In the countryside, the Greek military launched offensives against the villages of these rebels, with the help of U.S. intelligence agents and napalm bombs. What the Americans did not know, the Greeks never forgot; a Communist Party member told me in 2010 that the Americans “first tested” napalm on the Greeks (it was after they used it on the Japanese during World War II). Those years also saw the first counterinsurgency operation in America’s history led by the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency, which in turn trained Greek intelligence agents in counterinsurgency and interrogation “techniques.” James Becket, a lawyer who later lived and worked in Greece as a representative of Amnesty International, wrote that all of this energy, money, and lives were expended for a myth, because in Greece “an omnipotent Communist Party taking orders from the communist monolith in Moscow does not exist.”
But at the time, it was dissenters within the American apparatus, like George Polk, who were labeled “not objective.” “In the Cold War lexicon,” Marton writes, “the word ‘objective’ had thus assumed a new meaning.” I wasn’t sure that legacy wasn’t still with us. Long ago, I had accepted that the foreign Communists of that period had been our true enemies—that Communists existed, in fact, wherever the Americans said they did. I never questioned their guilt; I certainly never thought that perhaps “enemy” might simply mean someone who believes in a different political system. The outlandishly brutal actions of America abroad in the 1950s required compensatory rationalizing language, a language equally violent in its distortion. It was a discourse that defined “objectivity”—indeed, “reality”—according to the requirements of American power, and that, as much as in Greece, was created in Latin America.
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THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR in Athens during that era was a man named John Peurifoy, and he became one of the primary executors of postwar American policy. Peurifoy was known to participate in Greek security meetings, even intervene in discussions at Parliament. When the Greeks were debating which electoral system they preferred—proportional representation, which most politicians favored, or a majority system, which the prime minister wanted—Peurifoy warned in so many words that if the Greeks chose the proportional system, he would cut off American aid. Today, a Greek friend told me, Greeks still use the word “Peurifoy” to refer to the bullying manner in which a foreigner condescends to Greeks.
After Greece, the State Department sent Peurifoy to Guatemala. “I have come to Guatemala to use the big stick,” he announced upon arrival. Guatemala’s popular new president, Jacobo Arbenz, had been implementing agrarian reforms, which to Americans seemed similar to those in Communist China. Guatemala, the Americans reasoned, threatened to go Communist as well. “Public opinion in the U.S. might force us to take some measures to prevent Guatemala from falling into the lap of international Communism,” Peurifoy told Time magazine. Overthrowing Arbenz was the CIA’s top priority, and in preparation they distributed violent how-to manuals to their Guatemalan conscripts, and began training them for war. On the day of the Guatemalan “revolution,” Guatemalans, organized by Peurifoy and the CIA, invaded Guatemala to overthrow Arbenz and liberate Guatemala from “communism.” If Greece was one of the Americans’ first occupied satellite states after World War II, Guatemala would count as one of its first military coups.
The coup in Guatemala, according to the British historian Alex von Tunzelmann, spurred “a shock wave of anti-American feeling” across Latin America. Pedro Mir, a Dominican poet, said at the time of Americans: “You do not want Walt Whitman, the Democrat, but another Whitman, atomic and savage.” If there is one region about which Americans know their imperial history, it’s likely Latin America: the United Fruit Company; Coca-Cola and Del Monte working with Latin American death squads; David Rockefeller’s Business Group for Latin America conspiring with the CIA to bring about coups; the School of the Americas, an American military college in Fort Benning, Georgia, which trained seemingly every Latin American dictator in, among other things, torture techniques. There is no place of such thoroughgoing capitalist-imperialist horror as Latin America. But there is a tendency among Americans, even those marginally well-read, to rely on a number of assumptions about their history—for example, that the Soviets did pose a genuine threat to the United States—which serves to diminish the emotional impact of such imperial actions. How else could we still think of the 1950s as a period of innocence? In fact, it was during this decade, and largely in Latin America, that the American government began to find rhetorical ways to deliberately obscure its intentions. When President Eisenhower observed that the word “capitalism” had become associated with imperialism, he was disturbed. From then on, according to von Tunzelmann, he decreed that capitalism would be replaced with words such as “free enterprise,” “the free world,” or, most simple, “freedom.”
As in Greece, there wasn’t as great a Communist threat throughout most of Latin America as the Americans believed. Most Latin Americans were religious, unlikely to be swayed by godless communism; and Stalin himself had little interest in a region he saw as “the obedient army of the United States.” But the right-wing dictators throughout Latin America seized on the United States’ irrational fear of communism, and conjured a Communist menace whenever necessary for their own power and survival. The Americans supported monsters like Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, as well as military regimes throughout South America, political eras from which those countries still have not recovered. “Do nothing to offend the dictators,” said the American secretary of state John Foster Dulles. “They are the only people we can depend on.” Years later, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would admit that the Kennedy administration simply did not understand the many shades of leftist and progressive politics in Latin America, or anywhere.