Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
The Petén was a humid jungle region that would undoubtedly be terrible for his health, yet it was also the right setting for him to implement his plan to be a revolutionary doctor. His asthma had come to symbolize the malignant shackles of heredity that he was in the process of rejecting. He
wished to form a new identity, to reforge himself as a revolutionary, to vanquish once and for all the limitations he had been born with.
Ernesto’s bout of self-analysis helped clear his mind a little, but his asthma persisted relentlessly. A few days later, prostrate in his bed at the pension, he wrote that “not much and a lot has happened.” The job was looking likely, the union president had told him. “Hilda declared her love in epistolary and practical form. I was very sick or I might have fucked her. I warned her that all I could offer her was a casual contact, nothing definitive. She seemed very embarrassed. The little letter she left me upon leaving is very good. Too bad she is so ugly. She is twenty-seven.”
By now Ernesto was telling everyone he was going to the Petén, even though he didn’t have the slightest assurance that he really was. “I’m about to prepare a list of necessary things to take,” he wrote. “I burn to go. Hilda has me feeling nervous, on top of the anxiety I have about becoming ever more trapped in this country.”
The political pressure on Guatemala was intensifying. In March, at the Tenth Inter-American Conference of the Organization of American States held in Caracas, John Foster Dulles had twisted enough arms to obtain a majority resolution effectively justifying armed intervention in any member state that was “dominated by Communism” and that therefore constituted a “hemispheric threat.” Only Mexico and Argentina withheld their votes. Guatemala, the target of the resolution, was the only state to vote against it.
The Eisenhower administration now pressed its advantage. The CIA’s military training of Guatemalan exiles was well under way on one of Somoza’s ranches in Nicaragua. Mercenary pilots and a couple of dozen planes had been smuggled into Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Panama Canal Zone for use in the coming attack. Psychological warfare operatives were busy preparing taped recordings for propaganda and disinformation broadcasts, printing leaflets to be air-dropped over Guatemala, and buying up Soviet-issue weapons to be planted in Guatemala at the right moment as “evidence” of Soviet involvement with Arbenz.
Myrna Torres flew to Canada, where she had a fiancé. She left behind “a balance of broken hearts,” Ernesto wrote.
*
“But the worst of it is I don’t
know if I’m leaving. Always the same uncertainty ...” A few days later, his uncertainty had deepened, after the president of the medical union seemed cool and evasive when Ernesto saw him about the job in the Petén. Ernesto consoled himself in his journal: “Only Julia responds to me.” Julia aside, his mood was bitter. He now referred to the union president as an
hijo de puta
, a son of a whore. He expected “nothing” from their next meeting and complained he had had to stop writing letters because of all his running around. “Enthusiasm depends on health and circumstances. Both are failing me. The post in the Petén seems farther away all the time. ... Everything is getting fucked up. I don’t know what the shit to do. Hilda is being a pain in the neck. I feel like flying the fuck away. Maybe Venezuela.”
But he couldn’t leave. He had no money. To do something productive with his time, he persisted in his studies of parasitic diseases at Peñalver’s lab. He paid off part of his pension bill with some of Hilda’s jewelry, but he still owed several months’ rent. Then his landlady extracted a promise to pay a month’s worth within a few days, and when the day of reckoning came, he couldn’t pay anything. “I pawned my watch, a gold chain, and a ring stone of Hilda’s, and promised a gold ring—also Hilda’s,” he wrote. The banana plantation job, at a place called Tequisate, was still a possibility, but when he went there he had an asthma attack on the way: “a vision of what things will be like.”
He heard from home that his aunt Sara had died. Taking a break from his own travails, he mulled over his feelings. “I didn’t love her but her death affected me. She was a healthy person and very active and a death of this kind seemed the most unlikely, which nonetheless is a solution, since the conditions in which the illness would have left her would have been horrible for her.” He wrote to his mother, with peppy brevity, “Have spirit, what happened to Sara is now over and Paris awaits.”
It was now April, and his chief remaining obstacle for securing the job in Tequisate was obtaining his Guatemalan residency. He was becoming fatalistic. “The days keep passing but I could care less. Maybe one of these days I’ll go stay at Helena de Holst’s, maybe not, but I know one way or another matters have to fix themselves so I’m not going to overheat my brains anymore.”
One weekend, returning from the countryside, Ernesto, Hilda, and Harold White witnessed a candlelit Easter procession of hooded men carrying an effigy of Christ, which gave Ernesto the chills. “There was a moment I didn’t like at all, when the men with the lances passing by gave us ugly looks.”
On April 9, Guatemala’s Catholic Church issued a pastoral letter denouncing the presence of Communism in the country and calling on all
Guatemalans to rise up against it. The message was lost on no one. What wasn’t known to the public was that the pastoral letter was the direct result of an approach to the Guatemalan archbishop Mariano Rossell Arellano by the CIA. As priests read the letter aloud in churches, thousands of leaflets bearing the message were dropped all over rural Guatemala.
Ernesto wrote his mother a long letter. In their recent correspondence she had been enthusiastic about the prospect of their meeting in Paris. He had warned her that it might be the only chance they would have to see each other in the next ten years, the period of time he planned to be exploring the world. She had evidently inquired if he was interested in becoming an anthropologist, given his interest in archaeology and the condition of Latin America’s Indians, but he shot that down. “It seems a little paradoxical to make as the goal of my life the investigation of that which is irremediably dead,” he wrote. He was sure of two things, he told her: first, that he would reach his “authentically creative stage at around thirty-five years of age,” and would work in “nuclear physics, genetics, or some field like that”; and second, that “America will be the theater of my adventures and of a much more important nature than I had thought. I truly believe I have come to understand her and I feel [Latin] American; we possess a distinctive nature compared with any other of the world’s peoples.”
In the final days of April Ernesto made a “heroic and unbreakable” decision. He would leave Guatemala within fifteen days if his residency was not approved. He informed the owners of the pension of his plan and began arranging places to leave his possessions. “A kilo of adrenaline arrived, sent by Alberto from Venezuela, and a letter in which he asks me to go, or rather invites me to go,” Ernesto wrote. “I don’t really want to.”
As Ernesto prepared to leave, Washington was taking the next step in activating its destabilization plan. With a great deal of intentional publicity, Ambassador Puerifoy had been recalled to Washington for consultations. Well-placed news leaks indicated that the purpose of his visit was to discuss U.S. measures against Arbenz in view of the recent Caracas resolution regarding Communist involvement in the hemisphere. On April 26, Eisenhower warned that “the Reds” were already in control of Guatemala and now sought to spread their “tentacles” to El Salvador and other neighbors.
By May 15, Ernesto’s decision about where to go was made for him when he was told officially that he would have to leave the country to renew his visa. Just before leaving, he wrote to his brothers, whose birthdays were coming up. “Central America is
rechulo
[cute], as they say around here, no year passes without some rumpus in favor or against something or other. ... Right now Honduras is in the midst of a fantastic strike where
almost 25 percent of the country’s workers are stopped and Foster Dulles, who is the lawyer of the fruit company in these parts, says that Guatemala has meddled in it. There’s a clandestine radio that calls for revolt and the opposition dailies also do it so it wouldn’t be strange that with the help of the U.F. [United Fruit] they send a little revolution here so as not to lose the habit. ... I believe if the United States doesn’t intervene directly (which isn’t probable yet) Guatemala can withstand any attempt of this type well, and it also has its back covered, because there’s a lot of people in Mexico who sympathize with the movement.”
Despite Ernesto’s optimistic prognosis, an incident occurred on that same day that irrevocably doomed the Arbenz regime. The Swedish freighter
Alfhem
, which had left a Polish port a month earlier secretly loaded with Czechoslovaki arms, docked in the Guatemalan port of Puerto Barrios. Tipped off in Poland about the mysterious voyage and suspicious about its cargo and final destination, the CIA had monitored the ship as it crossed the Atlantic and altered its course several times. When it reached Puerto Barrios, Washington was quickly apprised of the true nature of
Alfhem
’s cargo—more than two tons of war matériel for the Arbenz regime—and went into action.
The
Alfhem
provided the United States with evidence that the Soviet bloc was involved in Guatemala. Allen Dulles convened the CIA’s executive intelligence advisory board and the National Security Council and got their backing to set the Guatemalan invasion date for the next month. On May 17, the State Department issued a statement denouncing the arms delivery, and Eisenhower followed up with a public warning that the Czech arms could allow the consolidation of a “Communist dictatorship” in Central America.
Guatemala was in an unenviable position. Having arranged for the shipment secretly and been discovered in flagrante, Arbenz looked like a man with something to hide. In succeeding days, Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles told the press that the arms shipment was larger than Guatemala’s military needs, and hinted that Guatemala’s real intention might be to invade its neighbors to impose Communist rule and, possibly, to launch an attack on the Panama Canal. With Washington’s propaganda machine in full swing, few journalists remembered that the United States had thwarted the Arbenz regime’s efforts to upgrade its army’s equipment, repeatedly rejecting direct appeals for American military assistance and blocking moves by other Western countries to sell Guatemala the arms it requested.
Less than a week after the
Alfhem
docked, Secretary Dulles signed a “mutual security treaty” with Honduras. It followed a similar treaty signed with Nicaragua’s dictator, Somoza, only weeks earlier. Now Honduras
would be defended by the United States in the event of a Guatemalan invasion. To drive the point home, U.S. military cargo planes flew to Nicaragua and Honduras, ostensibly carrying weaponry for their defense. In fact, the shipments were to be handed over to Castillo Armas’s Liberation Army, which awaited its marching orders to move to the Guatemalan border.
On May 20, in a move authorized by Allen Dulles to stop the delivery of the
Alfhem
’s weapons to Guatemala City, a band of CIA saboteurs set explosives on the railroad tracks outside Puerto Barrios. The explosives did little damage, and so the CIA men opened fire as the military train passed. One Guatemalan army soldier was killed and several were wounded, but the train and its cargo reached its destination without further incident.
Against this backdrop of escalating political drama, Ernesto left his pension. He still owed about three months’ rent, but the proprietors let him go in return for an IOU. He and Hilda spent the night in the village of San Juan Sacatepéquez. It was their first night alone together. A few days later, Ernesto left for El Salvador with twenty borrowed dollars in his pocket.
For a declared partisan in the confrontation in Guatemala, Ernesto was behaving in a remarkably carefree fashion. Once again he absented himself at a climactic moment. He couldn’t have picked a worse time to be visiting Guatemala’s neighbors. He carried some “questionable literature” that was confiscated at the Salvadoran border, but he bribed a policeman and was allowed to enter the country. After obtaining a new Guatemalan visa in the provincial city of Santa Ana, he continued on to the capital, San Salvador. There, he applied for a Honduran visa, thinking he might visit the Mayan ruins of Copán and also “check out” the ongoing workers’ strike. Over the weekend, he took off for the Pacific coast and camped out on the beach, where he made friends with some young Salvadoran men. Writing to his mother later, he told her that when they were all a bit drunk, he engaged in a little “Guatemalanesque propaganda and recited some verses of profoundly red color. The result was that we all appeared in a police station, but they let us go right away, after a
comandante
... advised me to sing about roses in the afternoon and other beauties instead. I would have preferred making a sonnet with smoke [gunfire].”
Returning to San Salvador, he found that his Honduran visa had been denied. He assumed this was because he had come from Guatemala, which was almost a criminal offense in the current political climate. With Honduras no longer an option, he headed to Chalchuapa in western El Salvador to see the pre-Columbian Pipil Indian pyramid of Tazumal. He explored the
ruins, making studious observations in his journal. That night he slept by the roadside outside Santa Ana, and in the morning he hitchhiked back across the Guatemalan border, heading for the ancient Indian ruins of Quiriguá. The next day he reached Jalapa, then got a train to the town of Progreso, where a woman took pity on him and gave him twenty-five cents. He set out on foot along the nearly completed new road to the now infamous port of Puerto Barrios. When he reached the ruins of Quiriguá, he noted similarities in the stone constructions to those of the Incas in Peru. But he was especially struck by the carvings’ Asian features and thought that one figure on a stela was “reminiscent of Buddha,” while another resembled Ho Chi Minh.