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The Turning Point. In such a sure-of-himself mood, Arbenz and his wife spent a sociable evening last December 18 with the newly arrived U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy and his wife. The President, articulate and outspoken, set forth his views and aims in full detail. Peurifoy listened until 2 a.m., covering up his increasing amazement. Next day he wrote an urgent report to the State Department. It was never made public, but later events plainly indicate that it must have boiled down to something like this: "Maybe this man doesn't actually think of himself as a Communist, but he'll sure do until one comes along." Career Man Peurifoy, who helped hold postwar Greece for the West, was in Guatemala as a troubleshooter. Earlier U.S. ambassadors had had simpler tasks; in the '30s, they simply kept contact with Dictator Ubico, who, as a great & good friend of the U.S.-owned United Fruit Co., once marched troops into Guatemala's Congress to force the Deputies to pass a bill giving the firm a concession to its present- Tiquisate banana plantation. Even under Arévalo, the notion of a Communist capture of the government was still farfetched; if Arana had shot Arbenz (as he may have intended), the Reds would have been stopped.
As it was, they were neither stopped nor stopping, and Peurifoy's report, bucked right up to President Eisenhower, signaled a sharp turn in U.S. policy toward Guatemala. Hand-wringing stopped and action started. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles himself formed the plan, and carried out its first step at the Caracas Conference of the Organization of American States: a resolution that Communist domination of a Western Hemisphere republic would call for consultation by OAS foreign ministers on moves to head off Red penetration. Guatemala's startling answer, in mid-May, was to import—under false manifests, on a Swedish freighter out of Stettin in Red Poland—2,000 tons of arms and munitions from Red Czechoslovakia. The shipment added up to more than all the arms received in all Central America in the previous 30 years; it completely upset the military balance of the area, and made some kind of blowoff inevitable.
Tampering Fingers. A depressing number of Latin Americans (and North Americans), refusing to take Guatemalan Communism seriously, have long insisted that the State Department's alarm was only a pretext for some kind of intervention on behalf of the banana-growing United Fruit Co. Arbenz' Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello has made shrewd propaganda use of this. But Guatemala's explosive purchase of Red arms in such quantity made the Kremlin's tampering fingers visible to the most myopic. Dulles further stressed that Communism, not the banana business, is the U.S.'s main concern in Guatemala. Said he: "If they gave a gold piece for every banana, the problem would still be Communist infiltration." The State Department brought up to date a 56-page documentary report on Communism in Guatemala, sent it to the hemisphere's chancelleries, and got hemisphere backing (except, of course, from Guatemala) for a consultative meeting of foreign ministers to be held in Montevideo around July 1.