University of Virginia Library

Trouble To The South

The rapidly deteriorating situation in
Guatemala shows the danger created by
our national obsession with Vietnam at the
expense of the rest of the world, particularly
our own hemisphere. The United States appears
to be making the same mistake-moral
as well as political-that we have
made in Southeast Asia by again backing a
corrupt, unrepresentative government in the
capital instead of the indigenous agrarian
reformers who are fomenting revolt among
the peasantry. The major difference is that
while Vietnam's nationalistic reformers
turned to Communism in their confrontations
first with the French and Japanese
and then with the Americans, the Guatemalan
revolutionists have yet to orient
themselves formally toward Peking or Moscow.

This is not to say that there are no
Communists among the revolutionists in that
country. But it is far from sure that we
still have a chance to guarantee that the
social democrats rather than the Communists
will form the next Guatemalan government.
The identification of the United
States with the ruling oligarchy is so great
and our military aid to the government's
army is so complete that it may be too
late to back the forces that truly represent
the ideals the United States is founded
upon.

The most eloquent testimony of this
impending disaster for American diplomacy
is that of Father Blase Bonpane, a young
Catholic priest who worked in rural Guatemala
as a colleague of the two American
priests and a nun who recently joined the
revolutionary movement there. "Guatemala
smells like South Vietnam a few years
ago," Father Bonpane wrote in the Washington
Post two weeks ago. He cited the
military advisers, the corrupt power structure,
the fear of communism to the point
of paranoia, the hatred of North American
power, the poverty and malnutrition and
high infant mortality among the discontented
population, the 2 per cent of the people
who possess 80 per cent of the land.

"American activities so far in the
smoldering Guatemalan civil war suggest
that the United States, in betrayal of its
highest ideals, is preparing to take on the
futile task of commanding the tides of
freedom to roll back," the priest commented.
The lesson of Vietnam-that the
United States cannot and should not try
to contain or destroy popular revolution-unfortunately
has not been learned.