Fighting the “Insatiable Octopus”: Revolutionary Nationalism and the Enclave, 1944–54

While previous scholars have examined the “Guatemalan Spring,” as the decade of democratic opening of 1944 to 1954 came to be known, there is little understanding of the forces that gave the period its revolutionary nationalist thrust. This paper reexamines questions of national sovereignty and economic self-determination that were so vital to the mass participation of social movements during this period. In particular, rather than focusing on the role of United Fruit in overthrowing president Jacobo Arbenz, as diplomatic historians tend to do, this paper reconsiders traditional historical conceptions of the foreign enclave itself, by placing the remote Caribbean coast and its diverse multiethnic migrant population at the very center of national politics. In their struggles with the United Fruit Company over wages and the redistribution of land, I contend, the men and women who lived and labored in the banana plantation enclave profoundly challenged the wider “banana republic” system as a whole.

Though historians have largely treated the CIA-sponsored coup as unchallenged by president Arbenz and an overwhelmed population, I will also examine the significant struggle waged by armed government supporters to prevent the overthrow and uphold the nation’s sovereignty. This paper, thus also raises questions over why much of this history of resistance has been erased.