Page 117 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 117 of 237

Castillo-Armas was generally regarded as an honest, proud and rather simple man who genuinely loved his
country. But he had a covey of advisers, and some of them were less dedicated than their chief. After the 1954
coup American gambler types began drifting into Guatemala, and certain of the liberator's lieutenants were cut in.
Castillo-Armas could not bring himself to realize that some of his followers were treacherous. A gambling casino
was built in which various Army officers shared a heavy financial interest with the Americans.

Castillo-Armas closed down the casino, and shortly afterward, on July 26, 1957, he was assassinated by a member
of the palace guard. The crime was first blamed on Communists, then on Castillo-Armas' enemies within the
government. It has never been solved.

The following year, Ydigoras was elected President and settled down for a term that was at least never dull. At
one point, when rumors of official corruption were rife, he went on television with his ministers. Like a
schoolteacher, Ydigoras went down the line, saying, "Now, Mr. Minister, you wouldn't steal from the treasury,
would you?" One by one, the ministers said no, they certainly would not.

Another time, a newspaperman accused Ydigoras of being a viejo enclenque, or enfeebled old man. Ydigoras
went on television again, repeated the charge and said: "I will show him." Then he proceeded to skip rope and
juggle Indian clubs before the amazed Guatemalan audience.

Still, Ydigoras was nobody's fool. When the CIA came to him in 1960 asking for Guatemalan bases for the Bay of
Pigs training, he said yes -- although fully aware that he was risking his political neck. In fact, the November,
1960, uprising (which CIA pilots helped to put down) was partly blamed on the issue of the Cuban training bases
in Guatemala.

On March 31, 1963, Ydigoras was ousted by Colonel Enrique Peralta in one of the first of a series of military
coups in Latin America that threatened to make a mockery of the political reforms at the base of the Alliance for
Progress. Colonel Peralta's regime was recognized by Washington in less than three weeks.

If any efforts were made by Washington to save the legally elected Ydigoras government -- which had risked its
future to provide bases for the CIA for the Cuban invasion -- they were certainly not effective. There is, in fact, no
available evidence that any such efforts were made.

And so, a decade after the CIA's liberation of Guatemala from Communism in 1954, the lot of Guatemalans was
about the same. The finca owners prospered. The 2,000,000 Indians, still largely illiterate, toiled on for wages still
ridiculously low. (Eighty cents a day is considered generous in many areas of the country.) And another military
junta was in the saddle.

As is so often the case, the Invisible Government had moved in, accomplished its task, and moved on. The yoke
of Communism had been thrown off but in its place there remained the yoke of poverty and an indifferent
oligarchy. The abysmal conditions that led to Arbenz in the first place were as apparent as ever.

_______________

* Henry Holland, the State Department's representative at the meeting.

* That same day William A. Beall, a thirty-year-old American flier from Tyler, Texas, showed up in Mexico City
saying he had crash-landed his plane in the Pacific Ocean off Guatemala two days before. He had flown to
Mexico City from Tapachula. Beall said two other American fliers had crashed off Guatemala a few days earlier,
but had been rescued "by the United States Navy."