklin D. Roosevelt's “Four Freedoms” speech as a rallying cry, Guatemalans, led by teachers, hold mass protests against Ubico's rule. A few days later, amid increasing international pressure, Ubico resigns. At this time, 2 percent of landowners own 72 percent of Guatemala's land and 90 percent of the people own just 15 percent of productive acreage. Ninety-five percent of the Mayan population is illiterate, with a life expectancy of forty years.

December 1945—
In Guatemala's first truly democratic election, a former teacher, Dr. Juan José Arévalo, is elected President with 85 percent of the literate male vote. By March, a new constitution guarantees a balance of powers, freedom of
speech and press, voting rights for women and illiterates, limited presidential power, the right to organize, the criminalization of racial discrimination, and other reforms. This constitution also bans monopolies and grants the government the authority to expropriate private property under limited circumstances.

October 1946—
Guatemala's Congress approves the first social security law. Inspired by the New Deal law, it mandates workplace safety, injury compensation, maternity benefits, basic education, and health care. A year later, it passes a labor code modeled after America's Wagner Act, which guarantees workers the right to organize, bargain collectively, and strike. It also establishes minimum wages and regulates child labor.

December 1949—
The Guatemalan Congress passes the Law of Forced Rental. It gives any peasant who owns less than 2.47 acres the right to petition to rent fallow acreage from neighboring plantation owners.

November 13, 1950—
Arévalo's defense minister, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, is elected President with 65 percent of the vote. At this point, 2.2 percent of landowners still own 70 percent of Guatemala's arable land. Less than 25 percent of these four million acres is cultivated. The vast majority of the economy belongs to American corporations, mostly United Fruit, which owns five hundred fifty thousand acres. Eighty-five percent of these acres lie fallow. Within a year, the World Bank releases a report on the Guatemalan economy, stressing the importance of recent reforms and calling for further reconciliation of income inequality to create a modern capitalist state.

June 27, 1952—
Jacobo Arbenz's Agrarian Reform Law is passed. The act authorizes the government to expropriate only uncultivated property from large plantations. The government pays for these confiscated acres with twenty-five-year government bonds with a 3 percent interest rate. The amount of compensation is assessed from the land's declared taxable worth in 1952. Expropriated land is then given to landless peasants in parcels no larger than 42.5 acres. Over eighteen months, the program gives a hundred thousand families 1.5 million acres, for which the government pays $8,345,545 in bonds.

March 1953—
In addition to expropriating 1,700 acres of his own land, Jacobo Arbenz and his government expropriate 234,000 acres of uncultivated land from United Fruit. The company is compensated with the amount it had claimed it was worth on its taxes: $2.99 per acre.

February 1954—
After more expropriation proceedings, 386,901 acres of United Fruit land are under dispute.

April 20, 1954—
The U.S. State Department issues a formal complaint on behalf of United Fruit, demanding $75 per acre for its expropriated land. Guatemala's foreign minister refuses to accept the complaint.

May 1, 1954—
The Voice of Liberation
goes on the air. The announcers accuse Jacobo Arbenz of communism and other atrocities, such as witchcraft and murder. Claiming to be reporting while on the run from Arbenz's military in
Guatemalan jungles, they are actually stationed in Miami and completely coordinated and funded by the CIA.

June 18, 1954—
The rebel Castillo Armas “invades” Guatemala from Honduras with 170 mercenaries paid by the CIA. Over the next several days,
The Voice of Liberation
reports a much larger army composed of “Guatemalan peasants” and large battles, with heavy casualties for Arbenz's military.

June 25, 1954—
American pilots, paid by the CIA, buzz Guatemala City, bombing a few strategic military targets and smoke-bombing other targets. Other planes in the preceding days drop leaflets. On the roof of the American embassy, speakers play a recording of bombing attacks, as
The Voice of Liberation
reports Castillo Armas's march toward the city.

June 27, 1954—
Jacobo Arbenz resigns, declaring to demoralized and frightened Guatemalans, “For fifteen days, a cruel war against Guatemala has been under way. The United Fruit Company, in collaboration with the governing circles of the United States, is responsible for what is happening to us . . .”

July 2, 1954—
In response to international uproar over involvement in the coup, which the U.S. denies, the U.S. State Department files an antitrust suit against United Fruit.

July 13, 1954—
The U.S. government officially recognizes the Castillo Armas government. A few weeks later, United Fruit and Castillo Armas sign a contract, guaranteeing the return of all expropriated land and a new, lower income tax. Castillo Armas also cancels the Agrarian Reform Law and bans illiterates from voting. By mid-August, he outlaws all political parties, peasant organizations, and unions, and restores Ubico's secret police chief. Some forms of union activity become punishable by death.

1958—
The antitrust suit is resolved, with United Fruit agreeing to give up some of its commerce and property to businesses in Guatemala.

1961—
The first guerrilla band forms to battle the series of U.S.-backed presidents who control Guatemala for the next thirty-six years. By 1966, the country falls into complete civil war. The United States gives more than $20 million between 1966 and 1970 for military and police training and equipment, increasing the Guatemalan national police force to thirty thousand by 1970. State-sponsored right-wing terror squads permeate the country by 1968.

1972—
United Fruit sells its Guatemalan land holdings to Del Monte.

April 1977—
Since the beginning of the civil war, the U.S. has given the Guatemalan military $33 million in aid. However, prompted by President Carter and alarming reports of human rights abuses, the United States Congress cuts off military funding. But the sanctions do not apply to previously approved military hardware and indirect funding. Between 1978 and 1982, the Guatemalan government will receive $7.9 million from the State Department's Military Assistance Program and the Foreign Military Sales Program.

March 23, 1982—
Army general José Efraín Ríos Montt assumes power through
a coup. A born-again Christian, Ríos Montt played a small role in the 1954 coup and promises to end Guatemala's civil war by defeating the guerrillas and bringing the country to Christ.

March 28, 1982—
Pat Robertson, the host of
The 700 Club
, flies to Guatemala to conduct Ríos Montt's first interview as President.
*
Robertson begins a lobbying campaign directed at Congress and President Reagan to lift Guatemalan military sanctions in order to defeat the guerrillas. He also partners with the California-based Gospel Outreach to raise money for Ríos Montt's government through International Love Lift, a fund meant to provide food, medical supplies, and missionaries to Guatemalan refugees.

December 4, 1982—
President Reagan visits Ríos Montt and—despite rising evidence of massacres in the highlands, reported by both Amnesty International and Americas Watch—declares that Ríos Montt is “getting a bad rap on human rights.”

January 7, 1983—
The U.S. Congress approves $6 million in “nonlethal” military hardware for Guatemala, including parts for helicopters used in counterinsurgency raids. Through the CIA, Reagan funnels weaponry that Congress will not approve. Over the seventeen months of Ríos Montt's rule, the bloodiest years of the civil war, over 400 Mayan villages are razed, a scorched-earth policy is adopted, and the first model villages are set up to control and reeducate the displaced Mayan population. International Love Lift sends 350 missionaries to Guatemala on the day that the sanctions are lifted. Before Ríos Montt is deposed in another coup, Love Lift will raise approximately $1.5 million for relief and building supplies to resettle the refugees.

March 29, 1994—
An American journalist is beaten into a coma by a mob of Maya in San Cristóbal, after a child she'd taken a picture of disappears. The child is later found, unharmed.

December 29, 1996—
Government and guerrilla leaders meet in Guatemala City to sign a peace agreement. After thirty-six years, the longest war in Latin American history comes to an end. As part of the agreement, truth and reconciliation will prevail, with no subpoenas and no prosecutions for any of the players.