Yes foreign immigrants in guatemala it's a lot of german immigrants who who take over indigenous land to build the coffee economy and they bring their technology with them and in uh in guatemala nicaragua honduras uh the united fruit company and the standard fruit company two big u.s banana companies again they bring their technology they take over huge amounts of land and they implement new forced labor systems so many many indigenous people who had escaped the forced labor of spanish colonialism are now drawn into the forced labor of this second conquest um so working on the plantations whether it's the coffee plantations or the banana plantations which are in foreign hands,
This is considered by the ruling elites who are the landed elites of these countries to be economic development because it makes them rich and this is also when the countries develop their own militaries and multiple police systems to implement this these land takeovers and forced labor systems so the militaries and police that exist today have their roots in this national consolidation of the late 1800s under foreign control and national consolidation in the hands of elites who are like middlemen and profiteers from the system of foreigners uh exploiting uh indigenous,
And peasant workers by dispossessing them of their land and forcing them into plantation labor so this is the system that's established at the end of the 1800s and it really is the cause of the revolutions um 100 years later although there's yet another step um which is the post-world war ii developmental decades and the cold war where the united states starts pouring money into yet another wave of export economies and there's a great book called export agriculture in the crisis in central america that looks at how um now just in the hands of the u.s because the united states has supplanted britain and and germany so it's really just the us by the time of world war ii or the end of world war,
Pouring new resources into yet another wave of uh land dispossession exploitation and forced labor uh in the name of economic development and even in the name of preventing revolution uh this cold war you know we want to make sure that these countries develop under us um promoting cotton sugar and beef cattle industries again in the uh interests of u.s corporations but also in the interests of counter-revolution um which has precisely the opposite effect but because by further concentrating land by further dispossessing the peasantry um it uh actually pushes the the poor of these countries into revolution there you go there's that concept again pushing them into revolutions making it inevitable a century,
They have essentially where they have no place else to go one of the places i used to take my students in san salvador after our trips through el salvador we'd end up in the military history museum and it's on a military base there and and it's basically just quantum head after kwanzaa of us military weapons that have been sent there uh by private companies as well as by the us going back to the 1870s the first ones that that were that were sent there and you can see these are the weapons that are being used to put down and keep in line the peasants under this consolidation especially dedicated to coffee lands in the late 1800s and going forward i mean they stop in the 1980s the weapons,
But it's a whole century's worth of u.s foreign policy basically there and there are these events that take place one of them that really strikes me is that in 1934 there are there's a weapon there's an m1 um garand that was sent there from the u.s and this is two years after uh la matanza in 1932. so it shows kind of what was happening after el mosote too there wasn't really a standard uh that you know of of atrocities that could be exceeded for us to stop sending them weapons and so in the 1920s and 30s 40s period there are these three events that characterize the three major countries like you have the matanza and el salvador you have the marine occupation of nicaragua and the war against sandino and then the ten years of spring that no americans know about this,
I mean when we you know when we talk about these to our classes they uh they really don't know about it but i always think those as examples of how they tried they tried to do something different and then the us not so much in the case of the matanza although we were present to a degree um but in in so many cases we're supporting the oppression of people who are trying these mass movements and then later on in the 70s and 80s they try it again and they're just walloped with even more can you talk about those those three yeah and you know um i always like to talk about the 1944 revolution in guatemala um again connected to something i was saying earlier how like people here seem to feel like oh you know the system is so strong,
There's nothing we can do and yet in the poorest countries the most dispossessed people keep finding things that they can do so is were there other potential futures for central america obviously there were and um you know the guatemala revolution of 1944 is one example that if the united states had chosen instead of choosing to use every tool in the kit to undermine and eventually in 1954 overthrow the guatemalan revolution and put into place decades of military dictatorship and genocide against the guatemalan indigenous population what if the united states had decided to either keep its hands off and allow the popular movements in guatemala,
The popularly democratically elected president of guatemala to try to implement social and economic reforms in their country in the interests of the majority or even more unbelievably decided to support this revolutionary experiment in the interests of social justice um what would have happened we don't know but certainly by destroying that we cut off any possibility for progressive social change in guatemala for decades and caused the the horrific deaths and massacres and genocide that that happened under our watch um and you know i think the same thing about the san diego revolution what if the united states like you know was the october revolution in guatemala perfect was everyone involved in it a paragon of virtue,
Of course not same thing with the sandinista revolution um same thing with the american revolution and every revolution that's ever happened but if the united states had decided either to just let nicaraguans figure out their own future or even provide support to those nicaraguans who were trying to build a more just country um you know the the future nicaragua's history would have unfolded very differently and so would guatemala so we can't just look at central america and say oh like they keep messing up they keep doing everything wrong it's like every time they try to do something differently we come in and quash it instead of saying oh maybe they can figure out solutions to their own problems,
And we shouldn't just like consider them roadkill in our drive to destroy the planet it reminds me what you're saying too is that that of so many conversations i've had with my students over the past 18 years which is that once you mention the guatemala coup in 1954 that even more so than pinochet in 73 or any of the other number of interventions that we've been involved in that one really stands out to my students this they just kind of that's a in the armor right there for them and and it's hard for anybody to argue uh against that ten years of spring that they had where they just had two democratically elected presidents uh with the case at least with allende,
Some people can say well he was marxist and maybe um maybe that justified uh our intervention and that's a whole other discussion but with arbenz and with arabella it's just uh how do you really ex how do you back something like that up um i mean i guess i just really resist the the idea that well he was marxist so maybe that justifies i mean i know you're not trying to justify that either but but i think we have to be really careful about going there and um talk instead about respecting sovereignty and autonomy and if a latin american government um pursues policies that we don't like they actually have the right to do that like we're not the world's policemen.
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