Guatemala invasion
The Guatemala invasion refers to the covert U.S. operation, known as Operation PBSuccess, which culminated in the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954. Arbenz, elected in 1950, implemented significant land reforms that threatened the interests of the United Fruit Company, a major American corporation in Guatemala. Growing concerns about Arbenz’s nationalist policies and perceived communist associations led U.S. officials, particularly during the Eisenhower administration, to take action against him.
CIA-sponsored rebels, primarily former military personnel, were trained and armed by the U.S. before invading Guatemala on June 17, 1954. Although the initial military efforts faced challenges, psychological operations and propaganda exaggerated the threat to foster dissent within the Guatemalan military, ultimately leading to Arbenz's resignation. This intervention had lasting implications, shaping U.S.-Latin America relations and setting a precedent for future covert operations. The event is widely viewed as a key moment in Cold War history, demonstrating the lengths to which the U.S. would go to counter perceived communist influences in the region.
Guatemala invasion
The Event U.S.-assisted rebel invasion of Guatemala that overthrew a reformist president
Date June, 1954
U.S. confidence in the effectiveness of covert operations as a tool in the Cold War grew as a result of a low-cost victory in Guatemala, but the affair left a residue of anti-American feeling in Latin America.
The 1950 election of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán as Guatemalan president set his nation on a collision course with the United States. Arbenz Guzmán was a determined nationalist who also was married to a communist. Moreover, his associations with the pro-Soviet Guatemalan Workers’ Party (PGT) deepened worries in the presidential administrations of both Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1952 and 1953, Arbenz Guzmán implemented a sweeping land reform program called Decree 900. It aimed to redistribute to poor peasants all large plantations, a plan that alarmed officials of Boston-based United Fruit Company (UFCO), the largest landholder in Guatemala. UFCO launched an ambitious public relations campaign that labeled Arbenz Guzmán a communist. Privately, UFCO lobbyists urged the U.S. government to take action, finding sympathetic ears especially with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Allen Dulles. They and other high officials in the Eisenhower administration had substantial ties to UFCO prior to becoming elected officials.
Official planning for the operation that Eisenhower ultimately would authorize as Operation PBSuccess began in August, 1953. Its purpose was the overthrow of the Arbenz Guzmán government, and it had several elements. An early goal was to foster alarm and panic in the Guatemalan public and thus to undermine support for Arbenz Guzmán within the Guatemalan armed forces. Coordinated from Opa-locka, Florida, a CIA-sponsored campaign of psychological warfare dubbed Radio Liberation was launched on a set of news radio stations. Though most of the Radio Liberation transmitters were in neighboring countries, two were inside Guatemala, and one was inside the U.S. embassy. Behind the scenes, subtle approaches were made to senior military officers, urging cooperation with the U.S. goal of stopping Arbenz Guzmán. To diplomatically isolate Arbenz Guzmán from neighboring states’ support, a March, 1954, Organization of American States conference at Caracas, Venezuela, produced near unanimous support for a U.S.-authored denunciation of communist influence in Guatemala. This influence seemed heightened by the May 15 delivery to Guatemala of more than fifteen thousand cases of military weapons—more than four million pounds—bought from communist Czechoslovakia and delivered by the cargo ship Alfem, a freighter of Swedish registry.
The Invasion
With the stage set, U.S.-organized rebels, chiefly former military personnel in exile, played a key part in the plan to overthrow Arbenz Guzmán. Former colonel Carlos Castillo Armas was chosen by the CIA as the rebels’ leader. His troops were armed by the United States, trained in Nicaragua with the assistance of its president, Anastasio Somoza , and then moved to the Honduran-Guatemalan border area, where they awaited the go-ahead from Washington, D.C. A CIA air force of numerous planes provided support. On June 15, 1954, Eisenhower gave the green light to the invasion, and two days later, the lightly armed exiles crossed the border. However, they advanced only a few miles into Guatemala before stalling: Castillo Armas’s Liberation Army did little militarily to dislodge the Guatemalan army.
To magnify perceptions of a mounting crisis, CIA aircraft then bombed Guatemalan fuel tanks and an important military base near the capital. Radio Liberation broadcasts over the next ten days greatly exaggerated the size of the invading force and its military capabilities, in one instance suggesting that perhaps five thousand invaders were armed, when, in fact, they numbered less than two hundred.
PBSuccess was designed not to conquer Guatemala but to stimulate the Guatemalan armed forces to demand a change of government. This event occurred on June 27, when army chief of staff Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz informed Arbenz Guzmán that it was time to leave; Arbenz Guzmán announced his resignation over the radio and requested asylum in the Mexican embassy. Subsequently, Castillo Armas was flown into Guatemala City by the United States and was named president of the country shortly thereafter.
Impact
The absence of extensive costs or casualties in the Guatemalan operation encouraged U.S. officials to believe that covert operations were an effective way to end anti-American regimes in developing nations. The removal of Arbenz Guzmán, which was sympathetically reported in the United States’ media as a victory for the “forces of freedom” in the Cold War, also built public support for the overall anticommunist policy of that era. While it would be decades before the United States openly would acknowledge its direction of the removal of Arbenz Guzmán, within Latin America it was broadly perceived as an American operation at the time, casting an ominous shadow over other countries who went against the grain of America’s interests.
Subsequent Events
An eyewitness to the overthrow of Arbenz Guzmán, Argentine exile Ernesto “Che” Guevara drew strong lessons from these events. When Guevara and Fidel Castro came to power as rulers of Cuba in 1959, they quickly disbanded the prerevolutionary armed forces, replacing them with a politically reliable and loyal force. Thus, when the very same CIA personnel attempted to replicate Operation PBSuccess in a new operation against Cuba in 1960-1961—an operation that used Guatemala as its training base—a small invading force of Cuban exiles could not stimulate a military coup against Castro. In this very real sense, the United States relied too much on lessons derived from Guatemala: They led the CIA directly to disaster at the Bay of Pigs in April, 1961.
Bibliography
Cullather, Nick. Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Written during the early 1990’s as an official CIA in-house history, this volume later was declassified for public use. Despite some deletions for security purposes, these official documents richly convey key features of the U.S. operation.
Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Originally published by Doubleday in 1982, this classic book places the fall of Arbenz Guzmán within an Eisenhower White House agenda driven by desire to protect U.S. economic interests. Includes an updated afterword by Schlesinger and a new assessment of the consequences of the invasion by former U.S. State Department official Richard Nuccio.
Streeter, Stephen M. Managing the Counterrevolution: The United States and Guatemala, 1954-1961. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000. A well-documented account that carefully compares the author’s thesis about American desire for hegemony with those of earlier works that emphasized economic or Cold War motives behind American actions. Provides extensive analysis of later impact of the 1954 events.