don@allegra.UUCP (08/13/83)
Mr. Hope's note about Arbenz fits my model quite well. One could paraphrase it as, 'Well, Arbenz did some nice things for the people, but he was too far left. Since him, there have been lots of nasty dictatorships, but by golly we saved them from the Communists.' I will concede that Arbenz was radical, but I think we could have lived with him, and I don't believe a Soviet take-over of Central America was a real danger in 1954. Latin American socialists are concerned with their own domestic issues, not with taking orders from the Kremlin. When Coolidge put the Samoza family in power in Nicaragua (1927) he claimed to be protecting them from "Mexican Bolshevism". How absurd! Talking about the Cubans and Russians in Latin American is just as absurd today. Coolidge's real motives were the same as Eisenhower's in Guatemala and Nixon's in Chile: to protect large US companies operating in the regions.
mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (08/16/83)
Surely Theodore Hope's message on Arbenz was a joke, even though he didn't put the expected :-) sign on it. A message that says we had to get rid of someone because he was doing good things for his country, signed using the name "Hope", has to be a joke. Martin Taylor