Nonfiction

The Republic Game

Imagine playing a board game. Let’s call it The Banana Republic Game. Our game has four teams—actually three teams and one solo player. In your mind, pick a number from one to four. If you chose #1, you have a huge team. The majority of players in The Banana Republic Game are on your team. We’ll nickname your team ‘The Natives.’ By numbers alone, it appears that you can’t possibly lose. Natives, you start the play. Imagine a game board illustrated with a tropical country of lush jungle lowlands to the North, mountainous central highlands, a string of volcanoes, some active and smoking, descending to a long coastline. To start the game, Natives fill the game board with ancient villages, pyramid temples, causeways between cities. Natives plant corn, beans and squash, feeding entire cities without the benefit of draft animals, wheels, or metal tools. Without telescopes, your astronomers predict eclipses and planetary paths. You create one of only five original written languages ever devised on the planet. Your architecture still stands after a thousand years. Your civilization is one of the most impressive accomplishments of ancient humanity. If The Natives designed your own playing piece, you would choose a deeply symbolic, spiritual icon, maybe a jaguar to symbolize power, ferocity, valor. However, The Natives have already been assigned a playing piece. It is a shovel. Enter exotic foreigners seeking wealth and power. If you chose #2, this is where you come in. You are The Spaniards, Team #2, led by your first wave, conquistadors. Your team playing piece is a conquistador’s curve-crested helmet. You come from a part of the world The Natives team never imagined exists. You ride on the backs of strange mythic-looking beasts. You carry metal-tipped lances and sharp steel swords that outmatch local weapons unable to penetrate your armor. You also carry an even more devastating weapon: Your vast army of invisible invaders wipes tens of thousands of Natives from the game board as they sicken and die from your invading hordes of new germs. Team #2 you conquer The Natives, claim their lands for your Spanish king, and treat The Natives thereafter as ignorant servants, chattel or slaves. Fast forward to the twentieth century and Team #3. Your playing piece is a bunch of . Your company grows and exports bananas to families of happy banana eaters

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throughout the world, particularly that prosperous country to the North where your company is based. Let’s give your company a generic sounding name, say . You discover how easy it is to manipulate a parade of corrupt, greedy dictators. By lining their pockets, they give you free and inexpensive land, low or nonexistent taxes and carte blanche throughout the country. You built railroads and ports and voilà! You control the country’s transportation of goods and exports. You oversee the country’s postal system. You own the nation’s radio and telegraph. You compel The Natives to slash and burn acres of rainforest and plant bananas, lots of bananas. When the thin, nutrient poor rainforest topsoil becomes depleted, you just move to a new plot of cheap or free land, slash and burn rainforest acreage and plant more bananas. You are the biggest landowner and biggest employer in the country. It’s starting to look like this game is rigged, right? In your favor, Team 3. Perhaps you want to swap your team’s playing piece, replacing bananas with a token inspired by your company’s nickname in the region, El Pulpo, The Octopus? This is when our fourth player makes his entrance. You are a one person team, but you play a pivotal role in the game. Your nickname is El Presidente. Your playing piece is a green felt hat with a jaunty feather. Think Robin Hood. You’re not a saint—maybe arranged the of your political rival—but once in office, you decide it’s time for your own poor rural countrymen to reap some of the benefits of their hard work and their country’s natural resources, instead of making foreigners wealthy. El Presidente, you build competing ports and highways. You initiate land reforms to buy back uncultivated lands from large landowners at the values landowners themselves declared on their tax statements. You distribute the land to landless peasant farmers. United Fruit Company Team, you cry foul!. You have only 15% of your land cultivated. You cry Communist plot—a serious accusation at the height of the McCarthy era. You complain loudly to your supporters in your wealthy country to the North—and what a powerful group of supporters you have! You have the Secretary of State and his brother, the CIA Director. Their law firm represents United Fruit Company.

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You have the U.N. Ambassador, a significant United Fruit stockholder. You even have United Fruit’s top PR man married to the personal secretary of the wealthy nation’s President. You may have guessed that this is not actually a fictional board game scenario. In 1951, Jacobo Arbenz became ’s second democratically elected El Presidente. By 1954, after Arbenz enacted land reforms, the CIA launched a successful coup replacing Arbenz with a manipulable opponent. The new dictator returned land to United Fruit and abolished fair labor practices Arbenz enacted. So you win, United Fruit Company, Team #3, you and Team #2, descendants of early Spanish who received huge land grants of former Mayan lands. You are the haves. El Presidente, you lose. You live the rest of your days in uneasy exile, moving from country to country, dogged by the CIA to ensure you never rise again to power. But the biggest losers by far are The Natives, indigenous Mayan people. This coup set the stage for 36 years of beginning in 1960. Government forces tortured, murdered, and disappeared more than 200,000 Guatemalans—some estimates as high as a quarter million— most unarmed Mayan peasants. To picture 200,000 people, imagine filling Rose Bowl stadium. Now make the crowds in the stands vanish. Then fill those stands again and make all those people vanish. Then add a full arena at Madison Square Gardens. Gone! In just three years in early 1980s, Guatemala’s government destroyed 626 Mayan villages, massacred Mayan men, women and children. burned crops, slaughtered livestock, fouled water supplies, and desecrated sacred Mayan sites. Why care about this now? Arbenz was ousted more than 60 years ago. Perhaps if America had not launched that coup, descendants of peasants with their first chance at land ownership may not now be risking the lives of their families to reach America to escape life-crushing poverty in Guatemala. I’d like to leave you with a question. Bananas are soft, bruise easily, come from thousands of miles away, and have a shelf life of only a couple of weeks. Apples are firm, less subject to bruising during shipping, grow here in the States, and under the right refrigeration conditions can last up to six months. So why can I go to a store in the States and buy a banana for 19¢ when at the same store I pay 49¢ for an apple? Thank you for playing the Banana Republic game with me.

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