Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

the fear of famine. The chairman’s most fervent partisans were the fifty million
peasants he promised land.
Agitation for land reform in the third world colored the postcolonial
geopolitical landscape of the twentieth century. In particular, subsistence
farmers in newly independent countries wanted access to the large land
holdings used to grow export crops. Since then, however, land reform has
been resisted by Western governments and former colonies, who instead
stressed increasing agricultural output through technological means. Generally,
this meant favoring large-scale production of export crops over subsistence
farming. Sometimes it meant changing a government.
In June 1954 a U.S.-backed coup overthrew the president of Guatemala.
Elected in 1952 with 63 percent of the vote, Jacobo Árbenz had formed a
coalition government that included four Communists in the fifty-sixmember
Chamber of Deputies. An alarmed United Fruit Company, which
held long-term leases to much of the coastal lowlands, launched a propaganda
campaign pushing the view that the new Guatemalan government
was under Russian control. It’s unlikely that the few Communist party
members in the government had that much clout; United Fruit’s real fear
was land reform.
In the late nineteenth century, the Guatemalan government had appropriated
communal Indian lands to facilitate the spread of commercial coffee
plantations throughout the highlands. At the same time, U.S. banana
companies began acquiring extensive lowland tracts and building railways
to ship produce to the coast. Export plantations rapidly appropriated the
most fertile land and the indigenous population was increasingly pushed
into cultivating steep lands. By the 1950s, many peasant families had little
or no land even though companies like United Fruit cultivated less than a
fifth of their vast holdings.
Soon after coming to power, Árbenz sought to expropriate uncultivated
land from large plantations and promote subsistence farming by giving
both land and credit to peasant farmers. Contrary to United Fruit’s claims,
Árbenz did not seek to abolish private property. However, he did want to
redistribute more than 100,000 hectares of company-leased land to small
farmers and promote microcapitalism. Unfortunately for Árbenz, U.S.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had personally drafted the banana
company’s generous ninety-nine-year lease in 1936. With Dulles on United
Fruit’s side, even the pretense of Communist influence was enough to
motivate a CIA-engineered coup in the opening years of the cold war.
let them eat colonies 111