Economic, political, and military warfare by the United States on Guatemala

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In 1954, Wikipedia:Guatemala's freely-elected, socialist-leaning president Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown by a small group of Guatemalans backed by the U.S. Wikipedia:Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA codename for the coup was Wikipedia:Operation PBSUCCESS, its second successful overthrow of a foreign government. The subsequent military rule, beginning with dictator Wikipedia:Carlos Castillo Armas, led to over 30 years of civil war that, from 1960, led to the death of an estimated 200,000 Guatemalan civilians. Due to the military's use of rampant torture, disappearances, "Wikipedia:scorched earth" warfare and many other brutal methods, the country became a pariah state internationally.

The Monroe Doctrine is the interim stage between overt and covert imperialism, and between influence primarily by force, to influence primarily by economic means

Economic, political, and military warfare by the United States on Guatemala

See Wikipedia:History of GuatemalaWikipedia:Decree 900Wikipedia:Guatemalan Civil War

The Monroe Doctrine

In the 1890s, the U.S. enforced the Wikipedia:Monroe Doctrine (1823), and replaced European colonial Wikipedia:Imperialism in the Americas with the Wikipedia:hegemony of the U.S. upon upon the natural resources, and the labor of the peoples of the Latin American countries, and the island countries in the Caribbean sea. In Central America, in Guatemala, the military dictators who ruled the country during the late 19th and the early 20th centuries readily accommodated the financial interests of American Wikipedia:multinational corporations, and the ideological interests of the U.S. Government.

This article contains content from Wikipedia. Current versions of the GNU FDL article Operation PBSUCCESS) on WP may contain information useful to the improvement of this article

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Unlike military occupation, the direct, imperial control of the politics and the economies of Wikipedia:Haiti, Wikipedia:Nicaragua, and Wikipedia:Cuba, in Guatemala, the U.S. exerted indirect, hegemonic control of the country, by means of either a sponsored government, or an installed government. The political subordinations of the country and the nation were achieved with the close co-operation of the Guatemalan Army and the civil police forces with their counterpart U.S. military and civil police forces; jointly, they maintained national law and order, which secured the corporate financial interests of U.S. businesses in Guatemala. Moreover, the dictators also exempted some U.S. corporations from paying taxes to the Guatemalan national treasury; sold the public utilities to private business enterprises; and ceded much prime farmland to foreign corporations, for their sole, private, economic exploitation.

Military government

File:General-Jorge-Ubico.jpg

General Jorge Ubico, military dictator of Guatemala (1931–1944)

In 1930, the U.S. supported the presidential ascension of General Wikipedia:Jorge Ubico (1931–1944), who, under the guise of public efficiency, installed a national “March Towards Civilization”, by which he assumed Wikipedia:dictatorial powers, and established a politically repressive régime that featured internal espionage (agents provocateur, spies, Wikipedia:informants), arbitrary arrest, torture, and execution of political opponents.

The régime of Wikipedia:anti-communist General Wikipedia:Jorge Ubico (1931–1944) opened the land and the economy of Guatemala to unrestricted foreign investment. President Ubico ceded physical control of much of Guatemala’s best agricultural land, and de facto control of Wikipedia:Puerto Barrios, the Caribbean Sea port that grants Guatemala access to the Atlantic Ocean, in exchange for building the economic infrastructure; resultantly, in labor-and-management relations, the Guatemalan government often was politically subservient to foreign business interests, especially those of the United Fruit Company.

To that effect, General Ubico installed Wikipedia:debt slavery, a feudal labor management system of Wikipedia:forced labor, the laws of which permitted landlords to discipline their workforces with Wikipedia:capital punishment, when necessary, for the efficient functioning of the business enterprise.

A self-identified fascist, Gen. Ubico openly admired his dictator contemporaries the Italian Wikipedia:Benito Mussolini, the Spanish Wikipedia:Francisco Franco, and the German Wikipedia:Adolf Hitler; racially, he disdained the indigenous Maya population of Guatemala, whom he described as “animal-like”, and who needed to be “civilized” with mandatory military training; that it would be like “domesticating donkeys”. As a plutocrat, he ceded thousands of Wikipedia:hectares of prime agricultural land to the Wikipedia:United Fruit Company (UFC), and exempted them from paying Wikipedia:taxes. Strategically, as President of Guatemala, General Ubico allowed the establishment of U.S. military bases in Guatemala, thus submitting Guatemala to U.S. hegemony.

Civil government

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The fledgling Guatemalan government had social and economic aims in common with the USSR, and need of its support

The thirteen-year dictatorship of General Jorge Ubico ended with the October Revolution of 1944, which initiated “Ten Years of Spring” in the national politics of Guatemala. The free election that followed installed a philosophically conservative university professor Wikipedia:Juan José Arévalo Bermejo, as the President of Guatemala (1945–1951); and a new political constitution allowed the legal possibility of Wikipedia:expropriating unused farmland for the benefit of the Guatemalan peasant majority. Yet the liberal social and economic policies derived from the new political constitution and the “spiritual socialism” philosophy of President Arévalo Bermejo, made the landed gentry and the urban bourgeoisie first distrust, and then accuse the President of Guatemala of supporting Wikipedia:communism, a serious personal and political accusation during the Cold War, of which the U.S. took serious note. Furthermore, in 1947, the Arévalo Government promulgated a liberal labor law that favored the rights of workers, and implicitly attacked the exploitive business practices of the United Fruit Company (UFC).

Hence, because of the business complaints of the UFC, the U.S. embassy in Guatemala City sent alarmist political intelligence to Washington, D.C. — that Guatemalan President Arévalo Bermejo allowed political rights to Guatemalan communists. Moreover, in keeping with his spiritual-socialism philosophy, President Arévalo Bermejo supported the Wikipedia:Caribbean Legion, a group of reformist Latin American Wikipedia:military officers and intellectuals who plotted the deposition of Wikipedia:right-wing Wikipedia:dictatorships in Wikipedia:Costa Rica, the Wikipedia:Dominican Republic, Wikipedia:Nicaragua, and Wikipedia:Venezuela; the CIA described the Caribbean Legion as a politically destabilizing force, dangerous to U.S. geopolitical interests in the Western Hemisphere. As a participant in the October Revolution of 1944, the Army Captain Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, facilitated the transition from Wikipedia:military dictatorship to Wikipedia:representative democracy, when he, and a comrade officer, Major Arana, forsook the Presidency of Guatemala for constitutional government, which earned them and the Army much popular respect as patriots. Later, in 1950, the presidential candidate Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán received 65 per cent of the votes. In post-dictatorship Guatemala, the Political Constitution of Guatemala allowed only a six-year term, and forbade presidential re-election.

Land reform

Operation PBSUCCESS: The Guatemala City headquarters of the United Fruit Company, the multinational corporation that instigated the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état.

For the ation of the Wikipedia:Republic of Guatemala, President Wikipedia:Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán's social and economic reforms included remedying the inequitable distribution of farmland in Guatemala, which dated from the Spanish Conquest, the Colonial period, and the military dictatorships.

In March 1953, October 1953, and February 1954, the Guatemalan Government expropriated unused Wikipedia:United Fruit Company farmlands, totalling 161,874.26 hectares (400,000 acres). Consequently, the UFC complained to and sought financial redress through the U.S. Government; and, in 1954, the U.S. State Department demanded that the Árbenz Government pay $15,854,849 to the United Fruit Company. The Árbenz Government rejected the demand, as a violation of the national sovereignty of the Republic of Guatemala.

The United Fruit Company asked the Eisenhower Administration to confront the Árbenz Government, and reverse Wikipedia:Decree 900. To involve the reticent President Eisenhower, the UFC employed the public relations-and-advertising expert Wikipedia:Edward L. Bernays to create, organise, and direct a psychologically inflammatory, anti-Communist disinformation campaign (print, radio, film, television) against the Guatemalan government. The U.S. State Department reduced Wikipedia:economic aid to and commercial trade with Guatemala, which as a vestige of the rule of the dictators sold 85% of its exports to, and bought 85% of its imports from, the United States. The economic Wikipedia:sabotage of Guatemala was secret, because Wikipedia:economic warfare violated the Latin American non-intervention agreement to which the United States was a signatory party; public knowledge that the U.S. was violating the non-intervention agreement would prompt other Latin American countries to aid Guatemala in surviving the economic warfare.

Operation PBFORTUNE

Like many CIA plans, the rudiments of Wikipedia:Operation PBFORTUNE were in place earlier, in 1951. CIA supporters put forth this among other facts to dismiss the expropriation of the Guatemalan farmlands of the United Fruit Company as inconsequential in the decision to invade, but instead part of a 'necessary, if dirty, fight against communism'.

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It is preferred that the public puts it in this same category with many of the hundreds of other CIA actions, and rest easy knowing that this sort of thing will not happen again. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, with the CIA expanding its activities to overt as well as covert wars, and Communism largely absent as a force. So Communism is not merely a secondary concern, it is barely relevant. It was not until 1954 that the CIA acted, because the agenda of establishing capitalist control over other countries is the primary goal of US interests abroad, which is pursued whether countries are Communist or not.

Operation PBFORTUNE: President Harry Truman authorized the CIA to effect a Guatemalan coup d’état in 1951

The most feasible way of overthrowing President Árbenz was determined to be secret support (financial, logistical, military) of his ideological opponents — exiled Guatemalan rebel-groups, and right-wing and anti-Communist politicians in Guatemala. To that effect, CIA Wikipedia:Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Wikipedia:Walter Bedell Smith despatched a secret agent to Guatemala City, to find and investigate potential candidates and organizations who would aid a U.S. coup d’état against the liberal Árbenz Government — which included Communists from the Wikipedia:Guatemalan Labor Party. In that time, the exiled political opponents of the Árbenz Government were ideologically divided, and thus impotent to overthrow the elected government of Guatemala. In the event, the CIA case officer reported to DCI Bedell Smith that there existed no reliable politician or military officer available to betray the Wikipedia:national sovereignty of the Republic of Guatemala.

Fortuitously for the CIA, that failed scouting trip coincided with the first U.S. Wikipedia:state visit of Wikipedia:Anastasio Somoza García, the President of Nicaragua (1937–47, 1950–56), who informed the Wikipedia:Truman Administration (1945–53) of the existence of a small, Guatemalan rebel-group commanded by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas; in exchange for CIA aid and support, the Nicaraguan dictator then offered to help the U.S. depose the Guatemalan president. Somoza further explained that the coup d’état also would be financially supported by President Wikipedia:Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, in exchange for the CIA’s assassination of Dominican opponents exiled in Guatemala. In June 1951, DCI Bedell Smith ordered CIA acceptance of the Somoza and Trujillo offers, and the establishment of connections with Col. Castillo Armas and his anti-Communist supporters. The CIA requested from Col. Castillo Armas a plan for the invasion of Guatemala; the Colonel planned to launch simultaneous attacks from Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras, which would be co-ordinated with simultaneous anti-Communist insurrections throughout Guatemala. To effect the invasion, the Colonel requested money and matériel, yet nonetheless told the CIA that his army of liberation, El ejército de liberación, would invade Guatemala, with or without U.S. support.

In September 1951, the U.S. State Department approved Wikipedia:Operation PBFORTUNE, the paramilitary coup d’état against the Árbenz Government. Nevertheless, shortly afterwards, shipment of the Soviet weapons for the Castillo Armas army of liberation was postponed — because, in conversation with other Central American heads of state, the indiscreet Nicaraguan President Somoza García had openly spoken about the CIA's planned deposition of President Árbenz. Public knowledge of the betrayed secret-intervention would provoke diplomatic problems for the U.S. — a signatory party to the Wikipedia:Rio Pact (1947), a Latin American non-intervention treaty derived from the Wikipedia:Good Neighbor Policy of the FDR Administration (1933–45). For which reason, President Somoza’s public boasting, the State Department and the CIA deactivated Operation PBFORTUNE until its reactivation became politically feasible; the liberation army matériel were stored, and the military Wikipedia:caudillo services of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas were retained, for three-thousand weekly dollars, until required to be President of Guatemala.

Operation PBSUCCESS

The coup d’état

The Guatemalan coup d'état began with Wikipedia:Operation PBFORTUNE (September 1952), the partly implemented plan to supply exiled, Wikipedia:right-wing, anti–Árbenz rebel groups with operational funds and matériel, to form a counter-revolutionary “army of liberation” to depose the Árbenz Government. Two years later, in June 1954, Operation PBSUCCESS realised the coup d'état, and installed Colonel Wikipedia:Carlos Castillo Armas as President of Guatemala. Afterwards followed Wikipedia:Operation PBHISTORY, with the intention of establishing that the Árbenz Government was a puppet of the USSR; the CIA document-analysis team found no government or communist (Wikipedia:Guatemalan Labour Party) document that supported this.

The paramilitary invasion, Operation PBSUCCESS (1953–54) featured El ejército de liberación an “army of liberation” recruited, trained, and armed by the CIA, 480 mercenary soldiers under the command of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, an exiled Wikipedia:Guatemalan army officer. The CIA army for the liberation of Guatemala were part of a complex of Wikipedia:diplomatic, Wikipedia:economic, and Wikipedia:propaganda campaigns. To disseminate the propaganda and the Wikipedia:disinformation (black propaganda), that the Árbenz Government were Communists, the CIA established Voz de la liberación (Voice of Liberation, VOL) radio station to transmit from Miami, Florida, USA, whilst claiming to be in the Guatemalan jungle, with the liberacionista army of Col. Castillo Armas. The liberationist propaganda and disinformation misrepresented the VOL as the spontaneous voice of domestic, counter-revolutionary Guatemalan patriots who opposed the Communism of the elected Árbenz Government.

In the event, the compelled resignation of the Presidency of Guatemala, by Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, ended the liberal, political experimentation of the “Ten Years of Spring”, which had begun with the October Revolution of 1944, which established Wikipedia:representative democracy in Guatemala. In 1957, three years after the Guatemalan coup d'état, Col. Castillo Armas was assassinated, and replaced by another military government; in 1960, three years later, began the 36-year Wikipedia:Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96), featuring brutal Wikipedia:counterinsurgency operations and massacres, which conflated historical ethnic conflict, between Wikipedia:ladino (Wikipedia:mestizo) Guatemalans and ethnic Maya Guatemalans, who were accused of being either communists or communist sympathizers. In the post–civil war period, the Guatemalan Wikipedia:Historical Clarification Commission classified such counterinsurgency killings of the Guatemalan civil populace as Wikipedia:genocide.

In the post–War United States, the departure of the cautious Wikipedia:Truman Administration (1945–53) and the arrival of the adventurous Eisenhower Administration (1953–61), abetted by the right-ward Wikipedia:Cold War national political climate, rekindled Presidential interest in Wikipedia:covert operations, which reanimated CIA advocacy of a paramilitary invasion of Guatemala to depose President Árbenz Guzmán and his government. Strategically, President Eisenhower favored the secret warfare of covert operations, as cost-effective means for combating the world-wide Wikipedia:hegemony of the U.S.S.R. In that context, the U.S. National Security Council revived the Guatemalan coup d’état after reviewing the malleability of anti–Árbenz politics, and because of the successful Iranian coup d’état against the elected Government of Prime Minister Wikipedia:Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953.

The CIA is responsible for enforcing the US interests upon a world frightened of their nuclear weapons

To initiate Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA selected the Guatemalan politico-military leader who would succeed Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán as President of Guatemala, and establish a pro–American Guatemalan government. The three exile candidates were: (i) the coffee planter Juan Córdova Cerna, formerly of the Cabinet of Advisors to the reformist President Wikipedia:Juan José Arévalo Bermejo (1945–51), and who also was a business consultant to the Wikipedia:United Fruit Company, which he aided in repressing a workers’ revolt. (ii) General Wikipedia:Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, a department governor under General Ubico; he was pro–Wikipedia:Nazi until 1943, when he changed fascist allegiance for democratic allegiance, and became pro–U.S.; as such, he mediated the overthrowing of General Wikipedia:Juan Federico Ponce Vaides, one of the triumvirate junta who succeeded the deposed dictator, General Jorge Ubico. (iii) Colonel Wikipedia:Carlos Castillo Armas, a contemporary of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán at the Guatemalan national military academy. As the most politically amenable white-horse Wikipedia:caudillo, the CIA appointed Col. Castillo Armas as leader of the Guatemalan army of liberation, the core of Operation PBSUCCESS.

Because of the continual bureaucratic postponements of the paramilitary invasion, the CIA worried that their Guatemalan army of liberation, or any other Guatemalan armed rebel-group, might prove over-eager and prematurely launch a coup d’ état. The worry proved true on 29 March 1953, when a futile raid against the Army garrison at Wikipedia:Salamá, in central Guatemala, was launched by a rebel group associated with Colonel Wikipedia:Carlos Castillo Armas — one of three men whom CIA considered installing as President of Guatemala. Besides the defeat and the jailing of the rebels, the failed invasion provoked the political response most feared by CIA — the Árbenz Government repressed and jailed the Wikipedia:anti-Communists connected with the exile rebels, and all other potentially treasonous right-wing politicians. Most Guatemalans supported the President’s repression, because the exile rebels and the domestic politicians sought to subvert the constitutionally-elected government of Guatemala with the aid of a foreign power, the United States. The jailing of the CIA’s Guatemalan secret agents rendered them operationally ineffective; thus, the CIA then relied upon the ideologically-fragmented Guatemalan exile-groups, and their anti-democratic allies in Guatemala, to realize the coup d’état against President Árbenz Guzmán.

In December 1953, the CIA established the operational headquarters of the Guatemalan army of liberation in suburban Florida; then recruited aeroplane pilots and mercenary soldiers, supervised their military training, established the radio station La Voz de la Liberación (The Voice of Liberation) to broadcast Wikipedia:disinformation and Wikipedia:propaganda; and arranged for increased diplomatic pressure upon Guatemala to reverse the Agrarian Reform Law of Wikipedia:Decree 900 — especially as it applied to the United Fruit Company. Moreover, despite being unable to halt the exportation of Guatemalan Wikipedia:coffee, the U.S. ceased selling arms to Guatemala in 1951; in 1953, the State Department aggravated the American arms embargo by thwarting Árbenz Government arms purchases from Canada, Germany, and Rhodesia. Faced with dwindling supplies of matériel, and having noted the unusually armed borders of Honduras, El Salvador, and other neighbor countries, President Árbenz Guzmán acted upon the intelligence indications of an imminent paramilitary invasion of Guatemala — confirmed by a Wikipedia:defector from Operation PBSUCCESS — and bought matériel in the Eastern Hemisphere. The Árbenz Government bought surplus Wikipedia:Wehrmacht matériel from the Wikipedia:Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, a Communist Wikipedia:satellite country of the U.S.S.R. The weapons were delivered to Guatemala at the Atlantic Ocean port of Wikipedia:Puerto Barrios, by the Swedish freight ship Wikipedia:MS Alfhem, which sailed from port Wikipedia:Szczecin, in the People’s Republic of Poland, a Communist, satellite country of the U.S.S.R. The U.S. State Department and the CIA tried to halt the arms-laden Ms Alfhem en route to Guatemala; in one instance, the CIA seized the freight ship Wulfsbrook, having mistaken it for the MS Alfhem. Nonetheless, despite the intelligence failure having allowed “Communist Czech arms” to reach Guatemala, in the American press, to the American public, the CIA misrepresented the arms purchase as a Soviet provocation in “America’s Back yard”.

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Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (1951–54)

The national defense of Guatemala

The Árbenz Government originally meant to repel the invasion by arming the military-age populace, the workers’ militia, and the Guatemalan Army; yet, public knowledge of the secret, cash-and-carry arms-purchase compelled the President to supply arms only to the Army; which the Guatemalan senate perceived as a political rift, between the President and the Military Establishment. Although the purchase of surplus Wehrmacht arms had been from Czechoslovakia, not from the U.S.S.R., the Operation PBSUCCESS propaganda misrepresented the business transaction as proof of direct Soviet interference in the Western Hemisphere — a geopolitical impingement upon the U.S. Wikipedia:hegemony established in the Wikipedia:Monroe Doctrine (1823). To the American public, the U.S. press reported that the Republic of Guatemala was suffering an externally instigated, Wikipedia:vanguard party Communist revolution, like those occurred in the Eastern European countries that border the U.S.S.R. The disinformation and propaganda planted in the U.S. news media, about the Guatemalan–Czech arms purchase and the arrival of the weapons to Guatemala, provoked much popular support for American military intervention. The fabricated domestic support allowed the Eisenhower Administration to increase the intensity of its open and secret wars against the Republic of Guatemala.

On 20 May 1954, the U.S. Navy began air and sea patrols of Guatemala, under the pretexts of intercepting secret shipments of weapons, and the protection of Honduras from Guatemalan aggression and invasion. On 24 May 1954, the U.S. Navy launched Operation HARDROCK BAKER, a blockade of Guatemala, wherein submarines and surface ships intercepted and boarded every ship in Guatemalan waters, and forcefully searched it for Guatemala-bound weapons that might support the “Communist Árbenz Government”. The blockade included British and French ships, which violations of maritime national sovereignty neither Britain nor France protested, because they wished to avoid U.S. intervention to their colonial matters in the Middle East; additionally, the blockade facilitated further psychological warfare against the Guatemalan Army. To disseminate propaganda, the military aeroplanes of Col. Castillo Armas flew over Guatemala City, dropping leaflets that exhorted the people of Guatemala to: Struggle against Communist atheism, Communist intervention, Communist oppression . . . Struggle with your patriotic brothers! Struggle with Castillo Armas! The messages were meant to turn the Guatemalan Army against President Árbenz Guzmán, personally, and against Communism, as economic policy. Moreover, the rebel aeroplanes flying over the cities were perceived as practicing bombing runs, which Guatemalans perceived as indicative of an imminent invasion. On 7 June 1954, a contingency evacuation-force of five amphibious assault ships, a U.S. Marines helicopter-assault Battalion Landing Team, and an anti-submarine aircraft carrier, were despatched to blockade the Guatemalan sea lanes.

Propaganda and disinformation

The Guatemalan coup d’état much depended upon Wikipedia:psychological warfare, because the 480-soldier Guatemalan army of liberation was over-matched by the Guatemalan Army; thus, deception by feint was most important. The CIA used propaganda in the forms of political rumour, air-dropped pamphlets, poster campaigns, and Wikipedia:radio (the mass communications medium that successfully deceived most of the Iranian populace to accept the foreign deposition of the elected government of Prime Minister Wikipedia:Mohammad Mosaddegh). In Wikipedia:third-world Guatemala, few people owned radio receivers; nonetheless, Guatemalans considered the medium of radio as an authoritative source of information. As directed by CIA case officers, from Florida, right-wing student groups successfully conducted internal propaganda, such as publishing El combate (The Combat),a weekly political pamphlet, covering walls and buses with the number "32" — referring to Article 32 of the Guatemalan Constitution, which forbade foreign-financed political parties; the propaganda claims received much attention from the local and the national press. Other psychological warfare techniques included character assassination, with signs that read: A Communist Lives Here affixed to the houses of Árbenz supporters; and the month-long daily delivery of false death-notices to President Árbenz Guzmán, his Cabinet of Advisors, and known Communists.

In due course, the disinformation-propaganda campaign provoked the Árbenz Government to politically repress the Guatemalan right wing, by arresting rightist students, limiting freedom of assembly, and intimidating newspapers. Furthermore, the CIA expected gossip (word-of-mouth) to assist in propagating anti-Communist claims against the elected Árbenz Government. From Florida, The Voice of Liberation radio station, which claimed to be broadcasting from the Guatemalan jungle, transmitted music, “news”, disinformation, and anti–Árbenz propaganda. Most of the radio programming was for the general populace, yet some propaganda specifically was a seditious call-to-arms meant to appeal to the right-wing men of action in the officer corps of the Guatemalan military, whose Wikipedia:treasonous complicity was essential to the success of the deposition of the elected Árbenz Government. The collaboration of the Guatemalan army (ca. 5,000 soldiers) was most important, because, as a professional military force, they could readily out-fight and defeat the CIA Wikipedia:mercenary army of liberation of Col. Carlos Castillo Armas. Nonetheless, because of the socio-political and military realities, the CIA knew that the Castillo Armas army of liberation could not conquer Guatemala with 480 mercenary soldiers. Hence, the importance of propaganda, of the co-optation of the Guatemalan military-officer corps to the usurpation of Guatemalan Wikipedia:representative democracy, by overthrowing the “Communist government” of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.

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Operation PBSUCCESS: Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, President of Guatemala (1954–1957)

Invasion

The CIA invasion of Guatemala suffered many tactical and strategic failures, but President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, fearing expansion of U.S. military intervention if the Guatemalan military decisively defeated the CIA invasion, resigned the Presidency of Guatemala on 27 June 1954, for exile in Mexico.

Engineering popular consent

Edward Bernays, known as the “Father of Public Relations”, had among his clients the Eisenhower Administration and the United Fruit Company whilst he engineered popular consent for the C.I.A.’s overthrowing of a capitalist democracy in Guatemala in 1954. Bernays’s propaganda operation used the North American press to frighten the American public to believe that President Árbenz Guzmán was a political puppet of the U.S.S.R., and that Guatemala had become a Soviet beachhead in the Western Hemisphere. The principal American news media misinformed the American public that the Árbenz Government had been overthrown by the C.I.A., and, instead, misrepresented it as a liberation from Communist tyranny by native Guatemalan freedom fighters restoring democracy to their country.

While a CIA official has it that the C.I.A. did little to hide their paramilitary involvement from the American public: “The figleaf was very transparent, threadbare”, there was misinformation in the US press. New York Times, Milton Brackersan misinformed his readers: “There is no evidence that the United States provided material aid or guidance” to the anti-Communist freedom fighters. The New Republic said that “It was just our luck that Castillo Armas did come by some second-hand lethal weapons, from Heaven knows where.”

Operation PBHISTORY

After the PBSUCCESS coup d’état, the CIA launched Wikipedia:Operation PBHISTORY, a document analysis team to Guatemala to collect and analyze Árbenz Government and Guatemalan Labour Party documents that would be evidence to support the geopolitical belief of the CIA that, under the presidency of Colonel Wikipedia:Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the Wikipedia:Republic of Guatemala was a Communist Wikipedia:puppet state in the Western Hemisphere Wikipedia:hegemony of the Wikipedia:Soviet Union. CIA intelligence analyses, of some 150,000 pages of Guatemalan Government and communist party documents, found no substantiation of the key geopolitical premise that justified the secret U.S. paramilitary invasion of Guatemala, and the deposition of the elected Árbenz Government. The Wikipedia:socialism practiced by the Árbenz Government was unrelated to the geopolitics of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, some U.S. businessmen and military officers believed that the Wikipedia:nationalism of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was a Communist threat to the business interests of American Wikipedia:multinational corporations, and advocated and supported the coup d’état against his government, despite the Guatemalan majority’s support and attachment to the original political principles of the "October Revolution" of 1944.

Aftermath

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U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld: The Guatemalan coup d’état violated the Charter of the United Nations

“For about eight years [1953–1960] 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.”-Thomas P. McCann, public relations for United Fruit Co.

In the aftermath of the Guatemalan coup d’état, which deposed Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán by compelled resignation of the Presidency of Guatemala, the CIA-installed usurper government had difficulty persuading the officer corps of the Wikipedia:Guatemalan Army to abandon their Constitutional allegiance to the head-of-state President, and become the Guatemalan Army commanded by Colonel Wikipedia:Carlos Castillo Armas. In the event, most of the officer corps abandoned the elected President of Guatemala, because, as political conservatives, they disliked the Agrarian Reform Law (Wikipedia:Decree 900) and its socio-economic changes, yet neither did they prefer the régime of Col. Castillo Armas. The popular response of the Guatemalan nation, to having had their elected government usurped by Wikipedia:right-wing Wikipedia:counter-revolution, varied by Wikipedia:social class. The upper-class landowners welcomed the end of the Decree 900 Wikipedia:agrarian reform, and expected the U.S. to reinstate their monopoly ownership of expropriated agricultural lands. Likewise, the native Maya had political opinions about the counter-revolution, those who benefitted from Decree 900 were unhappy, whilst those who lost lands to Decree 900 were happy, especially those Maya whose autonomous communities had lost political power to the Árbenz Government; other Maya Guatemalans favored President Árbenz Guzmán, like most Guatemalans, and understood the socio-political importance of the Decree 900 Agrarian Reform Law. In the cities of Wikipedia:Antigua Guatemala, Wikipedia:San Martín Jilotepeque, and Wikipedia:San Juan Sacatepéquez pro–Árbenz armed groups combated the Castillo Armas Government, because of the forced presidential resignation, and because they had benefited from the Decree 900 land reform. In the event, the U.S.-installed military government of Colonel Carlos Castillo proved Wikipedia:reactionary, and reversed the land-reform expropriations, returned the farmlands to private owners, for which reason some Guatemalan farmers burned their crops as economic protest.

File:Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo DN-SN-86-05174.JPEG

Democracy restored: Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo, President of Guatemala (1986–1991)

Military government reinstated

In the eleven days after the resignation of President Árbenz Guzmán, five successive Wikipedia:military junta governments occupied the Guatemalan presidential palace; each junta was successively more amenable to the political demands of the U.S., after which, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas assumed the Presidency of Guatemala. As the Guatemalan Wikipedia:head-of-state, Col. Castillo Armas proved an inept administrator, installed a corrupt Wikipedia:bureaucracy, and vigorously repressed the Wikipedia:civil warfare that resulted from the Guatemalan coup d’état in 1954; the previous occurrence of violent repression was a decade earlier, before the democratic October Revolution of 1944. International opinion reviled the Guatemalan coup d’état, the French and British press, Wikipedia:Le Monde and Wikipedia:The Times, attacked the United States’ “modern form of Wikipedia:economic colonialism”. In Wikipedia:Latin America, public and official opinions provoked much political criticism of the U.S. deposition of an elected Latin American government, and Guatemala became symbolic of armed resistance to the U.S. Wikipedia:hegemony of Wikipedia:Latin America. The Secretary General of the Wikipedia:United Nations, Wikipedia:Dag Hammarskjöld (1953–61), said that the paramilitary invasion by which the U.S. deposed the elected Guatemalan government violated the human-rights stipulations of the Wikipedia:UN Charter; moreover, the usually pro–U.S. newspapers of Wikipedia:West Germany, condemned the Guatemalan coup d’état. Historically, the Director of the Mexico Project of National Security Archives, Kate Doyle, said that the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état was the definitive deathblow to democracy in the Republic of Guatemala.

Civil War

Afterwards, for forty years, under the guise of Wikipedia:anti-Communism, each successive Wikipedia:military government waged counter-insurgency warfare against the civil populace, and thereby destabilized Guatemalan society with a civil war that conflated politics and racism, the historical ethnic conflict between mestizo ladinos and the native Maya; the counterinsurgency policies of systematic targeted-killing and of “disappearance” (political kidnap) produced a Wikipedia:genocide that killed 140,000 to 250,000 Guatemalans. In the latter stages of the thirty-six-year Wikipedia:Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), the CIA reduced the incidence and number of the violations of the Wikipedia:human rights of Guatemalans; and, in 1983, thwarted a palace coup d’ état, which allowed the eventual restoration of Wikipedia:participatory democracy and civil government; the resultant national election was won by Democrácia Cristiana, the Christian Democracy party, whereby Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo became President of the Wikipedia:Republic of Guatemala (1986–91).

See also

Wikipedia:Banana republic Wikipedia:Church Committee Wikipedia:CIA sponsored regime change Wikipedia:Covert U.S. regime change actions Wikipedia:Guatemalan Civil War Wikipedia:History of Guatemala

Wikipedia:List of acts labelled as state terrorism sorted by state Wikipedia:National Committee of Defense Against Communism Wikipedia:Operation Kufire Wikipedia:Operation Kugown Wikipedia:Operation PBFORTUNE

Wikipedia:Operation PBSUCCESS Wikipedia:Operation PBHISTORY Wikipedia:Operation WASHTUB Wikipedia:Plausible deniability Wikipedia:Timeline of United States military operations

Further reading

• Handy, Jim (1994). Revolution in the Countryside: Rural Conflict and Agrarian Reform in Guatemala 1944-54, Chapel Hill, Wikipedia:University of North Carolina Press.
• Chapman, Peter (2008). Bananas!: How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World, Canongate U.S..
• Gleijeses, Piero (1992). Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954, Wikipedia:Princeton University Press.
• Immerman, R. H., The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention, Wikipedia:University of Texas Press: Austin, 1982.
• Kinzer, Stephen and Schlesinger, Stephen. 1999. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge Massachusetts: Wikipedia:Harvard University Press.
• La Feber, Walter (1993). Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, Norton Press.

External links and further reading

• CIA.gov - CIA's declassified documents on Guatemala CIA Documents Chronicling the 1954 Coup
• American Accountability Project - The Guatemala Genocide
• Guatemala Documentation Project - Provided by the National Security Archive.
• Video: Devils Don't Dream! Analysis of the CIA-sponsored 1954 coup in Guatemala.
• The Guatemala 1954 Documents
• From Árbenz to Zelaya: Chiquita in Latin America - video report by Democracy Now!
• Template:Internet Archive short film
• Stephen Schlesinger, Stephen Kinzer, John H. Coatsworth, Richard A. Nuccio (Introduction); Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala Revised and Expanded edition, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (December 30, 2005), trade paperback, 358 pages, Template:ISBN, Template:ISBN