The immediate aftermath of the First World War saw a redrawing of the map of Europe. With the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires, a raft of new successor states emerged on the continental landscape. The redistribution of territory in peace-time and the establishment of new sovereign entities led to new tensions and political instability and contributed to the rise of “home-grown” authoritarian and fascist political parties in interwar Europe. The following will look at how this development played out in Hungary and Romania after 1918—focusing on the two states’ main far-right political force (Arrow Cross Party (H), Iron Guard Movement (R)—showing that the growth of fascism in the two states shared core similarities albeit with some individual differences.
(Image: Emerson Kent)
Successor states Hungary and Rumania were on opposing sides during the First World War. Backing the Central Powers, Hungary was a big loser, newly landlocked, forfeiting more than two-thirds of its territory (to Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) and five-ninths of its former population – with ramifications for future irredentism, about three-and-a-half million ethnic Hungarians outside the homeland. Conversely, Romania, ally of the Entente Powers, was the principal beneficiary of Hungary’s reversals. As a consequence, for the new state of Hungary, the seeds of a ready-made grievance for revisionist vengeance against its eastern neighbour was well and truly sown.
🚹 Arrow Cross (top) & Iron Guard flags
Agrarian-based societies
Romania and Hungary were predominately peasant-dominated populations between the wars…in Romania they comprised 78% of the population, in more urbanised Hungary they were less dominant but still a very significant 55% of the population. Because of lingering serfdom-like conditions and the abject failure to implement effective land reform, the bulk of peasants remained impoverished. The onset of the Depression in the 1930s exacerbated their plight, in such a time of crisis many of the peasantry found fringe groups like Arrow Cross (Nyilasok pártja)⧆ and the Iron Guard Movement (the Legion) offering a panacea for their woes with more appeal than the promises of the mainstream parties❂. The increasingly xenophobic pronouncements of the Legion’s ultra-nationalists struck a receptive chord among the Romanian peasantry, who Corneliu Zelea Codreanu identified as the mass base required for his planned revolutionary seizure of power…the Iron Guard leader exploited the peasantry’s distrust of communism and outsiders, making an appeal to “the custodian of the national historic mission” (of the peasantry) to conquer the towns (supposedly controlled by Ukrainian Jews and other ‘foreigners’)(Constantin Iordachi, ‘Ultranationalist utopias and the realities of reconciliation (part one)’, New Eastern Europe, 25-Feb-2021, www.neweasterneurope.eu).
🚹 Codreanu (R) with Gen. Antonescu, the ‘Conducător’
Characteristics of the movements
Political outliers
The Iron Guard Movement (IGM) and Arrow Cross (ACP), as self-described revolutionary movements, laid out radical platforms and pursued electoral strategies which placed them clearly outside the political mainstream…a deliberate repudiation of not just ideologies on the left, communism and social democracy but of the establishment right, the capitalist system, conservatism and bourgeois liberalism as well.
🚹 Codreanu, “The Capitane “
Nationalism
Both native fascistparties were fiercely nationalistic in outlook. The nationalism of Romania’s Iron Guard Movement is considered to have been an unusual “variety of fascism” (Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism (1964)). The movement was also infused with a strong Christian Orthodoxy, befitting it’s alternate name, Legion of the Archangel Michael. The party’s leader Codreanu enveloped the movement’s ideology in an odd form of chiliastic mystical religiosity with “spiritual and transcendental aims”, mixing a ‘morbid’ element of Christian martyrdom and ritualism together with a violent nationalism (‘An Unique Death Cult’, Stanley G. Payne, Slate, 22-Feb-2017, www.slate.com). Codreanu and Iron Cross formed a political strategy called by Weber “murder as method”, their plan being to launch “a murder campaign to clear the country…of the Jews and their corrupt protectors”. However the ring-leaders including Codreanu were arrested before they could enact it.
A plan for Hungarian regional hegemony
The ultra-nationalism espoused by ACP was a component of a peculiar ideology concocted by founder Szálasi…the party’s idiosyncratic nationalism was mixed in with ample doses of anti-communism, anti-capitalism, the promotion of agriculture and Szálasi’s own notion of anti-semitism, which he called “a-semitism” (by which he meant that Jews were not compatible to live in Europe with other ‘races’ and should be removed from Central Europe)§. Szálasi’s multifaceted program which was known as Hungarism was strongly revisionist with the Vezető pledging to restore the ”historic’ Hungary, uniting all of the Carpathian-Danube peoples under a Magyar-dominated empire, extending Hungary’s boundaries as far as the Black Sea.
🚹 Danube monument to Jewish victims of Arrow Cross
Anti-semitism and racialist policy in the Legion
IGM matched the virulence of ACP’s militant anti-semitism. Legionnaire ideologues harboured a fear that the heterogeneity of the Jews in Romania “might spoil the national unity required by the creation of a powerful state capable of fostering a strong culture that would propel Romania into History” (Marin). Ideas of purity and racial superiority were deeply embedded in the IGM ideological firmament◘ (“The Iron Guard and the ‘Modern State’. Iron Guard Leaders Vasile Marin and Ion I. Mota, and the ‘New European Order'”, Mircea Platon, Brill, 01-Jan-2012, www.brill.com). In the early 1940s when IGM was briefly in a power-share arrangement with military strongman General Ion Antonescu (National Legionary State), thousands of Jews, Slavs and Roma (Gypsies) were liquidated by its paramilitary arm. In the late stage of WWII ACP militiamen executed thousands of Hungarian Jews on the Danube riverbank, the location marked today in Budapest by a memorial to the victims (“Shoes on the Danube Promenade”).
🚹 Iron Guard Legionnaires
Anti-capitalism
The anti-capitalist plank of fascist nationalism was a distinctive feature of both Hungarian and Romanian fascist movements✮. IGM philosophy rejected both the class antagonisms of Marxism and the materialistic excesses of bourgeoiscapitalism – a transparently populist appeal by Codreanu to the anti-capitalist sentiments of the large, powerless Romanian peasantry. Instead Codreanuproposed a “spiritual third force”, the Legion’s own unique cocktail of targeted terror and mystical authoritarianism as salvation for the masses (G.L. Mosse, International Fascism (1979)).
Anti-communism
Both ACP and IGM exploited the masses’ distrust of the spectre of communism. In Hungary this was made easier with Hungarians having already in 1919 tasted “the disillusioning experience of the Bolsheviks”, the brief and unpopular Hungarian Soviet regime led by Béla Kun (Deák, I. (1992). ‘Hungary’.The American Historical Review, (4), 1041-1063. doi:10.2307/2165492).
(Source: reddit.com)
Cult of the leader
Both ACP and the Legion forged personality cult leadership structures in their respective movements, based around the charismatic and youthful figures of Szálasi and Codreanu – strong, magnetic leaders whose authority could not be questioned. Arrow Cross and Szálasi repeatedly suffered harassment and persecution at the hands of the conservative Horthy nationalist regime, creating in ACP a sense of martyrdom which the movement transformed paradoxically “into a process via which the leader gained charisma, instead of losing it” (‘The Arrow Cross. The Ideology of Hungarian Fascism – A conceptual approach by Áron Szele (Central European University), Budapest 2015),www.etd.ceu.hu). In Romania the Legion’s propaganda projected Codreanu as the new messiah guiding his devoted, bordering on the fanatic followers, on a millennialist mission to purify Romania by punishing the enemies of the Tara (fatherland), communists, Jews, ‘foreigners’ (Constantin Iordachi, in Ideologies and National Identities: The Case of Twentieth–Century Southeastern Europe, Edited by John Lampe and Mark Mazower (2004)). Codreanu and Szálasi’s integrity and legitimacy was enhanced by the leaders’ decision to pursue power by constitutional means⇹.
Handcuffing the left
Fringe right parties like ACP and IGM had their path to power facilitated by the neutralisation of the left. In Hungary and Romania conservative governments outlawed the communist party, shackled trade unions and kept social democratic parties in check. In addition to this, the law treated fascist terrorists more leniently…eg, Codreanu’s “death squad” Legionnaires were acquited of having assassinated Romanian premier Duca in 1933.
A right Royal millstone
The deteriorating state of internal politics in Romania in the Thirties was a boost to IGM’s fortunes. The extreme avarice and corruption of the egregious Romanian king, Carol II, a drift towards political stagnation, all combined with “the immiseration of the peasantry” to steer support towards the Legion (‘The Little Dictators’, Richard J Edwards (30-Nov-2006), www.gresham.ac.uk).
🚹 Szálasi and Hitler (Photo: Hitler-archive.com)
End-notes: (i) National regeneration
Both Szálasi and Codreanu had unwavering faith in the power of their wills, believing that they were destined to lead their movements in the revival of their respective nations, to lift them out of the morass of economic crisis, national trauma and social dislocation.
Arrow Cross militia
(ii) A fascist brotherhood under the Swastika
Like many alt-right groups in interwar Europe, ACP and IGM looked to the “first rank” far-right, totalitarian states, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, for inspiration and ideas. As Anthony Polonsky remarked, “fascism seemed to many the philosophy of the future – an efficient and orderly means of modernizing a backward country” (Evans). Widely regarded as puppets of Nazi Germany, Szálasi and Codreanu saw themselves as part of an emerging new order, a larger pan-European movement of fascist states, one in practice however securely under the control of Hitler and the Nazis.
🚹 Arrow Cross women (Photo: CEU Gender Studies)
Postscript: Arrow Cross women
The fascism practiced by ACP and the Legion, it has been noted, was not without a degree of plasticity. Both fascist parties perhaps surprisingly included a focus on the position of women. IGM was more predictably traditional in reinforcing the domestic role of women, but ACP made a concerted appeal to Hungarian women, attracting female members from those women marginalised, politically or professionally. ACP was the first political organisation to acknowledge and propose a plan to protect women from sexual harassment in the workplace (‘Lessons for Today: Women in the Hungarian Arrow Cross Movement’, Andrea Petö, Central European University, 01-Aug-2019, www.ceu.edu)
⧆ Arrow Cross was just the most prominent of several small “fascist-wannabe” political groups that surfaced in Hungary after WWI
❂ just as the German masses found Hitler’s message fresh and appealing cf. the tired, failing efforts of the Weimar politicians
§ Szálasi’s “a-semitism” was also directed at Arabs
◘ Szálasi’s Hungarism subscribed to a similar view of “master race” status for the Magyar people
✮ significantly though the fascists never moved beyond rhetoric to actually threaten the entrenched position of private property
⇹ ACP’s electoral zenith was in 1939 when it won 25% of the vote in Hungary, becoming the country’s most important opposition party
The Russian Revolution in 1917 fostered a desire for self-determination within the Ukraine (as with other national minorities inside the empire), setting up the impetus for a conflict in Russia’s ‘underbelly’ which would become economically and geopolitically crucial to Soviet ‘imperial’ statehood. The Ukrainian conflict that followed (1917-21)✱ was a complicated affair involving a civil war, foreign interventions by countries from both the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance, the White Armies (a loose confederation of international anti-communist forces), the Bolsheviks (the Red Army) and from neighbouring countries Poland and Romania with their own territorial ambitions in the Ukraine. The struggle for political control in Ukraine involved the succession (and sometimes the co-existence) of 14 separate governments◘, before the Bolsheviks finally established the country as a constituent republic of the USSR [The Times Guide to Eastern Europe, (Edited by Keith Sword), (1991); Encyclopedia of the USSR, (Warren Shaw & David Pryce), (1990)].
Reds, Whites and Blacks Various social and political groups within Ukrainian society—peasants, Cossacks, nationalists, socialists, communists, anarchists—formed into autonomous partisan detachments and embroiled themselves in the southern front showdown between the Red (Russian) and the White (foreign) armies. Of these groups, the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, colloquially known as the Black Army, in particular found itself in the middle of the White versus Red warfare.
Makhnovia AKA ’Makhnochina’
Of the assortment of homegrown players in the conflict in Ukraine, the Black Army was the most intriguing ideologically. Led by a brilliant military commander, Nestor Ivanovitch Makhno, and composed of peasants and workers, they were an army of revolutionary anarchists (or anarcho-communists). Makhno was engaging in a social revolution experiment by trying to establish a stateless, libertarian society in “free territory”. The Makhnovist Movement was based on the principle of self-government, a “federation of free soviets” without recourse to a dominant central authority◔ – a defiantly anti-statist position that was of course anathema to the Soviets. Aside from anarchists, the movement’s ranks were also swelled by Left Social Revolutionaries, Maximalists and maverick Bolsheviks [Nestor Makhno, Anarchy’s Cossack: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine 1917-1921, (Alexandre Skirda), (2004)]. At its high-water point Makhnovia boasted an army some 100,000-strong [‘The forgotten story of the Free Territory’, (John Dennehy), Contributoria, July 2015, www.contributoria.com].
The Bolsheviks in their Ukraine military campaign alternated between forming alliances with the Black Army against the White Army when it suited them, and warring with them at other times. Makhno’s effective use of guerrilla tactics and his own martial innovation, the tachanka◘, played a decisive role in stopping the advance of Anton Denikin’s White Army on Moscow by cutting its lines of supply. When the Reds eventually got the better of the Whites in the war, Leon Trotsky (Soviet Commissar of War) reneged on the agreement with the Makhnovists, vilified Makhno as a “bandit warlord” and a “counter-revolutionary”, and proceeded to crack down on the Blacks ruthlessly [‘Free Territory of Ukraine’, Libertarian Socialist Wiki, www.libsoc.wiki.fandom.com]. With the Black Army’s strength decimated by the desertion of thousands of soldiers, the Red Army,superior in numbers and better equipped✧, ultimately defeated and dispersed the Blacks, forcing Makhno to flee Ukraine, eventually taking refuge in France.
Footnote: Makhnovia’s geographical base in eastern Ukraine Makhno’s powerhouse was on the left bank of the River Dniepr, in the provinces of Ekaterinoslav and Northern Tavrida and in part of neighbouring provinces…an area forming a rectangle measuring 300 km by 250 km and populated by seven-and-a-half million people (Skirda).
⇣ A 1919/20 pictorial map of Ukraine(Image source: Christophe Reisser & Sons)
Postscript: Ukraine, ‘Malorossiya’ and historic ‘Great Russia’ assumptions of hegemony The perception historically of Ukraine as “Little Russia”—held by by both Russians and the outside world—as a geographic entity falling naturally within the realm of “Great Rus” or even as indivisible from it, has acted as a handbrake on Ukraine’s aspirations for independence❂. In the present Ukraine/Crimea imbroglio, Russia’s military intervention and support for separatism in Ukraine (ie, the 2014 idea of eastern Ukraine as ‘Novorossiya’, (“New Russia”), the encouragement of the separatist “Donetsk People’s Republic”), is the Soviet strategy redux of what happened in 1917 – the setting up of an alternative authority in the country to that of the Ukrainians, namely a pro-Russian regime in Kharkiv. The Europeans in 1917, perhaps with an underlying sense of the vast, sprawling Russian Empire as amorphously heterogeneous, had a poor awareness of the difference between Ukrainians and Russians (the Soviet policy of Russification was designed to further blur those differences)⧆ [‘Illusion of a friendly empire: Russia, the West, and Ukraine’s independence a century ago’, (Ihor Vynokurov), Euromaidan, 02-Sep-2017, www.euromaidan.com].
✱ because of the causal link the conflict in Ukraine is sometimes characterised as the southern front of the Russian Civil War. Invading White Army leader General Denikin referred to the region as “Southwestern Krai”, a name with Russian imperial overtones
◔ Makhnovia relied on the adherents to an anarchist model to self-organise into peasant communes and worker co-operatives (Dennehy)
◘ horse-drawn machine guns
✧ the Bolsheviks routinely and deliberately underarmed Makhno’s army (the Black Army always had more volunteers than guns) (Skirda)
❂ this is a part of a continuum which had its genesis with Muscovy’s supplanting of Kyiv as the centre of the Russian state
⧆ when the Ukrainian war for independence broke out, the western powers, in striking contrast to their ready endorsement of Polish self-determination and independence after WWI, failed to offer the same support to the Ukrainians’ aspirations (Vynokurov)
A fortnight after Jacobo Árbenz Guzman fell on his sword, resigning the presidency of Guatemala, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who had led the so-called “Army of Liberation”—the US-financed and trained rebel force which had invaded the country—was made president of Guatemala’s ruling military junta. Despite Washington’s professed intention to rebuild Guatemala through comprehensive reforms into a “showcase for democracy”, the US’s ongoing preoccupation with the drive to eliminate communism in the region took precedence [Brockett, Charles D. “An Illusion of Omnipotence: U.S. Policy toward Guatemala, 1954-1960.” Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 44, no. 1, 2002, pp. 91–126. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3177112. Accessed 4 Aug. 2020].
Árbenz’s resignation speech ⍗
Doubling down on communism America’s ‘Liberator’ for Guatemala however took a blanket approach to the communist witch hunt, his repressive crackdown targeted anyone suspected of opposing his increasingly dictatorial regime. Political opponents, labour leaders, remnants of the Árbenzista peasantry, were all rounded up (over 3,000 were arrested by Castillo Armas and an unknown number liquidated). Non-communists were routinely caught up in the purge, including ordinary farm workers from local agrarian committees. Árbenz’s agrarian land reform system was dismantled, the land appropriated from United Fruit Company (UFCo) was returned to it. Resistance to Castillo Armas’s removal of peasants from their lands acquired during the revolution was met with repression by the regime. Castillo Armas also had to deal with insurrections by disaffected left-wing Ladino officers (remnants of the military remaining loyal to Árbenz and Areválo), fighting a guerrilla insurgency from the highlands (Brockett).
Árbenz and his supporters spent 73 days in asylum in the Mexican Embassy before an inglorious exile ⍗
Armas’ presidency, which ended in 1957 when he was assassinated by an Árbenz sympathiser, was a disaster for a recovering Guatemala. The fallout from the Armas regime’s soaring debts and entrenched corruption was that it became almost completely dependent on US aid. The deteriorating situation under Ydígoras (the new president) led him to declare a “state of seize” in 1960, suspending civil liberties and establishing military rule. An attempt by a group of dissident military officers to overturn Ydígoras’ increasingly oppressive government triggered a civil war in Guatemala which lasted 34 years and claimed the lives of approximately 200,000 civilians, including a genocidal “scorched earth” policy conducted against the indigenous Q’eqchi Maya community [‘Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, American Republics, Volume V’, Office of the Historian,www.history.state.gov/]
⍐ the Guatemalan junta post-democracy
“Guatemala as domino” – a blueprint for coups in Latin America and the Caribbean Post-1954 the US continued to provide Guatemalan security forces with “a steady supply of equipment, training and finance, even as political repression grew ferocious”. The type of practices rehearsed in Guatemala—covert destabilisation operations, death squad killings by professional intelligence agencies—were lessons learnt for dealing with future ‘maverick’ regimes trying to chart a different political and economic path to that acceptable to Washington [Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, (2011)].
The most tragic and wide-reaching legacy of the 1954 Guatemala coup is that it provided a model for future coups and instability in the region set off by a heightened Cold War. The US followed the Guatemala playbook in orchestrating the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by reactionary exiles in 1961 – albeit with a very different outcome. The US’ toppling, with British complicity, of the democratically elected Jagan government in British Guiana in 1964 had familiar reverberations to 1954: Washington’s fear of confronting a communist government in the hemisphere after the Cuban Revolution resulted in “an inflexible and irrational policy of covert subversion towards a moderate PPP government” in British Guiana [Stephen Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story, (2005)]. The CIA and right-wing dissidents within the Brazilian military colluded in a coup which overthrew the liberal government of João Goulart in 1964 (golpe de 64), replacing it with an uncompromising military junta. Washington’s involvement was prompted by Goulart’s plans to nationalise the Brazilian oil industry and other large private businesses. The same techniques and rhetoric were employed in the Dominican Republic coup/counter-coup in 1965. Most notoriously the Guatemalan putsch was to have echoes in the 1973 coup d’état in Chile which violently removed Marxist president, Salvador Allende. This was in response to Allende’s move to nationalise foreign businesses including US-owned copper mines and telecommunications giant I.T.T. US president, Richard Nixon, in fact had already tried to prevent Allende from taking office after the socialist won the Chilean elections fair and square in 1970❅ [‘Chilean president Salvador Allende dies in coup’, History, www.history.com/].
⍐CIA headquarters in Virginia, USA
CIA hit-list for Guatemala CIA documents declassified in the 1990s reveals lists were compiled as early as 1952 of individuals in the Árbenz government “to (be) eliminated immediately in event of (a) successful anti-Communist coup”. Because the names were deleted during the agency declassification it can’t be verified if any of the assassinations were actually carried through [‘CIA and Assassination: The Guatemala 1954 Documents’, (Edited by Kate Doyle & Peter Kornbluh), The National Security Archive, www.nsarchive2.gwu.edu].
Footnote: the removal of Árbenz from Guatemala didn’t mean the CIA and Washington were done with the deposed president. The CIA continued its campaign to trash the reputation of Árbenz in exile, even though, personally, he was a politically impotent figure by this time. The CIA found it useful to continue to smear Árbenz as a “Soviet agent”, tying him to the ongoing US crusade against communism in the hemisphere✪ [Ferreira, Roberto Garcia. “THE CIA AND JACOBO ARBENZ: HISTORY OF A DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN.” Journal of Third World Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2008, pp. 59–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.og/stable/45194479. Accessed 6 Aug. 2020].
Nixon and Armas ⍗
PostScript: A mea culpa of sorts Decades later the US government through President Clinton issued an apology, not for the 1954 coup, but for the US’ role in the human rights abuses of the civil war in Guatemala, which slaughtered thousands of civilians. It wasn’t until 2011 that the Guatemalan government (under President Colom) apologised for the “historic crime” against Árbenz and his family [‘Apology reignites conversation about ousted Guatemalan leader’, (Mariano Castillo), CNN, 24-Oct-2011, www.edition.cnn.com; ‘Clinton apology to Guatemala’, (Martin Kettle & Jeremy Lennard), The Guardian, 11-Mar-1999, www.theguardian.com].
▂▁▂▁▁▂▁▂▁▂▁▂▁▂▁▂▁▂
❅ US I.T.T. (International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation) entreated the Nixon administration to wage “economic warfare” and take other covert measures against the Allende regime to ensure its ouster from power, ‘Papers Show I.T.T. Urged U.S. to Help Oust Allende’, New York Times, 03-Jul-1972, www.nytimes.com
✪ back in Guatemala, President Armas and the latifundios (rich conservative landowners opposed to the Árbenz agrarian policy) provided a in-synch chorus, echoing the US charges of communist collusion by Árbenz
With the go-ahead from incoming president Eisenhower in March 1953, Allen Dulles and the CIA continued the covert plot to undermine and destabilise the Árbenz government. The highly-orchestrated assault on the Árbenz regime took place on several fronts. Washington blocked a much needed loan from the World Bank to Guatemala and imposed an arms embargo on the country❈. The CIA forged an alliance of neighbouring states which were hostile or potentially hostile to Árbenz. The dictators running Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic and Venezuela didn’t require much persuading. Success by Árbenz in redistributing Guatemalan land could easily inspire the peasantries in their own countries to make similar demands, so the tiranos-caudillos were only too happy to get on-board with the CIA’s mission and pass on valuable intelligence about Guatemala to the US, and in the case of Nicaragua’s Somoza, Dominican Republic’s Trujillo and Venezuela’s Jiménez, help finance and arm the anti-Árbenz rebels.
⬆️Dulles Bros Inc
Within the turbulent atmosphere of Guatemala CIA pursued a strategy of divide-and-rule. The US dangled the carrot of future armaments before the country’s military high command – the arms withheld from them would be made available on the proviso that they were prepared to break with their loyalty to Árbenz. [Bowen, Gordon L. “U.S. Foreign Policy toward Radical Change: Covert Operations in Guatemala, 1950-1954.” Latin American Perspectives 10, no. 1 (1983): 88-102. Accessed July 28, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/2633365].
Peurifoy and anti-communism in one country At the same time the US State Department also utilised diplomatic channels to lever pressure on the Guatemalan regime. The State Department purposefully chose John Peurifoy as the new ambassador to Nicaragua. Peurifoy came with the right credentials to ‘help’ in Guatemala. As US ambassador to Greece in 1950 he interfered in post-civil war Greece to consolidate an anti-communist climate in the country. As Washington’s man-on-the-ground in Guatemala Peurifoy played a key role in destabilising the Árbenz government. The ambassador approached the task of rooting out communists in Guatemalan politics very zealously, describing a meeting with Àrbenz thus, “I came away definitely convinced that if President is not a communist, he will certainly do until one comes along, and that normal approaches will not work in Guatemala” [‘The Ambassador in Guatemala (Peurifoy) to the Department of State, Office of the Historian, www.history.state.com/]⧆. The CIA’s anti-Árbenz propaganda campaign also secured the assistance of the Catholic Church in Guatemala, whose priests infused their sermons with censure of the government.
Washingtonparachutes ”anti-red troubleshooter” into Guatemala (New York Times) ⬇️
Self-appointed gatekeeper of the Western Hemisphere Historians have debated the reasons for Washington’s persistently determined pursuit of the Guatemalan democracy. In the early to mid-Fifties the mania of anti-communism was at its peak in America. Eisenhower had been elected in 1952 pledging to stop the spread of the “communist scourge” both at home and globally⌑. In such a charged climate the US Administration found itself very disposed towards seeing developments in Guatemala under Árbenz as evidence of a Soviet beachhead in the region, as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine◰, and therefore justification for Washington to intervene in Guatemala’s affairs [‘Upholding the Monroe Doctrine: American Foreign Policy in the 1954 Guatemalan Coup d’Etat’, (Nadjalisse C. Reynolds-Lallement), [Dr. Karen E. Hoppes HST 201: US History June 5, 2013], http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/].
A symbiosis of political and economic interests? The consensus among historians is that Cold War politics was the prime mover for the US, and that the economic interests and profitability of United Fruit Company (UFCo) in Guatemala always was secondary in the scheming – although as Gordon has argued, there was a reciprocal relationship between the two at play, the US’ government’s “Cold War and anti-communist hysteria provided public cover for government action on behalf of UFCo, (the company’s) personnel facilitated the CIA’s Cold War task of subverting the Árbenz government” [Gordon, Max. “A Case History of U. S. Subversion: Guatemala, 1954.”Science & Society 35, no. 2 (1971): 129-55. Accessed July 27, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40401561].
Notwithstanding the fact that local communists held some sway over the Guatemalan labour movement, their impact on decision-making within the Árbenz government was at best minimal. Árbenz’ objectives on taking control were not doctrinal but pragmatically liberal ones – political liberalisation, creation of a middle class, modernisation of the country, to free the Guatemalan economy from dependency on world coffee prices and from control by foreign corporations𝄪 (Gordon). Try as they may, US apologists arguing that the intervention was saving the country from communism have failed to make any plausible, even indirect, connexion between the Árbenz government and the Soviet Union✧. Immerman’s view is that the State Department confused communism and nationalism [cited in Bowen)❂.
⬆️ JF Dulles, Time’s “Man of the Year, 1954”
Isolating the Western Hemisphere’s outlier state With former UFCo lawyer John Foster Dulles guiding US foreign policy, the diplomatic isolation of Guatemala was complete when it cajoled the other members of the Organisation of American States (OAS) into accepting its anti-communist resolution in the region at the Caracas meeting early in 1954. The US, with assistance from the UK, also blocked Guatemala’s efforts to secure UN intervention against those seeking to destabilise its democracy.
⬆️ Rebel troops attacking Guatemala City (Source: www.latinamericanstudies.org)
End-game: The putsch and its denouement By late 1953 Eisenhower had given the “green light” to the invasion plan that became Operation PBSUCCESS in 1954. The US propaganda campaign intensified a few months later with saturation airdrops of anti-Árbenz leaflets across the country. Concurrently, the US Embassy in Guatemala City employedblocking equipment to jam the government’s official wireless channels and replace it with misinformation discrediting the Árbenz regime (Bowen). The CIA chose a renegade, expat Guatemalan officer on the outer with Árbenz to lead the coup attempt. From Honduras, Colonel Castillo Armas, with a small force of Guatemalan exiles and mercenaries and financed largely by the CIA, invaded the country. At first repulsed by Árbenz’s troops, the rebels fortunes turned around after Peurifoy persuaded JF Dulles to provided them with air cover. US-piloted planes duly strafed Guatemala City and other towns. American intimidation and terror had a telling psychological effect on the population. Guatemalan army commanders, fearful of a full US military intervention, defected from Árbenz, and refused to allow the president to arm the peasant militia to resist the invaders, this prompted a demoralised Árbenz to resign his office in June 1954 and seek asylum in the Mexican Embassy. After some jockeying for power within the country’s military junta Castillo Armas emerged as the new (US recognised) national leader, hurling Guatemala once again into the void of a crippling military dictatorship [RABE, STEPHEN G. “The U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: The Documentary Record.” Diplomatic History 28, no. 5 (2004): 785-90. Accessed July 30, 2020.www.jstor.org/stable/24914824.]
⬇️Mexican artist Diego Rivera’s graphic take on the Guatemalan putsch
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❈ forcing it to seek arms from Czechoslovakia, allowing the US to fling further mud, characterising it as an evidence of Árbenz’s ongoing collusion with communism
⧆ revealingly, the New York Times at the time described Peurifoy as “a man of action rather than a diplomat”, The New York Times, 18-July-1954
⌑as Moye has noted, the Guatemala crisis provided a convenient and fairly easy way for the Eisenhower administration to demonstrate its promised “victory over communism”[MOYE, LAURA. “The United States Intervention in Guatemala.” International Social Science Review 73, no. 1/2 (1998): 44-52. Accessed July 31, 2020.www.jstor.og/stable/23883544/].
◰a foreign policy position of the US, first enunciated in 1823, warning off European powers from interfering with the governance of existing countries on the American continent
𝄪at the time of Guatemala’s to transition to a democratic state, the US accounted for 77% of its exports of 65% of its imports. UFCo functioned in Guatemala (and elsewhere in the region) as a “state within a state”, controlling 42% of the Guatemalan land and benefitting from light tax and import duty burdens [‘Background on the Guatemalan Coup of 1954’, www.umbc.edu/].
✧ Marks offers a contrary view, that the Árbenz government did pose a genuine communist threat, had a tendency towards authoritarianism itself and that the president had lost the confidence of the majority of Guatemalans by 1954 [MARKS, FREDERICK W. “The CIA and Castillo Armas in Guatemala, 1954: New Clues to an Old Puzzle.” Diplomatic History 14, no. 1 (1990): 67-86. Accessed July 30, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/24912032]. Although Rabe et al have countered that Marks’ conclusions rely on early State Department documents that have been discredited
❂ Getchell contends that in fact the USSR were “unwilling to prop up what they considered a bourgeois-democratic revolution” [‘Revisiting the 1954 Coup in Guatemala: The Soviet Union, the United Nations, and “Hemispheric Solidarity”’, (Michelle Denise Getchell), Journal of Cold War Studies, 17(2):73-102. April 2015. DOI: 10.1162/JCWS a 00549]
(Image: Emerson Kent)
🚹 Arrow Cross (top) & Iron Guard flags
🚹 Codreanu (R) with Gen. Antonescu, the ‘Conducător’
🚹 Codreanu, “The Capitane “
🚹 Danube monument to Jewish victims of Arrow Cross
🚹 Iron Guard Legionnaires
(Source: reddit.com)
🚹 Szálasi and Hitler (Photo: Hitler-archive.com)Arrow Cross militia
🚹 Arrow Cross women (Photo: CEU Gender Studies)
⧆ Arrow Cross was just the most prominent of several small “fascist-wannabe” political groups that surfaced in Hungary after WWI
