Guatemala election news buried by Tornado Trump

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Crucial results of a Central American run-off election last weekend were lost in the newsroom shuffle. Instead, television and computer screens were filled with pictures of terrifying natural phenomena of huge, raging forest fires in Western Canada, and Hurricane Hilary making landfall in Mexico and California. Also extensively covered was that unnatural phenomenon called Tornado Trump, wreaking havoc while twisting and turning on its path of self-destruction towards Fulton County Courthouse in Georgia.

Unnoticed in the midst of all this chaos, the electorate of Guatemala voted for Bernardo Arévalo to become their new president. He won a landslide victory for his left-wing anti-corruption party, which had campaigned against poverty, malnutrition, unemployment and other ills that had plagued his nation for so long. His father was that troubled country’s first democratically elected president in 1945, and it was only nine years later that another newly elected leader issued a decree to redistribute to peasant farmers some fallow agricultural land owned by the United Fruit Company (UFC) of Boston.

A recent television documentary vividly explained the outcome of that fateful decision, as not for nothing are Central American countries known as Banana Republics. The UFC had built all kinds of infrastructure, railroads, telegraph lines, ports, etc, and didn’t take too kindly to the Guatemalan government’s decrees in 1954.

They hired America’s best-known influencer, public relations lawyer Edward Bernays, to lobby the Washington, DC, government, and in very short order the CIA had engineered a coup to take out Guatemala’s new president. Over the next 36 years a civil war raged, claiming the lives of an estimated 200,000 civilians, while the impoverished country was run by a succession of brutal military regimes and puppet presidents, all with the blessing of the good old US of A.

Of course, the small country never had a chance against the giant bully to the north, who broke every rule of moral decency with their craving for cheap bananas. During the next few months it will be interesting to see how far President Bernardo Arévalo gets with his anti-corruption reforms, and if there is outside interference from the banana bullies or others. Sadly, the chances are that his best or worst efforts will be lost on the cutting room floor in newsrooms, where everything will be focused on the aforementioned twisting and turning machinations relating to the numerous indictments of Tornado Trump.

BERNIE SMITH

Parksville, BC

Canada