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Derlas Vol 2 No 1 Day DeRLAS Vol 2 No 1 Day Delaware Review of Latin American Studies Vol. 2 No. 1 December 15, 2000 The United States Media and the Guatemalan Coup d'etat of 1954 John Kyle Day PhD candidate Department of History University of Missouri-Columbia Introduction The media has always played a significant role in the tradition of United States intervention in the internal affairs of Latin America. From the earliest days of the Republic, foreign policy has to an extent been influenced by the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of a free press. Nowhere is this more apparent than in U.S policy toward Latin America. Consciously or not, the media has been pivotal in the U.S. taking a more direct role in Latin American affairs than its official policy has ever stated. The Monroe Doctrine, the premier statement of U.S. foreign policy that was originally drafted in 1823 to grant formal recognition to the new republics of Latin America and to halt further conquest of the Americas by European empires, has in turn also been used to justify United States intervention into the affairs of its sister nations of the Western Hemisphere. The media has always been involved in this intervention. Whether motivated by what has been perceived as protection of national self-interests or a sense of paternal obligation toward its southern neighbors, the U.S., with the aid of its media, has traditionally constructed a largely unilateral foreign policy in American affairs. This does not mean, however, that the media has had a predominate influence upon public opinion and has thus directly constructed U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America. Within the realm of U.S.-Latin American relations, the U.S. media has generally served as a tocsin that has accentuated, but not created, public attitudes towards particular situations in Latin America. Explicitly, the media historically has not determined how U.S. citizens and their leaders feel toward Latin America, but it has largely determined what the U.S. citizenry thinks about. Thus, although the media has not constructed the specific U.S. policies toward Latin American nations, it has contributed to what U.S. leaders have determined vital to the nation’s interests. There are numerous instances where the media undertook this role in U.S.-Latin American relations prior to the Second World War. For example, in the Spanish-American war of 1898, the media played a significant role in galvanizing public opinion to support U.S. intervention. The “yellow journalism” of the period—specifically the exaggerated depiction of the questionable sinking of the U.S.S. Maine and other alleged atrocities committed by the Spanish—aroused the American public into supporting intervention. Likewise, journalists’ glorified depiction of the charge up San Juan Hill contributed, among other things, to the persona of Theodore Roosevelt as an American folk hero and would be integral to his eventual ascendancy to the presidency in 1901. Another instance where the U.S. media assumed this alarmist role was U.S. attitudes toward Nicaragua in the period between the world wars, particularly the relationship between leftist ideologues and General Augusto César Sandino. According to American journalist Shirley Christian, Sandino in the 1930’s became the “darling of avant-garde political and socialist activists in New York, Mexico, and Europe” with the aid of favorable press coverage by liberal American journalists such as Carleton Beals of The Nation.1 Both of these examples demonstrate how the media has contributed to U.S. foreign policy by focusing the nation’s interests upon these particular situations. The media did not, however, significantly alter U.S. actions to the point where policymakers would have acted differently in Cuba or Nicaragua if the media had not taken the stance that it did. The media had aroused public support for the Spanish-American War by sensationalizing these events, yet the U.S. would have certainly become involved in Spanish-Cuban affairs at sometime in the near future even if the U.S.S. Maine had never been sunk in Havana harbor. Given the overwhelming amount of U.S. financial interests in Cuba, coupled with the race for empire that the U.S. was running with the European powers under the climate of Realpolitik, it was only a matter of time before the newly emerged superpower sought control over the Caribbean Sea. Similarly, given the isolationism inherently predominant in any U.S. foreign policy, the occupation of Nicaragua by U.S. Marines would still not have lasted through the Great Depression even if Sandino had not received favorable coverage by the U.S. press. When President Herbert Hoover decided to end occupation of Nicaragua in 1931,2 he was bowing to isolationist political pressure that has always existed in the U.S. Hoover 3 DeRLAS Vol 2 No 1 Day.html[8/29/2016 9:10:45 PM] DeRLAS Vol 2 No 1 Day withdrew the Marines—in Christian’s words—“largely in reaction to the public [U.S.] outcry against intervention.” In this same light, the deification of Sandino by American leftists was but an early rendition of the New Left’s support of other third world insurgents—such as Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara—in the 1960s. These may be oversimplifications, and surely the media’s relationship with both the Spanish-American War and the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua require individual studies, but these examples illustrate the general pattern of a triangular relationship between the U.S., the American media, and the Latin American nations in which the U.S. has become involved. Nowhere can this triangular relationship be seen more clearly than in the 1954 coup d’état in Guatemala, where with U.S. assistance a republican form of government with a democratically elected president was overthrown in favor of a military dictatorship. Studies such as Stephen Schlesinger and Steven Kinzer’s Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (New York: Doubleday, 1982) and Richard H. Immerman’s The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), have both exposed the media’s prominent role in the events that led to the demise of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán by forces led by Col. Carlos Enrique Castillo Armas. Particularly, Schlesinger and Kinzer have proven the influence upon the U.S. media establishment by the public relations machinations of Edward Bernays of the United Fruit Company of Boston, Massachusetts.4 Schlesinger and Kinzer have shown how Bernays used his intimate contacts within the American media establishment to portray the expropriation of United Fruit’s lands and other reforms by Arbenz as iniquitous and contrary to U.S. interests. However, Immerman, Schlesinger and Kinzer, as well as other authors addressing the period, have not explicitly addressed exactly how journalists conveyed the events surrounding the overthrow of Arbenz to their readers. Considering the dim view that the U.S. populace has traditionally held toward foreign intervention, one would likely assume that a few if not many journalists would question and/or criticize the Eisenhower administration’s decision to intervene in Guatemala. But this was not the case. As will be seen, the U.S. media supported its government’s actions almost absolutely. Thus, an assessment of the media’s depiction of events, combined with an examination of general trends in society and culture, is needed if an understanding is to be reached of exactly how and why the U.S. media supported the Eisenhower administration. This paper will examine the media’s coverage of the events of 1954 that led to the overthrow of the duly elected Arbenz with aid from the U.S. Specifically, the presentation of events by the Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, the New York Times, and Time and Newsweek magazines will be addressed. Though these periodicals by no means cover the entire spectrum of U.S. journalism of this or any era, they are key national mainstream publications, widely read and highly influential. Therefore, these periodicals provide for this study an adequate representation of the prevalent trends within the U.S. media during the period. By examining these periodicals’ coverage of the Guatemalan coup d’état of 1954, this paper will show that during the period the U.S. media failed in its responsibility to objectively report upon the activities of its government within Latin America in general and Guatemala in particular. This failure by the journalism community was the result of preexisting notions of paternalism, the historical precedent of intervention, financial and political ties between U.S. media and business interests in Latin America, and most importantly, the prevailing climate of public opinion that existed in the U.S. during the Cold War. The subsequent coverage of these events by the U.S. media directly contributed to the allowance of the U.S. government to conduct a largely clandestine foreign policy without the public being properly informed of neither their government’s actions in Guatemala nor affairs transpiring within Latin America at large. The inadequate news coverage in turn added to the continuing antagonism felt by Latin Americans toward the U.S., as well as the traditional iniquitous relationship between the two peoples. Certain questions need to be answered concerning the U.S. media in this affair if the above arguments are to be proven. Did the U.S. press look favorably upon a situation that was apparently in direct contrast to American ideals concerning democracy and republican forms of government? Was the U.S. media indifferent, or did it protest? Another question that needs to be answered is whether or not the press’s opinions reflected their views toward the Eisenhower administration.
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