Early CIA regime change operations
During the Cold War, the United States maintained nominal control over the Western Hemisphere — Latin American in particular. U.S. foreign policy attitudes toward its southern neighbors are characterized as paternalistic at best and interventionist at worst in the centuries leading up to World War II. The early nineteenth century Monroe Doctrine set a precedent for hegemonic interventionist control in the name of protecting American economic interests. This was only temporarily stymied by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy of nonintervention in the hemisphere. During World War II, the Good Neighbor policy evolved from one that fostered economic cooperation to one that created military dependency. George Kennan’s written corollary concerning the region, rooted in xenophobic rhetoric, painted Latin America as prime fodder for Soviet Communist expansion and that American foreign policy ought to prevent Latin American mobilization while protecting access to raw materials. Thanks to domestic McCarthyism — anything that remotely resembled communism was deemed an enemy incursion that should receive an American response.
Following Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1952 landslide victory, American interventions in the region returned as the U.S. sought to cement economic and political control against a backdrop of imagined impending Communist expansion. Eisenhower, an economic conservative, viewed covert operations by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a panacea of sorts. To his administration, they presented an attractive, low-cost option to achieve desired ends without the high cost of conventional force invasions.
Between 1954 and 1989, American leadership intervened in Latin America eight times. Many of these operations were overt conventional invasions, many were covert operations ran by American intelligence services designed to influence change and overthrow governments. Guatemala is unique because it serves as the first case of American covert intervention in the region and follows closely on the heels of the first successful intelligence ran coup. The twin coups in Iran and Guatemala began a trend in the Eisenhower administration to use clandestine forms of power to shape American foreign policy. This further precipitated a longer trend of these sort of operations to assert American dominance. Furthermore, the Guatemalan operation represented a clean break from the Monroe Doctrine, which sought to protect the Americas from outside forces. In 1954, despite reality otherwise, Washington DC intervened to “protect” Guatemalans from allegedly dangerous forces inside the Americas. The Guatemalan operation began a pattern of covert intervention and subversion in Latin America throughout the Cold War. While there exist many accounts of the operation, historians agree, generally, on the lessons learned from the operation. Historians differ, however, in their analysis of the reasons for the action, the depth of Communist influence in Guatemala, and the CIA’s role.
After the revolution of 1944 ousted an autocratic dictator and elected a popular government into power, American leaders grew increasingly worried about Guatemalan Communist tendencies and Soviet influence. The 1944 revolution overthrew U.S. aligned dictator Jorge Ubico and saw former teacher and middle-class hero Juan Arevalo elected as President. Arevalo pursued policies that protected labor while seeking to reform agriculture and land ownership in his country. In the lead up to the countries 1950 election, a mysterious assassination of one of his right-wing subordinates, Francisco Arana, preceded the election of Arana’s peer, Jacobo Arbenz. To the United States, Arbenz seemed a more significant communist threat as his labor, and agrarian reforms threatened the profits of the United Fruit Company (UFC) — an American corporation and the largest banana exporter in the world. At the time, United Fruit controlled much of the land in Guatemala and used its Washington lobbyists to influence government decisions all while sewing discontent among the American people toward Guatemala. Arbenz’s issuance of Decree 900 in 1952 promised to redistribute much of Guatemala’s unused land to peasant. This naturally drew the ire of the Truman administration in the United States, which viewed the action as signs of communist thought and potentially Soviet influence.
Led by students, teachers, military officers, and intellectuals — the 1944 revolution marked a significant departure from the previous thirteen-year-old dictatorship. Two subsequent elections ushered in numerous political and economic reforms designed to free Guatemalans from the liberal feudalism it found itself in with United Fruit Company’s agrarian hegemony. The Truman administration, pressured by anti-communist sentiment and alarmist reports from State Department and intelligence officials, plotted to have Arbenz overthrown in 1952 but never executed the plan. Known as Operation PBFORTUNE, the entire operation was called off by State Department officials after they discovered that the CIA failed to inform anyone outside of their sphere of influence. Regardless, the plan included three major phases: (1) psychological warfare and disinformation through radio propaganda called Operation SHERWOOD; (2) arming an opposition leader (Castillo Armas); and (3) coercing the Guatemalan Army to betray Arbenz. Despite not carrying out the coup itself, the CIA continued propaganda and subversive efforts in the country.
By August 1953, however, the new Eisenhower administration was so alarmed by the potential for communist influence in Guatemala that the President ordered the removal of Arbenz. The CIA subsequently dusted off its earlier plans and executed Operation PBSUCCESS. Throughout the first half of 1954, the CIA — with help from the State Department — recruited a proxy force led by former Guatemalan General Carlos Castillo Armas. Sensing his impending struggle for control of the country, Arbenz ordered a shipment of weapons from Czechoslovakia transported on a Swedish shipped called the Alfhem. The weapons were destined for a peasant militia he hoped to create but the CIA was tracking the shipment for almost its entire trip.
Nevertheless, the small rebel force easily ousted the Arbenz government without a shot fired thanks to the CIA’s propaganda efforts, and Armas assumed control of the country on June 27th, 1954. While successful in ousting Arbenz, the United States was more successful at creating further resentment throughout the region than they were at stemming the tide of Marxist ideologies. This operation marked the first time that the CIA overthrew a leader from their position of power in Latin America and would not be the last. Most scholars characterize the Guatemalan coup as an effort by the Eisenhower administration to maintain control over its “backyard” while simultaneously checking Soviet influence in the region. The decision to use covert means is often portrayed as born from a desire to achieve maximum results for the lowest cost. Therefore, most contemporary scholars cite two reasons for American intervention in Latin America, including Guatemala: national security and economic interests.
In 1982, two books The CIA in Guatemala and Bitter Fruit revealed the CIA’s involvement in the regime change from Arbenz to Armas in 1954. These books are based on the first declassified documents from the operation through the Freedom of Information Act. Richard H. Immerman’s The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention is a detailed scholarly analysis of the Agency, its operations, and the outcome of Operation PBSUCCESS. Immerman concludes that communism was not possible in Guatemala and that the United States interrupted a revolutionary process. Immerman also all but absolves United Fruit Company from involvement. While many connections between the company, its lobbyists, lawyers, and the highest levels of the State Department and the CIA exist, Immerman shows that the Guatemalan coup is a clear evolution of Agency covert action, especially following the 1953 Iranian coup. He also spends time describing a robust linkage between Guatemala and other revolutionary events and backlashes in Latin America — especially the Cuban Revolution.
Immerman demonstrates that this was less about financial concerns and more about the Eisenhower administration pushing communism out of the hemisphere. Immerman places the operation in a broader context, also showing how this small operation became an example for future operations. He also describes the effectiveness of psychological operations in Guatemala, known as Operation SHERWOOD, and how these techniques paved the way for future operations. SHERWOOD was, to Immerman, the key in getting so many Guatemalan army officers to desert and support Armas. Immerman implies that the Alfhem shipment was a boon to Arbenz loyalists but further scholarship shows the shipment was nearly worthless. In the end, Immerman concludes that Operation PBSUCCESS “made moderation impossible” and ushered in an era of aggressive political regimes in the country that turned it into one of the 20th centuries most dangerous places.
In Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Stephen Kinzer and Stephen C. Schlesinger provide a less analytical yet more engaging narrative of the operation. Because of its journalistic style and questionable sourcing, the book reads more like a popular history than a scholarly analysis as the two benefited from using Immerman’s research, which forms the basis for this book. Kinzer and Schlesinger portray Arbenz as merely a nationalist — far from the Soviet proxy that the CIA and State department portrayed him to be. The authors also state that the Czech weapons shipment aboard the Alfhem as “intended solely for the Guatemalan Army,” which is not true. Later interpretations show that these arms were to be used to arm the Guatemalan President’s workers militias as Arbenz correctly anticipated fickle loyalty from the Guatemalan Army. The authors do, however, realize that the shipment was virtually useless as it was full of outdated weapons. The book’s most significant departure from other works is its assertion that the interests of the United Fruit Company outweighed other concerns in pushing the United States to pursue regime change. The authors also misspell the name consistently, calling it Operation Success rather than its proper name PBSUCCESS, which only casts doubt on the author’s reliability.
Piero Gleijeses’s book, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 provides a Guatemalan perspective as he uncovered previously hidden Guatemalan documents. His interview with Arbenz’s wife, Maria Vilanova de Arbenz, also provides much-needed context into Jacobo Arbenz’s communist leanings, the inner workings of the revolution, and government action during the coup. Gleijeses is the first scholar to connect Arbenz to communism as he definitively documents Arbenz’s lean toward communist ideology — disproving earlier interpretations of Arbenz as merely a reformer and not a communist. According to his wife, President Arbenz read widely in Marxism and accepted its views on the sweep of history, believing that the triumph of communism was inevitable. Gleijeses concludes that Arbenz considered himself a communist during at least the last two years of his presidency and that he believed communism would triumph around the world. In so doing, Gleijeses challenges other scholars’ characterizations of Arbenz’s politics and intentions as not communist.
In the 1993 edition of his book Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, Walter LaFeber characterizes the operation in Guatemala as counterrevolutionary in nature — designed to defeat a revolutionary government. He argues that the Guatemalan coup is best understood through the lens of its lasting legacy, insofar as it destabilized and disoriented Guatemalan society until another revolutionary crisis in the early 1980s. LaFeber also notes Arévalo’s intention to support the United States in the Korean War as an attempt to acquiesce American fears of communism in the region. Arévalo even offered to round up Communists, but this did little to reassure American officials about the direction of Guatemalan politics.
LaFeber, like most scholars, also depicts protecting economic interests against rising tensions between the Guatemalan regime, United Fruit, and Washington, DC as a primary cause for action. For LaFeber, the matter centered on issues of private property. Decree 900 and expropriation of United Fruit’s land were reason enough for the U.S. sponsored invasion. The Communist weapons shipment on the Alfhem merely served as a firestarter. While LeFeber is loath to blame United Fruit as the sole reason for the invasion, he attributes the CIA’s use of United Fruit’s land in Honduras as critical to training and launching the invasion force. LaFeber sees the CIA’s use of radio broadcasts and other propaganda, however, as critical to creating minimal resistance within Guatemala and therefore decisive to the overall operation. Radio psychological warfare and experienced American pilots flying air cover enabled the guerrilla force to turn the Guatemalan Army against Arbenz and take over without a shot fired.
In Lars Schoultz’s Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America, the author characterizes the relationship between United Fruit and the Eisenhower administration as the best example of corporate influence on foreign policy in the United States. Shortly after Eisenhower’s inauguration, the Guatemalan government expropriated around 40% of United Fruit’s land, which in turn, Schoultz shows, led the company to ask for US government help resolving the matter. Schoultz sees the intervention as inevitable and attributes the cause to furthering American interests in the region and prevent the spread of international communism. He argues that the administration saw Guatemala experimenting with substantial reforms but notes that none were any more communist than American domestic reforms of the New Deal or Great Society. The coup in Guatemala, according to Schoultz, marked the beginning of Latin America becoming conceptualized in American minds “as a row of dominoes whose political immaturity made for an easy Communist pushover.” Schoultz therefore sees preventing communist expansion as the primary cause of the invasion.
Nick Cullather’s Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954, serves as a fascinating history of the operation rooted in official CIA documents. Part primary source, part official history, this book was published with the release of over 1200 documents related to Guatemala in 1997. Cullather spent a year on the history staff of the CIA in 1992 under their openness initiative where he had unprecedented complete access to the official files — over 180,000 pages in 260 boxes. Cullather intended the book to be a full account, but it became a “stand alone…training manual, a cautionary tale for future cover operators.” Originally classified secret and exclusive to the Agency itself as a learning tool, a redacted version was released to the public later. Cullather demonstrates through official documentation that “The CIA desired a ‘radical revolutionary change in Guatemalan politics,” and that they predicted the dictatorial rule that followed the coup. United Fruit, according to Cullather’s analysis, played a minor role despite their lobbying efforts “the threat to American business was a minor part of the larger danger to the United States’s overall security.” To Cullather, the CIA considered Guatemala a threat well before Decree 900 scared the banana conglomerate. Furthermore, United Fruit did not profit from the coup, and in fact lost money year over year afterwards until it sold its Guatemalan land to Del Monte in 1972.
Cullather considers PBSUCCESS critical to Agency hubris thereafter. He makes clear that the quick victory in Guatemala led directly to the disastrous Bay of Pigs incident. And while Cullather does not challenge whether or not the operation was carried out for economic or anti-communist interests, he does tie the success of the CIA in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala to President Eisenhower’s New Look policies as they thrust the CIA into the forefront of the national security apparatus. Cullather reveals that the radio broadcast operation, codenamed SHERWOOD, benefited from a fortuitous event in which regular Guatemalan radio went down for maintenance, leaving La Voz de la Liberación as the sole radio news provider and that SHERWOOD was decisive in the operation. Cullather credits the arrival of the Alfhem and its arms as not surprising but that it “removed the constraints on the Agency’s ability to retaliate.” The Alfhem incident showed the CIA that Arbenz was in cahoots with the Communist Bloc regardless of the actual utility of the arms on board. Regardless, Cullather’s treatment of the operation in this work is critical to understanding the inner workings of the Central Intelligence Agency during this monumental event.
Greg Grandin argues in his book, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, that the 1954 coup drew battle lines throughout the hemisphere, as all political actions thereafter divided according to Cold War priorities and ideologies. He agrees that the operation set a precedent for both the CIA and the rest of Latin America — fueling Che Guevara and others in their rejection of reform politics for armed revolution. For Grandin, Arbenz’s overthrow was the most complex CIA action to that point and encompassed nearly every component of American power. However, Grandin argues that this does not mark the beginning of the Cold War for Latin America as many others maintain; he places that in the years immediately following World War II when Latin America moved from five democracies to five non-democracies in the span of only two years. Nevertheless, Grandin agrees that the Guatemalan coup signaled a significant backward slide toward authoritarianism and a huge step forward for American cover influence.
Stephen Rabe’s The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America offers one of the most complete works on the Cold War in Latin America. He regards the Guatemalan coup as an effort by President Eisenhower to flex his muscles in the face of growing anti-communism in the U.S. and abroad. PBSUCCESS, along with the 1953 Iranian coup, allowed the President to demonstrate his ability to “roll back” communism definitively. Rabe stops short of attributing the reason for invasion to protecting United Fruit Company’s interests, preferring to maintain anti-communism as primary motivation. This of course comes as there is little to no evidence of international communist influence in the country and especially none from the Soviet Union. Rabe attributes the CIA’s role as planning and executing the entire operation. He sees their success at “controlled penetration” — infiltrating student, labor, church, women’s business, and media groups as pivotal to operational success. The CIA’s use of disinformation, what Rabe calls “black propaganda,” is likewise valuable in coercing the Guatemalan military to turn against the government. Black propaganda convinced Guatemalan officers that not only were their lives in jeopardy but that U.S. marines were waiting offshore to invade should they resist. PBSUCCESS marked the first test and validation of these techniques and others that became hallmarks of later CIA operations around the world.
Rabe offers many lessons of the intervention, principally that this operation shaped the nature of U.S. relations with Latin America to this day. PBSUCESS had a tremendous impact on Latin American leaders while also dividing the region between those who acquiesced to the United States and those who condemned it. While Rabe does not outright link this operation to the Cuban Revolution and other insurrections as other scholars do, he notes that Ernesto “Che” Guevara was in Guatemala during the time and incorporated many lessons from this operation into his resistance of American, capitalist, influence. This operation also gave the CIA immense confidence in the tactics of covert intervention despite the invasion portion of their plan failing miserably, mostly due to Castillo Armas’s ineptitude according to Rabe. Later operations — the Bay of Pigs invasion for example — were planned based on Guatemala and predictably failed. The CIA’s use of “controlled penetration” and psychological warfare, on the other hand, paid dividends in later uses against Brazil, British Guiana, and Chile.
What becomes clear when reading these books is that Arbenz’s flirtation with communism was minimal at best. Even Gleijeses’s account, which shows communist influence from his immediate family that was only nominally part of his nationalistic politics. The authors also largely absolve the United Fruit Company of any direct role. When the works are considered together, it is also clear that direct economic considerations or communist influence are tertiary factors. Michael Grow, in his book U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War, presents a fascinating counterpoint to most scholars’ interpretations. Grow believes that American policy decisions for intervention in Latin America is driven by factors of image, prestige, political self-interest and foreign manipulation. In the Guatemalan operation, Grow concludes that the potential for communist influence threatened U.S. credibility and international leadership in the Cold War and had to be checked. For the United States, any acquiescence to anything that might appear communist would create a perception of American weakness, especially if in its own “backyard.”
Regardless of national motivation, the Central Intelligence Agency played the primary role in overthrowing a democratically elected leader in the Western Hemisphere. This action, as many historians have shown, set a precedent for the rest of the Cold War and beyond. Be it the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the capture and killing of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the 1973 Chilean coup, supporting the Contras in Nicaragua, or combating narcoterrorism in the 1990s, the CIA has had a pervasive presence in the region. Further still, the CIA’s skills in controlled penetration and psychological warfare were honed in the jungles and mountains of Central America and carried throughout the world in its struggle against Soviet Communist influence. Nevertheless, American interventions in its own “backyard” follows an even larger pattern of influence and control set during the early stages of the American republic. Latin American countries have yet to have an opportunity for creating their own destiny without some kind of American influence. Issues the United States faces in the twenty-first century have a direct lineage to Central Intelligence Agency efforts to destabilize Guatemala’s first elected government.
