Guatemala and CIA - June 17, 1954

Guatemalan Gov't No Match for CIA in 1954
 
 
 
Jun 12, 12:19 PM (ET)

By GEORGE GEDDA 
 

WASHINGTON (AP) - It was a time when Cold War concerns transcended all others. 
So when Guatemala's reformist president, Jacobo Arbenz, appointed communists to 
several posts in 1951, the alarm bells sounded in Washington.

The CIA began drawing up contingency plans, including the assassination of 
leftist officials and their allies.

Over time, the planning was expanded, with the CIA arming and training an anti-
Arbenz "Liberation Army."

On June 17, 1954 - 50 years ago this Thursday - some 150 insurgents crossed the 
border into Guatemala from Honduras.

 
Within days, CIA bombers were strafing the capital, Guatemala City, and agency 
propagandists were broadcasting fake reports about rebel battlefield triumphs.

On June 27, the elected president fled the country, never to return. Arbenz's 
three-year rule was best known for its ambitious land reform program. With his 
departure, Washington no longer had to worry that his social reform ideas could 
inspire a peasant rebellion in neighboring countries.

U.S. officials also rejoiced in the knowledge that Moscow, at least for the 
time being, would not be able to add a Latin American country to the European 
and Asian ones already in its fold.

For Guatemala, it was a prelude to a tragic civil war that was to last 30 years.

An estimated 200,000 Guatemalans died, largely due to the excesses of the 
Guatemalan military. A postwar independent commission concluded that the 
military had committed "acts of genocide," mostly against the country's 
indigenous population.

The civil war began about a decade after the 1954 intervention, perhaps 
inspired by the land reform rollback imposed by the government that replaced 
Arbenz and by the 1959 Cuban revolution, a model at the time for leftists 
throughout the hemisphere.

Picked by the CIA to lead the assault against Arbenz was a Guatemalan former 
colonel, Carlos Castillo Armas, who was working as a furniture salesman in 
Honduras when he was recruited for the assignment.

An account of the invasion was written by Latin American historian Douglas 
Kraft, who is now a State Department historian.

Arbenz believed his army would defeat the rebels, Kraft wrote. That seemed the 
case when they attacked by land and sea, meeting strong resistance and 
stalling. It was then that the CIA undertook the psychological campaign.

"Jamming Guatemalan radio waves and broadcasting fictitious reports of an 
advancing rebel force, the CIA worked to unnerve the Guatemalan Army," Kraft 
wrote. "Simultaneously, CIA bombers strafed Guatemala City streets and dropped 
small bombs to arouse fear among the local population. ... Senior Guatemalan 
officers began to fear that the United States might invade should the rebel 
incursion fail.

By June 25, "these fears circulated at the front" and the military forces would 
not take on the rebels at Zacapa, according to Kraft.

"The military had effectively turned against Arbenz. His alternatives narrowed, 
the Guatemalan president ordered the military to arm peasant and labor 
organizations in a last ditch effort to stop Castillo Armas. The order 
represented Arbenz's fatal error," Kraft wrote.

"Entrusting the nation's defense to a band of peasants represented a vote of no 
confidence in the military. What little loyalty Arbenz still enjoyed 
evaporated."

Arbenz's ouster was not entirely the work of the CIA. Much of the army had been 
alienated by what they considered reckless implementation of the land reform; 
peasant land invasions were common. Some question whether the Arbenz government 
would have survived even if the CIA had done nothing.

Arbenz fled to Mexico. Castillo Armas, with a big assist from U.S. diplomats, 
was named to replace him.

The Eisenhower administration's concerns about Arbenz were reinforced just a 
few weeks before the invasion when his government bought several hundred 
thousand dollars worth of arms from Czechoslovakia, a Soviet ally.

Over the years, perceptions about the U.S. intervention have been colored by 
the financial interests of two of Eisenhower's top national security aides: 
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, the director of 
the CIA.

As a private lawyer in the 1930s, John Foster Dulles had helped broker a deal 
enabling the United Fruit Co., a major U.S. banana producer, to control 
Guatemala's only railway. The Dulles brothers also held stock in United Fruit 
after joining the Eisenhower administration. The company lost a huge swath of 
land under Arbenz's reforms.

John Foster Dulles dismissed suggestions that American hostility toward Arbenz 
was influenced by United Fruit's fate. American policy, he said, was motivated 
by "communist infiltration" in Guatemala.

Jose Manuel Fortuny, former leader of the Guatemalan Communist Party and a 
member of the Arbenz administration, agreed. The United States "would have 
overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas," he said, according to a study 
by Stephen M. Streeter of Canada's McMaster University.

Arbenz saw things differently. "Our crime," he said in his resignation 
speech, "is having enacted an agrarian reform which affected the interests of 
the United Fruit Company."

In the run-up to the invasion, U.S. officials were busy on the diplomatic 
front. In March, they persuaded the Organization of American States to support 
an anti-Guatemala resolution. Negative stories about the Arbenz government 
began appearing in the U.S. press, thanks to a State Department publicity 
campaign.

After Arbenz was ousted, John Foster Dulles' top aide for Latin America, Henry 
Holland, said, "The people of Guatemala rose and dispersed the little group of 
traitors who had tried to subvert their government into another communist 
satellite." He did not mention CIA involvement.

The CIA's plans to "neutralize" Guatemalan leftists were disclosed in 
declassified documents. Latin America researcher Peter Kornbluh, of the private 
National Security Archives, says the "A" list of those to be assassinated 
contained 58 names.

Planning for assassinations included budgeting, training programs, creation of 
hit teams, and transfer of armaments. The CIA has said it did not carry out the 
assassination plan.

Many Latin Americans were angry about the CIA intervention. Adolphe Berle, the 
State Department's troubleshooter for the region at the time, wrote in his 
diary: "We eliminated a communist regime at the expense of having antagonized 
half the hemisphere."

CIA agent David Atlee Phillips wrote that Arbenz's ouster was necessary because 
documents he left behind "revealed a paradigm of Soviet Cold War expansionism," 
according to Streeter's study.

Castillo Armas' presidency proved to be unpopular. He was assassinated by a 
member of the presidential guard in 1957.

The next U.S. attempt at governmental change in Latin America failed dismally. 
Seven years after Guatemala, CIA-trained Cuban exiles went after Fidel Castro's 
government. Defeat came in less than three days. Forty-three years later, 
Castro and his regime survive.

---

On the Net:

CIA documents on Guatemala: www.foia.cia.gov/guatemala.asp

Guatemala Human Rights Commission: www.ghrc-usa.org

Stephen Streeter's site:

http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/(tilde)streete/publications.html 



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