Not the kind of history I would typically read, but nonetheless it was very interesting. It’s fascinating that the United States had its own version of the East India Company known as UFCO. The authors are clearly fans of Arbenz and underplay the socialist tendencies that worried the United States so much. The book clearly shows just how terrible US intervention is and how it led to the problems that exist today in Guatemala and the West. ( )

I'm not sure how much I agree or disagree, because this is basically the only book I have read about the topic.
It is one of the few books I could find that dealt with Guatemalan history exclusively. I need to reread it now that I got the basics down, and maybe I'll get more of their particular point of view.

Their main thesis, as I remember it (because I write this 6 years after having read the book) is that the intervention in Guatemala in '55 was more due to the Arbenz government being a threat to the personal interests of some relevant officials than about a genuine threat to the US as a whole.

According to Kinzer and Schlesinger, the threat of a communist takeover of Guatemala was used to sell the intervention as vital to the American public interest, and the documented (also accepted by the authors) connections of Arbenz to leftist groups are explained away as simple alliance making in a government that had a strong opposition.

The main point that was unclear to me is how important the UFCO really was to US government officials, which seems to be the core of the argument of the book.

I cannot go into much more detail because I lack it, I read this book a long time ago. ( )

I'm too pissed to write a review. And if I did, I would probably get hate mail from American apologists and "patriots" who continually claim the U.S. is THE greatest nation on earth because we only act morally. ( )

GUAT-28