1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (1951–54)

The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état (18–27 June 1954) was the CIA covert operation to depose President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, with a paramilitary invasion by an anti-Communist "army of liberation". The liberal Árbenz Government had effected the socio-economic land-reform policies of Decree 900 (27 June 1952), such as the expropriation, for peasant use, of unused farmlands that national and multinational corporations had earlier set aside. The land-reform law of Decree 900 especially threatened the agricultural monopoly of the United Fruit Company, because that multinational corporation owned 42 per cent of the arable land of Guatemala; bought during previous military dictatorships of Guatemala. In response, the United Fruit Company asked the U.S. governments of presidents Harry Truman (1945–53) and Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61) to act diplomatically, economically, and militarily against Guatemalan President Árbenz Guzmán. In the geopolitical context of the U.S.–U.S.S.R. Cold War (1945–91), the secret intelligence agencies of the U.S. deemed such Guatemalan land-reform nationalization as government communism. The intelligence analyses led CIA director Allen Dulles to fear that the Republic of Guatemala would become a “Soviet beachhead in the Western Hemisphere”, the “back yard” of the United States’ hegemony. Moreover, in the U.S. national, political context of the aggressive anti-Communism of the McCarthyist era (1947–57), the CIA and the Eisenhower Administration (1953–61) shared the geopolitical fears of the CIA chief, Allen Dulles, who, like his brother, John Foster Dulles, the U.S. Secretary of State, owned capital stock in the United Fruit Company, which conflict of interest they conflated to the Western Hemisphere geopolitics of the United States.

The Republic of Guatemala

The Guatemalan coup d'état began in 1951, with Operation PBFORTUNE, the partly-implemented plan to supply right-wing, anti–Árbenz forces with operational funds and matériel, to form a counter-revolutionary army. In 1954, the coup d'état was realized with Operation PBSUCCESS; afterwards followed Operation PBHISTORY, with the intelligence-gathering remit to find, publish, and confirm the CIA geopolitical analysis — that the Árbenz government was a pro-Communist puppet state of the Soviet Union, part of the soviet hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Operation PBHISTORY found no documentary government evidence to support the American ideologic assumption that the government of President Árbenz Guzmán was infiltrated with Communists, but indicated that the President was abiding the constitutional right of Guatemalan Communists to form political parties, and so participate in national politics, in the senate of the Republic of Guatemala.

The paramilitary invasion Operation PBSUCCESS (1953–54) featured an “army of liberation” recruited, trained, and armed by the CIA; 480 mercenary soldiers under the command of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, an exiled Guatemalan army officer. The CIA army of liberation were part of a complex of diplomatic, economic, and propaganda campaigns. To disseminate disinformation (propaganda), the CIA established the Voice of Liberation (VOL) radio station, in Honduras, which transmitted anti-Communist programs (created in Miami, Florida) that misrepresented the VOL as the spontaneous voice of counter-revolutionary Guatemalan patriots who opposed the elected Árbenz government. With the resignation of the Presidency of Guatemala by Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, Operation PBSUCCESS ended the liberal, political experimentation of the “Ten Years of Spring”, which had begun with the October Revolution of 1944 that established representative democracy in Guatemala. In 1957, three years after the coup d'état, Col. Castillo Armas was assassinated, and replaced by another military government, and three years later in 1960 the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96) began. This featured brutal counterinsurgency operations and massacres, which conflated historical ethnic conflict, between mestizo, ladino Guatemalans and ethnic Maya Guatemalans, who were accused of being either communists or communist sympathizers. In the post–civil war period, the Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission investigations classified such counterinsurgency killings of the Guatemalan civil populace as genocide.

Historical background

Main articles: History of Guatemala, Decree 900, and Guatemalan Civil War

The Monroe Doctrine

The Monroe Doctrine comprises the Republic of Guatemala to the U.S. hegemony of the Western Hemisphere.

In the 1890s, the U.S. enforced the Monroe Doctrine (1823), and replaced the imperial European colonial powers with an American hegemony over the natural resources and the labor of the peoples of Latin America. The military dictators who ruled Guatemala during the late-19th and the early-20th centuries accommodated the financial interests of U.S. multinational corporations, and the ideological interests of the U.S. government. Unlike the imperialism of military occupation, direct political control of Haiti, Nicaragua, and Cuba, the U.S. exerted indirect political control of Guatemala’s politics and economy by proxy, by means of the close co-operation of the Guatemalan Army and police forces with counterpart U.S. military and police forces; jointly, they maintained national civil order, and thereby secured the financial interests of U.S. business 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 gave much farmland to foreign corporations, for their sole, private, economic exploitation.

Manuel José Estrada Cabrera, Dictator of Guatemala (1898–1920)

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

Military government

The régimes of Manuel José Estrada Cabrera and of General Jorge Ubico opened the land of Guatemala and the Guatemalan economy to unrestricted foreign investment. Moreover, General Ubico especially granted favors — political and financial — to the United Fruit Company (UFC) whose investment capital bought controlling shares of the capital stock that financed the construction of the railroads, the telegraph, and the electric utility, the economic infrastructure of the Republic of Guatemala. In his politico-economic favoritism, President Ubico ceded physical control of much of Guatemala’s best agricultural land, and de facto control of the Atlantic Ocean port of Guatemala; resultantly, in labor-and-management relations, the Guatemalan government often was politically subservient to foreign business interests, especially those of the United Fruit Company.

In 1930, the U.S. supported the ascension to power of General Jorge Ubico (1931–1944), who, under the guise of public efficiency, installed a national “March Towards Civilization”, by which he assumed dictatorial powers, and established a politically repressive régime that featured internal espionage (agents provocateur, spies, informants), arbitrary arrest, torture, and execution of political opponents. Personally, General Ubico was a wealthy aristocrat, with an income of $215,000 per annum. Politically, he was anti-communist, and so usually protected the financial and economic interests of the Guatemalan élites, the landed gentry and the urban bourgeoisie, especially in matters of land ownership and labor relations, against the legal complaints of the working class, trade unions, and the peasantry. To that effect, General Ubico installed debt slavery, a feudal labor management system of forced labor, the laws of which permitted landlords to discipline their workforces with capital punishment, when necessary, for the efficient functioning of the business enterprise. As a self-identified fascist, Gen. Ubico openly admired his dictator contemporaries the Italian Benito Mussolini, the Spanish Francisco Franco, and the German 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 hectares of prime agricultural land to the United Fruit Company (UFC), and exempted them from paying taxes. Strategically, as President of Guatemala, General Ubico allowed the establishment of U.S. military bases in Guatemala.

Civil government

In the "October Revolution" of 1944 General Jorge Ubico was overthrown. Juan José Arévalo Bermejo was elected. A new constitution allowed for the possibility of expropriating land. This, as well as Arévalo philosophy of "spiritual socialism", alarmed Guatemala's landed elite who began to accuse Arévalo of supporting communism. In 1947 he signed a labor protection law that implicitly targeted the UFC. The US embassy in Guatemala sent alarmed messages that Arévalo was allowing communists to organize and had reputedly provided known communists with support. Arévalo supported the Caribbean Legion, a group of ostensibly reformist Latin Americans who plotted to overthrow dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. A 1949 CIA analysis described it as a "destabilizing force."

Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, a captain in the Guatemalan Army who had an important role in the October Revolution of 1944, won 65 per cent of the votes in the 1950 election. The Political Constitution of Guatemala allowed only a six-year term, and legally forbade the president from re-election top office; hence President Árbenz Guzmán would be ineligible in the following presidential election of 1956.

Land reform

U.S. geopolitics: the Guatemalan Labour Party.

Casus belli: Farmland in the Quetzaltenango Department highlands, in western Guatemala.

For the social and economic reformation of the Republic of Guatemala, President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán advocated the unionization of the working class and land reform for the landless-peasant majority of the population. To redistribute the arable lands of the country, the President worked with the Communist Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT, Guatemalan Labor Party) to jointly compose, implement, and establish a realistic land-reform program that would remedy the inequitable distribution of farmland in Guatemala, which dated from the Spanish Conquest, the Colonial period, and the military dictatorships. In 1945, the Guatemalan bourgeoisie — approximately 2.2 per cent of the national population — owned 70 per cent of the arable land of Guatemala, yet they economically exploited only 12 per cent of that land; meanwhile, the remaining 97.8 per cent of the Guatemalan population were landless laborers. In 1952, the Árbenz government promulgated land reform and redistribution with Decree 900; the landless-peasant majority welcomed the President’s progressive changes to the Guatemalan Old Order established by the dictators Manuel José Estrada Cabrera and Jorge Ubico.

As a result of the progressive economic changes to Guatemalan society, the land-owning upper classes, and political factions in the Guatemalan military, publicly accused President Árbenz Guzmán of being unduly influenced by the Communist minority in the Guatemalan senate. The resultant political tensions caused civil unrest in parts of Guatemala, and threatened the business interests of the United Fruit Company (UFC). In the event, in March 1953, the Árbenz government expropriated unused UFC farmlands, for which the UFC was to be paid some US$600,000 — as determined by the UFC’s public tax-declaration of the worth of the unused farmland. In October 1953 and in February 1954, the Guatemalan government further expropriated 60,702.846 hectares (150,000 acres) of unused farmland from the UFC; at that date, the total area of farmland expropriated from the United Fruit Company was approximately 161,874.26 hectares (400,000 acres). In the event, the UFC complained to the U.S. government for financial redress by the Guatemalan government, and, in 1954, the U.S. State Department demanded that the Guatemalan government pay $15,854,849 to the United Fruit Company for the true value of its Guatemalan farmland in the Pacific Ocean coast of Guatemala. In turn, the government of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán rejected the usurious demand for over-payment, as a violation of the national sovereignty of the Republic of Guatemala.

After the expropriations began in 1953, the UFC asked the U.S. government to confront the Guatemalan government of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán; to draw the reticent Eisenhower administration, the UFC employed the advertising-man Edward L. Bernays to create, organise, and direct an an inflammatory, anti-Communist disinformation campaign against President Árbenz Guzmán and his government. Moreover, the U.S. government, the State Department, cut economic aid to and trade with Guatemala, which devastated the Guatemalan economy, because 85 per cent of its exports were sold to the United States and 85 per cent of its imports were from the United States. The economic sabotage of the republic of Guatemala was secretly effected, because it was was a violation of the Non-intervention agreement to which the United States was a party, and, if publicly known, that the U.S. was violating the agreement other Latin American governments would economically Guatemala.

In 2003, the U.S. State Department published a report wherein it confirmed that the U.S. coup d’ état against Guatemala, by the Central Intelligence Agency, resulted from the civil unrest consequent to the nationalization of foreign-owned farmlands and to the alleged Communist influence, of the PGT, upon the government of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. Moreover, in 1951, the initial plan to overthrow the Árbenz government, Operation PBFORTUNE (later Operation PBSUCCESS), was prepared before the expropriation of the Guatemalan farmlands of the United Fruit Company, and that, “in the Agency’s view, Árbenz’s toleration for known Communists made him, at best, a ‘fellow traveler’ and, at worst, a Communist, himself. The social unrest that accompanied the passage and implementation of the Agrarian Reform Law supplied critics in Guatemala and Washington with confirmation that a Communist beachhead had been established in the Americas. Agrarian reform was not the issue — Communism was”.

That U.S. government’s fears of a Communist Árbenz Government in Guatemala were exaggerated in the CIA propaganda campaign of Operation PBSUCCESS and in the planning of the coup d’ état proper. Afterwards, to justify U.S. intervention in the internal politics of the Republic of Guatemala, the CIA launched Operation PBHISTORY, which unsuccessfully sought Guatemalan government documents that proved that the Árbenz government was a puppet state of the Soviet Union in the Western hemisphere. In the event, Richard Bissell, once Special Assistant to the CIA Director, said that there “is absolutely no reason to believe” that the Eisenhower Administration’s desire to help the United Fruit Company had “any significant role” in reaching the decision to depose the elected government of the Republic of Guatemala. Yet Howard Hunt, a CIA case officer who participated in the Guatemalan coup d’ état, said that the political influence of the United Fruit Company upon the Eisenhower Administration was instrumental in the U.S. government’s overthrowing the progressive Guatemalan government of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in order to protect the national security of the United States of America and of the Western hemisphere against the hegemony of the Soviet Union.

Operation PBFORTUNE

Main article: Operation PBFORTUNE

As early as 1951, before the agrarian reform law had been written or passed, CIA apprehension about a Communist takeover caused the agency to seriously explore options for Árbenz's overthrow. Árbenz's toleration for known Communists made him at best a "fellow traveler," and at worst a Communist himself. The most viable option being considered was the covert backing of rebel groups and dissidents already active in Guatemala and the then CIA Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Walter B. Smith sent an agent to Guatemala City to investigate potential candidate individuals or organizations. At the time the state of the opposition to Árbenz was inert, divided, and increasingly fractious. The agent returned empty handed. Fortunately for the CIA, this roughly coincided with the first state visit of the President of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza. He informed them of Castillo Armas's small rebel group and stated that, with the CIA's support, he and Armas could unseat Árbenz. They also could expect financial backing from Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and, as Armas later claimed, from internal elements within the Guatemalan army. DCI Smith urged his subordinates to follow up on this and to establish contacts with Armas, which they did in June of the same year. At the CIA's request, Armas then relayed to them a plan for invasion, which was to launch from El Salvador, Mexico, and Honduras (from UFC land) and would be coordinated with simultaneous uprisings within Guatemala. Armas requested arms, money, aircraft, and boats and informed them that he would launch the invasion as planned regardless of the CIA's support if need be. In July the CIA secured arms, transport, and $225,000 (US) for Armas, and furnished a few World War II-era airplanes. In September the CIA secured State Department approval and Operation PBFORTUNE was set.

One of two major setbacks occurred shortly afterwards when, while preparing for the arms shipment, the operation had to be called off. Somoza had been speaking of the invasion plan with other Central American leaders and the operation's cover, which was very important due to the fragile diplomatic situation the United States had with the region, was blown. While Operation PBFORTUNE was officially terminated, the operation led a twilight existence with the arms shipment prepared prior still kept in waiting and with Armas being kept on a $3,000 a week retainer.

Operation PBSUCCESS

Operational names

Main article: CIA cryptonyms

The CIA name of the coup d’état operation, PBSUCCESS, is a cryptonym composed of a digraph (two-character prefix), which designates the functional, geographic area where the mission is effected. In Operation PBSUCCESS, the prefix PB denotes “Guatemala”, and the words SUCCESS and FORTUNE, respectively indicated the optimism and confidence of the CIA planners. In CIA crptonym practice, the PBSUCCESS and PBFORTUNE operational names were unusual, because most operational names either were arbitrary-word or misleading titles, meant to hide the true temper of the actions of the paramilitary operation.

The coup d’état

U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, the executor and the advocate of the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état.

Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, President of Guatemala (1954–57)

With the departure of the Truman Administration (1945–53) and the arrival of the Eisenhower Administration (1953–61), the right-ward Cold War political climate rekindled Presidential interest in covert operations, which reanimated CIA advocacy of a paramilitary invasion of Guatemala to depose the Árbenz Guzmán government. Strategically, President Eisenhower favored the secret warfare of covert operations as cost-effective means for combating the world-wide hegemony of the U.S.S.R. Despite the requisite bureaucratic politicking, the CIA planners worried that their Guatemalan army of liberation, or any other armed rebel-group, might prove over-eager and prematurely launch a Guatemalan coup d’ état, which fear proved justified in early 1953 — when a futile, poorly-planned paramilitary invasion was launched by a rebel group marginally associated with Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. Moreover, in Guatemala, the failed, premature invasion provoked the political response feared by CIA — President Árbenz Guzmán attacked and suppressed the anti-Communist politicians of Guatemala, and jailed many; such political repression of right-wing politicians was supported by the popular majority of Guatemalans. The incarceration and the political suppression of its Guatemalan secret agents (human assets) rendered them operationally ineffective, thus the CIA relied upon the ideologically-fragmented Guatemalan-exile groups (armed and unarmed) to effect the coup d’état against President Árbenz Guzmán.

The U.S. National Security Council revived the Guatemalan coup d'état after reviewing the anti-government politics of the Guatemalan right wing, and because of the successful CIA coup d'état against the Mossadegh Government of Iran (1953), the operational cadre included the case officers Tracy Barnes, the officer in charge, David Atlee Phillips, Jack Esterline, E. Howard Hunt, David Sánchez Morales, Frank Wisner, Rip Robertson, William Pawley, and Gerry Droller. To initiate Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA selected the Guatemalan leader for the rebel army of liberation, the man who would succeed Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán as President of Guatemala, and establish a pro–U.S. government. The three Guatemalan-exile candidates were: the favored first candidate, the coffee planter Juan Córdova Cerna, formerly of the Cabinet of Advisors to President Arévalo, and who also was a business consultant to the United Fruit Company, which he aided in suppressing a workers’ revolt. The second candidate was General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, a former department governor for General Ubico; he was pro–Nazi until 1943, when he changed fascist allegiance and became pro–U.S.; he went to the U.S. to mediate the overthrow of Ponce. The third candidate was Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who had attended the Guatemalan national military academy with Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The CIA selected Col. Armas as leader of the Guatemalan army of liberation, the core of Operation PBSUCCESS.

In December 1953, the operational headquarters of the Castillo Armas Guatemalan army of liberation was established in Florida, whence the CIA recruited pilots and mercenary soldiers, supervised their proper military training, established a radio station for broadcasting disinformation (propaganda), and increased diplomatic pressure upon the government of Guatemala to reverse the Agrarian Reform Law (Decree 900), especially for the United Fruit Company. Despite being unable to halt the exportation of Guatemalan coffee, the CIA foiled arms purchases from Canada and Germany. Faced with dwindling supplies of matériel, and noting the increased arming of the neighboring Central American countries, President Árbenz Guzmán heeded the intelligence and rumor indications of a paramilitary invasion of the Republic of Guatemala, which were confirmed by a CIA rebel-group defector who informed the Árbenz government of PBSUCCESS; the intelligence about a CIA invasion prompted the Guatemalan government to buy arms from other countries. The Árbenz government bought German weapons (WWII surplus matériel) from Communist Czechoslovakia, a satellite country of the Soviet Union. The Czechoslovakian arms were delivered to Guatemala, at Puerto Barrios, by the Swedish freight ship MS Alfhem which departed from the Polish port Szczecin.

The U.S. State Department and the CIA tried to delay and stop the freight ship; in one instance they stopped the freighter Wulfsbrook mistakenly having thought it was the MS Alfhelm; the intelligence failure allowed Czech Communist arms to reach Guatemala. The original defense plan of the Árbenz government was to arm the civil (workers’) militia and the Guatemalan Army; however, once the secret arms-purchase was revealed by the press, the circumstance compelled the President to arm only the Guatemalan military; which politicians perceived as a policy rift between President Árbenz Guzmán and the military. Although Guatemala’s cash-and-carry arms purchase was with Czechoslovakia, a Soviet Bloc country, not with the Soviet Union proper, CIA propagand misrepresented the business transaction as proof of Soviet interference in the Western Hemisphere, the hegemony of the U.S. established in the Monroe Doctrine (1823). To the American public, the U.S. press reported that the Republic of Guatemala was suffering a Communist revolution. The propaganda news of the Guatemalan-Czech arms purchase, and the arrival of the shipment to Guatemala provoked much popular American support for military intervention; such fabricated domestic support allowed the Eisenhower government 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 under the twin pretexts of intercepting secret shipments of weapons, and the protection of Honduras from Guatemalan invasion. On 7 June, a contingency evacuation-force of five amphibious assault ships, and an anti-submarine aircraft carrier, were despatched to blockade the Guatemalan sea lanes; also embarked was a US Marine Battalion Landing Team, for a helicopter assault.

On 24 May, the U.S. Navy launched Operation HARDROCK BAKER, a blockade of Guatemala, wherein submarines and surface ships stopped and boarded all sea-going vessels, and forcefully searched them for Guatemala-bound weapons that might support the Árbenz “Communist government”. The blockade and searches included British and French ships, about which violations of maritime national sovereignty neither the British nor the French protested, because they did not want the U.S. involved in their colonial troubles in the Middle East. The event made feasible further PBSUCCESS action against the Guatemalan Army. To disseminate propaganda, the military aeroplanes of Col. Castillo Armas’s flew over Guatemala City, dropping leaflets that exhorted the Guatemalan nation to: “Struggle against Communist atheism, Communist intervention, Communist oppression . . . Struggle with your patriotic brothers! Struggle with Castillo Armas!” The messages meant to turn the Guatemalan Army against President Árbenz Guzmán, personally, and against Communism, as an economic policy. Moreover, the aeroplanes were also perceived as practicing bombing runs, because of which the Guatemalan people believed that a military invasion was imminent.

Propaganda

The Guatemalan coup d’état depended upon psychological warfare, because the 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 rumor, air-dropped pamphlets, poster campaigns, and radio (the mass communications medium that successfully deceived the Iranian majority to accept the foreign deposition of the elected Mossadegh government). In 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 Miami, right-wing student groups successfully conducted internal propaganda, such as publishing a weekly political pamphlet, covering walls and buses with the number "32" — referring to Article 32 of the Guatemalan Constitution, which forbade foreign-financed, international political parties, which received much attention from the local and national press. Other techniques included character assassination, by means of signs that read: A Communist Lives Here affixed to the houses of Árbenz's supporters; the publication of false death-notices for President Árbenz Guzmán and his Cabinet of Advisors in the newspapers of Guatemala. In due course, the disinformation campaign provoked political repression of the right wing, when the Árbenz government abridged Guatemalan political rights by arresting right-wing students, limiting freedom of assembly, and intimidating newspapers. Furthermore, the CIA expected gossip (word-of-mouth) to assist them in propagating their right-wing propaganda against the elected Árbenz government. The CIA radio station, La Voz de la Liberación (The Voice of Liberation), based in Miami, Florida, claimed to be broadcasting from the jungle of Guatemala proper, transmitted music, “news”, and anti–Árbenz propaganda. Most of the radio programming was for the general populace, yet some propaganda was specifically meant as a seditious call-to-arms that would appeal to the right-wing men of action in the officer core of the Guatemalan military, whose treasonous complicity was essential to the deposition of the elected Árbenz government — the success of the Guatemalan coup d’état. 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 mercenary army of liberation led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. Given the social, political, and military realities, the CIA could not expect Col. Castillo Armas to militarily conquer Guatemala with a mercenary army of 480 soldiers; thus, the importance of propaganda, of psychologically intimidating the Guatemalan military-officer class to side with the usurpation of the Republic of Guatemala, in order to depose the “Communist government” of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.

Invasion

At 8:00 p.m. on 18 June 1954, the 480-soldier Guatemalan army of liberation of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas crossed the borders of Guatemala; the forces were in four groups who invaded the country at five key points of the Honduras–Guatemala border and of the Guatemala–El Salvador border. The multiple attacks along a wide front were meant to give the impression that the Republic of Guatemala was being invaded by a military force of greater size, and to disperse the soldiers and minimize the possibility of the 480-man force being routed, and the coup d’état being suppressed, with single, unfavorable battle. Preceding the main force were ten saboteurs tasked with destroying key bridges and telegraph communications. The Castillo Armas forces had been ordered to avoid confronting the dfending Guatemalan Army lest they co-ordinate their actions and either kill or capture the CIA invaders. As psychological warfare, the course of the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état invasion was meant to provoke popular panic, by giving the strategic impression of insurmountable odds against the successful defense of Guatemala, in order to compel the national populace and the Guatemalan Army to side with the invaders, rather than having to militarily defeat them. During the invasion, radio propaganda broadcast false news reports of great military forces being joined by the local populaces in overthrowing the Árbenz government with a popular counter-revolution.

Almost immediately, Armas's forces met with decisive failure. Invading on foot and hampered by heavy equipment, it was in some cases days before the rebels reached their objectives. This weakened the psychological impact of the initial invasion, as local Guatemalans realized they were in no immediate danger. One of the first groups to reach its objective, the group of 122 rebels whose task it was to capture the city of Zacapa, were severely crushed by a small contingent of 30 Guatemalan army soldiers, leaving only 28 rebels who had escaped death or capture. An even larger defeat was handed to the group of 170 rebels who undertook the task of capturing the heavily guarded port city of Puerto Barrios. After the police chief spotted the invading force, he quickly armed local dock workers and assigned them defensive roles. In a matter of hours the vast majority of the rebels were killed or captured, with the remaining men fleeing back into Honduras. Within three days, two of Armas's four prongs were out of commission. Attempting to recover momentum, Armas ordered an air attack on the capital the following day. This too failed, as a single slow flying plane managed to bomb a small oil tank, creating a minor fire that was doused in 20 minutes.

After these rebel failures, Árbenz ordered his military commander to allow Armas's forces to advance deep into the country. Árbenz and his chief commander didn't fear Armas's ragtag army, but there was a concern that, were the rebels to be too severely crushed, it would provide a pretext for open American military intervention. This fear spread widely amongst the officer class, with no one wanting to engage and defeat Armas's increasingly decimated force. Rumors spread - fueled greatly by the presence of the American amphibious assault force - that a Honduran landing by US Marines was in progress; preparatory to an invasion of Guatemala. Árbenz feared that the officers would be cowed into striking a deal with Armas. Confirmation of Árbenz' fear came when an entire army garrison surrendered to Armas a few days later in the town of Chiquimula. Árbenz summoned his cabinet to explain that the army was in revolt, and on June 27 Árbenz announced his resignation.

Aftermath

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

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

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 core of officers of the Guatemalan Army to abandon their Constitutional allegiance to the head-of-state, President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, and become the Guatemalan Army commanded by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. In the event, most of the officer core abandoned the elected President of Guatemala, because, as political conservatives, they disliked the Agrarian Reform Law (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 right-wing counter-revolution, was mixed. The upper-class landowners welcomed the end of the Decree 900 agrarian reform, and expected the U.S. to reinstate their monopoly ownership of expropriated agricultural lands. The Maya Indian population also had mixed political responses to the counter-revolution, some welcomed the régime change, because some had earlier been disenfranchised by the Árbenz government restrictions upon their autonomous-community local powers, other Maya Indians viewed President Árbenz Guzmán favorably, like most of the population, and understood the socio-political importance of the Decree 900 Agrarian Reform Law. In the cities of Antigua Guatemala, San Martín Jilotepeque, and San Juan Sacatepéquez pro–Árbenz armed groups combated the Castillo Armas government, because of the forced Presidential resignation, and because they had much benefited from the Decree 900 land reform. The U.S.-installed Castillo Armas military government was to expropriate their agricultural lands, and reinstate them to private owners, for which reason, in economic protest, those Guatemalan farmers burned their crops.

In the eleven days after the resignation of President Árbenz Guzmán, five successive 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 head-of-state, Col. Castillo Armas proved an inept administrator, installed a corrupt bureaucracy, and vigorously repressed the 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 Revolution of 1944. International opinion reviled the Guatemalan coup d’état; the French and British press, Le Monde and The Times attacked the United States’ “modern form of economic colonialism”. In 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. hegemony of Latin America. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, said that the paramilitary actions by which the U.S. deposed the elected Guatemalan government violated the human-rights stipulations of the UN Charter; moreover, the usually pro–U.S. newspapers of 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 death-blow to democracy in the Republic of Guatemala.

Afterwards, for forty years, under the guise of anti-Communism, each successive military government waged counter-insurgency warfare against the civil populace of Guatemala, thereby destabilizing Guatemalan society. Moreover, the civil war conflated historical ethnic conflict against the indigenous Maya population, which resulted in genocide; the military junta policies of systematic killing and “disappearance” (political kidnap) killed 140,000 to 250,000 Guatemalans. In the latter stages of the thirty-six-year Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), the CIA reduced the incidence and number of the violations of the human rights of the Guatemalan populace; and, in 1983, thwarted a coup d’ état, which allowed the restoration of democratic civil government, by the national general elections that were won by Democrácia Cristiana, the Christian Democracy party, whereby Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo became President of the Republic of Guatemala.

Following closely on the heels of the successful CIA-orchestrated coup which overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran to allow the Shah to rule autocratically in 1953 (see Operation Ajax), some argue that it employed ideas and methods that were relatively new at the time and, due to the ostensible success of the operation, led to Operation PBSUCCESS becoming the de facto model for the overthrow or destabilization of a defiant government for some time to come, including the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Operation PBHISTORY

After the PBSUCCESS coup d’état, the CIA launched Operation PBHISTORY, and sent agents to Guatemala to collect and analyze Árbenz government documents that would provide evidence to support the geopolitical belief of the CIA that, under the presidency of Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the Republic of Guatemala was becoming a Communist puppet state in the Western Hemisphere hegemony of the Soviet Union. CIA intelligence analysis, of more than 150,000 pages of Guatemalan government 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 socialism practiced by President Árbenz and his government was unrelated to the geopolitics of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, some U.S. businessmen and military officers believed that the nationalism of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was a Communist threat to the business interests of American 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 .

See also

• Banana republic
• Church Committee
• Covert operations, coups, military advisors etc.
• Covert U.S. regime change actions
• Guatemalan Civil War
• History of Guatemala
• National Committee of Defense Against Communism
• Operation Kufire
• Operation Kugown
• Operation PBFORTUNE
• Operation PBHISTORY
• Operation WASHTUB
• Plausible deniability
• Timeline of United States military operations

Further reading

• Chapman, Peter (2008). Bananas!: How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World. Canongate U.S.. ISBN 1-84195-881-6. 
• Cullather, Nick (1999). Secret History: The CIA's classified account of its operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-3311-2. 
• Gleijeses, Piero (1992). Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-02556-8. 
• Immerman, R. H., The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention, University of Texas Press: Austin, 1982.
• Handy, Jim (1994). Revolution in the Countryside: Rural Conflict and Agrarian Reform in Guatemala 1944-54. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-4438-1. 
• Kinzer, Stephen and Schlesinger, Stephen. 1999. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• La Feber, Walter (1993). Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. Norton Press. ISBN 0-393-03434-8. 
• Miguel Ángel Asturias, Week-end in Guatemala, 1956, is a fictional account of these events.
• Vidal, Gore, Dark Green, Bright Red, Ballantine Publishing Group, 1950, revised 1968. Gore's fiction uncannily presages the Guatemalan coup d'état.

External links and further reading

• CIA.gov - CIA's declassified documents on Guatemala CIA Documents Chronicling the 1954 Coup
• US State Dept. site - Foreign Relations, 1952-1954: Guatemala
• 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!
• The short film U.S. Warns Russia to Keep Hands off in Guatemala Crisis (1955) is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• 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, ISBN-10: 067401930X, ISBN-13: 978-0674019300