Preface: Continuing from the previous piece. This article was co-written with ChatGPT.

Bernays was explicit in his belief that lies are an inefficient tool for long-term persuasion. Lies are easily exposed, and once uncovered, they rapidly erode trust. A communication system that loses trust cannot operate sustainably. For this reason, Bernays was never interested in deception that merely “works once,” but in building opinion structures that could function reliably over time. His rejection of lying was not primarily moral, but functional: lies lack systemic durability.

From this premise, Bernays advanced a crucial insight: facts do not automatically generate meaning. Facts are inherently fragmented, and meaning is not embedded within them—it is assigned. Public opinion is never a simple aggregation of facts, but the result of organization and structure. Accordingly, the core task of propaganda is not to invent facts, but to decide which facts are presented, how they are ordered, how they are interpreted, and how they are linked into a coherent narrative. Meaning arises not from facts themselves, but from the relationships constructed between them.

At this level, Bernays emphasized that selection is unavoidable. Even when one claims to practice “objective reporting,” one cannot escape structural choice: what to cover, what to omit, which headlines to use, and where to place a story. These decisions already shape interpretation. Bernays did not invent bias; he made explicit what was usually concealed—that neutrality does not mean the absence of structure, but the refusal to acknowledge it.

This clarification also addresses a common misunderstanding: Bernays’ concept of propaganda is not equivalent to “brainwashing.” He rejected the notion that individuals are passive containers into which ideas can simply be poured. On the contrary, he argued that people respond only within preexisting psychological structures, emotional patterns, and social identities. His aim was therefore not to transform beliefs wholesale, but to activate, amplify, and rearrange tendencies that already existed.

As a result, Bernays relied less on logical argument than on fear, identification, shame, honor, and conformity. He did not seek to manufacture new desires, but to reconfigure existing emotional resources so that a particular attitude would feel natural and effortless.

This approach is clearly illustrated in the case of United Fruit Company and Guatemala.

From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Guatemala’s core problem was not ideology but weak state capacity: fragile public finances, limited infrastructure, and heavy dependence on a single export economy. The government sought foreign capital through concessionary arrangements, trading land and privileges for railways, ports, and export infrastructure. United Fruit entered under these conditions and gradually acquired influence that exceeded ordinary commercial activity.

At the land level, United Fruit accumulated large tracts of high-quality agricultural land through preferential terms, much of which remained idle. This land structure constrained access for local farmers and potential competitors, while sharply limiting the state’s ability to implement agricultural or land-use policy.

In transportation and logistics, the company—through affiliated firms—controlled railways linking plantations to ports and participated in operating key port facilities. Although formally private assets, these networks functioned as national infrastructure, restricting the government’s ability to enforce trade or transport policy independently.

Control over rail and port systems also produced informational asymmetries. Access to transport, pricing, and market information translated into structural bargaining power, while the state’s delayed access further weakened governance capacity.

At the fiscal level, United Fruit consistently undervalued land and assets for tax purposes, resulting in extremely low effective taxation. Given the state’s already limited revenue base, taxation ceased to function as a regulatory tool, and fiscal authority was effectively hollowed out through corporate reporting practices.

In labor relations, the company maintained closed employment systems in areas under its control. Workers depended on the firm for employment, housing, and basic necessities, making labor disputes difficult to address through national legal frameworks. Regulatory authority was displaced by internal corporate governance.

Together, these dynamics produced a situation in which the state retained formal sovereignty but lacked effective control over land, transport, revenue, labor, and exports. Policy space shrank to the narrow range that did not challenge corporate interests, and attempts at reform triggered systemic resistance.

It was within this structure that Jacobo Árbenz assumed office. Árbenz was elected president within Guatemala’s constitutional framework (1951–1954), not through revolution or coup. His reform agenda was not primarily ideological, but aimed at restoring the state’s basic capacity to allocate land, taxation, and public resources.

Land reform became central for structural reasons. Large areas of productive land were held idle, while the majority of rural workers lacked access to farmland. Agricultural productivity stagnated, and rural poverty intensified. The 1952 agrarian reform law distinguished between productive and idle land, authorizing expropriation only of the latter and compensating owners based on existing tax valuations. This design did not abolish private property; it sought to increase land utilization.

It was precisely the compensation mechanism that exposed the system’s internal contradiction. Longstanding underreporting of land values had been tolerated for tax purposes, but when compensation was calculated on that basis, the practice rebounded against its beneficiaries. The conflict was no longer about isolated losses, but about whether the state could again exercise sovereignty according to its own laws.

In this structural confrontation, Bernays’ role lay not in legal negotiations or domestic politics, but in narrative construction. His intervention reframed a conflict over governance and corporate power into an ideological and security issue. Land law, taxation, and compensation were displaced by labels such as “leftist government,” “communist infiltration,” and “Soviet influence in the Western Hemisphere.”

At the same time, corporate interests were deliberately obscured. United Fruit avoided direct public advocacy, while journalists, academics, and policy commentators supplied ostensibly independent analyses that converged on the same conclusions. The effect was the appearance of broad consensus rather than corporate lobbying.

This narrative work did not itself cause the coup, but it reshaped the environment in which intervention became politically defensible. By the time the CIA launched Operation PBSUCCESS, the threat narrative was already established, lowering the political cost of action.

In this sense, Bernays did not overthrow the Guatemalan government. He helped create the conditions in which overthrowing it became reasonable, intelligible, and politically survivable within the United States. In mass democracies, it is often this prior construction of legitimacy—rather than direct command—that determines how history unfolds.