Premium Episode 144 - United Fruit Company, Blood Bananas and the Guatemalan Genocide pt. 11: Mormons in Guatemala

[originally published on Patreon March 18, 2024]

A brief parenthetical before continuing with the story of the Guatemalan genocide, I decided to do an episode just for me (and the like three other Mormon listeners) about the Mormon church in Guatemala, though I think this will still be instructive. 

The history begins with a Mormon named John Forres O’Donnal who was hired to the US Department of Agriculture’s new agency, the Office of Rubber Plant Investigations and sent to Guatemala and more or less developed Guatemala's rubber industry for US strategic purposes. More or less downstream from that, Mormonism began to flow as a consequence of his presence in the country. Church leaders visited and US missionaries began to arrive in the 1950s after the 1954 coup.

A former Mormon missionary who learned Mayan languages went back to BYU and worked on creating the Cakchiquel Basic Course through funding via a grant from the U.S. Department of Health, Education & Welfare; this was published in 1969, and then expanded and republished in 1977. It is very likely that this program also received NSA funding as discussed in the Puzzle Palace by James Bamford. In turn, this facility with Mayan languages would have been used during the Guatemalan Civil War for counterinsurgency purposes.

Then, I tell the story of Cordell Andersen, a biological warfare doctor from a family with a biological weapons background. Andersen served a mission in Guatemala; later in life he would relocate his family to Guatemala where he became a farmer/landowner, entrepreneur, and vaccination enthusiast. He ran the Foundation (sometimes the Center) for Indian Development and later on, the Guatemalan Foundation which attempted to win the hearts and minds of indigenous Guatemalans. The O'Donnal and Andersen families were accused of stealing and selling war orphans from Guatemala. I cover this particular story as far as I can take it and discuss the heinous yet common trade in children in Guatemala, both through orphanages and international adoptions, and the darker shit too. This, in turn, brings us back to the very far-right networks destabilizing Guatemala in the first place. I also discuss Alex Jones's family in Guatemala around the same time, which is to say, the various and variously-supported pieces of evidence that he comes from an intelligence family background. Most of the Anglo Mormons active in the country around the same time have comparable histories and it is instructive to compare them. I go over my personal experiences with Guatemala and I discuss the history of the Guatemala City Temple and the ironic Shining Path connection to the O'Donnal story. I crunch some baptism and conversion statistics and come to some interesting conclusions about periods of church growth and civil unrest, and the nature of the Mormon church itself. Songs: various selections from documentaries about Cordell Andersen and his organizations Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down (traditional) performed by Uncle Tupelo