In the waning years WW11, Jorge Ubico's brutal dictatoship in Guatemala overtuned by revolt of the liberal middle class. The new governemt reformed the education system and created a new  labour code that alloowed trade unions to develop. Its sucesssor formed in 1951,proceeded to intrduce a land reform program that distributes unused lands to peasants. while landowners were compensated for their loses. Within three years, over 100,000 families had rceived new land.

But while peasants were improving their lot in life, an immensely powerful wealthy US corporation was doing a not very slow burn. The united Fruit Company owned huge estates stretching from ocean to ocean, along with the railway and the port(while paying almost no taxes on bananas and other fruits it exported). Because it used only 8 per cent of the land it owned, the company was threatened with large chunks of its lands being distributed to paesants. outraged by this attack on property, US media soon entered the frenzy of denunciation. A guatemalan colonel trained in the US and backed by American piloted F-47 bombers attacked the country in a fury of vengeance of which officials in Washington proudly clamied reponsibility. In a fiting bit irony, it turned out that the director of the CIA at the time, Allen Dulles, had been on the United Fruit board of directors.

Rather than an aberration, the ovethrow of the reformist government of Guatemala was just part of a long line of US military intervention thoughout the early twentieth  century, including coups, occupations or mass murders in Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico and El Salvado. In a paricularly candid reminiscence. US general Smedly D. Butler recalled  in 1935:

I spent thirty three years and four months in active service as a member of our country's most agile miltary force - the Marine Corps... And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers, In short, I was a racketeer for capatalism....thus I helped make Mexico and expical Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the Nation City Bank to collect revenue in....I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brough light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American Fruit companies in 1903;

What was done to Guatemala in 1934 may have been easily recognizable as just anothe act of US imperialism, but few cuold have predicted the longevity of the violence . To this day, the country continues to live in the shadow of the slaughter that stopped land reform and crushed oppostion to American big business. The executions of trade unionist, dissedent intellectuals, pesants and indigenous peoples is unceasing. Whenever popular opposition resurfaces, the brutality escaltes: between 1974 and 1978, for instance, troops and death squads asssassinated 124 union leaders. But the worst year may have 1967 when according to a Catholic priest the US, right wing terrorist killed 2,800 peasants, student, intellectuals and union activists. In a campaign uncompromisingly backed and funded by the US, the military went on a killing spree reminiscent of the conquistadors:

"All the men of the village of Cajon del Rio were exterminated: those of Tituque had their intestines gouged out with knives; in Peidra Prada they were flayed alive; in Afua Blanca de Ipala they were burned alive after being shot in the legs. A rebellious peasant's head was stuck on a pole in the center of San Jorge's Plaza. In cero Gordo the eyes of Jaime Velazques were filled with pins... In San Lucas Sacatpeques, the well yielded corpses instead of water. On the Mirflore plantation the men greeted the dawn with no hands or feet"

The US back terror regime-whose muder toll has now hit 200.000, the mojority indigenous people-remains in place to this day.