(NOTE: The following paragraphs are taken from pages 161-163 of Roland H. Ebel’s MISUNDERSTOOD CAUDILLO: Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes and the Failure of Democracy in Guatemala. The relationship between Guatemala and Mexico is an important one for us Belizeans to monitor, given that we are sandwiched between the two republics.)

OPERATION DRAKE

Guatemalan President Ydigoras’ strong measures against Mexican poachers enabled him to begin his second year in power surrounded by a wave of euphoria. However, it was not to last long and he would, by March, be seeking a way to restore diplomatic relations with his northern neighbor.

Guatemala had claimed the twelve-mile limit since 1940 and while Mexico never officially contested this, neither had it imposed any sanctions on its fishing boats that were violating Guatemalan waters. It had not had to, since Guatemala had never had a navy capable of defending its claim. However, the Ydigoras administration had moved to stimulate the shrimping industry by buying five new shrimp boats and by seeking private American capital for a joint venture. However, both foreign and local investors were concerned about the inability of the government to control poaching. Thus, on December 31, 1959, when Mexican shrimpers came to within two to three miles of the Guatemalan shoreline, Ydigoras launched Operation Drake (named after Sir Francis Drake, the sixteenth century pirate, a term he applied to the Mexican shrimpers) which resulted in the machine-gunning of some sixteen Mexican shrimp boats with a number of dead and wounded. The President claimed that these “pirate ships” were not only robbing Guatemala of great quantities of fish and shrimp, but were also making furtive landings along the coast with contraband arms and drugs.

Mexico, which claimed that the boats had been fired on in Mexican waters, sent a formal note of protest demanding the return of all captured vessels and fishermen, and reparations for the families of the Mexicans killed or wounded. When Guatemala rebuffed these demands, the Mexican foreign minister, Manuel Tello, called for the dispute to be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the Hague. However, riding a wave of nationalistic passion, Ydigoras again refused on the ground that ordinary police actions did not require international mediation. Mexico broke diplomatic relations with Guatemala on January 23 and Guatemala sent troops to within five kilometers of the border. While the Ydigoras government threatened to retaliate further by restricting its Mexican trade, cooler heads began to assess the dangers of taking that step. Guatemala depended on the Mexican government to control arbencista exiles living there. Furthermore, some products could be purchased more cheaply from Mexico than from the United States or Europe. Finally, Guatemala had a largely undefended border in the Peten which was subject to incursion by Mexico or by dissidents seeking to foment rebellion. By now the hottest passions had cooled and President Ydigoras was being criticized by the press for acting precipitously.

Thus, Guatemala returned the dead and wounded to Mexico immediately, and the captured shrimp boats just over a month later. Ydigoras also launched quiet discussions on the possibility of restoring diplomatic relations. Negotiations limped along for another six months until September 15 when, on Independence Day, the President was able to announce that Guatemalan-Mexican ties had been restored—although not under terms particularly favorable to Guatemala.

However, he had little choice but to get whatever terms he could and put the affair behind him. The immediate political benefits he had obtained by his actions had long since dissipated and a range of political pressures had built up against him.

Why had President Ydigoras been willing to risk war with a neighbor almost twenty times the size of Guatemala? Most theories center on his Machiavellian approach to the recuperation of Belize. One writer has propounded the theory that Ydigoras had struck a secret deal with the United States to provoke Mexico into violating the Guatemalan border in order to put the lie to that country’s “non-intervention ” stance—particularly as it related to Cuba – in order to ingratiate the regime with the U.S. State Department. There is no documentary evidence to support this. However, Francisco Villagran Kramer argues that the Mexican incursion provided an opportunity for the President to generate national support for a military action and to prepare the Guatemalan army for the eventual recuperation of Belize. Miguel Ydigoras Laparra agrees with much of this assessment. President Ydigoras did see the poaching problem as a pretext to test the mobilizational capacities of the army with the possibility of using it to intervene in Belize, but his order of priorities were to protect the fledgling fishing industry, to test the capabilities of the army, and to diminish civilian mistrust of the military. 

(AMANDALA Ed. Note: en.wictionary.org defines “arbencista”, mentioned in the third paragraph above, as “a supporter of Jacobo Árbenz, Guatemalan soldier and politician”.

According to en.wikipedia.org, “Árbenz ran in the presidential elections that were held in 1950 and without significant opposition defeated Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, his nearest challenger, by a margin of over 50%.” “He took office on 15 March 1951, and continued the social reform policies of his predecessor. These reforms included an expanded right to vote, the ability of workers to organize, legitimizing political parties, and allowing public debate. The centerpiece of his policy was an agrarian reform law under which uncultivated portions of large land-holdings were expropriated in return for compensation and redistributed to poverty-stricken agricultural laborers. Approximately 500,000 people benefited from the decree. The majority of them were indigenous people, whose forebears had been dispossessed after the Spanish invasion.

“His policies ran afoul of the United Fruit Company, which lobbied the United States government to have him overthrown. The U.S. was also concerned by the presence of communists in the Guatemalan government, and Árbenz was ousted in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état engineered by the government of U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower through the U.S. Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency. Árbenz went into exile through several countries, where his family gradually fell apart, and his daughter committed suicide. He died in Mexico in 1971. In October 2011, the Guatemalan government issued an apology for Árbenz’s overthrow.”)