Chronicle of Terrorism Foretold: Miguel Ángel Asturias’s “¡Americanos todos!” and 9/11
Keywords:
1954 US military coup in Guatemala, Miguel Ángel Asturias, State-sponsored terrorismAbstract
Acts of terror committed by extremist organizations tend to garner more media attention, but state-sponsored terrorism is far more deadly. Guatemala will mark, in 2024, the 70th anniversary of the CIA-orchestrated military coup that overthrew a democracy whose moderate agrarian reform threatened the economic interests of transnational corporations like the United Fruit company as well as local elites. Future Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias, incensed by this violent foreign intervention that cut short the progress achieved during what historians have called the Ten Years of Spring (1944-54) of Guatemalan democracy, penned a collection of eight short stories, Week-end en Guatemala, that denounce this covert US operation and its disastrous repercussions for his homeland. The anthology’s second story, “¡Americanos todos!,” offers a textbook illustration of “blowback,” a term coined by the CIA and popularized by political scientist Chalmers Johnson to refer to the unintended consequences that result from policies and covert activities hidden from the American people. In addition to narrating a cautionary tale that showcases the bitter fruits of the US government’s violent intervention in Guatemala in the aftermath of the coup, this masterful piece of short fiction anticipates the tragic events of 9/11, and nearly seven decades later, makes the case against covert military operations and for the fraternal ideal expressed in the story’s title of Americans, and by extension, humans all.
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