THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR --- Episode 36

THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT COMES TO THE
AID OF UNITED FRUIT COMPANY IN GUATEMALA IN
THE MID-1950s

   Ambassador to Guatemala, Jack Peurifoy, and other U.S. officials waged a vigorous propaganda and disinformation campaign both inside Guatemala and in neighboring states to discredit the Arbenz government and weaken its hold on power. In June 1954, CIA-trained mercenaries attacked from bases in Honduras and Nicaragua, backed by U.S. air support. When the initial attack stalled, Eisenhower provided Castillo Armas with additional planes. Even British and French officials balked at the thought of supporting such naked aggression. Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, confronted his British and French counterparts and threatened to withdraw U.S. support to Great Britain on Egypt and Cyprus and to France on Tunisia and Morocco if they failed to back the United States on Guatemala. 

On June 27, Arbenz, assuming that resistance was futile, handed power to a military junta headed by the army chief of staff. That night, he delivered a final radio address in which he charged, "The United Fruit Company, in collaboration with the governing circles of the United States, is responsible for what is happening to us." He warned about "twenty years of fascist bloody tyranny." That night the CIA station chief and another agent visited the new head of the junta and told him, "You're just not convenient for the requirements of American foreign policy." When he refused to step down,  the CIA bombed the parade ground of the main military base and the government radio station. Castillo Armas, who had been trained at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, returned in a U.S. embassy plane to head the new government. Dulles addressed the American public on June 30 and applauded the victory of "democracy" over "Soviet communism." He announced that the situation was "being cured by the Guatemalans themselves." One British official, gagging on Dulles' mendacity, observed of the speech that "in places it might almost be Molotov speaking about Czechoslovakia or Hitler about Austria." 

Shortly thereafter, Castillo Armas visited Washington and assured Nixon of his fealty. "Tell me what you want me to do and I will do it," he promise the vice president. He received $90 million in U.S. aid in the next two years, 150 times as much as the reform government had received in a decade. He set up a brutal military dictatorship and was assassinated three years later. United Fruit got its land back. 

Dulles said that the country had been saved from "Communist imperialism" and declared the addition of "a new and glorious chapter to the already great tradition of the United States." One retired Marine Corps colonel who participated in the overthrow wrote later that "or success" led to 31 years of repressive military rule and the death of more than 100,000 Guatemalans." The actual death toll might have been twice that number. Arbenz proved to have been optimistic when he predicted "twenty years of fascist bloody tyranny." The fascist bloody tyranny in Guatemala actually lasted forty years. 

While Eisenhower administration officials celebrated their victory, having fortified their belief that covert operations could be used to topple popular reform governments, others drew very different lessons. Among the witnesses to Guatemalan "regime change" was a young Argentinian doctor named Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who was in Guatemala City to observe Arbenz reform efforts. Hewrote to his mother from the Argentine Embassy, where he had taken refuge during the subsequent slaughter. Arbenz made one major mistake, he contended : "He could have given arms to the people, but he did not want to --- and now we see the result." Che would not make that mistake when the time came to protect the Cuban Revolution a few years later. The revolution faced its main counterrevolutionary challenge when an invading force of U.S.-backed exiles was smashed in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs. Several of those who played leading roles in the Guatemalan overthrow of 1954 would also figure prominently in the 1961 fiasco, including Ambassador William Pawley, CIA operatives E. Howard Hunt and Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Allen Dulles.