Reds In the Backyard

Nowhere else outside the Iron Curtain was there such a May Day as Guatemala celebrated last week. There, in a nation just four hours by plane from the Panama Canal, 20,000 government supporters paraded with floats and banners attacking the U.S. and praising Russia and Communist China. President Jacobo Arbenz proclaimed "our decision to move forward against native reactionaries and privileged foreign countries [and] forge a Guatemala which cannot be soiled by a foreign hand." The President shouted: "The accusation that we encourage Communism is false!" Then he turned and embraced Communist Labor Chief Victor Manuel Gutierrez, one of the organizers of the demonstration.

This bold Red display was typical of the changes which have transformed a green tourist land of lakes, volcanoes and picturesque Indians into a major headache for the U.S. The basic causes for the change stem directly from the Guatemalan revolution of 1944, which ended a century of dictatorship and set loose rampaging forces of nationalism and social upheaval. Today those forces are being adroitly exploited by a handful of clever Reds who took part in the revolution. They have no mass support worthy of the name, and get their only real power from a working alliance with the nationalist revolution's most fanatical spokesman: Guatemala's army boss, strong man and elected President, Colonel Arbenz.

Backroom Advisers. Guatemala's Reds are native products; not one is a Moscow-polished, internationally seasoned operator, and most of them turned Communist only after the 1944 revolution. They got a foothold under professorial Juan Jose Arevalo, President from 1945 to 1951, who let them organize the country's first trade unions but had enough political sophistication to hold them in rein. Their growth in behind-the-scenes power came under Arbenz, Arevalo's chosen successor, whom they helped elect.

The son of a Swiss-born druggist and a Guatemalan mother, Arbenz, now 39, is a dry, dogmatic professional officer who taught at the national military academy before he joined the army junta that fought and won the revolution. He took office with relatively little political experience and a few burning obsessions: ardent nationalism, a conviction that the country's worst problems can be solved by drastic land reforms, a deep-seated hatred of "foreign monopolies," i.e., United Fruit Co. and other U.S.-owned firms operating in Guatemala. No Communist himself, he nevertheless accepted the Communists around him at their face value, as old revolutionary friends ready to help carry out his nationalist aims.

Agrarian Reformers. Since then, the Reds have so wormed their way into the secondary ranks of government, and so identified themselves with the regime's revolutionary ideals, that anti-Communism is now officially regarded as subversive. Arbenz let the Reds form their own political party, in violation of the constitution, and took them into his government coalition; four Communists have been elected to Congress on the official ticket, and the anti-Communist opposition now holds only five of the 64 congressional seats. The President has given the Reds patronage and subsidies for their two newspapers. They run the government's radio and press propaganda; government trucks and projectors are used to show Communist films of alleged U.S. germ warfare in Korea.

Arbenz helped them take over the organized peasant movement, and they have repaid him with all-out support for his pet land-reform projects. When the Reds worked out a procedure for claiming United Fruit Co. property under the new agrarian law, he was delighted; in March the President formally upheld confiscation of 233,973 acres of the company's best reserve and fallow banana-growing lands. Now Red-led peasants are demanding 224,000 acres of the other big Unifruit plantation, and the company may eventually have to fold its $50 million Guatemalan operation and get out.

International Schemers. Arbenz may not yet realize how much he has come to rely on his Communist advisers and policymakers. If the Reds are putting over the Cominform line in Guatemala, the wider meaning of this is lost on him. Neighboring Central American republics are at odds with Guatemala over the growing evidence that its comrades play the international Communist game, passing Red propaganda into Nicaragua and El Salvador and sending agitators to stir up Salvadorian and Honduran banana and coffee workers. Inside his own country, the split between left & right has widened until Arbenz himself says: "There is no middle ground today in Guatemala."

Last March anti-Communist army dissidents staged an abortive uprising, quelled by military police after 18 hours. A better-planned revolt, once launched, might draw thousands of anti-Communist recruits and throw the country into a bloody civil war whose probable outcome, no matter who won, would be a return to dictatorship. Arbenz' strategy apparently is to try to sit on the lid and turn over his office four years hence to a hand-picked army successor who will carry on with his policies, Communists and all. Few Guatemalans have much hope that the stubborn President will ever see the Reds in their true color and break with them of his own accord; As he has said of himself: "Once I have taken a decision, I will not retreat a millimeter."

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