UNITED STATES—Already, the battle Allied Fruit waged against the Caribbean Basin was a bit complicated. Despite its Herculean efforts to overcome the monumental obstacles Pachamama had created that stood in the Company’s way, victory was far from a slam-dunk. Plant diseases, such as Panama Disease, had spread to every Allied Fruit division by 1925. The Company’s abandonment of over 10 000 acres of blighted land by 1930 was the result. Deaths from tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria afflicted thousands of Company employees and workers, threatening to halt plantation construction altogether and prevent the clearing and planting of new areas of ‘virgin’ soil.
Assigned with the task of battling disease-producing environments, namely those conducive to the spread of the Aegis Agypti and Anopheles mosquitoes, Allied Fruit’s Medical Department established sanitation programs designed to reduce the prevalence of infection and eliminate environmental obstacles to progress. Here’s where it got tricky.
Seeking to eliminate environmental conditions that were a product of both naturally occurring landscapes, and those created by the Company’s creation of a new version of nature, the Medical Department was beset by a wild set of challenges. By 1930, however, through the dedication of Allied Fruit and its medical department, the fight to secure ‘civility’ and construct an American version of nature was being won. Company plantations no longer resembled the ‘wild,’ and chaotic orchid-dotted tropical landscapes that had first greeted it decades before.
Employees and travelers alike spending time in one of Allied’s nine major divisions could enjoy modern American amenities, eat food imported from the United States, and relax in sanitary conditions that had reduced the morbidity and mortality to a rate below that of Baltimore and Memphis. Confident in its success, and in part working to develop tourist appeal, the Company sold its plantation communities as ‘health resorts’ to folks living in the United States and Canada.
Through advertising and American publications, the Company began to change the perception of the tropics in the United States with a decades-long campaign masterminded by adwiz, Bernard Lukasey, the Wolf of Madison Ave. The portrayal of a land transformed, one that existed as a neo-America in the tropics, symbolized the achievements it had made, and the victory it had won in the battle to construct a new version of Nature.
The Company, which had wiped out leagues of tangled jungle, constructed vast plantations, crisscrossed the Tropics with miles and miles of steels rails, won the battle against yellow fever, and produced bananas by the millions of bunches, an epic of accomplishment. In the process it poisoned the environment and brought wealth, civilization, and victrola records to the “world’s waste spot.”
The operation to save Allied Fruit from the Bolsheviks began with a couple haggard World War II fighter props flying low and loud, dropping smoke bombs and 100,000 paper flyers, listing the perils of the communist regime. This was followed by strafing runs. This lasted until the two former Air Force guys ran out of fuel and turned back to land in Mexico. Those two planes in the sky were the whole rebel air force. This sparse but impactful show was followed by the psychological bag of tricks meant to confuse the people and terrify President Gascón and his loyal followers.
Hidden speakers thundered out the sounds of guns and shelling. The CIA took over the entire bandwidth and fictional newscasts, some calling for the overthrow of the dictator and some claiming the dictator had already been overthrown. All the more confusing since Gastón was an elected president.
The radio pros who pre-recorded it in Miami gave it all the gusto of a play-by-play baseball game. Yet others heralded the arrival of the conquering hero, the coronel Juan David Guerra and his men where they were greeted by jubilant throngs that crowded the plaza, all scrupulously recruited and instructed to wear peasant clothes and a few hoisted signs in the space between the Cathedral and the legislative Palace.
These were the student protests that came down after Gascón was ousted from power. Long banners sustained by two sticks, BASTA! And placards in support of Gastón (“He’ll Defend the Constitution”) and still others, “Hunger Unites Poverty.” Dollar diplomacy. . . It didn’t make all that much impression; Guatemala City had a lot of racket, the street vendors, the old women sweeping the sidewalks, who listened top this boring stuff on the radio. They turned it off, tuned it out and whistled. Those who heard the recorded sounds of gunfire immediately presumed this might be fireworks for a church celebration for a saint.
This whole theatrical operation and experiment is psychological warfare, the brainchild of Bernard Lukasey, who learned that ideas make better weapons than bullets, and that a proper psychological mission could be so effective there would be no gun fired and essentially bloodless. It was all aimed at one man, anyhow, Juan Jacobo Gascón.
“This is not about politics and where you stand,” the president spoke on radio to the theoretical nation, but really he only spoke for himself. “It’s about money. It’s not about the United States. It’s about the Allied Fruit Company. It’s about El Gringo, the Banana Man, El Amigo. “In whose name have they carried out these barbaric acts? What is their banner? We know very well. They have used the pretext of anti-communism. The truth is very different. The truth is to be found in the financial interests of the Fruit Co.”
Colonel Guerra had gathered his army at an Allied Fruit banana plantation in Honduras. The nut-brown colonel, universally praised by the Yanquis for his Indio aborigine looks, the better to disguise their coup as a revolution (revolution is always a good brand, though it seems to have a short shelf life), now marched across the porous border into Guatemala. Allied Fruit trains and Allied Fruit boats transported his weapons and soldiers. A pushover. Less a war than a stroll in the countryside, a parade in the mountains. It was the easiest of the easy overthrows the Dewey Bros. had engineered.
To be continued…
