Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
The next day he hit the road again, deciding to strike out
“a lo macho”
for Puerto Barrios. He spent his last money on the train trip. It was a gamble, but it worked out. Right away, he found a night job unloading barrels of tar on a road construction crew. “The work is twelve hours straight, from six in the evening to six in the morning and is really a killer, even for guys with more training than me. At 5:30 we were automatons or
‘bolos,’
as they call drunks here.” He worked a second night—“with a lot less desire than the first”—but he proudly completed his shift, despite “the mosquitoes that are a real bother and the lack of gloves.”
The next morning, promised a train ticket back to Guatemala City from Puerto Barrios by one of the foremen, Ernesto relaxed at an abandoned shack at the sea’s edge, exulting in his achievement. It was the first sustained stint of physical labor he had ever done. “I have turned into a perfect
chancho
, full of dust and asphalt from the head down, but really content. I got the ticket, the old woman where I ate on credit told me to pay a dollar to her son in Guatemala [City], and I demonstrated that I am capable of standing whatever comes, and if it weren’t for the asthma, even more than that.”
“I paid back the dollar,” Ernesto wrote proudly after his return to Guatemala City. Hilda was surprised and pleased to see him back, for she had feared he wouldn’t return. As invasion jitters mounted, more people were leaving the country. A government official she knew had urged her to seek asylum, and Harold White had advised her to do the same.
Rumors abounded, and one of the first ones Ernesto heard had to do with himself. He learned from a Paraguayan acquaintance that he was widely believed to be a Perónist agent. Apparently, he quashed the rumor. He didn’t return to the pension, probably because he couldn’t repay his debt,
but ate his meals at Helena Leiva de Holst’s and shared a room with Ñico López and another Cuban who sang tangos. He was sneaked into and out of the room clandestinely, and since there were only two single beds, they pushed them together and slept sideways. Ñico was preparing to leave for Mexico on the orders of his organization, and spent his days “shitting with laughter but doing little else.”
Despite Ernesto’s expectations, life settled back into the same routine as before. The medical post beckoned like a mirage. He was told to come back for a meeting, then to wait, and, finally, to give it another week. There were few letters from home. Ñico left, and Ernesto moved into another room with a Guatemalan named Coca. Helena Leiva de Holst was also preparing to leave but promised to fix him up for meals at another woman’s house and to talk one last time with the minister of public health. To top everything off, his asthma returned.
Ernesto’s days of tedium were about to end, however, because of increased activity in the U.S.-Guatemala standoff. American warships had begun inspecting all suspicious shipping in the Caribbean, and Secretary Dulles was noisily preparing a document calling for sanctions against Guatemala to be ratified at the next OAS conference, slated for July. Howard Hunt (later of Watergate fame), the CIA propaganda chief of Operation Success, had organized a Congress Against Soviet Intervention in Latin America in Mexico City.
All over Latin America, the CIA was placing newspaper articles and propaganda films and handing out booklets that warned of the growing Communist threat in Guatemala. Arbenz sent his foreign minister to speak to Ambassador Puerifoy, offering conciliatory measures to begin negotiations with Washington and ward off the invasion. The overture went nowhere.
The CIA’s psychological warfare campaign was paying off. On June 2, a plot against Arbenz was foiled and some arrests were made. The next day, a group of military officers asked Arbenz to dismiss Communists from government posts. He told them he had the Communists under control. But many officers remained unsettled, and on June 5 a retired air force chief defected. His voice was soon heard on broadcasts over a radio station that called itself “La Voz de Liberación.” Broadcasts on the station were directed by a CIA agent named David Atlee Phillips. They exhorted Guatemalans to help the Liberation Army, giving the impression that it had thousands of fighters. The broadcasts also played on the military’s fears by accusing Arbenz of planning to disband the armed forces and turn weapons over to Communist-controlled unions to form “peasant militias.” On June 6, invoking the threat of invasion, Arbenz suspended constitutional guarantees for thirty days.
On June 14, Ernesto celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday. The next day, President Eisenhower called a high-level meeting to put the final touches on Operation Success. Two days later American mercenaries began flying bombing missions over Guatemala. On June 18, at the head of his paltry Liberation Army of some 400 fighters, Castillo Armas drove across the Honduran border into Guatemala. The invasion had begun.
*
Ernesto was thrilled at being under fire for the first time. In a letter to his mother, he confessed to “feeling a little ashamed for having as much fun as a monkey.” When he watched people run in the streets during the aerial bombardments, a “magic sensation of invulnerability” made him “lick his lips with pleasure.” He was awed by the violence. “Even the light bombings have their grandeur,” he wrote. “I watched one go against a target relatively close to where I was. You could see the plane get bigger by the moment while from the wings intermittent little tongues of fire came out and you could hear the sound of its machine gun and the light machine guns that fired back at it. All of a sudden it stayed suspended in the air, horizontal, and then made a rapid dive, and you could feel the shaking of the earth from the bomb.”
A few days later, in a more sober frame of mind, Ernesto wrote in his journal, “The latest developments belong to history. It is a quality that I believe appears for the first time in my notes. A few days ago, planes coming from Honduras crossed the frontier with Guatemala and passed over the city, machine-gunning people and military targets in the full light of day. I signed up with the health brigades to collaborate in the medical area and in the youth brigades that patrol the city at night.”
A nocturnal blackout had been imposed, and one of Ernesto’s duties was to ensure that nobody showed any lights that would provide bombing targets. Hilda also did her bit, attaching her name to a communiqué signed by political exiles in support of Guatemala’s revolution and assembling a women’s brigade at her office to take food to the men on patrol.
On June 20, Ernesto sent a birthday letter to his mother. “I imagine you’ve been a little worried about me,” he wrote. “I’ll tell you that if right now there is nothing to fear, the same can’t be said for the future, although
personally I have the sensation of being inviolable (inviolable isn’t the word but maybe the subconscious gave me a bad turn).”
Despite the provocations of the aerial attacks and Castillo Armas’s ground incursion, he told her, the Arbenz government had proceeded cautiously, allowing the mercenaries to get far enough into Guatemala to avoid any border incidents that would allow the United States and Honduras to claim Guatemalan aggression and invoke their mutual security treaty. So far, Guatemala had limited itself to a diplomatic protest against Honduras, and to a presentation of its case to the United Nations Security Council for a special hearing. “The incident has served to unite all Guatemalans under their government, and those like myself, who had been drawn to their country,” Ernesto wrote. He closed with a judgment that would soon prove woefully wrong. “Without a doubt Colonel Arbenz is a guy with guts, and he is ready to die in his post if necessary.”
Initially, the news from the battlefronts was encouraging. The government forces were fighting back, with some success. Castillo Armas had managed to enter the town of Esquipulas, the pilgrimage site of Guatemala’s black Christ, but elsewhere his troops had bogged down in the thrusts toward their main objectives, the towns of Zacapa and Puerto Barrios. Despite the early panic they had caused, the CIA’s mercenary planes had so far done relatively little damage, frequently missing their targets. Several of them had been hit by ground fire and put out of action. A Honduran ship, the
Siesta de Trujillo
, was seized at Puerto Barrios as it tried to offload a cargo of arms and munitions for the invaders. Finally, as the victim of an attack coming from outside its borders, Guatemala had a good case for requesting UN intervention on its behalf.
On the day Ernesto wrote to his mother, June 20, the American overseers of Operation Success were becoming alarmed at the likelihood that their Liberation Army was about to be routed. At Allen Dulles’s request, President Eisenhower authorized the dispatch of two more fighter bombers to the field. By June 23 the new planes were in action and remained so for the next three days, strafing and bombing important targets in key Guatemalan towns, including the capital.
Simultaneously, the United States was engaged in a blocking maneuver to thwart Guatemala’s request for a special session of the UN Security Council to discuss the crisis. The acting council president for June was the U.S. ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, who went to battle with Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld over the affair. Lodge finally agreed to convene a session on June 25, by which time the new bombers had wreaked their havoc, allowing Castillo Armas’s forces to regroup and launch new assaults.
On June 24 the invaders seized the small town of Chiquimula, and Castillo Armas proclaimed it the headquarters of his “provisional government.” La Voz de Liberación beat the war drums, giving listeners the impression that the Liberation Army forces were an unstoppable military juggernaut, scoring successes left and right as government defenses crumbled.
The confidence of Arbenz and some of his top military men began to crack. Meanwhile, Ambassador Lodge was busily lobbying other council members to vote against Guatemala’s request for a UN investigative team to be sent to Guatemala. Particular pressure was put on Britain and France, with Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles leaning on the visiting British prime minister, Winston Churchill, in Washington. Their message was that if London and Paris didn’t go along with the Americans on Guatemala, U.S. help would not be forthcoming in Cyprus, Indochina, and the Suez. When the Security Council vote was taken on June 25, the United States scored a narrow victory, a 5–4 vote against a UN inquiry, with Britain and France abstaining. Guatemala was on her own.
By July 3, Operation Success had earned its name. That day, the “Liberator,” Castillo Armas, flew into Guatemala City with Ambassador Puerifoy at his side. His ascension to power, brokered by the United States, followed a confusing week of power struggles between Guatemalan military leaders after they forced Arbenz’s resignation on June 27.
“A terrible shower of cold water has fallen over the Guatemalan people,” Ernesto observed a few days later. He wrote to Celia again, rueful over the heroic rhetoric of his last letter, explaining that he had written it “full of glorious dreams, just before going to the front I would never reach, to die if it were necessary ...
“It’s all happened like a wonderful dream which one clings to after awakening. Reality is knocking on many doors, and now the sound of gunfire can be heard, the rewards for the more ardent adherents to the ancien régime. Treason continues to be the patrimony of the army, and once more proves the aphorism that calls for the liquidation of the army as the true principle of democracy (if the aphorism doesn’t exist I create it).” In Ernesto’s mind, the other culpable sectors were the “reactionary” press and the Catholic Church, which had aided and abetted Arbenz’s downfall, and he mentally earmarked them as problem sectors needing special attention if socialist revolutions were to succeed elsewhere in the future.
Ernesto went on to castigate Arbenz—who had immediately sought asylum in the Mexican embassy
*
—for buckling under to military officers. Egged on by Puerifoy, they had demanded and won his resignation. Ernesto especially resented Arbenz’s reluctance to arm the people to defend the country. He was in an understandably bitter mood. In the final days of June, he had joined an armed militia organized by the Communist Youth. A Nicaraguan volunteer, Rodolfo Romero, was the “military chief” for the Augusto César Sandino Brigade at a house in northern Guatemala City. Ernesto was accepted into the brigade and remained with it several days, anxiously awaiting his chance to go to the front and do some fighting, but the public health minister appeared and transferred him to a hospital to await further orders. At this point, Romero and Ernesto lost sight of each other. (They would meet again four and a half years later, when Romero, in search of support for an anti-Somoza guerrilla war, flew into the newly liberated Cuban capital of Havana at the invitation of Comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara.) At the hospital, Ernesto once again offered to go to the front, but, as he noted in frustration, “They haven’t paid me any mind.” He waited for another visit by the health minister, but on Saturday, June 26, the day before Arbenz’s resignation, he lost his last chance when the minister came and left while he was out visiting Hilda.
During the tense buildup to Arbenz’s downfall, Hilda recalled Ernesto desperately seeking to forestall the collapse, trying to get a message to Arbenz that he should turn his back on his military advisers and arm the people so that they could fight a guerrilla war in the mountains. (In fact, two days before his ouster, Arbenz had tried to distribute arms to the militias like the one Ernesto had joined, but the army had refused.) Now, from his post in the hospital, Ernesto watched with increasing anxiety and frustration as one capitulation after another led to the consolidation of Castillo Armas’s triumph and the ignominious demise of the Guatemalan revolution. Martial law was declared, the Communist Party was banned, and the embassies began filling with fearful asylum seekers. Ernesto predicted his own expulsion from the hospital, since he was seen as a “Red,” and Hilda took precautions by moving into new lodgings.