JCG-11 Guatemala City
November, 1966
My friend, who has worked with the United States aid program in Guatemala long enough for his cynicism to be mellowed by a “let-us-seek-a-solution” evening about once a month thinks he has found the answer:
When aid first began in the late 1940s,” he said, “it was in the hands of technicians, persons who actually went into countries and did things and gave lessons to the host governments.
“The economists have it now. Kennedy saw to that. We’re all excited about infrastructure and takeoff, and in reforming this ministry and that ministry, all in hopes that it someday will be the same as OUR government.
“Maybe it’s time to turn to the sociologists and anthropologists, the persons who are experts at knowing why societies change, and who are capable of promoting change from the individual up through the top of the government.”
Then he sighed deeply. “Or, again, another solution would be to shut down the entire program and use the money to hire a battery of psychiatrists to fly In and give consultations to the whole damned population.”
Soon after arrival in Guatemala City I picked up a report which lists, in neat tabular form, the year-by-year breakdown of economic and military aid the United States has put into the country since 1953. The grand total, I eventually ascertained, was $194.5 million in grants and loans – about a dollar a head for the U.S. about $500 per capita for the four million-odd Guatemalans.
My idea was to attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of the aid program; to ascertain, if I could, the impact of the spending on the Guatemalan people, and whether any lasting changes had been made in their lives.
After three weeks of visiting aid projects, and Guatemalan projects involving aid collars, and talking with assorted officials both U. S. and Guatemalan, I reached some conclusions – both about aid and Guatemalans in general. First, however, here are a sampling of some of the norteamericanos working in the aid program, and what they are doing.
Dr. Donald W. MacCorquodale until four years ago had a thriving general medical practice in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He came to Guatemala on a one-shot special assignment for the Agency for International Development (AID), liked the change of pace and challenge, sold his practice, and returned as a full-timer.
Don MacCorquodale administers the “special development fund,” which might be called AID’s petty cash box. The amounts in which he deals are small; the impact they make, however, is perhaps the most direct of any program in the country.
Guatemala is a land with an abundance of volunteer labor for the self-help projects begun in villages, but with a dearth of hard cash. There are now some 54 private agencies, religious and lay, with representatives here, each capable of stirring campesinos into action, Dr. MacCorquodale’s job is to fill the gap between muscle and money.
Consider the Indians of Santa Catarina Ixtahuacan, who for decades failed trees and sold the logs for two cents each. The middlemen in turn would mill the logs into $100 worth of lumber. Father Tim O’ Halloran, a missionary priest from Spokane, Washington, organized a sawmill cooperative but the Indians couldn’t find the money to buy the needed equipment.
Dr. MacCorquodale’s fund supplied a $2,600 loan for machinery (which the priest personally trucked in from Iowa) and a $600 grant for oxen to pull logs from the mountains. The saw mill thrives.
The people of La Estancia persuaded a doctor to agree to come to their village weekly if they built a clinic. Adobe brick for the walls they made without cash outlay. But, living outside the money economy, they could not provide a proper roof. SDF contributed $107 for sheet metal. The clinic is now operating.
“Projects such as these bring the Alliance for Progress down to the village level, where it is easily identifiable and appreciated,” says Dr. MacCorquodale. “City dwellers are aware of the Alliance because of its physical presence and the publicity which it receives in the press. The campesinos might not ever read a line about the Alliance, but they know it supplied the few extra dollars that meant the difference between success or failure of their little project.”
Because of the administrative difficulties Inherent In small loans, SDF likes to find a viable local institution such as a cooperative, make it a grant, and require it in turn to lend the funds to smaller units. A good example is El Quetzal, a league of 15 farming cooperatives, which has funneled almost $20,000 into the building of warehouses and silos. Dr. MacCorquodale has SDF geared so that it processes loan and grant applications in two weeks or less, lightning speed in an agency as hidebound with regulations as AID. Some of the $50,000 annual budget is revolving, with loan repayments returning immediately to circulation.
SDF’s projects are as varied as the needs of Guatemala. It backstops anti-illiteracy programs among the 50 percent of guatemaltecos who speak only Indian tongues. There are 20 major languages; to converse with half the population one would need to know four of them. Political unity is Impossible so long as Guatemala consists of linguistic enclaves. Thus SDP spent $1,500 for printing booklets in Kekchi spoken by 300,000 Indians to aid in the teaching of Spanish. A popular title is ‘Chatenk’ a La Tenamit” – Help for Your Town.
In Chimaltenango, a Peace Corps couple, Frank and Edna Vaccaro, helped Indians establish a rabbit-raising cooperative with a $1,000 SDF grant and loans of $2,800. Some 300 rabbits a week are now being sold in Guatemala City – and the number is increasing rapidly in what one might call obstetrical proportion.
Since its inauguration in Guatemala three years ago SDF had spent $150,000 on about 100 projects. The smallest was a grant of $50 to a group of fishermen in Livingston, on the east coast, who wanted to buy tools so they could clear land on which to grow rice to bring variety to their family diets.
AID, through SDF projects, is doing two things to encourage changes in the structure of Guatemalan society:
Through its grants and loans it is making easier the organization of farming and marketing cooperatives. The task is not easy. Cooperatives got a bad name during the Communist-tainted Arbenz regime (1950-54), and campasinos who joined them were imprisoned, beaten and subjected to other reprisals when the military regained control of the country. But cooperatives are important because they cleave through lines of established authority that historically have meant misery for the country-dwellers. Indians forced to work for 25 cents a day on a coffee finca, and to buy their meager goods at inflated prices at controlled village stores, discover they can better themselves by banding together.
By encouraging official agencies to become involved in aldea projects, AID implants in people’s minds the idea that the central government in Guatemala City is an institution not a myth.
Dr, MacCorquodale’s workday ends at 5:30 P. M, and there is no AID rule that he must work on Saturdays. And indeed, after half a lifetime of delivering babies In Colorado snowstorms (“usually at 4 in the morning”) no one could complain if MacCorquodale spent weekends at home with his charming blonde wife Joyce. But he doesn’t. On Saturday Don MacCorquodale’s office becomes La Limonada.
The words mean “The Lemonade,” and because Guatemalan lemonade is bitter the name is an apt one for the fetid slum that clings to a canyon wall for perhaps two miles near downtown. La Limonada starts at the canyon rim and is composed of row after ghastly row of wooden and paper shacks that are as tightly-packed as the cubicles of a wasp nest, as rank and evil-smelling as the drunk tank of a country jail. But to 15,000 Guatemalans, La Limonada is home.
Dr. Mac Corquodale first saw La Limonada soon after his arrival in Guatemala. “To me it was a black eye on the aid program,” he says. “No matter how much good we might be doing elsewhere in the country, La Limonada was something so big, so horrible, that it could not be ignored.” And, as a medical doctor, he was appalled by an open sewage ditch running down the “main street” of the slum to a stagnant pool in the bottom of the canyon, and by the scabby infections marking the faces and scalps of the children who used it for a playground.
An open ditch with raw sewage ran down this “main street” of La Limonada before MacCorquodale project enclosed it with a covered culvert.
Dr. MacCorquoaale met with the alcalde of the neighborhood and persuaded him it would be a good idea to replace the open ditch with a pipe. MacCorquodale didn’t make rosy promises to the residents. “I can’t change the basic conditions of your section,” he told the residents at a mass meeting. “I can’t give you a decent school or a new home, but maybe I can make living here a bit easier for you.” After several meetings, residents agreed to contribute labor. The AID Wives Club took on the project and contributed $2,000 for materials, and MacCorquodale found more cash in SDF. There were skeptics. Many of the AID women didn’t like the idea because it was “so dirty.” A Guatemalan official told Dr. MacCorquodale: “Doc, these people are bums, thieves and whores. They’ll never work.”
Many times in the next two years MacCorquodale saw the “bum, thieves mid whores” digging in the rainy season when their ten-foot ditch held five feet of water. An average of ten men a day worked on the project, seven days a week s more on weekends. At the dedication ceremony the alcalde called Don MaeCorquodale to the front of the crowd and handed him a handwoven sweater (“a token of our gratitude”) and a certificate proclaiming him an “auxiliary alcalde” of La Limonada. The latter is displayed on MacCorquodale’s den wall with prominence equalling his medical degree.
To both visitor and resident La Limonada remains a goddawful place, and there are no comforting statistics to show how many cases of dysentery and hepatitis were prevented by Don MacCorquodale’s project. But the children of La Limonada no longer spend their days playing in the aguas negras – black waters – of an open sewage ditch.
SAM FULLILOVE describes himself unabashedly as a “humanitarian.” You’d never mistake him for Dr. Schweitzer, but there’s quite a bit of do-gooder concealed in Fullilove’s burly frame. Sam drills water wells, 2,500 of them in Guatemala in the past ten years, first for International Development Services, a private relief organization; later for the International Cooperation Administration, AlD’s predecessor; now with AlD, assigned to work with Accion Civica crews of the Guatemalan Army.
The before-and-after contrasts of a Sam Fullilove project are dramatic.
When a village doesn’t have water it means the women and girls walk – maybe half a mile, maybe three miles, maybe more or less – to the nearest river, balancing a narrow-necked earthern jug on their heads. Water brought in by head is precious. Thus the children never form the habit of washing their hands before eating, or of bathing, except when their mother forces them to the river for a swim.
The river water is of varying quality. In November the rivers of Zacapa and Chiquimula were relatively full, for the rainy season had just ended, and dust had not reclaimed the land, as it does after a while, and the water was clear and running. In six weeks more, the residents know from centuries of bitter experience, the rivers slow and recede, and the water becomes brown and unpalatable, and somehow it doesn’t seem worthwhile to bath and wash clothes in it. The rum consumption of the men picks up appreciably. It’s this time of year, also, that mothers learn to watch their children closely for signs of the dysentery and diarrhea that make the Guatemalan mortality rate 40 times higher than that of the United States for youngsters less than six -years old. And it’s the low-river stage when the children are no longer chided for not bathing, for a dip in the water then-means skin rashes that soon turn into gaping ulcers. So the dirt cakes on their feet and faces, and in a month or so their skin takes on the texture of a smoked ham, and sores appear at the hairline and gradually spread down the face.
Little girls on left trudge up path from river with family water supply, while those on right avail themselves of Accion Civica pump, a project superpervised by Sam Fullilove.
When a village has a pump the first thing a visitor notices is the dean faces of the children. In one place a lustily bawling four-year-old stood beneath the faucet while a scarcely older sister scrubbed him down. The women still carry water home in jugs, but they seem happier because it comes from an accessible pump rather thin from the river.
Have the wells made a dent on the infant mortality rate? “Who knows?” says Fullilove. “’The people out here have more to do than to keep statistics, and there’s so many things that can happen to one of these children that no study would be reliable. But I like to think so, and common sense says the pure water must be helping them.”
“Gringo” is normally a dirty word in Latin America, but these youngsters call Sam Fullilove “Senor Gringo” with affection. An Accion Civica well is 25 feet from their house.
Fullilove’s first move on a well project is to scout the terrain for well sites, making his selections by a combination of intuition and geological observation. Soil characteristics are important: much of Zacapa is littered with large round rocks which deflect the drilling stems and send them wandering off at a slant. There is also much brackish and salt water a relatively short distance beneath the surface. Fullilove must coach the army drilling crews to keep their holes straight and to bore past the bad water without stopping. If he hits good water before 200 feet the holes are lined with pipe; a cap and hand pump are Installed; a concrete platform is built around the top to reduce seepage from the ground from spoiling the well; the villagers are told to discourage hogs from congregating under -the faucet, and the women end their dreary trudging to the river.
Sam Fullilove is a native of Shreveport, Louisiana, a cotton and oil town a couple of telephone poles from where I was reared in East Texas. He has the type of open-faced, easy-talking rapport with people that we used to call “good old country boy,,” Fuillilove is as relaxed when he’s drinking good Scotch with an important Guatemalan Army colonel as he is squatting with a couple of naked-from-the waist toddlers he befriended while drilling near their house.
Many of the soldiers with whom 6am works had never encountered anything more complicated than a machete before joining a well crew. He must show them how to coax the drilling pipe through rocky terrain without forcing or breaking it; how to keep a mixture of cooling mud flowing through the hole so the bit doesn’t overheat; how to pick a site that won’t be contaminated by the proximity of a hog pen or an outdoor privy. The teaching is made all the harder because it’s difficult for an adviser to give “orders” to a Guatemalan soldier. The crews at times seem determined to prove themselves right, and the gringo wrong, and so Fullilove must grit his teeth and remain silent although the machinery whines and screeches in protest and eventually breaks. Then he patiently explains another way of doing it, and the crew tries again.
FuIlilove carries a sleeping bag and air mattress in his Willys station wagon (he’s worn out seven in ten years and his eighth shows signs of imminent collapse); he’s used to finding quarters in any village that will give him a floor. The closest Fuililove gets to comfort during the work week is the hotel Ferrocarril in the city of Zacapa, a two-story wooden monstrosity that belongs on the set of an old Humphrey Bogart movie, located a measured 25 feet from a railroad track on which four steam engines work throughout the night. The Communist-led Fuerzas Armadas Rebeides – Rebel Armed Forces or FAR–move around Fullilove constantly, but have never bothered him, and he doesn’t worry about them.
Sam Fuililove is going to Vietnam soon to work for AID there (he might even be enroute by now) because the Guatemalan AID mission says there isn’t enough money to renew his contract. When Fuililove joined AID no did so on a personal service contract rather than as a “direct hire,” and thus is not a permanent employee in a technical sense. He isn’t particularly happy about the change, because he believes – and with Justification – that the well projects are both popular and successful, and that now is the time to expand the program. His bosses reply, however, that after ten years the Guatemalans should have learned to drill their own wells, and that they should no longer have to rely upon Fullilove for guidance. They explain that AID’s role is that of teacher, not of perpetual wetnurse, and that tile Guatemalans eventually must be weaned. Perhaps so, muses Fuillilove, but “you don’t whack off your nose just because you’re mad.”
He thought a bit, “I don’t give a damn,” he eventually drawled. “The Minister of Defense wrote a letter asking that I be retained. I guess a lot of it is the cuts that Congress made in the AID budget this year. But I’ll go wherever there are people who say they need me, and need water. I’m a humanitarian.”
Charles H. T. Townsend, Jr., is a rubber expert. Tomorrow he could go to any rubber-growing (or rubber-aspiring) county in the world, and set his price. Yet his life for the moment is Las Brillantes, a Guatemalan farm experiment station near Cuyotenango on the west coast for which he is an adviser.
Because of Charlie Townsend, Guatemala is on the threshold of a transformation of its economic life.
What Townsend has done is to introduce into Guatemala a rubber plant that will be able to grow on an estimated one million acres of land now vacant or cultivated with marginal quality coffee.
Townsend’s plant is the result of 27 years of grafting, cross-grafting, re-grafting and back-grafting of stock from Brazil and Southeast Asia. After hearing him describe the process for ten minutes one noon between puffs on his ever-present cigar, the suspicion crossed my mind that Townsend was putting on an exhibition of double-talk.
He wasn’t; the rubber plant is just that complicated. The important thing however, is that it works.
In previous years Guatemala has been economically independent on bananas and coffee for its export dollars. Disease has effectively curtailed the former, and United Fruit Company has abandoned its once vast plantations on the west coast and cut back sharply elsewhere. Coffee, now the largest earner, is subject to world market prices as erratic as the flight pattern of a flock of wild birds.
The U. S. first began promoting rubber in Guatemala in 1940, hoping for a hemispheric producer to decrease reliance on war-threatened Southeast Asian producers. A U. S. Department of Agriculture survey team found 300,00 acres with the altitude (600 to 2,500 feet), soil, rainfall (80 inches minimum a year) and accessibility necessary for rubber cultivation. Much of this territory, however, was also susceptible to development of a leaf blight disease known as dothidella ulei, which preys upon the hevea species of rubber and no other plant, and which is wide spread in the Amazon Valley and other parts of tropical America. Dothiaella ulei kills rubber plants through incessant attacks on their new foilage, blackening and withering leaves.
The disease, fortunately, occurs only where the daily dewfall lingers for eight hours or more, and one area of Guatemala – the pacific coast around Las Brillantes – has a combination of climactic factors that cuts the dew period to three to four hours daily, Horticulturists learn to “breed around” diseases such as dothidella ulei, and Las Brillantes thus afforded them a contamination-free laboratory in which to work.
Townsend wasn’t at Las Brillantes when this work started, but he, too, was occupied with dothidella ulei in Brazil. He came there in 1934 from George Washington University to work on the Ford Motor Company’s plantations and later moved over to the Department of Agriculture and AID. The working materials in the battle were (a) high-yielding selections from millions of trees growing in the Far East, but which were highly-susceptible to leaf blight; and (b) blight-resistant but; low yielding plants selected from wild seedling trees growing in the Amazon Valley, The research involved close to 400,000 hand-pollinations between the two strains of trees, producing some 75,000 crosspollination progenies worthy of a second look. From this group, 6,442 diseaseresistant individuals were selected &nap in turn, submitted to another phase of crossing. Each “generation”’ of crosses requires a minimum of nine years; the pro gram now is entering its third generation, another convergence of the better lines. Parentage of the resultant plants will be about 7/8ths high-yielding Asian, yet also with blight-resisting qualities.
Townsend came to Guatemala in 1959 and spent considerable time his first few months climbing trees before dawn. “I felt kind of ridiculous at times.” he recollects, “but it was important for me to see for myself how much dew there was, and when it started. The only way to find out is to go up into the trees and feel the leaves. Townsend’s major contribution to the program in those early years was development of a substitute plant to use while the lengthy crosspollination process was carried out. This was the “sandwich tree”–a rootstock, a high-yieiding but susceptible trunk, a resistant “top,” put together through grafts. The Las Brillantes nursery still has a stock of one million of these plants, but they will be gradually replaced as the resistant-yielding combination trees come into production.
In addition to helping support Las Brillantes ($493,478 of a total $1,636,311 budget since 1960) AID lent the Bank of Guatemala $5 million to re-lend to farmers to encourage them to go into the rubber business. The amounts are up to $25,000 per cabarallia (111.5 acres) to cover the seven-year cost of cultivating a grove to maturity, Of the 25,000 acres now planted, 14,000 were financed by the rubber development loan fund – and contain Townsend’s “sandwich trees.” AID is also installing a pilot rubber-processing plant at Las Brillantes.
The profit potential from rubber is so vast that visitors Las Brillantes – even reporters and AID officials–spend the return drive to Guatemala City daydreaming about becoming plantation owners. In the seventh or eighth year cash Income is computed at about $25,000 per cabarellia, the amount of the original investment. And groves produce for 80 years with minimal maintenance. Latin America now imports rubber and rubber products worth $100 million annually – a market which Guatemala could preempt if its present program progresses as anticipated. The goal is for 80,000 acres in cultivation by 1975, which would supply only Latin America’s needs. The vast Peten region in Guatemala’s northeast, which holds one-third the nation’s land area, now almost entirely vacant, Is suitable for rubber cultivation, and will be opened to agriculture when a highway system is completed around 1970, Townsend sees an even million rubber acres there alone. Since rubber consumption in developing nations doubles each decade, the potential world demand is virtually unlimited. And Guatemala is a decade ahead of other potential producers.
Rubber, unlike coffee, is suitable for small-farm cultivation. Townsend figures that five acres, the area that can be handled by one man, will yield a profitable crop and support a small processing plant. (This is important because Guatemala’s present agricultural system of large fincas is doomed – if not In the Mendez Montenegro administration, soon thereafter.) Townsend expects the 80,000 acres to furnish new jobs for 17,000 men, meaning that living standards for some 100,000 persons will be bettered. Substantial increases in employment are forecast also in support industries and in businesses attracted to Guatemala by the presence of a rubber supply.
A drive around Las Brillantes with Townsend is a glimpse into Quatemala’s agricultural future–provided that farmers can be persuaded to break from the monotony of coffee and corn, and find the dollars to do so. “Much of this land is incredibly rich,” says Townsend. “What it needs is the diversification that will provide both money crops and food.” One intriguing possibility is all-spice, which grows wild in the Peten, but which is not cultivated commercially. We could supply all of Latin America and other countries, too,” I says Townsend. “It’s light, easy to store, easy to transport, has a stable market price – an ideal diversification crop.” He gestured across the field. “That is bixa; it’s the stuff you use to color margarine. We’re testing 54 varieties. Amazingly easy to cultivate.” Citrus, black pepper, cacao, vanilla, tea – “It’s enough to make a fellow want to take up farming.” Townsend mused.
For Guatemalans, however, the process isn’t that easy. Lack of credit is the most formidable barrier. Consider Mario who spent several years in Europe studying orchard management. Guatemala is the only Central American nation with the attitude and climate for cultivation of apples, peaches, pears and plums, yet orchards are few, and what fruit that exists is dear. (Apples sell in the field for 25 cents a pound.) Mario, after his return, sought a $20,000 loan so he could buy land and plants. “The bank asked what kind of land I could put up as collateral,” Mario recollects ruefully. “I said, ‘If I had land, I wouldn’t have any reason to be here.’ I didn’t obtain the loan. It’s a closed society; one must have money to make a start, but the money is all in the same hands, and hands that won’t turn it loose.” Mario now works as a second-level functionary in the Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture, his dream sidetracked.
The AID people are aware of these problems. Persons such as Townsend think the answer is to demonstrate the feasibility-and profitability – or new crops; once this is done, they say, an economic balance will be struck.
“The riches are here,” ‘Townsend says. “Now I only hope someone can be persuaded to take them.”
The aid program’s history in Guatemala is a tortured one. Immediately after the ouster in 1954 of President Jacabo Arbenz Guzman by dissident colonels aided by the CIA, the U. S. rewarded the new military government with the highest per-capita aid program of any Latin nation, The “reward thy anti-Communist friends no matter what their faults” policy of the late John Foster Dulles continued through the administration of Colonel Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, another conservative. In fiscal 1961 alone Ydigoras received $32.2 million, $14.2 million of it in outright grants. Backed by a strong Washington lobby that continually stressed his anti-Communism, and blessed with many Congressional friends, Ydigoras propped up his budget with U. S. dollars.
The Kennedy Administration marked a turnaround in relations. The new aid concept stressed local development rather than direct subsidies. Ydigoras was flatly unwilling to start the internal reforms mace a requisite for aid under the Alliance for Progress; the programs he did initiate were half-hearted and put on paper mainly to appease AID officials in hopes they could be deluded into continuing the dollar supply. Ydigoras resented bitterly the imposition of conditions on loans, and the abandonment of the direct grant program. AID officials found themselves unable to work with the government; projects disappeared into the maze of colonels occupying the National Palace. The aid program slowly slid to a halt; loans and grants dropped to $10.6 million in fiscal 1962, a two-thirds out from the preceding year.
Ambassador John O. Bell in March 1963 drafted a letter to Ydigoras protesting vigorously the Guatemalan attitude. While the letter was still in the office Guatemala found itself with yet another coup-colonel president,, Enrique Peralta Azurdia. Bell sent the letter anyway, reasoning that nothing had changed in the government except the top man. Peralta replied that the U. S. government “will not dictate to me” and the AID mission director and his deputy were declared persona non grata and expelled from the country.
The sniping continued. Peralta’s economic minister inspired stories in the Guatemalan press criticizing AID, making untruthful allegations about such things as the amount of interest charged on AID loans. The Peralta people refused to become interested in new projects, repeating again and again that they had “caretaker” status only, and preferred to do nothing. At one point Bell had a letter written in which he told Peralta that (a) the petty criticism must halt and (b) Guatemala must display a willingness to continue in the program or (c) the program would be curtailed and the AID mission reduced to a skeleton to oversee existing projects, At the last moment Bell decided not to send the letter. Many persons in the AID mission today think that he should have, and that the sudden threat of loss of money would have shocked Peralta into the realization that the Alliance for Progress mandates were taken seriously by the U. S. government, They feel Peralta would not have run the political risk of permitting Guatemala to be the only Central American nation outside of the Alliance.
But the letter was not sent, the AID mission remained (at a severe morale cost, for AID personnel are activists who are not happy twiddling their thumbs when there is work to be done) and Peralta continued his cold war. There are suggestions today personality conflicts were partially responsible, that covert anti-Semitism prevented Peralta from accepting any suggestions that came from the current mission director, who is Jewish. A more logical reason is that Peralta honestly feared to do anything that would stir social change in Guatemala; that his supporters, the military and the staunchly conservative business community that formed his power base, would have put him out of office in a moment had he done what AID asked of him.
AID mission contacts with the new Mendez Montenegro government began even before it formally took office. AID people quietly sought out the persons who would be the brains of the administration and did what they could to insure that it would get off to a brisk start. Essential advance work was done on several projects. For example, on July 13, only 12 days after Mendez Montenegro was sworn in, the Guatemalan government was able to apply for a loan for paving of a key highway from Rio Hondo in the department of Zacapa to the Honduran border. In two weeks flat AID sped the application to Washington with a favorable recommendation. It was authorized Sept. 30 and the Guatemalans signed for a $758,000 loan on Oct. 14. Construction crews are now at work.
The new government also followed AID’s advice and designated one man as coordinator for all loan and grant applications. Previously, each cabinet minister did his own negotiating with AID, with a consequent waste of time because of unfamiliarity with the formidable paperwork and procedures required. “Now we have one place in government where you can began processing a project,” says AID assistant mission director Edward Marasciulo.
The AID mission is barely able to contain its excitement about the new government’s enthusiasm for national development programs. “Because of the newness, it’s hard to detect concrete results as yet,” one official said. “But the dirt is beginning to churn. Many of the programs now being initiated won’t pay off for a couple of years, but the change of attitude is the important thing.”
A diversity of projects has gone through the AID office since July 1:
The Rio Hondo paving contract. The present highway is a dusty washboard that stretches from Rio Hondo 94 kilometers south to a point five kilometers short of the Honduran border between Esquipulas, Guatemala, and Nuevo Ocotepeque, Honduras. The road is intended to improve communications between Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador, and to give access to Central American Common Market port facilities at Puerto Barrios and Matias de Galves, Guatemala. The route goes through the guerilla portion of Zacapa, but no trouble is expected. The contractor will employ 600 men and, as quipped Charles R. Connolly, Jr., the affable AID loan officer, “ They’ll be better paid than the FAR.”
A renegotiation of the rubber loan program for which Charles Townsend is doing field work. The government of Guatemala posted $300,000 to bring its share of the fund up to part opening the way for credit for more farmers.
A $1,550,000 loan to the Guatemalan government for increased malarial control activities, as part of a Central American program to wipe out disease-carrying mosquitoes.
Customs modernization. A retired expert from the U. S. Customs Service is attempting to bring order to one of Guatemala’s most snarled agencies.
The enthusiasm in the AID mission over the new government’s attitude is tempered somewhat by concern over the lack of personal dynamism of President Mendez Montenegro (see JOG-10: Guatemala: A Democracy Falters), and disappointment over concrete accomplishments of the assistance program in the last 21 years. In private comments by the working-level people (and these persons engage in self-introspection to the point of addiction) one hears echos of the questions asked recently by Senators Clark, Fulbright and Morse – i. e., isn’t it about time that some of the assistee nations began to stand on their own feet and train local personnel to do the work now being performed by norteamericanos? The situation of Sam Fuillilove, the water engineer, was a frequently-voiced example. Too, the Guatemalans have shown little inclination to modernize their governmental machinery, a helpless, stifling affair even by Latin American standards. One man who has daily contact with three of the largest Guatemalan ministries says he remembers only one firing during three years for other than political reasons: The victim was an official who was let go when his daily drunkenness reached the point he couldn’t make it to the office.
The Guatemalans also lack the decisiveness of action – the desk-pounding directness – that one would think essential in the present critical period. Equipment for AID projects has sat in the customs warehouse at Puerto Barrios for months while officials haggle over its release. AID officials beg for the opportunity to put the machinery to work in the field, and their words vanish as if into a feather pillow. (In fairness, it must be stated that norteamericanos are not the only persons to encounter trouble with Guatemalan customs. A 1965 law required that all goods brought into the country be transported on national carriers. Guatemala has only two small ships in its national merchant marine; Aviateca, the national airline, flies no further north than New Orleans and Miami, no further south than Panama; thus there is a definite and practical limit on just what can be handled by “national” carriers. The law permitted the entry of goods into the country but not their release from customs, and officials took the language at face value while assorted shipments piled up in warehouses. Some European diplomats were reduced to frothing rage in attempts to free their household goods. The law collapsed of its own idiocy when the regime of Colonel Peralta had a shipment of ammunition arrive on a non-Guatemalan vessel. The colonels – and this was a military government, mind you – fought with customs for five weeks before obtaining their ammunition.
Another quality sorely lacking in Guatemala is a spirit of nationalism and its accompanying national pride, a shortcoming all the more vivid to a visitor whose most immediate prior experience was in Mexico. When I arrived in Guatemala City in October the government was in the midst of a celebration marking the overthrow of dictator Jorge Ubico in 1944. The placards called it “The Guatemalan Revolution,” an empty boast considering the country’s return to coup-imposed military governments one decade hence. The show windows and vacant walls were filled with placards showing campesinos and students and workers waving rifles and machetes; the tag line identified Mandez Montenegro as the “Third President of the Revolution.,’ neatly leapfrogging over Colonels Castillo Armas, Ycligoras and Peralta, and the iv, years the revolution spent in a deepfreeze. On a quiet &~unda7 afternoon, when Guatemala City’s omnipresent advertising sound trucks graciously afforded a day of peace, I walked over to the National Palace and looked at a photographic exhibit on the Urbico overthrow. It consisted mainly of blowups of newspaper front pages chronicling the key events: Urbico signing his resignation; a massive reception at the place for Juan Jose Arevalo, member and later key figure in the youthful triumvirate that took command of the country; deposed officials filing into the adjacent Mexican Embassy for refuge (the building is now occupied by the National Tourism Department); a headline proclaiming “Tierras de Guatemala Solo Para Manos Guatemaltecos” –Guatemalan Lands Only for Guatemalan Hands”; group shots of the guardia civica, the student militia set up by the new government to counterbalance the military. Sprinkled throughout the display were photos of Jacobo Arbenz Gusman, elected to replace Arevalo in 195O; thrown out in the CIA supported coup of Castillo Armas in 1954; now Fidel Castro’s guest in Havana and unwilling to risk a return home. Also scattered about were photos of Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro, not so often as those of the more active Arbenz and Arevalo, but enough to establish him as a participant in the revolt. But all in all, the celebration seemed hollow, designed to publicize the Partido Ravolucionario, rather than an outpouring of public excitement over an event that has not changed materially the life of the average Guatemalan in the 22 succeeding years.
Another barrier to national development is the built-in class prejudice against Indians that makes Guatemala’s ruling ladino class oblivious to the nation’s problems. To ask a Guatemalan whether he has Indian blood is as grave an insult as imputing Afro-American ancestry to a Daughter of the Confederacy. (By contrast, most Mexicans are proud that Aztec blood flows in their veins.) The prejudice begins at birth. If a Guatemalan child is even of pre-school age, becomes angry with a maid, he kicks and slaps her. She stands silent, taking the punishment, knowing that to resist would mean instant dismissal. In most Guatemalan homes the maid’s quarters are adjacent to the wash room. Two feet of extra pipe would provide hot water for her bath, No, Even in the frigid Guatemalan winters maids must take cold baths (and it does become cold in Guatemala, even though it is a Central American nation; the temperature dropped into the 40s during my stay there). The ladinos argue in honest – and despicably ignorant – sincerity that the maids “like cold baths because they are used to them.”
The neglect is far more serious in the countryside. Teachers tall of seeing three-fourths their class fall asleep on their desks by mid-morning, exhausted by the ill diets of finca living. At a malnutrition hospital run by Belgian Catholic priests in Jocotan I saw two-year-olds whose calves were the thickness of the length of the first joint of my index finger –pitiable creatures who looked more like sick-kittens than children, fighting for life with weak little mews, their uncomprehending eyes staring with fright at their surroundings. In the starkly impoverished Central Highlands, the colorful Indian garb so beloved by tourist photographers hides the pot-bellies and spindly legs of malnutrition. “But that is impossible,” exclaimed the wife of an American finquero to a visitor. “We pay our people 45 cents a day and give them rations.” what kind of rations? “Why, corn and beans, that is what they like.”
The finqueros complain that they are unjustly criticized and that outsiders – particularly norteamericanos – don’t understand their problems. Read the following paragraphs with one thought in mind: Vihather what the man is saying is true or false is irrelevant; the important thing is that he runs his finca on the assumption that it is true, and he is not going to change unless convinced otherwise, and probably not even then:
“In the coffee harvesting season I pay campasinos 80 cents for each basket of beans they pick. A fast worker can pick two a day, and his wife and family also work, meaning they could earn $2, maybe even more. They go into the fields at dawn and by 9 or 10 o’clock the men start coming in. They’ll have maybe 20 or 30 cents of beans. They won’t go back. No. I think I don’t want to work any more today.
In the cane cutting season it’s the same. If a campasino doesn’t feel like stooping he will cut the cane at waist level, wasting one-third to one-half the value of the stalk, for the weight is at the bottom. Cultivation of a coffee tree requires seven years to maturity. Many don’t survive the first picking season. Campesinos pull off branches to get to the berries easier, or break down the entire tree with their feet. They can’t understand that we need the same tree for next year’s crop. To them next year – or even next week, or tomorrow –is a conception beyond their understanding.
“I built a school on my rinca but few attend. The fathers want to put their children into the fields as soon as possible so they (the fathers) can loaf at home all day. During the off season I give rations to 500 families a day, which means about 3,000 persons. They pay nothing. I built every house on this finca. I could sell out tomorrow and become a millionaire and never work again. If I did so, and the new owner wasn’t as generous, these people would starve in three months. So I stay on, and break even, and do the best I can.
“Higher salaries? They’d just drink up the money.”
A Personal Thought
The Mexican Revolution proved that violent catharsis, while costly of life and physical property, in time can mature into stable, relatively progressive government.
The Cuban revolution proved that violent catharsis can also degenerate into personalistic dictatorship and negation of human rights.
But yet isn’t a sharp wrench essential at one phase or another of a country’s history, if there is to be any noteworthy development?
A degree of violence was required to obliterate the sweatshop system In the United States, through the medium of labor organizational work and strikes. The U. S. private sector, reluctantly but ultimately yielding, prevented the unrest from growing to Mexican or Cuban proportions. But this fact of history is something which the. Guatemalan ruling structure cannot comprehend; thus it shows no sign of yielding to change, only a unified antipathy to any idea that resembles the 20th Century.
No one has found a means of rooting this upper class rigidity from Latin life. Fidel Zastro provided them a good scare; then, emulating the Southern segregationists they so much resemble, the Latins use “Communism” (read “Negro”) as a pretext for hardening their battle lines for massive resistance to the inevitable. The Latin’s lack of national maturity. the ability to admit that something is wrong in his society, eventually will become the Latin’s gallows. He can bow gracefully now and survive to become even more prosperous, as was the case in the United States, or continue his bitter-end obstinacy and hear cries of paredon – to the wall – as his nation collapses.
The AID Man Again
My friend in the AID mission was reflective now for it was past midnight. “In retrospect I think the worst thing that ever happened to the aid program was its overnight success in western Europe with the Marshall Plan. The American public and Congress expect the same type of instant miracle here and elsewhere.
“Well it’s not going to happen. There the United States helped with the physical rebuilding of a modern but temporarily shattered society. In Latin America, the modern society exists in rare and scattered pockets only.
“That’s why I say – we’ve reached the point now where aid is a job for the social scientists.
“Modernization of countries such as Guatemala in dependent upon a transformation of national character, of an entire culture. We can’t do it with schools and tractors and tapeworm medicine. Hell, I don’t know – maybe we can’t do it at all.”
Received in New York December 6, 1966.
©1966 Joseph C. Goulden, Jr.
Mr. Goulden is a 1965 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship winner on leave from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Permission to publish this article may be sought from The Managing Editor, Philadelphia Inquirer.
