Situació actual de la televisió pública a la Unió Europea.

As  historians  have  shown,  the  post-­WWI  accommodation  of  Latin  American  economic   nationalism  on  the  part  of  US  corporations  did  not  mean  that  they  refrained  from  utilizing  their   influence  with  US  state  actors  to  try  and  redirect  Latin  American  governments  away  from.  Despite   being  surmountable  in  the  moment,  the  rise  of  economic  nationalism  was  still  regarded  by  US   capital  as  a  fundamental  threat  to  the  future  of  doing  business  in  the  region.  Indeed,  throughout   the  late  forties  and  early  fifties,  US  firms  that  traded  with  and  held  investments  in  Latin  America   grew  increasingly  intolerant  of  the  region’s  emergent  business  climate  and  the  direction  it  was   taking.  As  author  Naomi  Klein  (2007)  reports,  from  the  US  corporate  point  of  view,  “their  products   were  being  blocked  at  borders,  their  workers  were  demanding  higher  wages,  and,  most  

alarmingly,  there  was  growing  talk  that  everything  from  foreign-­owned  mines  to  banks  could  be   nationalized  to  finance  Latin  America’s  dream  of  economic  independence”  (pp.  90-­91).  According   to  Klein  (2007),  corporate  discontent  translated  into  corporate  pressure  on  the  US  state.  This   pressure  in  turn  took  shape  as  a  foreign  policy  movement  in  both  the  United  States  and  Britain   (still  a  significant  trade  partner  and  investor  vis-­à-­vis  Latin  America)  that  “attempted  to  pull   developmentalist  governments  into  the  binary  logic  of  the  Cold  War”  (p.  91).  In  other  words,  US  

companies  turned  to  exploiting  the  growing  Cold  War  concerns  of  the  US  state  to  paint  the  shifts   of  Latin  American  states  towards  social  democracy  as  a  decisive  move  towards  totalitarian   communism.  In  this  context,  the  signaled  preferences  of  the  US  State  Department  for  anti-­ communist  dictatorship  over  social  democracy  would  take  on  new,  more  violent,  more   interventionist  proportions  in  the  early  fifties  and  beyond,  beginning  with  the  CIA/-­coordinated   overthrow  of  democratically  elected  Guatemalan  president  Jacobo  Arbenz  in  1954.  As  this  event   marked  the  CIA’s  first  official  covert  operation  in  Latin  America  and  because  it  powerfully  

illustrates  the  shape  that  US  capitalist  imperialism  would  take  on  the  post-­WWII  era,  I  devote  the   following  paragraphs  to  reviewing  how  it  all  unfolded.        

   As  Jeffrey-­Jones  (2003)  illustrates,  by  the  early  1950s,  US  capitalists  had  already  found   a  willing  ally  in  the  CIA.  As  underscored  by  Klein  (2007),  this  fact  has  to  be  understood  within  the   context  of  the  close  relations  between  US  capitalists  and  CIA  director,  Allen  Dulles  (nominated  by   Eisenhower  in  1953  and  confirmed  by  the  Senate  the  same  year).  Before  coming  to  the  CIA,   Dulles  had  been  employed  by  the  prestigious  corporate  law  firm  of  Sullivan  &  Cromwell,  where,   along  with  his  brother,  John  Foster  Dulles  (Eisenhower’s  Secretary  of  State),  he  had  represented   top  US  companies  that  stood  to  lose  substantial  profits  if  Latin  America  was  to  continue  in  its   region-­wide  move  toward  nationalization  of  private  companies  (Klein,  2007).  His  clients  had   included  J.P.  Morgan  &  Company,  the  International  Nickel  Company,  the  Cuban  Sugar  Cane   Corporation,  and  United  Fruit  Company  (Ibid).      

   It  would  be  under  Dulles’  leadership,  and  at  the  direct  request  of  United  Fruit  Company   (UFC)  that  the  CIA  would  orchestrate  the  successful  overthrow  of  Guatemalan  President  Jacobo   Arbenz  Guzman  in  1954  (Jeffreys-­Jones,  2003).  Democratically  elected  in  1950,  Arbenz  had   become  president  of  Guatemala  in  1951,  seven  years  after  the  commencement  of  the  country’s   “October  Revolution,”  a  movement  led  by  university  students,  professionals,  and  members  of  the   military  against  the  notoriously  repressive  regime  of  Jorge  Ubico  y  Castañeda,  who  had  ruled  for   thirteen  years  as  a  puppet  dictator  for  the  US  state  and  UFC,  allowing  the  former  to  establish   military  bases  in  Guatemalan  territory  and  granting  hundreds  of  thousands  of  hectares  of  the  

country’s  most  fertile  land  to  the  latter,  all  while  keeping  the  majority  of  the  rural  peasantry   landless  and  in  bondage  through  a  pernicious  system  of  debt-­slavery.  By  the  early  1940s,  UFC   controlled  40%  of  the  country’s  most  fertile  land,  owned  the  country’s  railroad  (through  its   subsidiary  International  Railway  Company  of  Central  America),  and  unofficially  controlled  the   country’s  port.    

  Aiming  to  initiate  a  new  era  of  democratic  rule,  free  speech,  social  reforms,  and  national   land  reform,  the  October  Revolution  had  begun  with  a  general  strike  in  response  to  the  killing  of  a   schoolteacher  by  military  forces.  In  response,  President  Ubico  had  quickly  resigned,  appointing  a   military  triumvirate  that  would  soon  be  deposed  by  a  joint  team  of  Arbenz  (then  a  military  captain)   and  Major  Francisco  Javier  Arana  when  it  failed  to  honor  its  original  pledge  to  hold  free  elections.   When  Arbenz  and  Arana  enabled  elections  in  1944,  Juan  Jose  Arévalo  had  been  chosen  as  the   first  post-­dictatorship  president.  A  formerly  exiled  professor  of  philosophy,  Arévalo  had  instituted   reforms  that  included  an  increased  minimum  wage,  literacy  programs,  and  some  land  reform  that   expropriated  foreign  estates  and  redistributed  their  lands  to  the  rural  peasantry.  Comprehensive   land  reform  (envisioned  as  the  expropriation  of  foreign  owned  lands  with  compensation  to  the   deposed  companies  and  subsequent  redistribution  of  land  to  the  rural  peasantry),  however,   remained  an  unrealized  objective  during  Arévalo  six  years  in  office.  Upon  coming  to  office  in   1951,  Arbenz,  an  Arévalo  supporter,  had  acted  to  change  this,  issuing  Decree  900,  which  

expropriated  large  amounts  of  unused  land  (with  full  compensation)  owned  by  UFC.  In  addition  to   expropriating  UFC’s  land,  Arbenz  supported  militant  actions  of  UFC  workers,  and  initiated  

construction  of  a  highway,  a  project  that  would  create  direct  competition  to  the  country’s  railroad   industry  over  which  UFC  held  a  monopoly.  UFC  had  historically  been  successful  in  blocking  the   highway  project.      

  Predictably,  the  political  ascents  and  the  subsequent  actions  of  both  Arévalo  and  Arbenz   were  followed  by  tremendous  pushback  from  UFC.  By  1950,  the  company  was  retaining  skilled   lobbyists  and  publicists  to  convince  the  US  government  and  the  CIA  that  Guatemala  was  on  the   brink  of  a  full  communist  overhaul  (Jeffreys-­Jones,  2003).  Its  efforts  would  ultimately  contribute  to  

the  creation  of  Plan  PBSUCCESS,  a  CIA  operation  designed  to  oust  Arbenz  on  the  grounds  that   he  was  a  member  of  the  Communist  party  whose  intentions  were  to  turn  Guatemala  into  a  puppet   regime  of  the  Soviet  Union.  Between  1950  and  1954,  the  CIA  utilized  methods  of  economic   destabilization,  diplomatic  isolation,  and  psychological  warfare  on  the  Guatemalan  population   (including  the  spread  of  disinformation  about  Arbenz  through  newspaper  articles  and  a  fraudulent   radio  station  that  broadcast  from  Miami  but  claimed  to  be  located  in  the  heart  of  the  Guatemalan   jungle;;  death  threats;;  and  bombings),  all  intended  to  generate  anxiety,  fear,  and  Arbenz-­fatigue   among  the  Guatemalan  population.  The  pinnacle  of  this  activity  was  the  CIA’s  recruitment  and   training  of  mercenary  soldiers.  This  group,  a  majority  of  whom  were  Guatemalan  exiles,  would   grow  to  number  nearly  five  hundred  men  and  would  ultimately  lead  the  coup  against  Arbenz.   Their  leader,  Colonel  Carlos  Castillo  Armas,  a  Guatemalan  right  wing  exile,  would  appoint  himself   as  president  of  the  country.  Upon  taking  office,  Castillo  made  immediate  and  dramatic  changes,   making  voting  rights  conditional  upon  a  literacy  requirement  (thus  disenfranchising  over  half  the   population),  nullifying  Arbenz’s  Decree  900  (the  official  legislation  that  expropriated  the  UFC   lands)  and  evicting  peasants  from  the  land  they  had  received  through  it,  banning  political  parties,   bringing  back  the  secret  police  created  by  Ubico,  and,  under  the  direction  of  the  CIA,  establishing   the  National  Committee  of  Defense  Against  Communism,  intended  to  suppress  any  known  or   suspected  communist  elements.  Castillo  was  assassinated  in  1957  but  the  country  would  remain   under  military  rule  for  the  next  three  decades,  during  which  time  the  Arbenz-­expropriated  lands   would  be  returned  to  UFC,  a  bloody  civil  war  would  embroil  the  country  as  the  military  regime   fought  to  suppress  leftist  activists  and  guerrillas  who  mobilized  against  it,  and  extensive  steps   would  be  taken  by  the  US  government  (primarily  the  intense  training,  funding,  arming  and  all-­ around  fortification  of  the  Guatemalan  military  and  police  forces)  to  guarantee  the  preservation  of   the  military  government  it  had  worked  to  implement.  

  The  Guatemalan  coup  of  1954  would  be  the  first  of  many  post-­WWII  actions  on  the  part   of  the  US  government  that  would  blatantly  violate  the  non-­intervention  “Good  Neighbor”  pledge   that  had  been  issued  and  upheld  since  the  1930s.  According  to  Grandin  (2006),  this  fact  was  

openly  acknowledged  in  a  1951  memo  written  by  the  Assistant  Secretary  of  State,  who  advised   that  because  of  this  violation  the  various  steps  of  the  coup  had  to  be  “justified  on  technical   grounds”  so  as  to  enable  the  United  States  to  continue  claiming  a  commitment  to  Roosevelt’s   Good  Neighbor  policy  that  had  been  so  critical  in  winning  Latin  American  alliance  in  the  years   leading  up  to  World  War  II.