1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

• 1. Introduction

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  The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état ended a decade of democratic government in ten days, with an invasion force of just 480 men. The man those men were meant to depose, Jacobo Árbenz, had won a free election and was redistributing uncultivated land to landless peasants. Among the civilians sheltering in Guatemala City during the fighting was a 25-year-old named Che Guevara. What the CIA called Operation PBSuccess would ripple forward into the Bay of Pigs, a 36-year civil war, and a genocide of the Maya peoples. How did a country in the middle of its first genuine democracy end up with a military dictatorship? The answers involve a fruit company, two brothers with law firm ties, a radio station broadcasting from Miami, and a Cold War logic that proved remarkably difficult to argue against.

• 2. Banana Republic Foundations

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  U.S. president James Monroe's 1823 foreign policy doctrine warned European powers against further colonization in Latin America, but historian Mark Gilderhus notes it also carried racially condescending language that likened Latin American countries to squabbling children. By 1895 President Grover Cleveland had sharpened the doctrine into something more blunt, declaring the U.S. "practically sovereign" on the continent. Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, that claim translated into an economic empire across the Caribbean, including a 1903 treaty with Cuba tilted heavily in the U.S. favor.

  Guatemala sat squarely inside this sphere. From 1890 to 1920, economic dominance over the country passed from Britain and Germany to the United States, which became Guatemala's main trade partner. A series of Guatemalan presidents made the arrangement work by offering generous terms to foreign companies. Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who held the presidency from 1898 to 1920, was among the most accommodating. He granted large concessions to the United Fruit Company, which had been formed in 1899 through the merger of two large U.S. corporations.

  By 1900 the UFC was the world's largest exporter of bananas. In Guatemala it controlled not just plantations but the railroads, the docks, and the communication systems. Journalist William Blum described its role as a "state within a state". The U.S. government was closely involved in Guatemalan finances under Cabrera, frequently dictating policy and securing exclusive rights for American companies. When Cabrera was overthrown in 1920, the U.S. dispatched an armed force to ensure the incoming president remained friendly.

  The Depression brought a new strongman. Fearing popular revolt, wealthy landowners backed Jorge Ubico, who won an uncontested election in 1931. Ubico abolished debt peonage but replaced it with a vagrancy law requiring all landless men of working age to perform at least 100 days of forced labor each year. He authorized landowners to take any actions they wished against workers, including executions. By 1930 the UFC had built an operating capital of 215 million U.S. dollars, and Ubico handed it a contract granting 200,000 hectares of public land, tax exemption, and a guarantee of no competing contracts. He also requested the company cap its workers' daily wages at 50 U.S. cents, to limit the bargaining power of workers elsewhere. The company obliged.

• 3. The Revolution That Worried Washington

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  University students and middle-class citizens toppled Ubico in 1944, handing power to a junta that was itself soon swept away by the October Revolution, which aimed to build a liberal democracy. The first genuinely free election that followed brought in Juan José Arévalo, a philosophically conservative university professor. Arévalo expanded labor protections, built health centers, increased education funding, enacted a minimum wage, and created state-run farms for landless laborers. He was also, notably, anti-communist: he cracked down on the Guatemalan Party of Labour and in 1945 criminalized unions in workplaces with fewer than 500 workers.

  None of this reassured Washington. The U.S. was suspicious of Arévalo from the start, worried he was under Soviet influence. Part of this suspicion came from his support for the Caribbean Legion, a group of progressive exiles that included Fidel Castro, which sought to overthrow U.S.-backed dictatorships across Central America. The State Department saw the Legion as a vehicle for communism rather than as the anti-dictatorial movement it described itself as. Arévalo survived at least 25 coup attempts during his presidency, one of which, in 1949, was led by Francisco Arana and foiled in an armed shootout. Arana was killed; the defense minister who led the force against him was Jacobo Árbenz.

  Árbenz won the largely free 1950 election, marking the first democratic transfer of power between elected leaders in Guatemalan history. His most prominent policy was Decree 900, an agrarian reform bill he had drafted himself after consulting economists across Latin America. The law expropriated uncultivated land from holdings larger than 673 acres, compensating owners with government bonds valued at what the owners themselves had declared in their 1952 tax returns. Of nearly 350,000 private landholdings, only 1,710 were affected. By June 1954 about 1,400,000 acres had been redistributed, reaching approximately 500,000 individuals, or one-sixth of the entire population. Contrary to the predictions of critics, Guatemalan agricultural productivity, cultivated area, and purchases of farm machinery all saw a slight increase.

• 4. The Fruit Company's War on Truth

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  By 1950 the United Fruit Company's annual profits stood at 65 million U.S. dollars, twice the total revenue of the Guatemalan government. The company virtually owned Puerto Barrios, Guatemala's only Atlantic port, and profited from the flow of every good that passed through it. Of the 550,000 acres it owned in Guatemala, only 15 percent was under cultivation; the rest was idle, and thus fell squarely within the scope of Decree 900.

  The UFC responded with an intensive lobbying campaign in Washington. Several members of Congress criticized the Guatemalan government for failing to protect the company's interests. The Guatemalan reply was direct: the company was the main obstacle to progress in the country. American historians noted that to Guatemalans, it appeared their country was "being mercilessly exploited by foreign interests which took huge profits without making any contributions to the nation's welfare".

  When the government expropriated 200,000 acres of uncultivated UFC land in 1953, it paid 2.99 U.S. dollars per acre, which was twice what the company had paid when it purchased the land, but matched the value the company itself had declared for tax purposes. The UFC found its leverage through U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had close ties to the company. It also hired Edward Bernays, who ran a concerted public relations and misinformation campaign over several years, portraying the company as the victim of a communist government.

  The UFC commissioned a 235-page research report from a firm known to be hostile to social reform. Historians described it as full of "exaggerations, scurrilous descriptions and bizarre historical theories", yet it had a significant impact on the members of Congress who read it. In total, the company spent over half a million dollars to convince lawmakers and the American public that the Guatemalan government needed to be removed.

• 5. Building the Coup

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  The first attempt to topple Árbenz was Operation PBFortune, authorized by President Harry S. Truman in 1952. Planning involved the CIA, the UFC, and Anastasio Somoza García, the Nicaraguan dictator who had visited Washington in April 1952 and offered to "clean up Guatemala" if given the arms. The CIA identified Carlos Castillo Armas, a Guatemalan army officer exiled after a failed 1949 coup attempt, as the man to lead the effort. It paid him a monthly retainer of 3,000 U.S. dollars and gave him 225,000 U.S. dollars to build a rebel force. A freighter borrowed from the UFC was refitted in New Orleans and loaded with weapons disguised as agricultural machinery. The operation was aborted when it came to the attention of Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

  Dwight Eisenhower's election in 1952 changed the climate entirely. He had pledged a harder line against communism, and his administration was deeply connected to the UFC. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles had both been partners at the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, where they had arranged deals for the company. Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith later became a company director; Eisenhower's personal assistant Ann C. Whitman was the wife of the UFC's public relations director Edmund S. Whitman.

  Eisenhower authorized the CIA to carry out Operation PBSuccess in August 1953, granting an initial budget of 2.7 million U.S. dollars for psychological warfare and political action. The total budget has been estimated at between 5 and 7 million dollars, and more than 100 CIA agents worked on the planning. The CIA trained at least 1,725 foreign guerrillas plus thousands of additional militants as reserves, establishing camps in Nicaragua and Honduras. The headquarters, code-named Lincoln, were located in a concealed office complex in Opa-locka, Florida. Field command was given to former U.S. Army Colonel Albert Haney, then chief of the CIA station in South Korea.

  The preparations were only superficially covert: the CIA intended Árbenz to find out about them, as part of its plan to convince the Guatemalan people that his overthrow was inevitable. At the Caracas conference in March 1954, U.S. pressure produced a resolution condemning the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere, with only Guatemala voting against, because dictatorships dependent on the U.S. backed the measure despite delegate sympathy for Guatemala's position. Foreign minister Guillermo Toriello called it the "internationalization of McCarthyism".

• 6. Ten Days of Psychological Terror

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  Voice of Liberation, La Voz de la Liberación, began broadcasting on the 1st of May 1954. The station claimed to transmit from deep within Guatemalan jungles; in reality, it was concocted in Miami by Guatemalan exiles, then broadcast through a mobile transmitter in Central America. Foreign correspondents from major publications believed it to be the most authentic source of news on the situation. The station ran two-hour bulletins twice a day, broadcasting exaggerated reports of rebel troops converging on the capital and contributing to widespread demoralization.

  Castillo Armas' 480-man force crossed the Guatemalan border at 8:20 am on the 18th of June 1954, divided into four groups ranging in size from 60 to 198 men. The invasion fared poorly. A 60-man force was intercepted and jailed by Salvadoran police before reaching the border. The 122 men targeting Zacapa were beaten decisively by a garrison of just 30 Guatemalan soldiers, with only 30 men escaping death or capture. The force attacking Puerto Barrios was repelled by policemen and armed dockworkers.

  By the 22nd of June, Castillo Armas was down to a single P-47 aircraft. CIA field commander Colonel Al Haney informed Allen Dulles that without more planes, the invasion would fail. In an Oval Office meeting, Dulles briefed Eisenhower on the need for additional aircraft. Eisenhower approved their purchase; businessman William Pawley bought three P-47s on behalf of the Nicaraguan government and flew them into action on the 23rd of June. Early on the 27th of June a rebel plane bombed a British cargo ship being loaded with Guatemalan cotton and coffee at Puerto San José, an incident that cost the CIA one million U.S. dollars in compensation.

  Árbenz wanted to arm civilian militias, but Army Chief Carlos Enrique Díaz warned him it would be unpopular with the soldiers. The military had always been anti-communist, and Ambassador John Peurifoy had been applying pressure on senior officers since arriving in October 1953. On the 25th of June Árbenz learned from PGT secretary general Alvarado Monzón that the army at Zacapa was highly demoralized and refusing to fight. Officers sent a message asking the President to resign, stating that given U.S. support for the rebels, defeat was inevitable. Árbenz left the presidential palace at 8 pm on the 27th of June, having taped a resignation speech broadcast an hour later. He walked to the Mexican Embassy and sought asylum.

• 7. What Followed

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  Negotiations held in San Salvador, brokered by U.S. Ambassador Peurifoy with the backing of El Salvador's dictator Óscar Osorio, produced an agreement announced at 4:45 am on the 2nd of July. The CIA considered Castillo Armas, in the words of one of its assessments, sufficiently corrupt and authoritarian to be well suited to lead the new government. He was unanimously elected president of the junta on the 7th of July, after two colonels who had been paid 100,000 U.S. dollars each resigned to outnumber his opponent.

  Castillo Armas quickly reversed all the reforms of the previous decade. He outlawed labor unions, peasant organizations, and every political party except his own National Liberation Movement. Over the following years, a committee he established investigated nearly 70,000 people. At Finca Jocatán, near Tiquisate, where the first private sector union in the country had been founded in 1944, an estimated 1,000 United Fruit workers were executed in the immediate aftermath of the coup. Estimates of total executions in the first few months range from hundreds to five thousand.

  The CIA launched Operation PBHistory on the 4th of July 1954, sending agents into Guatemala City to search Árbenz's files for evidence of Soviet influence. After examining 500,000 documents, the operation found none. PBHistory failed in its chief objective. The Soviet description of the coup, that the U.S. had crushed a democratic revolution to protect UFC control of the Guatemalan economy, became far more widely accepted than the CIA's version.