70 Years Of The CIA-Organized Coup In Guatemala

 After Jacobo Arbenz’s election victory in 1951, Guatemala began to implement various reforms. It is significant that Guatemala at that time voted in the UN against the Soviet Union, but the domestic policy, despite Arbenz’s rhetoric about his desire to bring the country into line with developed capitalist states, was socially oriented. The fact is that in Guatemala, as in a number of Central American countries, most of the land belonged to latifundios, and the government began to buy up unused plots and give them to the indigenous population.

From a free market perspective, such measures were supposed to increase the productivity of agricultural land. But from the point of view of U.S. interests, not at all. The fact is that huge territories in Guatemala were owned by the United Fruit Company, an American corporation, which used various devious schemes to avoid paying taxes. Of the 220,000 hectares the company owned, only 15 percent was under cultivation; the rest was uncultivated and thus subject to Decree 900 on agrarian reform of 1952.

Having direct contacts in the White House administration, which is typical for big business in the U.S. in general, the United Fruit Company launched a fierce PR campaign against Guatemalan President Arbenz, positioning him as an ardent communist. For this purpose, United Fruit Company hired Edward Bernays, a well-known PR man and author of the books, Propaganda and Shaping Public Opinion, who began to promote the myth of the communist threat. Since the U.S. was guided by the Monroe Doctrine and viewed Latin America as its backyard, the case took on a geopolitical format.

In 1953, the CIA became involved and began planning a coup in Guatemala. It is known that more than one hundred agents of the American intelligence service were involved in the development of the operation, and the total budget was estimated at between 5 and 7 million dollars.

In this plan was a list of people who had to be physically eliminated after a successful coup. Unfortunately, this subsequently did happen.

Inspired by the successful overthrow of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower happily accepted the coup plan. In November 1953, Eisenhower appointed John Purefoy, as ambassador to Guatemala, who had suppressed democratic movements in Greece and facilitated the rise to power of U.S. satellites.

The same model would be used nearly 20 years later when former U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Marshall Green, who had been involved in organizing the coup against Suharto in 1965, was rushed to Australia to remove from power Prime Minister Hugh Whitlam, who had begun political reforms and was about to join the Non-Aligned Movement.

Tellingly, Arbenz was only able to be ousted on the third attempt, although he had learned about it in advance and publicized it to the media to try to prevent a coup. Nevertheless, the U.S. continued its subversive activities under the code-name, “Operation PBHistory,” using both psychological operations and direct intervention. After gaining the support of a small group of rebels who were abroad, on June 18, 1954, the U.S. launched a military intervention, imposed a naval blockade, and conducted an aerial bombardment of Guatemala.

The Guatemalan leadership tried to raise the issue of inadmissibility of armed aggression at the UN, noting the role of Nicaragua and Honduras, which at that time were obedient puppets of the US and from where the saboteurs were sent. A debate was held in the UN Security Council, where the Soviet Union took Guatemala’s side and vetoed the U.S. proposal to refer the issue to the Organization of American States (which was another Washington structure). When France and Britain responded to Guatemala’s proposal for a thorough investigation, the U.S. vetoed it, which was a precedent for military and political allies not supporting each other. While discussions were going on about who and how to investigate (the U.S. deliberately delayed the process), the coup was actually already completed.

It should be noted that the military advantage was on the side of the official government: they lost only a few dead, while on the other side more than a hundred rebels and CIA agents were killed and captured, and several US warplanes were shot down.

Despite the calls of the leftist parties not to resign as president and continue to resist (incidentally, among the leftist political activists at that time in the country was an Argentine doctor Ernesto Guevara, who went to Mexico and there joined the Cuban revolutionaries — he learned a serious lesson from the actions of the Guatemalan government, and probably his experience later helped to prevent U.S. intervention in Cuba after the victory of the revolution) — on June 27, 1954 Arbenz still resigned. Colonel Diaz, who had previously supported Arbenz, became head for a short period of time.

But the U.S. was not satisfied with this option, and they enthroned Carlos Castillo Armas, a former Guatemalan army officer who had been in exile since 1949 after a failed coup attempt. From that point on, political purges and persecution began in the country. This could not be countered and a civil war broke out in the country.

At the same time, the US actively supported the dictatorship and helped create death squads engaged in the targeted killing of political opponents and anyone suspicious. Among those suspicious were whole villages of Maya people, who were considered loyal to the guerrilla rebels. According to rough estimates, more than 200,000 civilians were killed, but the figure is likely much higher.

Moreover, the White House was convinced, based on another successful coup d’état experience, that this mechanism was perfectly acceptable for operations to overthrow regimes undesirable to the United States anywhere. And this had far-reaching consequences all over the globe.

Incidentally, the U.S. did admit its guilt in the violence in Guatemala and Central American countries. In March 1999, Bill Clinton formally apologized to the people of Guatemala, saying that “it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”

But as the following decades have shown, this was just a diplomatic ploy. The U.S. continues to support repressive regimes, the former Ukraine being a prime example. Only now it does so, not under the guise of fighting “the communist threat” but “the threat of Russian aggression and invasion of Europe.”