Every mans battle author
The official narrative was always suspicious. But Vargas Llosa takes up a subplot that remains murky: the murder of Castillo Armas, in 1957, and the part that Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, may have played in it. government cables dislodged through years of public-records requests, journalists and historians have been able to reconstruct the operation, from the roles of the State and Defense Departments and United Fruit (“ Bitter Fruit,” by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer) to the machinations of the C.I.A. To the novelist and political aspirant, the events in Guatemala hold an undeniable interest, and the historical record supplies a detailed plotline. Of writing the great novel in real life.”
#Every mans battle author full
“The moral obligation wasn’t the decisive factor,” she said, as he gamely recounts in his memoir, “ A Fish in the Water.” “It was the adventure, the illusion of living an experience full of excitement and risk. His wife at the time warned him that his motivations were not entirely pure. After becoming a vocal critic of Peru’s left-wing populist President in the late nineteen-eighties, Vargas Llosa ran for the job, in 1990, and lost. The man himself is no stranger to lofty ambitions. Of the nearly twenty novels to his name, some of his most memorable-“ Conversation in the Cathedral” (1969), “ The War of the End of the World” (1981), “ The Feast of the Goat” (2000)-are studies of the psychological warfare wrought by politics. The author has always been interested in the lures and predations of power. At eighty-five, Vargas Llosa is no longer just a man of letters but a pundit, with a syndicated column, and his pronouncements on politics generate their own news-in Peru, in his adopted home of Spain, and across Latin America. coup and its aftermath are the subject of “ Harsh Times” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a new novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate, which has been translated by Adrian Nathan West. Árbenz was flown into Mexican exile, but not before Castillo Armas forced him to strip to his underwear for the cameras as he boarded the plane. Ambassador, he was rewarded with the Presidency. In June, 1954, after an invasion staged with American bombers and choreographed by the U.S. (“He looked like he had been packaged by Bloomingdale’s,” one commentator said at the time.) His chief qualification was his willingness to do whatever the Americans told him. They eventually landed on Carlos Castillo Armas, a rogue Guatemalan military officer with dark, diminutive features and a toothbrush mustache, who came across as flighty and dim. and the United Fruit Company auditioned figures to lead a “Liberation” force against the government. “We should regard Guatemala as a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism,” a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s National Security Council said, in 1953.
It was the start of the Cold War, which made American officials into easy marks. government that Árbenz was a Communist sympathizer who needed to be overthrown. In response, United Fruit unleashed a relentless lobbying campaign to persuade journalists, lawmakers, and the U.S. Weren’t monopolies considered anathema in the U.S., too? A moderate institutionalist, he argued that the law reflected his capitalist bona fides. To address the country’s rampant inequalities, including its feudal labor system, Árbenz passed an agrarian reform law to convert unused private land into smaller plots for peasants. Not only had the company been exempt for decades-it had also secured a guarantee that it would never have to pay its employees more than fifty cents a day.
He was trying to get United Fruit to pay taxes on its vast holdings. They formed, in his words, “an invisible government” with “true ruling power” over the U.S., to say nothing of the countries under American sway.īy 1952, the President of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, was fighting a battle he couldn’t win. Running United Fruit’s publicity department, in New York, was a legendary adman who claimed to have a list of twenty-five thousand journalists, editors, and public figures at his beck and call. State Department officials had siblings in the upper ranks of the company. It was Guatemala’s largest employer and landowner, and it controlled the country’s only Atlantic port, almost every mile of the railroads, and the nation’s sole telephone and telegraph facilities. The other, an American corporation called the United Fruit Company, was known inside the country as the Octopus, because it had tentacles everywhere. There were two powers running Guatemala after the Second World War, and only one of them was the government.