| abstract
| - In the early 1950s, the liberal Árbenz Government had effected the socio-economic agrarian reforms of Decree 900 (27 June 1952), the national expropriation and distribution to the peasants and of the unused, prime farmlands that multinational corporations (Guatemalan and US) had set aside as reserved business assets. The Decree 900 land reform especially threatened the agricultural monopoly of the United Fruit Company (UFC), the American multinational corporation that owned 42 per cent of the arable land of Guatemala; which landholdings either had been bought by or been ceded to the UFC by the military dictatorships who had preceded the Árbenz Government (1950–54) of Guatemala. In response to the expropriation of idle farmland assets, the United Fruit Company asked the US Governments of presidents Harry Truman (1945–53) and Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61) to act diplomatically, economically, and militarily against Guatemalan President Árbenz Guzmán. Initially, the US government perceived no threat from the "Guatemalan Revolution" to American economic, financial, and political interests. Yet, Árbenz continued the progressive elimination of the feudalism that had retarded the economic growth and social development of Guatemala throughout its national history. The elimination of Guatemalan feudalism was begun by the predecessor régime of President Juan José Arévalo Bermejo (1945–51), whose national government was “favorably disposed, initially, toward the United States, was modeled, in many ways, after the Roosevelt New Deal [1933]”. Nevertheless, such political and economic liberalism, in the government of a Latin American country, was worrisome to the corporate and political establishments of the United States. The perspective of the CIA minimized the social and economic development of Guatemala by the Árbenz Government, and especially dismissed the importance, to Guatemalan societal stability, of the Decree 900 agrarian-reform laws as “an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the Banana republic.” Moreover, the progress of the Árbenz Government towards eliminating feudalism with agrarian reform rendered the Guatemala of President Árbenz Guzmán a dangerously liberal threat to the economic status quo in Central America, and thus to the political and economic interests of the U.S. About the geopolitical threat of economic liberalism, the Inter-American Affairs Bureau officer Charles R. Burrows said that the State Department perceived that: Arbenz was to serve as a lesson to other nationalists who held the "belief in their immunity from the exercise of United States power": In the geopolitical context of the US–USSR Cold War (1945–1991), the secret intelligence agencies of the US misinterpreted liberal politics, agrarian reform, and resource nationalization as consequences of the communist infiltration of a Latin American government, instigated by order of the USSR. The intelligence analyses aggravated the geopolitical fears of CIA Director Allen Welsh Dulles: that Guatemala would become “a Soviet beach head in the Western Hemisphere”, and thus challenge US hegemony over “America’s Backyard” — the countries and peoples of Central and South America. In the context of US national politics, then enthralled by the over-aggressive anti–Communism of the Red Scare McCarthy era (1947–57), the US Government, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the American people, all feared the Soviet Union’s ideologic, military, and economic presences in the Western Hemisphere. Although the CIA had for years been spying on the Árbenz Government, had determined that Guatemalan agrarian reform endangered US economic interests, and had planned a coup d’état in 1952, the Eisenhower Administration (1953–61) had no feasible excuse to attack Guatemala. Fortuitously, the Decree 900 land expropriations from the American fruit companies proved to be a political opportunity for subversive action, especially as presented to the US President by CIA Director Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State; they mislabeled the Árbenz Government of Guatemala as proof of the political infiltration of the Western Hemisphere, by the international communist conspiracy of the USSR. Each man owned capital stock in the United Fruit Company, and some have claimed that each man flouted that inherent conflict of interest with his government job; thus, the Dulles brothers’ conflation of public policy (duelling hegemonies) and private profit (corporate ownership) made feasible the coup d’état against President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, in June 1954. However, in retrospect, Richard M. Bissell, Jr., assistant to the CIA Director, denied that the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état resulted from the conflation of private, multinational, business interests and US Government foreign policy; he said that there “is absolutely no reason to believe” that the Eisenhower Administration’s (1953–61) desire to help the United Fruit Company had “any significant role” in deciding to depose the elected Guatemalan government of President Jacobo Árbenz. (See: The Monroe Doctrine.) The Guatemalan coup d’état began with Operation PBFORTUNE (September 1952), the partly implemented plan to supply exiled, anti–Árbenz rebels with operational funds and matériel to organize a counter-revolutionary “army of liberation” to depose the Árbenz Government. The paramilitary invasion of Guatemala was contingent upon the confirmation, by the secret intelligence services of the US, that President Árbenz Guzmán was a Communist in service to the USSR, but the lack of proof cancelled Operation PBFORTUNE. Nevertheless, two years later, in June 1954, Operation PBSUCCESS realised the anti–Árbenz coup d’état, and installed Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas as President of Guatemala. Afterwards followed Operation PBHISTORY (July 1954), with the intelligence-gathering remit to find and publish communist documentary evidence — from the Árbenz Government files and from the files of the Guatemalan Labour Party — which would substantiate, confirm, and prove the geopolitical opinions of the CIA: that under the Árbenz Government, Guatemala was a communist puppet state, and part of the USSR’s hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. In the event, the CIA document-analysis team found no government or communist-party documents that supported the Agency’s ideologically mistaken assumption that the Árbenz Government had been infiltrated by Guatemalan communists controlled from the Soviet Union. The PBHISTORY intelligence analyses of Árbenz Government documents further indicated that President Árbenz Guzmán had abided Guatemalan constitutional law by respecting the right of national communists to form political parties, to participate in national politics, to stand for election to the National Congress, and that Guatemalan communists were ideologically independent of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The paramilitary invasion of Operation PBSUCCESS (1953–54) featured El ejército de liberación, an army of liberation recruited, trained, and armed by the CIA, that was composed of 480 mercenary soldiers commanded by Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, an exiled, right-wing Guatemalan Army officer. The CIA’s invasion of Guatemala was part of a complex of diplomatic, economic, and propaganda campaigns meant to subvert the Árbenz Government. To disseminate propaganda and disinformation (black propaganda) that misrepresented the Árbenz Government as Communist, the CIA established Voz de la liberación (Voice of Liberation, VOL), a radio station that transmitted from suburban Florida, USA — whilst claiming to be in the Guatemalan jungle with the army of Col. Castillo Armas. Likewise, the liberationist propaganda and disinformation misrepresented the VOL as the spontaneous voice of domestic, counter-revolutionary Guatemalan patriots who opposed “the Communism of the Árbenz Government”. The compelled resignation of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, on 27 June 1954, ended the liberal, political experimentation of the Ten Years of Spring, which had begun with the October Revolution of 1944 that established representative democracy in Guatemala. In 1957, three years after the Guatemalan coup d’état, President–Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas was assassinated by a presidential bodyguard, and then was replaced with another military government. In 1960, three years later, began the thirty-six-year-long Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96), that featured brutal counterinsurgency operations and massacres of peasants, a conflation of Cold War anti–Communism and historical ethnic conflict between ladino (mestizo) Guatemalans and ethnic Maya (Indian) Guatemalans accused of being either communists or “fellow travellers”, passive sympathizers to the communist cause.
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