Abstract

Minority Report

The whole misery and disgrace of current US. involvement with the "wrong side" in Central America began with the invasion of Guatemala in 1954. This invasion/coup was brought off by the usual suspect, U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon, the C.I.A., the United Fruit Company and other practitioners of destabilization. But in "Bitter Fruit" their exemplary account of the Guatemalan intervention, Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer also describe how solicitous the destabilizers were to the small but significant forces of liberalism and social democracy in the United States. A managing editor of "The New Leader" in the 1950s, Daniel James, wrote a book titled Red Design for the Americas, which provided a rationale for the destruction of Guatemalan democracy.