An Example of a Good Student Paper

Now that you've read about how to write a paper, it may be helpful to read an example of one.  The spacing of the paper below may be off, because of its transfer from Word to HTML, and the paper doesn't include a literature review because it wasn't necessary.  With that, on with the show...

Bananas and Communism: The Guatemalan Coup, 1954

by Melissa Coy

Clandestine CIA operations.The spreading of anti-communist propaganda.Arming a small regiment and establishing a puppet dictator.These are the actions that mark the extent of U.S. involvement in the Guatemalan coup of 1954.The Guatemalan republic, born ten years earlier and first headed by Juan Jose Arevalo and later Jacobo Arbenz, implemented many reforms for the welfare of the large percentage of lower class peoples.However, not all of Arbenz’s reforms pleased everyone.When he directly threatened the monopolistic, United States-owned United Fruit Company through competition and later through agrarian reform, tensions between the U.S. and Guatemala escalated.Also seen as a threat to the U.S. was Arbenz’s employment of communists in the government.At a time of increased polarization between communism and democracy, the United States saw communists in Guatemala’s government as incredibly threatening to both itself and to Central America.Endangered business interests coupled with the threat of communism prompted the U.S. to initiate the Guatemalan coup of 1954.
 

In 1944, a democratic revolution took place in Guatemala to overthrow the oppressive dictatorship of General Jorge Ubico.Under Ubico, workers were paid at starvation wage levels and the elite held the majority of the land.1 Malnutrition was widespread and illiteracy was rampant.United Fruit, along with its subsidiaries International Railways of Central America (IRCA) and Electric Bond and Share, were given remarkable concessions under Ubico.2 Economic inflation, an increase in nationalism, and World War II rhetoric about world freedom, led to the dictator’s overthrow.A large coalition of the lower middle classes, intelligentsia, peons, students, urban workers, and the mestizo military leadership headed the revolt.3 It was truly a revolution initiated by the majority of the population.
 

After Ubico’s overthrow, the Guatemalans held elections.Juan Jose Arevalo, a teacher living in exile, was elected president by a wide margin in December 1944.Arevalo initiated many social reforms, but in order to avoid alienating the elite altogether he did not alter the land system nor the tax structure.4 The U.S. government had little problems with Arevalo’s leadership.However, relations between the United States and Guatemala shifted once Arevalo’s successor threatened United States’ business interests in the region.
 

Relations between the United States and Guatemala intensified when Arbenz, succeeding Arevalo, became the second democratically elected president of Guatemala in November 1950.5 Arbenz implemented more liberal reform than Arevalo, including needed land reform.When Arbenz came into office, 2.2% of the landowners owned 70% of arable land, and the annual income per capita of agricultural workers was 87 U.S. dollars.6 United Fruit Company was the largest landowner in Guatemala with 555,000 acres, 85% of which was uncultivated land held in reserve against the meager threat of banana disease.7 This large inequity of land distribution prompted Arbenz to act.
 

Arbenz first determined to compete directly with the monopoly of UFCo and its subsidiaries.He ordered the construction of an Atlantic port and highway to compete with IRCA, as well as a hydro-electric plant to produce cheaper energy than the U.S. controlled electricity monopoly.8 Arbenz intended to limit the power of North American companies by direct competition rather than nationalization.It was a move that obviously threatened UFCo’s hegemony in the region.
 

His next step, however, was much bolder.Under the Agrarian Reform Law of 1952, the government could expropriate only uncultivated portions of large plantations.Lands taken would be paid for in 25-year bonds with a 3% interest rate, and the land’s valuation was determined from its declared taxable worth as of May 1952.Land was then redistributed to the landless peasants, who received 42.5 acres each.In turn, they rented the land from the government for the equivalent of 3-5% of the value of food.9 Though competition challenged UFCo and its subsidiaries, the land reform law soon became a direct threat to United States’ monopolistic business interests.
 

Much to its chagrin, United Fruit Company was not exempt from expropriations.The first confiscation of 209,842 acres of uncultivated Fruit Company land occurred in March 1953.10 Two more seizures of its uncultivated land occurred in August and October of that year, resulting in a total of 386,901 acres expropriated.11 UFCo demanded $16 million for its expropriated land.However, the Arbenz government offered $627, 572 for it—United Fruit Company’s declared valuation for taxes.12 The direct threat toUFCo’s business interests escalated tensions between the U.S. and Guatemala.
 

United Fruit Company had some influential friends in the Eisenhower administration.Before becoming Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles worked on legal banking matters for the company as did the head of the CIA—his brother Allen Dulles—who also had stock in IRCA.Other stockholders included John Moors Cabot, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, and UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.Eisenhower’s personal secretary, Anne Whitman, was the wife of the company’s public relations director.13 All of these government officials stood to lose some of their personal gains from the company if Arbenz continued with the land expropriations.Washington made the official decision to direct the coup early in August 1953,14 after the first of Guatemala’s confiscation of UFCo’s land.
 

The Agrarian Reform Law of 1952 and the subsequent land seizures seemed to confirm U.S. officials’ suspicions of communist infiltration of the Guatemalan government.To Washington, redistributing land seemed blatantly socialist and Kremlin-directed.Given the extent to which the U.S. government went in order to eradicate any communist influence within its own borders, often relying on hearsay and circumstantialevidence, it seemed just as determined to advocate similar purges of communists from other governments.Guatemala’s Foreign Minister, Guillermo Toriello, phrased the concept of the U.S. influencing other countries from eradicating communism from within their borders as “the internationalization of McCarthyism.”15 Within days of arriving in Guatemala as the new U.S. Ambassador in October 1953, John E. Peurifoy warned Arbenz that relations between the U.S. and Guatemala would be strained if a single communist remained anywhere on the government payroll.16 Though the threat of U.S. business interests in Guatemala influenced Washington’s decision to implement the coup, the perceived role of the communist party was a major reason as well.Communist-led labor unions supported Arbenz’s government, but so did professionals, intellectuals, and anti-communists.Arbenz believed that it was proper for a democracy to allow even communists to participate in the government.The U.S., however, didn’t agree with such toleration of an enemy force.According to William Blum,
 

Washington continued to insist that Arbenz was too tolerant of such people—not because of anything they had done which was intrinsically threatening or offensive to the U.S. or Western Civilization, but simply because they were of the species communist, well known for its infinite capacity for treachery.17

In a time of Cold War, when the U.S. perceived the world situation as either pro-Soviet or pro-democracy, Washington saw no room for even the least bit of allowance of communists in any aspect of government.Because the Cold War was real, any amount of communist influence needed to be eliminated, and the United States was up to the task.
 

In order to dispose of communist influence in Latin America, the U.S. coordinated the Tenth Inter-American Conference in Caracas, Venezuela in March 1954.At the conference, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles described in detail the Soviet Union’s quest for world domination through its puppet organizations.18 To Arbenz’s reasons for tolerating the communist party in Guatemala, Dulles offered his retort:
 

It has been suggested that even though the international Communist movement operates in this hemisphere, it may serve a liberating purpose, compatible with principles of our American States….Such suggestions lose all plausibility when we recall what this Communist movement has done to the nations and the people it has come to dominate.19

For any country to allow the communist party’s existence meant it was fraternizing with the enemy.Furthermore, the U.S. perceived that communists “infiltrated” the Guatemalan government, “exploited” specific programs, and “used” Arbenz.20 Such infiltration suggested the “fall” of Guatemala and, according to the prevalent Domino Theory, the “fall” of its neighboring countries.The U.S. government felt that it was its duty to eradicate communism and make the world safe for democracy.
 

As the conference continued, Dulles advocated the elimination of communists in a similar manner as the United States had done.Dulles identified the Guatemalan situation with the red-hunt in the U.S.:
 

In the United States there has been a succession of exposures and judicial convictions which prove that international communism plots against our form of government.I venture to say that every delegate here knows of similar activities within his own country which are being conducted from Moscow way stations.21

In an official setting, Secretary Dulles supported Peurifoy’s admonition to Arbenz during the previous October.Because communism was seen as an evil entity, the U.S. government insisted that Guatemala follow its example and exterminate its influence from government.
 

At the close of the Caracas conference, Secretary of State Dulles pushed for a resolution advocating that any evidence of communist influence would be seen as “a threat to the sovereignty and political independence of the American States, endangering the peace of America, and would call for a meeting of consultation to consider the adoption of appropriate action in accordance with existing treaties.”22 Of course, that “appropriate action” hinted that if the implied communist nation—Guatemala—did not eliminate communists from the government itself, its neighboring countries would do so by force.23 The Caracas anti-communist resolution was passed by 17-1; the only vote against the resolution was from Guatemala, which viewed the resolution as anti-Arbenz.The other 17 sided with Guatemala because they despised U.S. bullying, yet they voted along U.S. lines in order to continue receiving economic aid.24 The fact that Guatemala was the only Latin American state that voted against the Caracas resolution was soon used against it.
 

To Secretary Dulles, Guatemala’s negative vote was evidence that the state had been infiltrated by the Kremlin’s tentacles.In the spring of 1954, the evidence appeared more concrete.On May 17, the State Department announced that arms had arrived from Czechoslovakia to Puerto Barrios, Guatemala on the Swedish ship Alfhem.25 Washington interpreted the shipment, meant to supply the country’s army, as an aggressive step towards communist domination of the rest of Central America.However, Washington failed to admit that because of an embargo implemented by the U.S. and its free world allies since 1948, Guatemala couldn’t obtain defensive weaponry from anyplace else.Nevertheless, in a news conference on May 25, Secretary Dulles stated that because Guatemala received “a massive shipment of arms from behind the Iron Curtain” and voted against the Caracas resolution, it was evident that Guatemala was a communist country set to “dominate militarily in the Central American area.”26 Shortly after the Alfhem incident, the United States Air Force airlifted war materials to Honduras and Nicaragua.These materials aided the hand-picked “revolution” leader, Guatemalan right-winged exile Castillo Armas, and his meager troops to enter Guatemala from Honduras on June 19.
 

Despite all of the rhetoric, U.S. claims of a communist regime in Guatemala were weak.Although the United States argued that Arbenz was tied to the Kremlin, Arbenz actually voted closely to the United States on issues of Soviet imperialism in the United Nations.27 Although communists did exist within Guatemala, they wielded no control in the national police force, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and most domestic bureaucracies other than land reform and communications agencies.Other factions had more power than the communist party.These factions included the large landowners, the Catholic hierarchy, small businessmen, the other three parties of Arbenz’s coalition, and the leftist but non-communist National Confederation of Guatemalan Peasants—which had the majority of influence on unionized workers.28 Despite the realities of communist influence in Guatemala, however, the United States would not tolerate communismanywhere.
 

There is little doubt that the U.S. implemented, funded, armed, and directed the overthrow of the Arbenz regime.On June 27, Arbenz resigned—not because of the contingent led by Armas, but because U.S. air power bombed Guatemala City.29 The leadership was then handed over to a military junta headed by Carlos Enrique Dias.Dias was forced out 2 days later on the direct demand of U.S. Ambassador Peurifoy and continual bombing of the capital.30 Armas became president of Guatemala shortly thereafter.He became a United States puppet, making Guatemala safe from communism and friendly to the United Fruit Company.
 

Months after the coup, in October 1954, special hearings were held before the House of Representatives on communist aggression in Guatemala.Those who testified in the hearings were the “revolutionary” warriors who removed Arbenz from power as well as U.S. state officials who had been to Guatemala while Arbenz was in power.No one represented Arbenz’s government.The hearings produced more so-called evidence of ties to the Kremlin.President Armas claimed that the communists controlled all aspects of the government, and witness after witness offered pictures of Guatemalan officials in Moscow, lists of Marxist books purchased by Arbenz and his wife, and pictures of Stalin and Mao Zedong in government offices.31 After the dust settled from the coup, it seems that this hearing was meant to strengthen the United States’ weak claims that Arbenz’s government was a communist regime.Furthermore, it was easier to justify U.S. intervention in Guatemala’s affairs because of communism rather than shady business operations.   The United States government directed the coup against Guatemala’s President Arbenz because of threats to its business interests as well as the menace of communism in a Cold War world.Although initially the U.S. had little trouble with the revolutionary government, the tide changed once Arbenz became president in 1950.His Agrarian Reform Law was a direct threat to United Fruit Company’s monopoly over Guatemala’s resources, and the U.S. perceived it as evidence of Soviet expansionism.The fact that Guatemala voted against the Caracas resolution and received arms from behind the Iron Curtain seemed to confirm U.S. suspicions of communist infiltration of the Western Hemisphere.Therefore, the United States assumed its role as defender of democracy, and implemented the coup.Unfortunately, the man it placed into power and supported became the brutal dictator it claimed Arbenz to have been32—but at least the United Fruit Company was safe.

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Endnotes