Both of these books are exposés of CIA-State Department perfidy in the United States—sponsored 1954 coup against the Jacobo Arbenz government of Guatemala. What closer observers have long suspected has now been proven. The incriminating evidence? Government documents released to these authors under the Freedom of Information Act. These dirty tricks are now a matter of public record: President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secret decision to oust Arbenz, the use of CIA money, arms, and mercenaries to do the job, State Department and Pentagon complicity in this effort, the subsequent installation of a United States-puppet president (Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas) in Guatemala, and the deliberate falsification and cover-up of United States foreign policy actions.
Richard H. Immerman and Stephen Schlesinger-Stephen Kinzer cover similar terrain. Both books sketch in the well-known Guatemalan background history to the 1954 coup. The long legacy of underdevelopment and the oligarchy’s repression of the Indians (Mayas) and middle classes (ladinos) ended in the 1944 overthrow of Dictator Jorge Ubico. The victorious rebels embraced former Education Minister Juan Arévalo, who easily won the December 1944 presidential election. A non-Marxist, populist reformer, President Arévalo (1945-51) pursued protection of labor, improvement of education, expansion of democracy, and reform of agriculture. The presidential-succession issue split the army between the partisans of leftist Major Jacobo Arbenz and rightist Captain Francisco Arana. The latter’s July 1949 assassination, under mysterious circumstances, resolved the matter as Arbenz won two-thirds of the vote in the 1950 elections and assumed the presidency in March of 1951.
The Arbenz administration’s deepening of the revolution to the point where labor and agrarian reforms threatened the profits and properties of the United Fruit Company (UFCO) and to the point where democratic reforms permitted communists to excel in the labor movement, to be elected to Congress, and to be employed in the middle ranks of the bureaucracy is what prompted a reaction in Washington. Groundwork for such reaction was skillfully prepared through communist smear campaigns conducted by UFCO lobbyists Edward Bernays and Tommy Corcoran and UFCO publicist John Clements and Associates. UFCO’s high-ranking friends in the executive branch of government included Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles (both former partners in Sullivan and Cromwell, UFCO’s legal counsel in Central America), United Nations Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, and Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America John Moors Cabot (both UFCO stockholders and both from Massachusetts where UFCO was headquartered).
In August 1953, Eisenhower approved a covert CIA-State plan to get rid of Arbenz and replace him with Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, exiled in Honduras since 1950 for his pro-Arana right-wing coup attempt. The CIA brought in Albert Haney from its Korea station to be “field commander.” With about 6 million dollars and 100 agents he set up headquarters at Opa-Locka Marine Base in Miami in October of 1953. Through a dummy armaments firm (International Armament Corporation) guns and ammunition were funneled to assorted Central American mercenaries, who made up Castillo Armas’s 150-man Liberation Army. United States pilots flying CIA planes made up the Liberation Air Force; Howard Hunt, of subsequent Watergate infamy, was put in charge of psychological warfare, which included “big lie” leaflet barrages, Liberation radio broadcasts, jamming government radio frequencies, subverting the army, and funding anti-Arbenz clergymen—all designed to provoke a spontaneous popular uprising.
Concomitantly, in October 1953, John Foster Dulles brought in as United States Ambassador to Guatemala, John E. Puerifoy, fresh from his triumph over the communist guerrillas in Greece, to be “theater commander.” Puerifoy coordinated his work with Haney and Hunt through CIA Station Chief John Doherty in Guatemala City and with Castillo Armas through United States Ambassador Whiting Willauer in Tegucigalpa. In March 1954, at the Tenth Inter-American Conference in Venezuela, John Foster Dulles forced through the less-than-enthusiastic Latin American delegates the Declaration of Caracas, by which communist domination of any Latin American country justified appropriate joint action under the 1947 Rio Defense Treaty. In April 1954, the United States concluded a Military Defense Assistance Pact (MDAP) with Dictator Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, and in May 1954 a similar MDAP was signed with Honduras. Meanwhile, the United States arms embargo against Guatemala was maintained, and the United States military attachés warned Guatemalan army officers that neither United States arms nor military aid would be forthcoming until they deposed Arbenz.
The pretext for implementing “Operation Success” was the May 17, 1954, arrival in Guatemala of Czech arms aboard the Swedish freighter Alfem. On June 18, 1954, Castillo Armas’s Liberation Army “invaded” six miles into Guatemala and waited while the CIA and State attempted to rouse the populace and subvert the army. The CIA planes dropped propaganda leaflets and incendiary bombs on the capital, while Hunt’s associates stepped up the anti-Arbenz media barrage. Arbenz appealed to the United Nations, but Lodge blocked the move on jurisdictional grounds. Instead, the United States called for a meeting of the OAS Peace Committee, then delayed holding it until “Operation Success” was concluded and the meeting was no longer necessary. By June 27, 1954, the unrelenting United States pressure had compelled Arbenz’s brother officers to force his resignation. Puerifoy, in turn, forced out the new junta in favor of Castillo Armas, the United States presidential designee. The Eisenhower administration’s postcoup declarations that the Guatemalan people had risen spontaneously to defeat communism in their country convinced almost no one.
Both books arrive at similar conclusions—that a communist takeover was not possible in Guatemala in 1954, that the United States destroyed a popular, democratic reform government, that subsequent United States support of rightist authoritarian regimes subjected the Guatemalan people to more than a quarter-century of military terror.
Although these are both good books, discerning scholars will prefer Immerman. His is the more balanced, comprehensive, and objective treatment. Only he develops the essential United States background to intervention. He shows it originating in the Cold War ethos developed during the administration of Harry Truman. Also, it is only Immerman who fingers the real culprit—President Dwight D. Eisenhower himself. Schlesinger-Kinzer should be faulted for loose referencing—too many confidential interviews, too many unpublished manuscripts available only to them, and multiple references to assorted text information with no indication as to which fact each reference applies.
