Happy birthday, Jacobo Arbenz! (September 14, 1913)

President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was only the second democratically-elected leader in Guatemala's history. A lifelong progressive who was friendly with socialists and communists, Arbenz played a prominent role in the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944 which toppled the country's repressive right-wing government. as Minister of Defense under President Juan José Arévalo, Arbenz was crucial in quashing a military coup which sought to end the revolution, a portent of things to come. Arbenz was then elected President in his own right and sought to extend the revolution, including through land reform and redistribution of uncultivated land. Much of this land was owned by the United Fruit Company, which lobbied the US government for Arbenz's removal. The CIA acquiesced, launching Operation PBSuccess, a military coup that removed Arbenz from power and unleashed decades of genocidal violence on the people of Guatemala, with the backing of the United States. Arbenz, for his part, fled into exile, where he would die in 1971.

"Our crime is wanting to have our own route to the Atlantic, our own electric power and our own docks and ports. Our crime is our patriotic wish to advance, to progress, to win economic independence to match our political independence. We are condemned because we have given our peasant population land and rights."

Mossadegh & Arbenz & Lumumba & Sukarno & Allende... shirts — a primer on #CIA coup history:

Iran (1953) | Mohammad Mossadegh

Guatemala (1954) | Jacobo Arbenz

Congo (1960) | Patrice Lumumba

Indonesia (1965) | Sukarno

Chile (1973) | Salvador Allende

100% cotton top quality unisex shirts screen printed with water based ink. Limited edition.

The Mossadegh Project

if i had a nickel for every time the CIA has helped boot a well-loved and supported politician out of office in another country (where said politician was either democratically elected or fairly appointed to their position) because some company didn't like that the politician was looking out for human rights, i would have AT LEAST two nickels. there may be more.

like if these ppl said Film bros who are definitely real and not hypothetical when you dont wanna watch a boring 2 hour black n white film set in guatemala abt the fallout of the 1954 coup against jacobo arbenz 😱😱 it wld be so instantly obvious how theyre implicitly saying that they believe nobody outside the anglosphere has anything worthwhile to say or contribute to any art form

The following year, the CIA had to take out the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz because he had the temerity to redistribute a bit of fallow land back to landless peasants. And then, in 1956 there was a Suez crisis where President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and there was an invasion by France, the UK, and Israel. And he was saying, look, we’re going to keep coming up against this problem. We don’t want to have to have a system where we have to go in hard, overthrow governments, assassinate leaders, whatever it may be. We need a legal system, an infrastructure in place where we can exercise power above the heads of these people, so even if we get a Nasser in power, an Arbenz, or a Mohammad Mosaddegh, they can’t move.

Matt Kennard

On June 27, 1954, democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was deposed in a CIA-sponsored coup to protect the profits of the United Fruit Company. Arbenz was replaced by decades of brutal U.S.-backed regimes who committed widespread torture and genocide.

Diego Rivera’s “Glorious Victory,” a painting depicting the 1954 CIA overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. John Foster Dulles, holding a bomb, shakes hands with new leader Carlos Castillo Armas. They’re flanked by an armed conflict and banana plantation workers loading fruit onto an American ship.

{WHF} {HTE} {Medium}

Imagine that you are Jacobo Arbenz in the 1950s, or Fidel Castro in the 1960s, or Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, or, skipping ahead, Hugo Chavez in the present day. You’re trying to get a fledgling administration off the ground and you’ve got a big problem: the institutions of your country are littered with assets controlled by Western intelligence agencies. The CIA, for instance, has moved into town and set up shop under various assumed names to operate an ‘opposition’ press, which daily agitates against the sitting government with heavy doses of manufactured ‘black’ propaganda. If you take any action against these operations, you will be vilified via the entire Western media establishment for brutally censoring the opposition press and crushing free speech. If you do nothing, the problem will continue to fester and grow. What do you do? The political and military infrastructure of your country is seeded with Quislings, installed by the Western puppet regime that previously ruled your land, but if you take any action against these operatives you will be vilified via the entire Western media establishment for brutally repressing the political opposition — thus ‘proving’ to all the world that you are indeed the monstrous tyrant that Washington claims you to be. If you do nothing, you leave yourself and your administration vulnerable to coups, assassination plots, election rigging, propaganda campaigns, and all manner of other covert shenanigans. What do you do? Washington has left you only two choices: do nothing and allow the covert machinations to run their course, or take action and provide Uncle Sam with a manufactured justification for waging overt warfare against you. Those are your options.

Dave McGowan, Newsletter #38

Three days ago — June 10 — was the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University. Reading or listening to the speech today, it is not difficult to see why the U.S. national-security establishment deemed Kennedy to be a grave threat to national security, just as it did with certain foreign leaders, such as Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, Congo leader Patrice Lumumba, Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz and, later, President Salvador Allende of Chile.  For some 150 years, the federal government had been a limited-government republic. After World War II, however, the federal government was converted to a national-security … Continue reading →

Toxic Democracy

The American foreign policy is hypocrisy consistently Jacobo Arbenz, what you are seeing in Africa you will witness in Central and South America As they too have suffered this foreign policy of hypocrisy in Iran Kermit Roosevelt grandson of FDR, former president to get rid of Mohammed Mossaddegh Click the red links watch the videos tell me what you think We all know the truth that led America…

View On WordPress

Happy birthday, Che Guevara! (June 14, 1928)

One of the 20th Century's most impactful revolutionaries, Ernesto "Che" Guevara grew up in a well-off family with left-wing sympathies in Argentina. As a young medical student, Guevara embarked on a trek across Latin America which would change him forever, as he came to see the plight of the poor and destitute firsthand. He was further radicalized by his experiences in Guatemala, where he witnessed the coup carried out by the United States at the behest of the United Fruit Company against progressive President Jacobo Arbenz. This event galvanized Guevara's view of the United States as the world's foremost imperial power, one which had to be opposed and fought to achieve economic and social freedom for Latin America, and cemented his commitment to armed revolution as a force for social change. To this end, he joined the forces of Fidel and Raul Castro, and became a leading figure in the Cuban Revolution. During the revolution Guevara helped to established schools and medical facilities for campesinos, and helped lead the revolutionaries to victory in the Battle of Santa Clara. After the revolution, Guevara played a major role in the new Cuban government, overseeing land reform and literacy campaigns. However, he soon felt a desire to continue his revolutionary activities, traveling abroad to support revolutionary movements in Africa and South America. While in Bolivia leading the Ñancahuazú Guerrilla, he was captured and executed by the Bolivian government.

"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."

At the final 1960 Presidential debate with John F. Kennedy, Vice President Richard Nixon said the U.S. “quarantined” Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz, who was ‘thrown out’ by the people, and would do the same to Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Noting the unmentioned CIA role, The New York Times called it “the joke of the weekend”.

The Mossadegh Project

Drugs and death squads: The CIA connection (1989)

From the US-based Freedom Socialist Party’s (Trotskyist) newspaper June 1989 Robert Crisman 

Imagine you’re a CIA operative in the early 1960s — E. Howard Hunt perhaps. You’re a star in the spook trade, a real growth industry. With luck, you can prosper in the years ahead.

You and your colleagues are charged with organizing the covert aspect of U.S. capital’s drive to maintain and extend the American Empire. And successful empire requires the subjugation of the world’s peoples, markets, resources, and investment arenas. Profits must flourish or America, Inc. will die.

You do the dirty work. You bribe amenable leaders and recruit mercenaries to overthrow unfriendly governments. Your work has enabled the empire to spread like leukemia in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

You can point with pride to past successes, such as the 1953 overthrow of elected Iranian premier Mohammad Mossadegh and the subsequent installation of the hated Shah Reza Pahlavi. Then, a year later, you engineered the brisk removal of the social democrat Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. There will undoubtedly be future triumphs. Still, you’ve got your problems.

To begin with, your job is a tricky one, condemned as it is by world legal and moral opinion and officially disavowed (though privately extolled) by your mandarin employers in Washington, D.C. And despite your best efforts, and the near-global chill of ’50s reaction, the world stubbornly refuses to roll over and play dead for the U.S. colossus. When kicked it snarls, even louder today than yesterday. Africa is shrugging off the last of the old colonial rulers, and the anti-imperialist Patrice Lumumba now speaks for the continent. Southern Asia is threatening to burst the Western encirclement that stretches from the Middle East to Hong Kong. In Cuba — a mere 90 miles from Florida’s Gold Coast — an upstart named Castro has bounced the mobsters out of Havana, expropriated U.S.-owned sugar mills, and lit a fuse to smoldering Latin America.

Behind them all stand the Russians, of course, H-bomb and all.

This is the stuff nightmares are made of. Worse yet, winds of unwelcome change are stirring in the heartland: increasingly unquiet civil rights rabble, peaceniks, and commies, always commies to contend with.

If the commies ever have their way in the Land of the Free, your dreams of power and gold are history.

What to do about the commies?

Time to step up the covert wars in defense of the American Way!

But war is expensive. Congress, mindful of the charades a democracy must play, is coy with the purse strings. Private monied interests are generous, but there is so much work to be done!

Ah, never fear. There is a gold mine waiting for someone with the good sense to tap it. Illegal drugs! Heroin, cocaine — bliss for sale, and at high prices; because these most delicious of commodities are officially banned, they are perhaps the most profitable substances, gram for gram, on the world market today.

Hmmm… If you and your friends could control the supply … you could lavishly grease the guns of clandestine wars without suffering the hassle of appropriations hearings, and without the nosy public looking over your shoulder.

Present at the creation. Actually, the CIA was never really a stranger to the narcotics underworld.

In 1947 and ’48, U.S. agents financed and helped organize Corsican mobsters battling French communists for control of Marseilles. After the communists were routed, the Corsicans established a heroin pipeline into the U.S. as spoils of war.

The CIA was also tight with Kuomintang generals who’d ruled northern Burma, Thailand, and Laos since Mao booted them out of China in 1949. These generals, with Taiwan’s blessing, controlled the opium trade in the Golden Triangle, where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge. American secret agents, staunch allies of Chiang Kai-shek, got a piece of the action.

When the wars for global domination intensified in the ’60s, the CIA went big-time into the drug trade, buying into or wresting control of major networks and establishing new ones from Panama to Pakistan. Narco-dollars financed the recruitment of mercenary armies and the spread of illicit arms to rightwing strike forces worldwide. The money facilitated coups, counterrevolutions, and “destabilizations” of governments hostile to White House goals. It also was essential in crystallizing repressive military/police regimes (along with their inevitable death squads) from one end of Latin America to the other.

Nouveau riche drug lords put generals and cops on their payrolls, and in some countries came to vie for outright control of the government.

That’s not all. Dope played a major role in the decimation and “depoliticization” of the turbulent U.S. social movements in the late ’60s and ’70s. Then it served to facilitate the ongoing “pacification” of the ghettoes, barrios, and American youth in general. Not pretty, perhaps. But the pacifiers figured that, with austerity chewing at the future of millions, better that untold numbers rot in drug-sugared limbo than contemplate the dismantling of the capitalist misery factory.

By the middle of the ’80s, the drug scourge took its place alongside AIDS as a banner-headline horror story. Anti-drug hysteria mushroomed and the government whipped up an all-out War Against Dope. What better excuse to justify sending anti-insurgency armies into Bolivia, and at the same time erase the First Amendment at home?

Government officials do exist, of course, who are actually, genuinely, hell-bent to knock out the drug trade. Who in their right minds wants to manage a stinking Necropolis, after all?

But the efforts of these straight-arrow narcs are worth only a snigger up the sleeve to the pushers on the government payroll. Just Say No indeed. There’s a war going on for control of the earth, and without the drug trade — and the death squads it pays for — the American Empire is done for.

The Cuban connection. A dealer can’t deal without product access and a worked-out distribution network. No problem here for the CIA.

Castro’s coming to power in 1959 sealed an alliance between the agency and Santo Trafficante, Jr., once the facto overlord of Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba, and the premier U.S. importer of Marseilles heroin. The CIA enlisted Trafficante’s help in several attempts to assassinate or overthrow Castro.

The change of regime in Cuba bequeathed the CIA a ready-made army: thousands of rightwing Cuban exiles — formerly pimps, pushers, police and patrones under Batista — now capos and soldiers in Trafficante’s Florida mob.

These are the cadres the agency sent against Castro at the Bay of Pigs and in subsequent operations financed and armed via massive dope-for-munitions deals.

The arms came from such firms as Interarmco, founded by former CIA agent Samuel Cummings. Cozy? You bet.

After the Bay of Pigs, the CIA placed exiles throughout the Western Hemisphere as key personnel for coups and destabilization efforts in Honduras, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico.

Especially chilling is the collusion of the CIA and Cuban exiles with the Chilean secret police after Salvador Allende’s overthrow. Out of it came the 1975 murder of Chilean Christian Democrat leader Bernardo Leighton in Rome and the 1976 assassination of diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. Also following, predictably, was the takeover of Chile’s cocaine distribution network by Augusto Pinochet’s right-hand man, General Manual Contreras.

The CIA put the exiles to work in the U.S. as well, where they penetrated the very highest levels of government. Under Richard Nixon, E. Howard Hunt secured them key positions in a succession of “anti-drug” agencies used by the administration for undercover operations against domestic political opponents. The most notorious of these, ODALE (Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement), specialized in a no-knock, door-smashing reign of terror, earning the nickname “American Gestapo.”

Myles Ambrose, the head of ODALE, resigned in disgrace in 1973 after he was discovered hobnobbing with indicted dope-and-gunrunner Richmond Harper at Harper’s Texas ranch.

And all the while, the CIA’s own godfather, Trafficante, was flooding the U.S. with top-grade China White heroin.

Blitzkrieg below the border. Beginning in 1973, CIA operatives and exiled Cubans fanned out across Latin America as agents of the newly created Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Officially, they worked with host governments in “eradicating the drug trade.” But in reality, their job was to funnel U.S. arms, torture expertise, “development aid,” and drug profits to rightwing armies, police, and death squads for their war on insurgent workers and peasants.

Operation Condor was launched in Mexico in 1976 under the pretext of providing U.S. military equipment and training to Mexican narcotics agents supervised by DEA. Later disclosures revealed that landowning patrones used DEA helicopters and U.S. guns, rockets, and napalm in a war of extermination against revolutionary peasants. Major dope dealers prospered untouched, though smaller independent dealers were rounded up, tortured, and killed.

Colombia passed a law in 1978 declaring the military and police “exempt from any legal responsibility for their actions against violence and drug trafficking.” Later that year, at DEA’s instigation, President Julio César Turbay gave the military the power to arrest anyone it considered subversive without observing constitutional guarantees. During the next two years, more than 60,000 people were arrested by the military. Amnesty International documented massive cases of “prolonged incarceration without trial, torture … and political assassinations,” especially of Indian and labor leaders.

Meanwhile, Colombian cocaine exports shot up over $3 billion by 1979, surpassing coffee as Colombia’s number one cash crop. Many of Colombia’s politicians and top cops (all U.S.-trained) were among those making the fattest profits. Colombian dope kings paid out hundreds of millions of dollars yearly in bribes — and still had enough left over to fund the elections of 15 to 20 percent of the Colombian Congress.

U.S. and host country propaganda typically fingered leftists as the drug smugglers. In a classic 1974 TV appearance with U.S. ambassador Robert Hill to promote the U.S./Argentine “anti-drug” war, Argentina’s Social Minister and Anticommunist Alliance death squad leader Jose López Rega declared that “guerrillas are the main users of drugs … Therefore, the anti-drug campaign will automatically be an anti-guerrilla campaign as well.”

One year later, an Argentine military intelligence report identified López Rega as a ringleader of — guess what? — an enormous network supplying cocaine to the U.S.

Globe-trotting villains. In the ’60s and ’70s, drug-running and counterinsurgency kept the CIA as busy as flies on a side of bad beef, and not only in Latin America. At that time, Southeast Asia was the hottest spot on earth for covert operations. The CIA ran some dandies there: the secret war against Laotian communists, the Operation Phoenix program of terror and assassination, and the marketing of heroin to GIs in Saigon.

The careers of some of the period’s key U.S. figures active in Southeast Asia will help to illustrate the continuity between the Vietnam war-era operations and later affairs like the Iran/contra dope-for-arms deal. This rogues’ gallery will also further illuminate how CIA drugrunning is the financial linchpin of global para-fascist networks and a crucial component of imperialist existence.

First up for examination is Theodore Shackley. A young CIA up-and-comer, Shackley was brought in from Berlin after the Bay of Pigs fiasco to head the agency’s Miami station, JM/Wave, which fought the secret war against Cuba from 1961 to 1965. It was Shackley who oversaw the deployment of Cuban exiles throughout Latin America in the mid-’60s, and who left behind a highly trained force of 6000 thugs, drugrunners, and rightwing fanatics when he was shipped off to Southeast Asia in 1966.

While based in Vientiane, Laos, Shackley organized the opium-growing Meo (Hmong) tribesmen for a war on communism. Capitalizing on the CIA’s 20-year friendship with the Golden Triangle’s Nationalist Chinese generals, he rapidly turned Vientiane into the center of the Southeast Asian heroin trade.

Interestingly, one of the men involved in the Laotian war was a young Marine fire-eater named Oliver North.

Shackley left Laos to run the CIA station in Saigon, where the heroin traffic flowed like the Mekong River (thanks to the cooperation of Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky). After Shackley arrived, high-quality heroin from Laotian labs flooded Vietnam and turned an estimated 15 percent of the U.S. GIs there into addicts.

Alarmed army and U.S. narcotics bureau investigators actually tried to shut down the heroin labs. But the U.S. embassy in Saigon— where future CIA director William Colby was second-in-command — hushed up and otherwise impeded investigations.

The U.S. heroin market mushroomed, naturally, when addicted GIs returned home.

It is useful to recall that Santo Trafficante, Shackley’s partner in crime from the Miami days, had traveled to Southeast Asia in 1968 and successfully concluded a deal with the dope mavens there for exclusive U.S. import rights. Also noteworthy is the fact that one of the chemicals necessary to the production of China White was shipped in from Taiwan, where the government held a godfatherly interest in Golden Triangle opium production.

Another point of interest: two of Shackley’s Saigon crew were Bay of Pigs veteran Felix Rodríguez and CIA warhorse Donald Gregg. Nearly twenty years later, Gregg and Rodríguez would surface in congressional testimony as key players in the Iran/contra scheme. As Vice President George Bush’s national security adviser, Gregg sent Rodríguez to El Salvador to oversee the shipment of arms to the contras. Rodríguez also laid down the pipeline through which Colombian cocaine kings sluiced $10 million to the contras.

Bush, an ex-CIA chief, has admitted meeting with Rodríguez personally three times, but he claims he knew nothing of Rodríguez’ role!

Old spooks never die. Shackley was back in the Western Hemisphere as chief of its covert CIA operations in time to ramrod Allende’s overthrow in 1973.

He popped up in Teheran in the mid-’70s, just as the Shah’s CIA-trained secret police, SAVAK, were pumping up Iranian heroin production. This was an important undertaking. Who knew how long the Golden Triangle network would last after the fall of Saigon?

In 1979, after Senate investigations into covert activities, Shackley resigned from the CIA — or was “sheep-dipped,” that is, given a new cover. He went to work as a consultant for the Stanford Technology weapons brokerage firm. In 1984, he was the American first approached by the Iranian government about cutting a direct arms deal with the U.S. government. His contact was former SAVAK agent Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian munitions dealer and Ollie North’s political confidant and arms supplier for the Iran/contra project.

Even the names remain the same. Shackley’s odyssey through the spook underworld provides a singularly useful map to the path that led from the Bay of Pigs to the Iran/contra mess. A glance at the careers of two other Laotian war bigwigs — retired U.S. Army Major General John Singlaub and retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord — will help fill in the topography.

Singlaub was the army’s operations chief in Laos, Shackley’s military counterpart there. Secord, one of Singlaub’s air-wing commanders, worked closely with Shackley, undoubtedly overseeing the transport of heroin.

In 1978, Singlaub, long a far-right luminary, helped organize the remnants of Somoza’s army into an anti-Sandinista fighting force. Picked by Oliver North of the National Security Council to head up private contra fundraising efforts in 1984, he tapped reactionaries in Taiwan, South Korea, and Latin America for millions.

Secord became the top U.S. Air Force official in Iran in the mid-’70s, and by 1979 had advanced to the position of top Pentagon weapons broker. In 1986, he again joined his good friend Shackley, this time on the payroll of the private arms merchants at Stanford Technology. It wasn’t hard for the Iranians and contras to guess where to go for the guns.

Red-hating agents of Empire. The ideological tie binding all these high-level arms smugglers and dope dealers together, of course, is anti-communism.

John Singlaub is head of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), the world’s premier neo-fascist lobby. WACL’s membership ranges from U.S. reactionaries, Taiwanese drug magnates, and Latin American death squad leaders to Afghani mujahideen and unreconstructed old-line Nazis scattered in exile throughout Europe and the Americas.

WACL is the most sophisticated political expression to date of fascism’s global agenda and methods, and is the mask under which the face of U.S. ambition increasingly shows itself. WACL’s history vividly reveals the fascist essence of empire-and pinpoints the source of the Empire’s addiction to drugrunning.

Founded in Taiwan in 1967 by CIA and Taiwanese intelligence personnel, WACL has roots in the old China Lobby, which urged the unleashing of Chiang Kai-shek against revolutionary China in the ’50s. The Lobby’s leading lights — E. Howard Hunt and William Pawley to name two — were instrumental in stitching together the CIA’s Cuban exile and Kuomintang networks.

Hunt and Pawley in fact embody the convergence of these networks: Hunt was a special agent in the CIA’s precursor, the OSS, in South China, where the Americans forged bonds with Chinese officials trading in opium and gold. He went on to aid in the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala and helped establish the Latin American branch of W ACL. Pawley, once a lobbyist and arms-runner for Taiwan, also owned the Havana bus system during the days of Batista. He was involved with Hunt in the dispatching of Arbenz, and accompanied Trafficante on a gunboat raid against Castro.

China Lobby/WACL bigwigs and their associates — Hunt, Pawley, Secord, Singlaub, Shackley, et al. — lodged themselves tightly in the postwar U.S. intelligence, military, government, and business establishments. They were the drumbeaters and spear-carriers for stepped-up anti-Castro warfare and the Vietnam war. They were responsible for coups, counterrevolutions, and the formation of death squads from Mexico to Brazil; CIA/DEA “anti-drug” torture and counterinsurgency; the Chilean slaughter; support for the Shah and rightwing Afghani “freedom fighters”; and the contra war.

Everywhere you look the red-hating generals and spies were there. And everywhere, drugrunning financed their opium dreams of Empire.

This is a viewpoint editorial by Kudzai Kutukwa, an enthusiastic monetary addition supporter who was acknowledged by Fast Company publication as one of South Africa's top-20 young business owners under 30. The United Fruit Company (AKA El Pulpo which implies "the octopus") was an American business that had an overarching existence in Latin American nations. They grew and traded all type of fruits, however they were a giant monopoly in the banana trading company. El Pulpo's supremacy extended beyond Central America, extending as far as the West Indies which saw the business control 603,111 acres of land by1954 Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica and Honduras were greatly depending on the export of bananas, which represented a significant part of their overall exports-- thus these nations made the label, banana republics As an outcome the business had enormous control over the economies of these countries and were infamous for paying off regional political leaders to get their method, along with ousting leaders that would not play ball. Jacobo Arbenz, a democratically chosen president of Guatemala, was made an example of by El Pulpo when the business had him ousted by the U.S. federal government in 1954 for expropriating a few of the business's land and rearranging it. The seeds for instability were planted in the Central American country which ultimately culminated in a 36 year long civil war in between 1960 and1996 El Pulpo left a tradition of damage and death, not simply in Guatemala however throughout Central America. The United Fruit Company ended up being the personification of neocolonialism in the area mostly due to the impact of the U.S. federal government and the power of the almighty dollar. While El Salvador wasn't a direct victim of El Pulpo, similar to its Central American next-door neighbors it was not unsusceptible to U.S. intervention in the area, mainly apparent throughout the 12 year Salvadoran Civil War that left 75,000 individuals dead, most of which were civilians. Today El Salvador deals with a various variation of El Pulpo in the type of the international fiat monetary system represented by the IMF. On September 7 2021 El Salvador made history by ending up being the very first nation on the planet to formally embrace Bitcoin as legal tender. Nearly instantly the IMF and the World Bank fasted to concern stern cautions to El Salavador's federal government about this policy choice, advising them to reverse it. They are "guardians of the worldwide monetary system," like Agent Smith in the film The Matrix. What started as an experiment in El Zonte (commonly referred to as Bitcoin beach) in 2019, thanks to a confidential donor and the steadfast efforts of internet user Michael Peterson, has actually now changed into an innovative motion that influenced Bitcoin City, Bitcoin-backed bonds(aka Volcano Bonds) and monetary addition for 70% of the population that were formerly unbanked. 12 years after Bitcoin originated, it is now being utilized as legal tender in a nation. El Salvador might have been the very first to embrace Bitcoin, however it absolutely will not be the last. Just like how the United Fruit Company had Latin America in its grip, the IMF wields a remarkable quantity of power over the international economy. Developed in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference, the IMF's preliminary function was to safe and secure global financial cooperation, to guarantee stability of currency currency exchange rate and to broaden global liquidity. After President Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, it lost its authority to control currency exchange rate and the IMF rotated to being a lending institution of last hope to distressed countries-- an objective that has actually attained uninspired outcomes to date. A Heritage Foundation research study reveals that IMF loans to establishing nations have actually been mainly inefficient and some of the nations that got these loans were even worse off financially later on:

Of the 89 less industrialized nations that got IMF loans in between 1965 and 1995, 48 are no much better off financially today than they were prior to getting IMF loans. Of these 48 nations, 32 are poorer than they were prior to getting IMF loans. Of these 32 nations, 14 have economies that are at least 15 percent smaller sized than when they got their very first IMF loans. With these lead to mind let's turn our attention back to El Salvador to attempt and determine why the IMF is emphatically versus Bitcoin's legal tender status. El Salvador is a little nation with a population of simply ~ 6.5 million individuals and a GDP of $25 billion-- why then does the IMF view Bitcoin adoption by El Salvador as" positioning dangers to monetary stability, monetary stability and customer defense?" The basic response is that the IMF is among the enforcers of the dollar hegemony worldwide and the effective adoption of Bitcoin by any country state postures a substantial hazard to the "rules-based order." The U.S. has de facto veto power over all significant choices made by the company and has the biggest ballot power of any country in the world. As an alternative financial system Bitcoin was created to outdated the function of relied on 3rd parties like reserve banks and by extension companies like the IMF. Offered the reality that El Salvador is a dollarized economy, the blood circulation of a U.S, dollar option like Bitcoin, might ultimately decrease the function of the dollar in negotiating, not simply in El Salvador however throughout Central America and the rest of the international south. This would gradually introduce a multi-polar world and might perhaps cause bitcoin changing the dollar as the worldwide reserve currency. In such a world, there is definitely no requirement for companies like the IMF. The bitcoin-backed bonds have actually likewise ruffled the plumes of the IMF with some directors " revealing issue over the threats related to providing bitcoin-backed bonds." The creation of Samson Mow, the $1 billion of Volcano Bonds will be utilized to purchase $500 million worth of Bitcoin and $500 million will go towards facilities, consisting of facilities to harness volcanic energy to mine bitcoin. The international bond market deserves $100 trillion and an effective bond problem will not just be transformative for the marketplace however will function as an evidence of idea for other nations looking for an exit out of the IMF's system of fiat-based ponzi plan financial obligations. This is a viewpoint that popular financier Simon Dixon echoed in a current interview where he stated, " If [El Salvador] is successful, this is a huge issue for business design of the IMF. They're not a bailout business, they're not a system for establishing the world ... They're a system for dollarizing the world and executing an international reserve bank digital currency on top of their unique illustration rights, so they can keep control of their systems." As the modern El Pulpo, the IMF is hell bent on preserving their dominant position in the worldwide economy and regardless of all the favorable advancements that might accumulate to El Salvador thanks to the Bitcoin Law, they will continue to emphatically oppose it. They will utilize every tool at their disposal to not just guarantee the turnaround of Bitcoin's legal tender status in El Salvador however to stop other fiat-enslaved nations from following a comparable course to financial obligation flexibility. A current example of this would be the $45 billion bailout plan they authorized for Argentina in March that included an arrangement that requires the Argentinian federal government to punish cryptocurrencies and prevent their usage as a condition for the bailout. The stipulation comprehensive Argentina's efforts "to dissuade making use of cryptocurrencies with a view to avoiding cash laundering, informality, and disintermediation" in order to "to additional protect monetary stability.

" Argentina's reserve bank consequently prohibited banks in the nation from using any Bitcoin or cryptocurrency associated services to their customers. This is simply the start and it would not be unexpected to see this stipulation being consisted of in every bailout bundle moving forward. With the Bitcoin rate at ~$20,000 since time of composing, around 56% lower than it was throughout El Salvador's adoption in 2015, mainstream media experts fast to explain El Salvador's paper losses, which are approximated to be anywhere in between $40 million and $60 million on the Bitcoin that the federal government purchased, as proof of the disappointing failure of the "Bitcoin policy." This analysis is misguiding because it relates a drop in portfolio worth to real recognized losses, which aren't appropriate in this case as El Salvador hasn't offered a single bitcoin. It's likewise myopic due to the fact that by exchanging dollars with a limitless supply, for bitcoin, a limited digital bearer-asset, President Bukele's relocation guaranteed El Salvador versus dollar debasement. Remarkably enough previous to the Bitcoin Law, El Salvador was barely pointed out in the Western mainstream media other than in relation to gang violence. Ever considering that the Bitcoin Law came into result, President Nayib Bukele has actually been implicated of gaming the nation's resources on bitcoin, with the policy being considered a failure Furthermore, El Salvador's sovereign financial obligation score has actually been devalued by Fitch, Moody's and S&P to scrap status, with all 3 score companies pointing out the sovereign's adoption of Bitcoin as a risk to protecting IMF financial backing as one of the factors for the downgrade. According to S&P "The dangers related to the adoption of bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador appear to surpass its possible advantages. There are instant unfavorable ramifications for the credit." On February 16, U.S. Senators, James Risch (R-Idaho), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) presented the " Accountability for Cryptocurrency in El Salvador (ACES) Act," which is legislation that forces the State Department to compose a report on El Salvador's adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender and a strategy to reduce dangers developing from this. To put "dangers" in viewpoi nt, El Salvador's GDP ($25 billion) is 840 times smaller sized than the U.S.'s GDP ($21 trillion). Talking about the costs in a news release Dr. Cassidy stated, "El Salvador acknowledging Bitcoin as main currency unlocks for cash laundering cartels and weakens U.S. interests ... If the United States wants to fight cash laundering and protect the function of the dollar as a reserve currency of the world, we need to tackle this problem head on." It's indisputable that this is a strategy right out of El Pulpo's playbook whose objective is to stymie El Salvador's Bitcoin adoption. Despite all the obstacles and attacks there is a silver lining in the clouds. From the time the Bitcoin Law entered impact a year ago El Salvador has actually seen a 30% boost in tourist according to Salvadoran Tourism Minister, Morena Valdez. This year alone El Salvador has actually invited 2.2 million travelers and in a current tweet President Bukele kept in mind that tourist in the nation had actually recuperated to pre-pandemic levels, pointing out "Bitcoin and browse" combined with the continuous crackdown on gangs, as the significant factors for the healing. The beach town of El Zonte is set to get over $200 million worth of facilities upgrades. Offered the uptick of tourist due to El Zonte's renowned status from Bitcoin Beach, the cash is being utilized to fund the building and construction of brand name brand-new features to deal with the travelers gathering to the town. With tourist presently contributing 9.3% to El Salvador's total GDP these are all really substantial favorable advancements. El Salvador's GDP grew by 10.3% in 2021 and it's worth keeping in

mind that previous to 2021 El Salvador had actually never ever had double digit GDP development. Exports for 2021 likewise grew by an extra 13%. Yearly remittances to El Salvador represent 24% of its GDP ( around $6 billion) with 70% of Salvadorans reliant on them for survival. Thanks to Bitcoin they might conserve at leas t $400 million in cash transfer charges each year which corresponds to 1.5% of El Salvador's GDP. Given that there are now more Salvadorans with Bitcoin wallets than those with bank accounts these expense savings are right away being recognized by the bulk of the population. The media easily overlooks pointing out these and various other instant advantages that have actually emerged post Bitcoin adoption. In 1958 Guinea tried to declare its financial sovereignty from the French by leaving the CFA franc zone Over a 2 month duration the French took out of Guinea taking whatever with them from light bulbs to sewage pipeline strategies, and they even reached burning necessary medications. The next action was to destabilize Guinea and weaken any efforts of financial success through a hidden operation that ended up being referred to as " Operation Persil," where they counterfeited Guinean bank notes and flooded them into the nation. The intent of the operation was to craft financial collapse through run-away inflation. The French produced banknotes that showed to be more resistant to the humidity of the Guinean environment much better than the main bank notes, therefore financial instability in the nation was effectively activated and the Guinean economy collapsed. For the El Pulpos of the world like the IMF, ruining Bitcoin is an outright need since failure to do so would cause their termination. It would be ignorant to presume that these companies will let El Salvador go out of their fiat ponzi-scheme system without arguing. As the fractures in the fiat financial system start to appear, Bitcoin is a defense system versus monetary censorship, dollar debasement and seizure like when it comes to the confiscation of Russia's foreign reserve; it still attains worldwide agreement in an adversarial environment. Bitcoin is a tool for withstanding all kinds of financial repression and El Salvador's adoption of it is a statement of financial self-reliance from the dollar imperialism that grips the world. As geopolitical stress increase and the steady de-dollarization of the world happens, the alternatives for country states will be a dollar basic vs a BRICS requirement or a Bitcoin requirement. Having actually picked the latter, El Salvador is the brand-new Camelot. This is a visitor post by Kudzai Kutukwa. Viewpoints revealed are totally their own and do not always show those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine. Read More

June 27, 1954: Elected Guatemalan Leader Overthrown in CIA-Backed Coup 

On June 27, 1954, democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was deposed in a CIA-sponsored coup to protect the profits of the United Fruit Company. Árbenz was replaced by decades of brutal U.S.-backed regimes who committed widespread torture and genocide.

Read a description below of the coup in an excerpt from the book Harvest of Empire by Juan Gonzalez.

Harvest of Empire Excerpt

Guatemala: Bodies for Bananas, pg. 135-137

In similar fashion, the tragedy of modern Guatemala owes its origins to U.S. foreign policy. A garrison state for more than forty years, Guatemala was home to the longest and bloodiest civil war in Central American history. The roots of that war go back to an almost-forgotten CIA-sponsored coup in 1954, which overthrew a democratically elected president.

Throughout the early part of the century, Guatemalan presidents faithfully protected the interests of one landowner above all others, the United Fruit Company. President Jorge Ubico, who ruled the country from 1931-1944, surpassed all his predecessors in the favors he bestowed on UFCO. . . .

Ubico forced Guatemala’s huge population of landless Mayans to work on government projects in lieu of paying taxes. He made all Indians carry passbooks and used vagrancy laws to compel them to work for the big landowners. As for Ubico’s penchant for jailing opponents and stamping out dissent, Washington simply ignored it so long as U.S. investment in the country flourished.

Ubico, like all the region’s dictators, eventually aroused the population against him. In 1944, a coalition of middle-class professionals, teachers and junior officers, many of them inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism, launched a democracy movement. The movement won the backing of the country’s growing trade unions and rapidly turned into a popular uprising that forced Ubico to resign.

The first democratic election in Guatemalan history followed in 1945, and voters chose as president Juan José Arévalo, a university philosophy professor and author who had been living in exile in Argentina. Tall, handsome, and heavily built, Arévalo was a spellbinding orator. From the moment he returned home to launch his campaign, he became an almost messianic figure to Guatemala’s impoverished masses. . . .

After six years in office, Arévalo was succeeded by Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, a young military officer and Arévalo disciple. Arbenz swept to victory in the 1951 elections and vowed to take Arévalo’s peaceful revolution a step farther by redistributing all idle lands to the peasants. Arévalo knew that in a country with no industry to speak of, with more than 70 percent of the population illiterate, and with 80 percent barely eking out survival in the countryside, ownership and control of land was Guatemala’s fundamental economic issue. The county’s soil was immensely fertile, but only 2 percent of the landholders owned 72 percent of the arable land, and only a tiny part of their holdings was under cultivation.

The following year, Arbenz got the Guatemalan Congress to pass Decree 900. The new law ordered the expropriation of all property that was larger than six hundred acres and not in cultivation. The confiscated lands were to be divided up among the landless. The owners were to receive compensation based on the land’s assessed tax value and they were to be paid with twenty-five-year government bonds, while the peasants would get low-interest loans from the government to buy their plots. As land reform programs go, it was by no means a radical one, since it only affected large estates. Of 341,000 landowners, only 1,700 holdings came under the provisions. But those holdings represented half the private land in the country. More importantly, it covered the vast holdings of the United Fruit Company, which owned some 600,000 acres-most of it unused.

Arbenz shocked UFCO officials even more when he actually confiscated a huge chunk of the company’s land and offered $1.2 million as compensation, a figure that was based on the tax value of the company’s own accountants had declared before Decree 900 was passed. United Fruit and the U.S. State Department countered with a demand for $16 million. When Arbenz refused, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles convinced President Eisenhower that Arbenz had to go. The Dulles brothers, of course, were hardly neutral parties. Both were former partners of United Fruit’s main law firm in Washington. On their advice, Eisenhower authorized the CIA to organize “Operation Success,” a plan for the armed overthrow of Arbenz, which took place in June 1954. The agency selected Guatemalan colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to lead the coup, it financed and trained Castillo’s rebels in Somoza’s Nicaragua, and it backed up the invasion with CIA-piloted planes. During and after the coup, more than nine thousand Guatemalan supporters of Arbenz were arrested.

Despite the violent and illegal manner by which Castillo’s government came to power, Washington promptly recognized it and showered it with foreign aid. Castillo lost no time in repaying his sponsors. He quickly outlawed more than five hundred trade unions and returned more than 1.5 million acres to United Fruit and the country’s other big landowners. Guatemala’s brief experiment with democracy was over. For the next four decades, its people suffered from government terror without equal in the modern history of Latin America. As one American observer described it,

In Guatemala City, unlicensed vans full of heavily armed men pull to a stop and in broad daylight kidnap another death squad victim. Mutilated bodies are dropped from helicopters on crowded stadiums to keep the population terrified . . . those who dare ask about ‘disappeared’ loved ones have their tongues cut out.

The Immigration Conversation pt3

Onto the next country that the US has screwed over for their own personal gain.  In 1950, the Guatemalan people elected Jacobo Arbenz, who was the second democratically elected president after overthrowing long-time dictator in 1944. Arbenz won 65.44 percent of the votes. He pushed for many reforms that the people would benefit from like expanding the right to vote and allowing public debate. The biggest thing he pushed for was the redistribution of uncultivated lands back to his people, which benefited 500,000 people- majority of them being indigenous. But this threatened the United Fruit Company’s interests- now known as Chiquita- so they bought up all the land of Guatemala, owning all of its transportation, and taking advantage of Banana Republic, which is countries that rely on bananas for money. “Arbenz was labelled a communist by Washington and the US company lobbied for his removal.” In 1954,  Arbenz was taken out by the CIA (a command authorized by Dwight D. Eisenhower) and replaced with authoritarian leader Carlos Castillo Armas. 

Because I am only addressing Latin American immigration I am focusing on addressing what the US has done to Latin American countries, but I shit you not in 1953 LITERALLY ONLY ONE YEAR PRIOR TO WHAT THEY DID TO GUATEMALA THE UNITED STATES TEAMED UP WITH THE UK AND ENDED DEMOCRACY IN IRAN IN LITERALLY FOUR DAYS, BECAUSE THE IRANIAN PRESIDENT AT THE TIME WANTED TO LIMIT THE CONTROL THAT THE UK HAD ON IRANIAN OIL RESERVES. 

“Following the coup in 1953, a government under General Fazlollah Zahedi was formed which allowed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran to rule more firmly as monarch. He relied heavily on United States support to hold on to power. According to the CIA's declassified documents and records, some of the most feared mobsters in Tehran were hired by the CIA to stage pro-Shah riots on 19 August. Other men paid by the CIA were brought into Tehran in buses and trucks, and took over the streets of the city. Between 200 and 300 people were killed because of the conflict. Mosaddegh (the elected president that was overthrown by the US and UK) was arrested, tried and convicted of treason by the Shah's military court. On 21 December 1953, he was sentenced to three years in jail, then placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Other Mosaddegh supporters were imprisoned, and several received the death penalty. After the coup, the Shah continued his rule as monarch for the next 26 years until he was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution in 1979.” *

Anyways, I promise this will all come together in the end, but it’s just a lot that needs to be addressed before hand. But I hope that with all these examples you can see the the US really doesn’t give a shit about democracy as long as they can drain a country of it’s resources they don’t care if a country is lead by a monarch or an authoritarian leader, which is a very different picture than what you learn in school. 

pt1  pt2