This man on the left is Jacobo Árbenz. On the right is Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed has gotten me to thinking about Árbenz. Here's why. Árbenz is the former President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954. At the time, Guatemala was one of the poorest countries in the world. The average wages were around $20 per year. By comparison, the impoverished African American community in America was making 40-times as much. And this was the precursor to the war on poverty. One company, the United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita), dominated the entire Guatemalan economy. It owned most of the railroads, roads, telegraph equipment, and so on. The UFC was actually worth more money (about $500 million--or $7 billion in today's standard--than the entire Guatemalan GDP. So it's not like they couldn't afford to pay their workers more. They jsut chose not to. Where else were workers going to go? So Arbanz decided to do something about it. A good chunk of Guatemala's land was owned by the UFC, but not farmed. It was just sitting there. Apart from that, the UFC claimed it was worth a lot less than it actually was. Arbanz's plan was simple. Buy the land for what the UFC said it was worth, and then provide loans to citizens at a reasonable rate so they could have their own farms and reduce poverty. Well now. This wasn't sitting too well with UFC. So they went and talked to their good buddies John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who ran U.S. foreign policy during the 1950s. President Dwight Eisenhower appointed John Foster as Secretary of State and Allen as Director of the CIA. Now, they both had strong financial ties to the UFC, but exactly how much is in dispute. But they definitely were connected. John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, had been a senior partner at the powerful law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. United Fruit was a client of Sullivan & Cromwell, and the firm performed legal work for UFC. John Foster Dulles personally worked on matters involving the company, including agreements connected to its operations in Guatemala. His brother Allen Dulles, Eisenhower's CIA director during the 1954 coup, had also been a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. He therefore came from the same law firm as his brother with the United Fruit relationship. There are some reports that he was on the UFC board, but I can't verify that. It went the other way too, with a former President of the UFC, Thomas Corcoran, and his relative, John Moors Cabot, connected to the Eisenhower Administration. So, to put it mildly, there was certainly more than a little bit of conflict of interest. So when Árbenz got elected, the Dulles brothers got to couping. Literally. They claimed Árbenz was a Communist. He wasn't. He was just a danger to unfettered and unregulated capitalism. The United States, through the Dulles brothers, sponsored a coup that ended with Arbanz dead and Carlos Castillo Armas in charge. Armas was a despot who ruled until he got assassinated three years later. And by then, Guatemala's democracy was destroyed, and they descended into a 36-year civil war that has more than a little to do with why we still have people from Guatemala requesting asylum. So the moral of the story is that when rich white uber-wealthy Americans start screaming that a brown person is a communist because he is challenging unfettered Capitalism. Pay attention. Things might not be what they say they are.