You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. Today I'm talking to Rachel Nolan, who teaches Latin American history at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, and has a piece in the current issue of the LRB on the 1954 coup in Guatemala and its aftermath. The piece is a review of Mario Vargasiosso's most recent novel, Harsh Times. Hello, Rachel. Thank you very much for joining me. Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

We'll get on to Vargasiosa in a bit, but let's begin with what happened in 1954 with the events of the coup.

And maybe you could just talk to see what happened.

Sure. So the 1954 coup in Guatemala is an event that I'm always surprised people haven't heard of because it's even

somewhat funny if you aren't a Guatemalan whose government was overthrown, of course.

So what happened in 1954 is that Guatemala was a tiny Central American country that most

people in the United States had never heard of. However, it had overthrown decades of sort of semi-feudal dictatorship in 1945 with the

opening of what was called the Democratic Spring or the Guatemalan Spring. So Guatemans had

had open elections and elected presidents freely and fairly for the first time. However, this

grew to concern the United States because one of the democratically elected presidents,

Hacobo Arbans, began a systematic land reform. And this wouldn't have been an issue,

right? A small Central American country undergoing land reform.

Why did the United States care? They cared because one of the largest corporations in the United States at that time was United Fruit, which made an absolute boatload of money by shipping

bananas in to the United States and around the world from various Central American countries.

They were known as El Pulpo, the octopus, because they had their tentacles in every aspect of

Guatemalan economy.

So they controlled the railroads.

They controlled the electrical system, et cetera, et cetera.

And they had generally enjoyed enormous political influence in Guatemala.

So when the land reform came around in 1952, the United

Fruit said, no, no, no, this will ruin our business, absolutely. And so they hired a publicist

who happened to be Sigmund Freud's nephew to kind of promote the idea in the United States

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