Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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Thomas McCann, describes how the specialist they hired, Edward
Bernays, used his contacts with the Times to bring the Guatemalan
situation to their attention (as perceived by United Fruit) by 1951,
inducing them to send publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger to inspect at the
company’s invitation, witnessing a “Communist riot”—“a first-class
public relations coup” by Bernays. The material successfully marketed in
the press also included faked atrocity photos, and of course the whole
US-fabricated story about the Bolshevik conspiracy overturned by
patriotic Guatemalans. McCann later wrote that “a great deal of the
news of Central America which appeared in the North American press
was supplied, edited and sometimes made by United Fruit’s public
relations department in New York,” though “It is difficult to make a
convincing case for manipulation of the press when the victims proved
so eager for the experience.” 203 The US government and its associates in
executive suites hardly need a separate state propaganda apparatus as
long as they can count on the Arthur Krocks and Times journalists and
editorial writers.
Summarizing these events on June 29, 1954, the Times editors
concluded:
The answer to communism in Guatemala and in other countries is
not reaction but liberal reform. The road is a long one. This
country [the US] may have made mistakes over the years past and
in this particular episode. Now it is for us to show ourselves warm
and intelligent friends of all the people of Guatemala.
And so we have been doing for 30 years, destroying agrarian reform,
installing and maintaining murderous tyranny, slaughtering the natives
and arming the killers and torturers, looking the other way as the longsuffering
Mayans are subjected to near-genocidal assaults and slave and