Arvalo Breaks into Presidential Runoff for Center-Left Surprise in Guatemala

[Judi Lynn]

Monday, June 26, 2023
Roman Gressier

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With 98 percent of ballots counted at 9 ET on Monday, social-democrat Congressman Bernardo Arévalo of the Semilla (“Seed”) party shocked Guatemala’s political scene by grabbing second place in the presidential election (11.9 percent of the vote) alongside running mate Karin Herrera, a biology professor from the country’s public university.

In an August 20 runoff, he will face former first lady and legislative power broker Sandra Torres, of the National Unity of Hope (UNE) party (15.6 percent), who has studiously avoided criticizing the dismantling of democratic institutions in the country.

“We can now say that it’s a definitive trend,” Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) Magistrate Gabriel Aguilera announced at 3:20 a.m. “It would be most responsible to make the announcement tomorrow [Monday], but the two who are leading are UNE and Semilla.”

Semilla was founded in 2017, in the spirit of the 2015 mass anti-corruption protests that ended with President Otto Pérez Molina and VP Roxana Baldetti’s imprisonment on customs fraud charges. Since its inception, the party has invoked the democratic tradition of the Guatemalan Revolution (1944-1954).

More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202306/centroamerica/26908/arevalo-breaks-into-presidential-runoff-for-center-left-surprise-in-guatemala

[Judi Lynn]

1. Important information in the 4th paragraph of the above article. Very important.

That paragraph, again, is this:

Semilla was founded in 2017, in the spirit of the 2015 mass anti-corruption protests that ended with President Otto Pérez Molina and VP Roxana Baldetti’s imprisonment on customs fraud charges. Since its inception, the party has invoked the democratic tradition of the Guatemalan Revolution (1944-1954).

Please check the following information in Wikipedia, to get an accurate sense of why that Guatemalan Revolution, which meant so much to the people, suddenly ended:

Wikipedia: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état (Golpe de Estado en Guatemala de 1954) was the result of a CIA covert operation code-named PBSuccess. It deposed the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and ended the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944–1954. It installed the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas, the first in a series of U.S.-backed authoritarian rulers in Guatemala.

The Guatemalan Revolution began in 1944, after a popular uprising toppled the military dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. Juan José Arévalo was elected president in Guatemala's first democratic election. He introduced a minimum wage and near-universal suffrage, and turned Guatemala into a democracy. Arévalo was succeeded in 1951 by Árbenz, who instituted land reforms which granted property to landless peasants.[1] The Guatemalan Revolution was disliked by the United States federal government, which was predisposed during the Cold War to see it as communist. This perception grew after Árbenz had been elected and formally legalized the communist Guatemalan Party of Labour.

The United Fruit Company (UFC), whose highly profitable business had been marginally affected by the slight softening of highly exploitative labor practices in Guatemala, engaged in an influential lobbying campaign to persuade the U.S. to overthrow the Guatemalan government. U.S. President Harry Truman authorized Operation PBFortune to topple Árbenz in 1952, which was a precursor to PBSuccess.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected U.S. president in 1952, promising to take a harder line against communism, and his staff members John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles had significant links to the United Fruit Company. The U.S. federal government drew exaggerated conclusions about the extent of communist influence among Árbenz's advisers, and Eisenhower authorized the CIA to carry out Operation PBSuccess in August 1953.

The CIA armed, funded, and trained a force of 480 men led by Carlos Castillo Armas. After U.S. efforts to criticize and isolate Guatemala internationally, Armas' force invaded Guatemala on 18 June 1954, backed by a heavy campaign of psychological warfare. This included a radio station which broadcast anti-government propaganda and a version of military events favorable to the rebellion, claiming to be genuine news, as well as air bombings of Guatemala City and a naval blockade.

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

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To quickly move the U.S. public to support the invasion of Guatemala, the US Government employed the services of Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, who distinguished himself by becoming widely known as the "Father of Spin."

The part of this article dealing with his involvement in the invasion of Guatemala starts down the page a bit:

How Did We Get Here?
THE HISTORY OF MARKETING, PROPAGANDA, AND POLITICS FROM WWI TO THE POST-TRUMP ERA

. . .

Part 3. Corporate Propaganda and Politics Collide
We can see how Bernays used propaganda for both profit and politics simultaneously when he helped orchestrate the Guatemalan coup in 1954 to overthrow democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz on behalf of his client, the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita), to protect company profits.

In his biography, Bernays describes the company:

“United Fruit was a way of life; the company was conducted like a private government. It had its own behavior patterns and loyalties. Individual lives were merged with the company’s life, for the company decided who was to live where, and how long. United Fruit employees in the tropics were thrown among other members of the company in all their activities. The company plantation in the jungle town was a settlement of American people, houses, and folkways…the native agricultural workers were treated as human machines rather than human beings and without regard to their folkways or culture patterns.”

Reading this horrifying description now, it’s hard to believe that Bernays thought this company deserved rescuing through public relations, but his book recounts how — despite seeing the ways United Fruit dehumanized its workers and bought up huge swathes of lands from farmers, forcing locals to become dependent on its corporate rule — he helped wage a decades-long war in Central America to secure United Fruit’s power and profits.

When Jacobo Árbenz took office, he began nationalizing the land controlled by United Fruit and returning it to the Guatemalan people. Bernays launched a public relations campaign to position Árbenz, not as a nationalist trying to secure his peoples’ ability to survive, but a communist under Soviet influence, who was working with the USSR to sabotage American capitalism and imperialism.

Thanks to Bernays’ relentless propaganda, he convinced President Dwight D. Eisenhower that Guatemala would soon fall to communist rule, which led to Operation PBSuccess. The CIA paid and trained Honduran militias to invade Guatemala and overthrow Árbenz.

The leader of the Honduran militia, Carlos Castillo Armas, replaced Árbenz and became the first in a series of military dictators that controlled Guatemala until the 1990s — all backed by the CIA. Armas returned the nationalized land to United Fruit and ensured that the American company received preferential treatment in Guatemalan commerce.

The "Gloriosa Victoria" mural by Diego Rivera, which depicts the 1954 Guatemalan coup. The US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, is painted striking a deal with Castillo Armas. Foster holds a missile with Eisenhower’s face. The group is flanked by an armed rebellion and laborers in a banana plantation.

While Bernays left United Fruit in 1959, after the Cuban Revolution, saying, “I, too, became a casualty of this revolution” — an appallingly glib and self-involved statement in light of the many deaths his work wrought — his influence endured.

More:
https://rachaelkayalbers.com/trump-fbi-raid-history-marketing-propaganda/

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Wikipedia: Edward Bernays

Edward Louis Bernays (/bɜːrˈneɪz/ bur-NAYZ, German: [bɛʁˈnaɪs]; November 22, 1891 ? March 9, 1995) was an American theorist, considered a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".[3] His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations.

Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and Sigmund Freud (his own double uncle), he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and he outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desired ways.[4][5] Bernays later synthesized many of these ideas in his postwar book, Public Relations (1945), which outlines the science of managing information released to the public by an organization, in a manner most advantageous to the organization. He does this by first providing an overview of the history of public relations, and then provides insight into its application.

Bernays was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the twentieth century by Life.[6] He was the subject of a full-length biography by Larry Tye entitled The Father of Spin (1999) and later an award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC by Adam Curtis entitled The Century of the Self.

. . .

United Fruit and Guatemala
See also: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état
The United Fruit Company (today's Chiquita Brands International) hired Bernays in the early 1940s for the purpose of promoting banana sales within the United States, which he did by linking bananas to good health and to American interests and by placing them strategically in the hands of celebrities, in hotels, and other conspicuous places. Bernays also argued that United Fruit needed to put a positive spin on the banana-growing countries themselves, and for this purpose created a front group called the Middle America Information Bureau, which supplied information to journalists and academics.[53]

United Fruit shut down the Middle America Information Bureau in 1948 under the new presidency of Thomas Dudley Cabot. Bernays resented this change but stayed on with the company, for a reported annual fee of more than $100,000.[54] Bernays worked on the national press and successfully drummed up coverage of Guatemala's 'Communist menace'.[55]

He recommended a campaign in which universities, lawyers, and the U.S. government would all condemn expropriation as immoral and illegal; the company should use media pressure "to induce the President and State Department to issue a policy pronouncement comparable to the Monroe Doctrine concerning expropriation." In the following months, The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek, and the Atlantic Monthly had all published articles describing the threat of Communism in Guatemala. A Bernays memo in July 1951 recommended that this wave of media attention should be translated into action by promoting:

(a) a change in present U.S. ambassadorial and consular representation, (b) the imposition of congressional sanctions in this country against government aid to pro-Communist regimes, (c) U.S. government subsidizing of research by disinterested groups like the Brookings Institution into various phases of the problem.[56]

Per Bernays's strategy, United Fruit distributed favorable articles and an anonymous Report on Guatemala to every member of Congress and to national "opinion molders".[57][58] They also published a weekly Guatemala Newsletter and sent it to 250 journalists, some of whom used it as a source for their reporting.[58] Bernays formed close relationships with journalists including The New York Times reporter Will Lissner and columnist Walter Winchell.[55][56] In January 1952 he brought a cohort of journalists from various notable newspapers on a tour of Guatemala, sponsored by the company. This technique proved highly effective and was repeated four more times.[58] In June, 1954, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency effected a coup d'état code-named Operation PBSuccess. The CIA backed a minimal military force, fronted by Carlos Castillo Armas, with a psychological warfare campaign to portray military defeat as a foregone conclusion. During the coup itself, Bernays was the primary supplier of information for the international newswires Associated Press, United Press International, and the International News Service.[59][60]

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays