At Christmas 2021, I had a shock. One of my daughters, Raquel, gave me as a gift the latest novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, “Tiempos recios” which is set against the backdrop of the events in Guatemala in 1954 and the overthrow of President Jacob Arbenz by manoeuvres organised by the CIA on behalf of the US government.
My daughter knows what I think of Vargas Llosa, but she also knows that the subject of the coup in Guatemala interests me and the book, moreover, is very well written and crafted. Jacob Arbens was a nationalist military man, of Christian background, whose great dream was to transform Guatemala into a small United States, for him a democratic country, where workers could organise themselves into unions, and peasants did not go hungry as in small Guatemala.
But this was of no interest to United Fruit, which had a monopoly on the production and sale of fruit throughout Central America and in some other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Guatemala, and which, moreover, paid no taxes. It was necessary to overthrow President Jacobo Arbens and to do this the solution was to manipulate world public opinion, beginning with that of the United States, convincing everyone that Arbens was going to transform Guatemala, so close to the United States, into a colony of the Soviet Union. It was all a lie, the North Americans knew it and it was there that they started manoeuvres that they would repeat for the following decades, in several countries of the region, including Brazil in 1964.
In the first paragraph of the book, Vargas Llosa states that although unknown to the general public and not visibly present in the history books among the most influential people in the destiny of Guatemala and all Central America (I would say Latin America) in the 20th century one cannot fail to mention the most important. They were Edward L. Bernays and Ed Sam Zamurrai, the latter a Russian Jew who went to the United States and there, out of nothing, built an empire, American Fruit.
Edward L. Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, is considered the father of Public Relations, a specialty that he built and that even guided US universities, in their communication and administration courses, to create a career in public relations. And which, as seen in Guatemala, became, as Llosa says, “the main political, social and economic weapon of the 20th century”. Zamurray dominated banana production in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia and several Caribbean islands”.
Bernays, on the other hand, a nice, pleasant, intelligent guy, was a publicist who had privileged contacts with representatives of the diplomatic, political and financial world, including bankers, directors of newspapers, television channels and radio stations. In his book “Propaganda” whose first edition dates back to 1928, he stated that “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society. Those who manipulate this unknown mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the real power in our country. The intelligent minority needs to make continuous and systematic use of propaganda.”
In February 1972, on my first trip to the United States, invited to establish contact with the best communication programmes and courses in the United States, a meeting with Barneys was included in the programme. Freud’s nephew, then around eighty years old, received me at his home, in a nice neighborhood of Boston, offered me tea and biscuits, talked a lot about how he developed the public relations courses in US universities, asked many questions about what we were doing at UnB – University of Brasilia- , and, at the end, gave me a copy of his main book with a nice dedication. This copy is now in a special collection in the library of the Federal University of Minas Gerais.
Resuming the thread of the story, Zamurray and Bernays got together and promoted the first great campaign reaching public opinion in the United States and all over the world, using, on the ground, Protestant pastors and Catholic priests. With this, he also promoted the consumption of bananas as an indispensable food, using the charms of the Luso-Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda, whom he discovered and brought to the United States. Carmen Miranda was famous for the films in which she adorned herself with bananas and sang “Chiquita bacana lá da Martinica, dresses herself with a banana peel…”.
United Fruit, however felt that this was not enough and that if Jacobo Arbens was not eliminated, the company would have to pay taxes, the peasants would become landowners, the company’s workers would unite in unions. Bernays took it upon himself to convince the US government, prestigious newspapers and magazines like the New York Times and the Times, that a Soviet republic was being installed in America’s backyard. He was not interested in the publications that the Republicans read. They did not need to be convinced. He tried to convince the newspapers considered liberal, left-wing, which were closer to the Democrats even then. And he succeeded in elaborating a methodology that, from then on, was always used in Latin America to overthrow democratic governments.
Barneys knew it was all a lie. The Jacobo Arbens that we students of the late fifties and early sixties worshipped had nothing revolutionary about him. He was, at most, a social democrat. He had no contact with the Soviet Union. His dream was to create, in Central America, a political model similar to that of the United States. Bernays knew that everything he told about Guatemala was a lie.
He was also responsible for other spectacular actions. In the first part of the 20th century, smoking was not seen as a good thing for women. Bernays spent fortunes of cigarette companies hiring Hollywood stars in scenes and photographs that made women find smoking charming and seductive. With this, we can say today, he encouraged practices that surely led to the death by cancer of thousands of human beings, including, exactly two years ago, on 25 November 2020, that of my wife, Sonia.
In other words, that is where the shock I got when I read the book my daughter gave me for Christmas comes from. The person who treated me best on my first visit to the United States, the one whose memory, until then, was linked to one of the best moments of that visit to the academic world of the great country of the North, was a manipulator, a liar, responsible for the overthrow of several democratic governments in Latin America. In short, he was the predecessor, the one who laid the foundations of the current fake news system that is doing so much harm to democracy around the world and to Brazil in particular.
Related Posts
At Christmas 2021, I had a shock. One of my daughters, Raquel, gave me as a gift the latest novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, “Tiempos recios” which is set against the backdrop of the events in Guatemala in 1954 and the overthrow of President Jacob Arbenz by manoeuvres organised by the CIA on behalf of the US government.
My daughter knows what I think of Vargas Llosa, but she also knows that the subject of the coup in Guatemala interests me and the book, moreover, is very well written and crafted. Jacob Arbens was a nationalist military man, of Christian background, whose great dream was to transform Guatemala into a small United States, for him a democratic country, where workers could organise themselves into unions, and peasants did not go hungry as in small Guatemala.
But this was of no interest to United Fruit, which had a monopoly on the production and sale of fruit throughout Central America and in some other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Guatemala, and which, moreover, paid no taxes. It was necessary to overthrow President Jacobo Arbens and to do this the solution was to manipulate world public opinion, beginning with that of the United States, convincing everyone that Arbens was going to transform Guatemala, so close to the United States, into a colony of the Soviet Union. It was all a lie, the North Americans knew it and it was there that they started manoeuvres that they would repeat for the following decades, in several countries of the region, including Brazil in 1964.
In the first paragraph of the book, Vargas Llosa states that although unknown to the general public and not visibly present in the history books among the most influential people in the destiny of Guatemala and all Central America (I would say Latin America) in the 20th century one cannot fail to mention the most important. They were Edward L. Bernays and Ed Sam Zamurrai, the latter a Russian Jew who went to the United States and there, out of nothing, built an empire, American Fruit.
Edward L. Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, is considered the father of Public Relations, a specialty that he built and that even guided US universities, in their communication and administration courses, to create a career in public relations. And which, as seen in Guatemala, became, as Llosa says, “the main political, social and economic weapon of the 20th century”. Zamurray dominated banana production in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia and several Caribbean islands”.
Bernays, on the other hand, a nice, pleasant, intelligent guy, was a publicist who had privileged contacts with representatives of the diplomatic, political and financial world, including bankers, directors of newspapers, television channels and radio stations. In his book “Propaganda” whose first edition dates back to 1928, he stated that “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society. Those who manipulate this unknown mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the real power in our country. The intelligent minority needs to make continuous and systematic use of propaganda.”
In February 1972, on my first trip to the United States, invited to establish contact with the best communication programmes and courses in the United States, a meeting with Barneys was included in the programme. Freud’s nephew, then around eighty years old, received me at his home, in a nice neighborhood of Boston, offered me tea and biscuits, talked a lot about how he developed the public relations courses in US universities, asked many questions about what we were doing at UnB – University of Brasilia- , and, at the end, gave me a copy of his main book with a nice dedication. This copy is now in a special collection in the library of the Federal University of Minas Gerais.
Resuming the thread of the story, Zamurray and Bernays got together and promoted the first great campaign reaching public opinion in the United States and all over the world, using, on the ground, Protestant pastors and Catholic priests. With this, he also promoted the consumption of bananas as an indispensable food, using the charms of the Luso-Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda, whom he discovered and brought to the United States. Carmen Miranda was famous for the films in which she adorned herself with bananas and sang “Chiquita bacana lá da Martinica, dresses herself with a banana peel…”.
United Fruit, however felt that this was not enough and that if Jacobo Arbens was not eliminated, the company would have to pay taxes, the peasants would become landowners, the company’s workers would unite in unions. Bernays took it upon himself to convince the US government, prestigious newspapers and magazines like the New York Times and the Times, that a Soviet republic was being installed in America’s backyard. He was not interested in the publications that the Republicans read. They did not need to be convinced. He tried to convince the newspapers considered liberal, left-wing, which were closer to the Democrats even then. And he succeeded in elaborating a methodology that, from then on, was always used in Latin America to overthrow democratic governments.
Barneys knew it was all a lie. The Jacobo Arbens that we students of the late fifties and early sixties worshipped had nothing revolutionary about him. He was, at most, a social democrat. He had no contact with the Soviet Union. His dream was to create, in Central America, a political model similar to that of the United States. Bernays knew that everything he told about Guatemala was a lie.
He was also responsible for other spectacular actions. In the first part of the 20th century, smoking was not seen as a good thing for women. Bernays spent fortunes of cigarette companies hiring Hollywood stars in scenes and photographs that made women find smoking charming and seductive. With this, we can say today, he encouraged practices that surely led to the death by cancer of thousands of human beings, including, exactly two years ago, on 25 November 2020, that of my wife, Sonia.
In other words, that is where the shock I got when I read the book my daughter gave me for Christmas comes from. The person who treated me best on my first visit to the United States, the one whose memory, until then, was linked to one of the best moments of that visit to the academic world of the great country of the North, was a manipulator, a liar, responsible for the overthrow of several democratic governments in Latin America. In short, he was the predecessor, the one who laid the foundations of the current fake news system that is doing so much harm to democracy around the world and to Brazil in particular.
Related Posts
At Christmas 2021, I had a shock. One of my daughters, Raquel, gave me as a gift the latest novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, “Tiempos recios” which is set against the backdrop of the events in Guatemala in 1954 and the overthrow of President Jacob Arbenz by manoeuvres organised by the CIA on behalf of the US government.
My daughter knows what I think of Vargas Llosa, but she also knows that the subject of the coup in Guatemala interests me and the book, moreover, is very well written and crafted. Jacob Arbens was a nationalist military man, of Christian background, whose great dream was to transform Guatemala into a small United States, for him a democratic country, where workers could organise themselves into unions, and peasants did not go hungry as in small Guatemala.
But this was of no interest to United Fruit, which had a monopoly on the production and sale of fruit throughout Central America and in some other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Guatemala, and which, moreover, paid no taxes. It was necessary to overthrow President Jacobo Arbens and to do this the solution was to manipulate world public opinion, beginning with that of the United States, convincing everyone that Arbens was going to transform Guatemala, so close to the United States, into a colony of the Soviet Union. It was all a lie, the North Americans knew it and it was there that they started manoeuvres that they would repeat for the following decades, in several countries of the region, including Brazil in 1964.
In the first paragraph of the book, Vargas Llosa states that although unknown to the general public and not visibly present in the history books among the most influential people in the destiny of Guatemala and all Central America (I would say Latin America) in the 20th century one cannot fail to mention the most important. They were Edward L. Bernays and Ed Sam Zamurrai, the latter a Russian Jew who went to the United States and there, out of nothing, built an empire, American Fruit.
Edward L. Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, is considered the father of Public Relations, a specialty that he built and that even guided US universities, in their communication and administration courses, to create a career in public relations. And which, as seen in Guatemala, became, as Llosa says, “the main political, social and economic weapon of the 20th century”. Zamurray dominated banana production in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia and several Caribbean islands”.
Bernays, on the other hand, a nice, pleasant, intelligent guy, was a publicist who had privileged contacts with representatives of the diplomatic, political and financial world, including bankers, directors of newspapers, television channels and radio stations. In his book “Propaganda” whose first edition dates back to 1928, he stated that “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society. Those who manipulate this unknown mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the real power in our country. The intelligent minority needs to make continuous and systematic use of propaganda.”
In February 1972, on my first trip to the United States, invited to establish contact with the best communication programmes and courses in the United States, a meeting with Barneys was included in the programme. Freud’s nephew, then around eighty years old, received me at his home, in a nice neighborhood of Boston, offered me tea and biscuits, talked a lot about how he developed the public relations courses in US universities, asked many questions about what we were doing at UnB – University of Brasilia- , and, at the end, gave me a copy of his main book with a nice dedication. This copy is now in a special collection in the library of the Federal University of Minas Gerais.
Resuming the thread of the story, Zamurray and Bernays got together and promoted the first great campaign reaching public opinion in the United States and all over the world, using, on the ground, Protestant pastors and Catholic priests. With this, he also promoted the consumption of bananas as an indispensable food, using the charms of the Luso-Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda, whom he discovered and brought to the United States. Carmen Miranda was famous for the films in which she adorned herself with bananas and sang “Chiquita bacana lá da Martinica, dresses herself with a banana peel…”.
United Fruit, however felt that this was not enough and that if Jacobo Arbens was not eliminated, the company would have to pay taxes, the peasants would become landowners, the company’s workers would unite in unions. Bernays took it upon himself to convince the US government, prestigious newspapers and magazines like the New York Times and the Times, that a Soviet republic was being installed in America’s backyard. He was not interested in the publications that the Republicans read. They did not need to be convinced. He tried to convince the newspapers considered liberal, left-wing, which were closer to the Democrats even then. And he succeeded in elaborating a methodology that, from then on, was always used in Latin America to overthrow democratic governments.
Barneys knew it was all a lie. The Jacobo Arbens that we students of the late fifties and early sixties worshipped had nothing revolutionary about him. He was, at most, a social democrat. He had no contact with the Soviet Union. His dream was to create, in Central America, a political model similar to that of the United States. Bernays knew that everything he told about Guatemala was a lie.
He was also responsible for other spectacular actions. In the first part of the 20th century, smoking was not seen as a good thing for women. Bernays spent fortunes of cigarette companies hiring Hollywood stars in scenes and photographs that made women find smoking charming and seductive. With this, we can say today, he encouraged practices that surely led to the death by cancer of thousands of human beings, including, exactly two years ago, on 25 November 2020, that of my wife, Sonia.
In other words, that is where the shock I got when I read the book my daughter gave me for Christmas comes from. The person who treated me best on my first visit to the United States, the one whose memory, until then, was linked to one of the best moments of that visit to the academic world of the great country of the North, was a manipulator, a liar, responsible for the overthrow of several democratic governments in Latin America. In short, he was the predecessor, the one who laid the foundations of the current fake news system that is doing so much harm to democracy around the world and to Brazil in particular.
