12 – Edward Bernays, the creation of Propaganda and social manipulation.

“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”

This concise guide is conceived as an introductory scholarly resource. The questions advanced herein are not central to the principal debates of this course; rather, they function as elementary points of departure. The material is presented with the utmost commitment to objectivity, while recognizing that the interpretive framework is not, and cannot be, neutral.

Prof. Jorge Majfud.

Table of contents

Questions

Who was Edward Bernays?
What were some of his «achievements»?
How did Bernays shape opinion about Guatemala?
How did propaganda serve corporation’s interests?
What links 1954 propaganda to today’s disinformation?
What was his role in Latin America?
How did Team Jorge manipulate public opinion through hacking and disinformation?
What does the Cerimedo case reveal about political manipulation in Bolivia?
What parallels can be drawn between Chiquita’s history in Latin America and the manipulation of public opinion during the opioid crisis?

Audiovisuals

When is it not propaganda? – Bermuda Blue

Edward L. Bernays interview, October 23, 1986.

Documents

Team Jorge

Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections

‘Team Jorge’ unit exposed by undercover investigation
Group sells hacking services and access to vast army of fake social media profiles
Evidence unit behind disinformation campaigns across world
Mastermind Tal Hanan claims covert involvement in 33 presidential elections

“Team Jorge” is a private intelligence and disinformation operation led by former Israeli special-forces operative Tal Hanan, who uses the alias “Jorge.” Through undercover recordings and leaked documents, British journalists found evidence that the group offers governments, political campaigns, intelligence agencies and private clients services designed to secretly manipulate elections and public opinion since about 2010. Hanan claimed involvement in 33 presidential-level campaigns, although the journalists stress that many of his claims could not be independently verified.

The operation combines hacking, fake identities, automated social-media manipulation and psychological warfare. Its Aims software could reportedly control more than 30,000 fabricated online profiles across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram and LinkedIn, while the team also demonstrated techniques for infiltrating Gmail and Telegram accounts. The investigation found links between Team Jorge and political operations in countries including Nigeria and Kenya, as well as evidence of activity in numerous other countries.

Perhaps the most important revelation is that electoral manipulation has become a private, international business rather than something conducted exclusively by states. Team Jorge allegedly sold these capabilities for millions of euros, sometimes working alongside or seeking contracts from firms such as Cambridge Analytica. The investigation therefore raises a broader question: if wealthy political actors can secretly purchase hacking, fake citizens, propaganda networks and psychological operations, elections can be manipulated without voters ever knowing who is behind the manipulation. Hanan, for his part, denied wrongdoing.

How Big Tech Is Intervening in Latin American Elections

The recent Cerimedo case in Bolivia has exposed what appears to be a broader digital-political infrastructure operating across Latin America. In August 2026, Bolivian authorities found a “bot farm” in a property linked to Argentine political consultant Fernando Cerimedo, who had worked with campaigns associated with Javier Milei, Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia and Nasry Asfura in Honduras. The equipment allegedly allowed coordinated manipulation of social-media accounts. Cerimedo has denied having a bot farm, although he had previously acknowledged controlling tens of thousands of artificial accounts.

The technological network appears to extend beyond Cerimedo. Investigations have identified Brad Parscale, an American digital campaign manager, as a key technology provider. Parscale’s Clock Tower X supplied Campaign Nucleus software and the EyesOver monitoring platform to operations involving Cerimedo. According to FARA records cited by La Jornada, Clock Tower X’s Israel-related operation transferred $702,250 to companies associated with Cerimedo for global content production. Cerimedo himself reportedly described Parscale as the person who “mounted all the infrastructure” he worked with.

There are also allegations of a wider technological lineage involving Palantir and Peter Thiel, although these connections require more documentation than the documented Cerimedo-Parscale relationship. Some investigations argue that Campaign Nucleus and related systems draw on the same large-scale data analysis, behavioral targeting and information-management model associated with Palantir, while linking Thiel’s political-financial network to Parscale’s technology ecosystem. Other reports claim that former Cambridge Analytica technology was subsequently reconstituted through platforms such as Campaign Nucleus and EyesOver. These are reported or alleged connections, not proof that Palantir itself financed Cerimedo or directly participated in his operations.

The emerging picture, therefore, is less of an isolated “bot operator” than of a transnational political-technology ecosystem: data and targeting technology → campaign software → digital consultants such as Cerimedo → networks of media, influencers and potentially automated accounts. The documented financial link to Clock Tower X is significant, but claims about Palantir, Cambridge Analytica and Israeli financing should be presented as investigative allegations or technological lineage unless supported by direct financial records.

«We are going to Uruguay to breed the Master Race»

Nick Fuentes about Big Tech investors in 2026

«We are going to Uruguay to breed the Master Race… We are going to do embryo selection… And we are going to return to America to kill everybody… And that is the only thing we van do!»

New Chiquita Banana supports terrorism in Colombia

Chiquita Brands, one of the world’s largest banana companies, has a long history of political intervention in Latin America, particularly in Colombia and Central America. The company and its predecessors became symbols of the “banana republic” system, in which U.S. corporations exercised enormous economic and political influence over governments while protecting their interests through lobbying and, at times, cooperation with armed groups.

Chiquita spent $780,000 lobbying Congress over the previous 18 months against legislation designed to extend compensation and legal protections for victims and first responders of the September 11 attacks. The bill sought to make it easier for victims to pursue claims against parties whose actions might have contributed to terrorism.

The controversy was especially significant because Chiquita itself had previously admitted making payments to Colombian paramilitary organizations. In 2007, the company agreed to pay a $25 million criminal fine after admitting that its Colombian subsidiary had made payments to designated terrorist organizations, including the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Chiquita argued that the payments were made under coercion, while US prosecutors maintained that the company knowingly continued them. The irony is that Chiquita paid it to the US Government, not to the victims.

Another irony was that a corporation with a history involving political influence and payments to armed groups abroad was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying against legislation concerning corporate responsibility for terrorism-related claims. The case illustrates the broader legacy of the “banana republic”: the extraordinary political power that large U.S. corporations could exercise in Latin America, and their continuing ability to influence U.S. policy through lobbying.

Chiquita’s ‘Banana Republic’ History Is Why It’s Lobbying Against a 9/11 Victims Bill

The Chiquita company, worldwide purveyor of bananas, fruits, and paramilitary groups, has spent $780,000 over the past year and a half to lobby against a 9/11 Victims’ Bill, according to a report from The Daily Beast.

From Bernays’s Manipulation of Consumption to the American Opioid Crisis

The opioid crisis can be understood as a darker continuation of the consumer culture that Edward Bernays helped theorize in the early twentieth century. Bernays understood that advertising did not have to sell a product by explaining its utility; it could manufacture a desire for the product by attaching it to identity, status, pleasure, or an apparently scientific authority. His famous campaign for bacon and eggs, for example, helped transform a commercial interest into what looked like an ordinary American habit.

Decades later, the pharmaceutical industry applied a far more sophisticated version of the same logic —not simply to what Americans wanted, but to what they believed they needed. Beginning in the 1990s, companies such as Purdue Pharma aggressively promoted opioids for chronic and everyday pain, while medical institutions and professional organizations helped normalize the idea that pain should be treated more aggressively. OxyContin was presented as a modern medical solution, while concerns about addiction were minimized.

The difference is that Bernays was largely teaching corporations how to create consumers using doctors’ opinions; the opioid industry demonstrated how that logic could keep entering the doctor’s office half a century later. Advertising, professional authority, scientific language, lobbying and commercial incentives converged until a highly addictive narcotic could appear not as a dangerous drug, but as a normal product of modern life. What had been engineered was not merely a purchase, but a habit —and eventually, for millions, a dependency.

In this sense, the opioid epidemic is one of the most disturbing achievements of the American consumer society: when desire can be manufactured, even suffering can become a market. The same machinery that once persuaded Americans that they needed a particular breakfast could help persuade them that ordinary pain required a powerful chemical solution. The difference was measured not only in profits, but in addiction and death.

The parallel is striking: Bernays helped turn smoking and foods such as bacon and eggs into desirable habits by using advertising, authority and carefully constructed messages, while the pharmaceutical industry later used doctors, medical journals and apparently scientific evidence to normalize opioids. In both cases, commercial interests helped shape not only what people consumed but what they believed was safe or necessary. The crucial difference was that, in the opioid case, companies promoted the drugs despite warnings from scientists and accumulating evidence about addiction, helping persuade physicians and patients that powerful narcotics could be used routinely with little risk.

The logic that Edward Bernays helped develop —using advertising, authority, and manufactured desire to shape consumption— later appeared in the pharmaceutical industry’s promotion of opioids. Doctors and patients were persuaded that powerful narcotics were safe and minimally addictive despite growing scientific warnings. The consequences went far beyond the original prescription-drug market: from 1999 to 2024, more than 860,000 Americans died in opioid-involved overdoses. The first wave was driven largely by prescription opioids; later waves shifted toward heroin and illicit fentanyl, revealing the long afterlife of a market that had normalized opioid consumption on an unprecedented scale.

America’s opioid crisis: how prescription drugs sparked a national trauma

Aggressive marketing of painkillers made from opium poppy led to a generation of addicts and the deaths of almost 100 people a day from overdoses.

Notice: The following pages are not mandatory readings. They provide a historical background drawn from “The Wild Frontier: 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Fanaticism in Latin America” that may be considered for this topic.

Further readings

1953. Public opinion is a consumer product

Washington, D.C. August 15, 1953—President Dwight Eisenhower signs the authorization for Operation PBSuccess, through which the CIA has decided to overthrow Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz by fabricating a story about a communist threat. In the words of Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit Roosevelt Jr., who a year earlier had successfully participated in the overthrow of another democratically elected president, Mohammad Mossadegh, “Guatemala will be another Iran.” In Guatemala, only four of the 61 elected members of Congress are communists, and their influence in the military—as in any other Latin American military—is nonexistent. Ironically, it is the communists who advise the president to pursue a capitalist reform, meaning that the land to be expropriated should not pass into the hands of the government but rather into the hands of Guatemalan farmers.

On December 3, 1953, the CIA approved a budget of three million dollars for this operation, to which it would later add another four and a half million.[1] To support this, John Foster Dulles appointed John Peurifoy as ambassador to Guatemala—a West Point dropout who wanted to be president of the United States and who, with that goal in mind, had secured a job as an elevator operator at the Capitol through a special favor from a well-known congressman. Dulles sensed that the former elevator operator had what he needed: a reliable paranoia about “the Red menace.” In December, shortly after the arrival of the new ambassador, Peurifoy, the deputy chief of the US Embassy in Guatemala and a veteran diplomat, William L. Krieg, completed his report and stated that the reactionary and oligarchic forces were “first-rate vagabonds… parasites who think only of money,” while the communists “worked hard, had ideas, and were conscious of the purpose of their work,” in addition to being “honest and committed.” The tragedy, Bill Krieg adds, is that “the only people committed to hard work are those who, by definition, are our enemies.”

As fate would have it, almost everyone involved in planning the coup against Árbenz was an investor in the United Fruit Company: Secretary of State John Foster Dulles; CIA Director Allen Dulles; the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs and brother of the former director of the United Fruit Company, John Moors Cabot; Senator and U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge; President Eisenhower’s secretary, Ann Whitman, wife of Edmund Whitman, the CIA’s press director; and Walter Bedell Smith, Under Secretary of State, who would go on to serve on the board of directors of the United Fruit Company.

The economic reasons are deep-rooted and far-reaching, yet easy to understand. In 1936, the current Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, as an attorney with the firm Sullivan & Cromwell, had secured the United Fruit Company’s banana monopoly in Guatemala on Wall Street, all with the invaluable assistance and support of the dictator in power at the time, General Jorge Ubico.[2]

Since then, John had also served as a representative for Railways of Central America and Electric Bond & Share. Now, together with his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, he is drawing on the powerful state apparatus of the world’s greatest superpower to prevent the poor in some remote corner of the world from acquiring a tiny plot of land in their own country to produce basic foodstuffs and threaten the authority of the successful elites of the North. The UFCo’s reign in Guatemala had come to an end in 1944 when philosophy professor Juan José Arévalo and his “spiritual socialism”—inspired by Franklin Roosevelt—won the country’s first free elections. With this fledgling democracy came a rare period of reforms that put a cap on the land giveaways and tax exemptions that had benefited “El Pulpo” during the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. Resorting to his classic method of making others say what he wanted the people to repeat—just as he had previously placed a cigarette in the mouths of opera singers—the mercenary propagandist Edward Bernays placed a banana in the hands of Hollywood stars and began to whitewash “El Pulpo.” As always, Bernays’s propaganda campaign was a resounding success.

It’s not just a matter of reducing production costs through subsidies and starvation wages. Business ideology requires a psychology and an ethic at its service. The workers’ near-total dependence on companies like UFCo prevented the poor from returning to their own lands, thereby ceasing to be wage laborers and desperate consumers. Long before its massacres in Latin America, the UFCo knew it had to instill a desire for material possessions in its southern workers. This was by no means a new idea. A century earlier, to enact the abolition of traditional slavery on their Caribbean estates, the British had devised a form of slavery that the new slaves themselves desired. On June 10, 1833, a member of Parliament, Rigby Watson, had put it in very clear terms: “To make them work and instill in them a taste for luxuries and comforts, they must first be taught, little by little, to desire those objects that can be attained through work. There is a progression that goes from possessing the necessities to desiring luxuries; once these luxuries are attained, they will become necessities in all social classes. This is the kind of progress that Black people must undergo, and this is the kind of education to which they must be subjected.” The UFCo took note and put it into practice. In 1929, its most prominent journalist (and friend of Henry Ford), Samuel Crowther, reported that in Central America “people work only when forced to. They are not accustomed to it, because the land provides them with the little they need… But the desire for material things is something that must be cultivated… Our advertising has the same effect as in the United States and is reaching ordinary people, because when a magazine is thrown away here, people pick them up and their advertising pages appear as decoration on the walls of thatched huts. I have seen the interiors of huts completely covered with pages from American magazines… . All of this is having the effect of awakening a desire for consumption among the people.” Samuel Crowther viewed the Caribbean as the “lake of the American Empire,” which protected and guided the destiny of its countries for the glory and development of all.

But development has not materialized—quite the opposite. Nor has the desire for material consumption emerged with the same intensity as the desire for freedom and democracy sweeping through Latin America, which, at this point, has already toppled several dictatorships. With the election of Jacobo Árbenz—a captain from the upper class but with that tendency some have to look down on others—Professor Arévalo’s reforms continued without becoming radical. During his administration, hundreds of committees of poor peasants had been formed to discuss and manage the newly distributed lands, a development that was then seen as an unmistakable sign of communism or something equally dangerous. When Árbenz took office, 70 percent of the population was illiterate—a rate that rose to 90 percent among the indigenous population—meaning that more than 60 percent of Guatemalans were subjected to forced labor with traditionally non-existent wages and a life expectancy of 38 years. Between the UFCo and the Creole oligarchy, 2 percent of the population owned 72 percent of the land, in a country whose economy was based almost exclusively on agriculture.

The tension and conflict of interest created by the democratic period of 1944–1954 claimed the lives of two landowners, but this failed to halt the country’s democratization process. In 1950, Árbenz had launched an agrarian reform plan that affected 1.3 percent of the land available for agriculture. The reform included the expropriation of a small portion of unproductive land held by the UFCo—land that the company had received from the dictatorships preceding Arévalo.^[3] “El Pulpo” refused to accept payment at the value he himself had declared on his taxes ($2.98 per acre) and demanded $75 per acre.

Once the democratic president was overthrown and replaced by General Castillo Armas—one of the many puppets who are never hard to find—Edward Bernays, the CIA, and the Eisenhower administration continued their efforts to whitewash the image of the nervous little dictator. Before the successful coup, the general with the Hitler-style mustache was known in Washington. In 1946, he had completed a training course at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and in 1950, he had failed in his attempt to stage a coup against Arévalo. In 1953, the CIA had tracked him down in Honduras and taken him to a training session in Opa-Locka, Florida. It then paid him $3,000 a month

($29,000 at 2020 value) plus provisions for his 140 men. Every operation in which Castillo Armas and his men participated ended in defeat and resulted in several deaths. The CIA never cared because this group was not operational; it merely served as the second main excuse to keep the press occupied.

Now Vice President Richard Nixon will invite him to Washington to speak on television about the communist Árbenz government, overthrown by the Guatemalan people who never accepted the lies and foreign intervention (the backdrop will show a cross—like St. George’s lance—over the hammer and sickle). The nervous general tells Nixon: “Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it right away.” In the years and decades to come, Guatemala’s successive dictatorships will be unable to conceal the hundreds of thousands of people massacred as a result of Washington’s “salvific” plans. One of these dictators alone, Efraín Ríos Montt, will order the massacre of 18,000 indigenous people in 1982. Shortly thereafter, during his visit to this tropical hell, President Ronald Reagan would praise the perpetrator of genocide as a model of the struggle for freedom in Guatemala and against “the Sandinista regime” of their Nicaraguan neighbors. The most powerful churches in the United States, such as Club 700, would also support the evangelical leader until his death in 2018.

Despite the brutal campaign, the CIA acknowledged that, both in Guatemala and in Latin America, communists were a minor force. The Agency and some Latin American armies—such as Argentina’s—would reach the same conclusion before embarking on the adventure of “saving” their countries through yet more coups d’état. In 1954, of the 61 Guatemalan legislators, only four were communists. Except in labor unions, where, for obvious reasons, they play a somewhat prominent role. As has been the case for a century, the central problem is not communism but disobedience, which is conveniently labeled as communism. Before Árbenz was elected president, the US Embassy had sent President Juan José Arévalo a list of names of individuals who were to be removed from his government, but the president, in an unusual move, had ignored the request. Threatening the profits of a US company under the pretext of a law passed by some banana republic’s congress was another clear demonstration of insubordination. The same researcher from the CIA’s History Department, Professor Nicholas Cullather, would conclude decades later that the United Fruit Company routinely reported profits and asset values far below their actual amounts to evade taxes, but Edward Bernays convinced the US Congress and the public otherwise: “it wasn’t about bananas, it was about communism.” From the very beginning, the idea was very persuasive. “Wherever you see the United Fruit Company being discussed or criticized, you must substitute the company’s name with that of the country, the United States.” Some reports describe Jacobo Árbenz as a conservative politician. The US military in Guatemala also saw no “communist threat,” but, as in the invasion of Mexico 110 years earlier, they acted against their own convictions in the name of efficiency, duty, and honor. It wasn’t until decades later that some began to have pangs of conscience and started speaking their minds.

At this time, Edward Bernays is the advisor to the company in question (the United Fruit Company), the most important propagandist of the century and the inventor of modern public relations. He personally selects the journalists he considers least well-informed from the Times, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune and sends them to Guatemala, with all expenses paid by the United Fruit Company, to “report on communist activities” in Central America. On the trip to Guatemala, amid cigars and plenty of whiskey, the organizers made sure to instill the dogma in the journalists: they were all going to cover events in a country that had been taken over by a Marxist dictatorship. The Russians prefer vodka. Once indoctrinated, upon arriving in the actual country, the reporters’ perspective conforms to the dogma—not to reality—and quickly translates into headlines in the US press and in the public opinion of the “Free Country.”

The only journalist who would dare to mention President Jacobo Árbenz’s reasonable agrarian reform and the population’s discontent with the U.S. transnational corporation was Sydney Gruson of the New York Times. Shortly thereafter, the business editor of the New York Times would receive a visit from his friend, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and Sydney Gruson would be taken off the Central American beat.

Without ever having set foot in Guatemala, Bernays knows exactly what it’s all about. That is his trade: not only knowing what others are unaware of, but also making them believe what his clients want others to believe. Bernays is a veteran mercenary, and he is so skilled that his annual salary (one hundred thousand dollars, not counting bonuses) exceeds that of any US president. As Sigmund Freud’s nephew, his interest lies not so much in the study of the human mind as in the money to be made from manipulating it. In 1924, he had convinced President Calvin Coolidge to cook pancakes for his supporters during his reelection campaign—a populist tradition that would survive as a dogma well into the 21st century. In 1927, with his “Torches of Freedom” campaign, he had succeeded in getting women to start smoking to boost profits from Lucky Strike cigarettes. Even unsuspecting feminists fell into his trap. The great Bernays is also responsible for Americans eating eggs and bacon for breakfast—a feat he achieved to increase bacon sales for his client, the Beech-Nut Packing Company of New York. He was also one of the masterminds behind the marketing of wars and coups d’état, such as the one in Guatemala. Not only had Adolf Hitler read with admiration the book The Passing of the Great Race by the American Madison Grant—to whom he wrote a thank-you note for providing him with his “political bible”—but his future propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, kept Edward Bernays’s books in a prominent place in his library (yes, Goebbels also had Jewish friends). In the 1940s, Bernays had been hired by the United Fruit Company—known for its tentacles as “The Octopus”—a transnational corporation that had ruled over the Caribbean and Central America since the 19th century with budgets larger than those of any of the banana republics in which it operated freely.

Now, the strategy is clear: it is necessary to stir up the specter of communism once again. There is no shortage of means, and none are overlooked. It is very easy to be a genius when money is in abundance. The powerful CIA agent Howard Hunt Jr. visits the Catholic bishops of the United States and convinces them of the Guatemalan threat,

so the bishops wasted no time in condemning President Árbenz’s communism. On April 9, 1954, a pastoral letter reached Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arellano, followed by more elaborate ones sent to the bishops of Guatemala, warning of the dangerous forces “enemies of God and the Fatherland.” Rossell y Arellano would play a decisive role in the destruction of democracy and the rule of law in his country and would leave his post as archbishop—as is often the case—upon his death in 1964. Shortly before the coup d’état, on April 4, 1954, he commissioned a wooden statue of Jesus, later cast in bronze, which would be christened the Christ of Esquipulas. Thus, Jesus—who in life detested weapons as much as he favored the poor and marginalized—will be used as the “Commander-in-Chief” of the fascist forces of the National Liberation Movement against the Árbenz government and in support of the US empire, without considering that Jesus was executed by the ruling empire of the time as a mere criminal, along with two others, and for political—not religious—reasons. The archbishop’s statement reads: “We raise our voices to warn Catholics that the worst atheistic doctrine of all time (anti-Christian communism) continues its brazen advance in our country, disguising itself as a social reform movement for the most needy classes… Every Catholic must fight against communism by virtue of being a Catholic… They are people without a nation, the scum of the earth, who have repaid Guatemala’s generous hospitality by preaching class hatred in order to plunder and completely destroy our country.” The talking points work perfectly in Spanish. Catholic fanaticism bears a striking resemblance to its old enemy, Protestant fanaticism.

Although less powerful, Guatemala’s major labor unions still support the president. Even if Árbenz were not a communist—even if, as in any Latin American country, communists were a very small minority—convincing people in the United States and in Guatemala that he was one poses no problem whatsoever.[4] The right of other peoples to be whatever they choose to be—even communists—isn’t even on the table. Without the slightest bit of evidence, radio stations and major newspapers begin to publish Washington’s narrative: “We are convinced of the ties between Guatemala and Moscow.” More than enough. After all, a country with a top-secret agency like the CIA always knows more than the rest of us mortals and reserves the right to withhold evidence “for security reasons.”

At the OAS, Guatemala’s representative, Guillermo Toriello Garrido, protested the organization’s resolution regarding the right of other nations to intervene in the event that communist influence is detected. The resolution was presented at the behest of CIA Director Allen Dulles, who, at that same meeting in Caracas, described the Venezuelan dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez as exemplary. Amid the international uproar, Toriello was able to see clearly what millions cannot and will never be able to see: “It is deeply regrettable that any nationalist or independent movement should be labeled as such [communist], as well as any anti-imperialist or anti-monopoly action… And most critically of all, those who label democracy in this way do so in order to destroy that very democracy.”

Mexico, Argentina, and Uruguay are the only countries that support Toriello’s arguments, criticize all forms of interventionism, and oppose the “Caracas Declaration.” But they abstain from voting. Guatemala stands alone. Resolution 93, sponsored by Washington, is forceful and proposes “to adopt the necessary measures to protect the political independence [of the American nations] against the intervention of international communism, which acts in the interests of foreign despotism, and to reaffirm the faith of the people of the Americas in the effective exercise of representative democracy” . The political literature of power, known as Realism or Realpolitik, is endowed with boundless patriotic imagination.

Meanwhile, in Opa-Locka, Florida, Radio Liberación’s fictitious campaign continues to prepare public opinion for the final stage, while pretending to be a rebel radio station operating from the Guatemalan jungle. In addition—and as would become a long-standing tradition on the continent—the CIA and the USIA used their financial clout to plant at least 200 articles in various Latin American newspapers denouncing the communist threat in Guatemala.[5] This is only part of the plan. Although US officials consider Árbenz’s policies to be “democratic and conservative,” Guatemala is unable to secure even World Bank loans to carry out its agrarian reform. Some Guatemalan landowners are furious and seek help from Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, who, during his visit with President Truman at the White House in April of last year, had told him in his fluent English: “Just send me the weapons, and I’ll wipe out Guatemala for you in one fell swoop.”

Since Árbenz’s victory in the 1950 elections, Washington has refrained from selling weapons to the new government—a terrible sacrifice, but for a good cause. In 1953, it had blocked the purchase of defense equipment from Canada and Germany, but now it is supplying the best weapons to Guatemalan exiles in Honduras and Nicaragua. On February 9, in collaboration with the FBI, the CIA carried out Operation Washtub, in which it planted Soviet weapons on the Nicaraguan coast so they would be discovered by fishermen and the Somoza dictatorship could accuse Guatemala of communist plots in the region.

With no other options, President Árbenz (as Patrice Lumumba would do in the Congo seven years later) turned to Czechoslovakia. On May 5, 1954, the Scandinavian MS Alfhem arrived in Puerto Barrios with a shipment of weapons that turned out to be obsolete—and a new excuse for Washington’s intervention. In June, the CIA bombed the British ship Springfjord with napalm in Puerto San José; the ship turned out to be carrying a shipment of cotton and coffee belonging to the US company Grace Line,

which is why it would be one of the few mistakes for which the CIA would be sued. On May 27, 1954, the friendly dictator Anastasio Somoza informed the press that, in addition to the weapons found, photographs were available of the Soviet submarine that had been carrying them to Guatemala.

In 1987, Major John R. Stockwell, a CIA officer involved in the operation, would acknowledge that “the killing of 85,000 Guatemalans at the hands of U.S.-backed governments has not won this country any new friends, I can assure you… In the end, the UFCo went bankrupt and its president committed suicide.” Another CIA agent, an active participant in the operation in Guatemala—Navy Colonel Philip Clay Roettinger—was tasked with training soldiers in Honduras and propelling General Castillo Armas, “that nervous little man,” into the presidency. In 1986, Roettinger would acknowledge that “no one in the government thought Guatemala could pose any threat to the United States… the only threat the Guatemalan government could pose was to the interests of the United Fruit Company; that was the only reason.” Years after the coup, Roettinger would abandon everything and move to Guanajuato, Mexico. ^[6]

Things didn’t turn out very well for the new dictator, General Castillo Armas, either. Before being assassinated in 1957, the general with the Hitler-style mustache would be honored by Columbia University with an honorary doctorate for his “struggle for democracy” (which is why Rómulo Gallego would return the degree conferred on him by the same institution) . Castillo Armas will visit Washington and appear on a television program with Vice President Richard Nixon. Against a backdrop of a hammer and sickle pierced by the relentless spear of the cross, Nixon will say: “The uprising in Guatemala was a rebellion of the people against a communist regime… in other words, the regime of Jacobo Árbenz was not a Guatemalan government but one controlled by foreign forces.” Guatemala’s general and supreme dictator, Castillo Armas, responds to everything with “yes, yes.” He does not understand English, nor does he understand anything else. He knows only that his repressive force comes from members of Jorge Ubico’s regime (an unabashed Nazi in a country of Indigenous people), that his regime has banned the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky as subversive, and that a few years ago someone told him that, perhaps, the United States could help him become president after he lost the election to that damned Jacobo Árbenz.

On December 29, 1996, the UN will sponsor a peace agreement in Guatemala. By then, two percent of the population will own half of Guatemala’s arable land. 200,000 people will have been killed under successive military dictatorships, 93 percent of them executed or massacred by the Soldiers of the Fatherland. In 1999, President Bill Clinton will visit the country and acknowledge his country’s responsibility for the destruction of democracy in 1954 and the subsequent aid provided to the genocidal military. “US support for the Guatemalan military and the intelligence agencies involved in the violence in Guatemala was a mistake that must never be repeated,” he says.

The same tears will be shed in 2010 when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledges the atrocity committed by Washington in conducting experiments with syphilis and gonorrhea on Guatemala’s poor in the 1940s. As always, all of this happens when no one cares anymore and it has no consequences for the victims—nor for those in power. Or almost none. 1954. He Who Does Not Know How to Deceive Does Not Know How to GovernGuatemala City. June 27, 1954—President Jacobo Árbenz is forced to resign from office and goes into exile, bringing to an end a rare decade in which the country was free of military dictatorships in the region. His “sin” was attempting to fulfill his campaign promises to nationalize a small portion of his country’s land and return it to the peasants who were not fortunate enough to work for starvation wages for the US-based UFCo. Hurt by the complicit passivity of the national army, the deposed president says: “Perhaps the greatest mistake I made was the total trust I placed in the Guatemalan Army and having conveyed this trust to the people and popular organizations. But I never imagined that, in the face of foreign aggression, when the freedom of our homeland, its honor, and its independence were at stake, the Army could betray us.”Neither in the United States nor in the “Wild Frontier” do the media use the word “invasion.” Words matter more than bombs. The coup is a carbon copy of the manual recently written by the CIA to overthrow the secular and democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, a year earlier and for the same reasons. Persuaded by the British oil company BP, the CIA had injected one million dollars into Mossadegh’s opponents and hundreds of thousands of dollars into the ruling clerics and the local press to convince the people of the danger posed by the elected president. Mossadegh was another pro-independence president and a supporter of the nationalization of national resources such as oil, which, for half a century, had left the country with a meager 16 percent. While hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed to the “protesters” on the streets of Tehran, the New York Times, Newsweek, and other influential media outlets repeated stories about “the dictator Mossadegh” and his “regime.” The CIA playbook would be repeated in the Congo when the amateur journalist, president-elect, and national hero Patrice Lumumba failed to secure Washington’s support to maintain the country’s recently achieved independence. The only reasons for the refusal would be economic: Wall Street businessmen were committed to the Belgian colonists. The CIA, along with the Belgian government and companies, would support his overthrow and subsequent assassination a few years later, in 1961. The brutal “friendly” dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko—Lumumba’s murderer (and, as is often the case, a former officer under the rebel leader)—would erect a monument to his own victim, to the delight of the people, and rule the Congo for decades, to the approval of civilization and the advancement of the master race.

In his penultimate radio address, Árbenz declared: “Our only offense has been to enact our own laws; our crime has been to apply them to the United Fruit Company… It is not true that the communists are seizing power in our government… We have not imposed any regime of terror; on the contrary, it is Mr. John Foster Dulles’s Guatemalan friends who wish to impose terror upon the Guatemalans by attacking children and women from pirate planes.”^[7]

The Guatemalan army, still bound by the constitution, achieves a small victory by shooting down one of those U.S. pirate planes. A considerable portion of the population remains unaffected by Radio Liberación and the hundreds of thousands of leaflets dropped from the air against Árbenz. The CIA detects some popular resistance. To prevent the collapse of a masterful operation, President Eisenhower sends more planes to intensify the harassment. More money flows into the coffers of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza to secure non-U.S. aircraft. CIA pilot Jerry DeLarm, alias Rosebinda, bombs Guatemalan military bases and the public radio station with grenades and Coca-Cola bottles filled with fuel, while loudspeakers installed at the U.S. embassy simulate a war that never took place.

Guatemala requests a UN investigative commission, but on June 25, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge vetoes the resolution. He refuses to accept any investigation. The CIA continues to bomb oil supplies for three days and drops NTN bombs on Chiquimula, Gavilán, and Zacapa. Árbenz puts forward a last resort: arming the peasants. But it is already too late. ^[8]

On June 27, 1954, Árbenz reads his final message on public radio: “We all know how they have bombed and machine-gunned cities, slaughtered women, children, and the elderly… In the name of what do they commit these atrocities? What is their flag? We all know it… I bid you farewell, my friends, with bitter sorrow, but holding fast to my convictions. Take care of what has cost so much. Ten years of struggle, of tears, of sacrifices, and of democratic achievements… It is not the enemy’s arguments that have cornered me, but the material means at their disposal for the destruction of Guatemala.”

These farewell words of Árbenz’s would be echoed nearly twenty years later when, in Chile in 1973, Salvador Allende was forced to do the same. Similarly, the declarations of innocence by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1954 and by Henry Kissinger in 1973 would be repeated as if they had been written on carbon paper—further proof of the systematic paranoia of those who need to control the world.

Now, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles reports that “the State Department has not the slightest indication that this was anything other than a rebellion by the Guatemalans against their government.”

Once the coup d’état was complete, John Foster Dulles himself—the religious fanatic guided solely by the moral rectitude of the Scriptures—after organizing the plot based on repeated lies, announced on a radio broadcast: “The Guatemalan government and its communist agents around the world have insisted on obscuring the truth—that of communist imperialism—by claiming that the United States’ interest was to protect the economic interests of American companies… Led by Colonel Castillo Armas, the Guatemalan people have decided to overthrow the communist government. It has been an internal matter for the Guatemalans.”

With the 1954 coup d’état, UFCo would not only recover its nationalized lands but also see several areas of public property privatized. The army generals involved in the coup would also receive land—a sort of reverse agrarian reform. Meanwhile, now facing no resistance from any union or dissident journalist, El Pulpo would continue to pay each worker 50 centésimos secos per day and report an annual profit of $65 million—double the Guatemalan government’s budget. ^[9] As has been and will continue to be a historical pattern, Washington will invest millions of dollars in Guatemala under the dictatorship (14 million in the next five years alone) to demonstrate to the world the effectiveness of obedience—which it will call, for some as yet unexplained reason, democracy.

Needless to say, the ultimate cost of Anglo-Saxon fanaticism will infinitely exceed the price of the lands disputed under a legitimate agrarian reform law. The persecution and demonization of dissidents, along with the banning of nearly all grassroots organizations, will, in and of themselves, be a price far too high. But Guatemala’s tragedy had only just begun there. Thousands of peasants will refuse to abandon the (public and expropriated) granted by Árbenz and will be forcibly displaced or simply executed. Another 200,000 Guatemalans will be murdered or massacred by the military dictatorships that will continue into the 1990s. President Ronald Reagan will call them “friendly dictatorships” and hold them up as models of freedom and democracy.

Sam Zemurray (Samuel Zmurri), a promoter of other coups d’état in the region since the turn of the century and the principal shareholder and president of UFCo., died in 1961. In 1972, the company—by then operating under different names—was accused of corruption in Honduras. On February 23, 1975, its president, Eli Black (the Polish rabbi Elihu Menashe Blachowitz), overwhelmed by allegations of bribery and the company’s debts, jumped to his death from his office on the 44th floor of the modern Pan Am Building in New York. The United Fruit Company would survive as Chiquita Bananas. In the century to come, it would be accused by the U.S. government itself of financing paramilitaries in Colombia. On March 14, 2007, Chiquita would lose the lawsuit and be ordered to pay Washington (not the Colombian victims) $25 million for supporting terrorism.

1954. Our main weapon spits not bullets but words

Guatemala City. September 9, 1954—After 73 days taking refuge in the Mexican embassy, ousted President Jacobo Árbenz is told he’d better leave the country. At La Aurora Airport, the press follows the man who, until recently, had been the country’s most popular president. At 11:00 p.m., for forty minutes, in front of the cameras, in front of his wife and children, immigration authorities force him to undress to verify that he is carrying neither jewelry nor any foreign ideology. The crowd, represented by a dozen distinguished ladies and gentlemen of good standing, shouts at him, “Traitor! Out with the communist!” One of the country’s few communists, by chance, is traveling that very night. According to former CIA agent Philip Agee, Carlos Manuel Pellecer (alias Linlick) is a CIA mole within the Guatemalan Communist Party and the communist and popular movements in Mexico City.

Just four months earlier, in March 1954, the powerful CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, still in Chile, had received a call summoning him to an urgent meeting in Miami. ^[10] Phillips’s new mission was to destabilize Guatemala and force President Jacobo Árbenz to step down. Decades later, in his 1977 memoir, he recalled his own surprise at the request and his naive question:

—But Árbenz is the president elected by the people of Guatemala in free elections. What right do we have to overthrow him?

Time and again, Phillips would demonstrate in his memoirs, The Night Watch, that he possessed a secret trove of information of incalculable value, but he failed to realize that he did not understand how the Agency for which he worked operated; his knowledge had a ceiling, and his superiors would not allow any of their agents to exceed it. It didn’t matter that Phillips had met with CIA Director Allen Dulles in Washington during a brief meeting. Dulles, too, applied the same method to those below him: dividing up information, compartmentalizing knowledge so that any leak could be limited to a small area that would ultimately prove inconsequential (just as in a domino setup, barriers are placed at intervals to prevent the entire system from collapsing). Decades later, on June 31, 2016, the Washington Post would reveal how one of the methods used by the Agency, known as Eyewash, consisted of lying to its own officials so that no one would ever be sure whether something was true or false.

“This operation could lead Guatemala into a bloody civil war,” Phillips insisted. “Many people could die…”

—“That’s true,” replied Agent Tracy Barnes, who would also take part in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. “That’s why we’ll try to do it in a way that avoids a massive bloodbath, if that’s possible.”

The coup in Guatemala had been planned using new strategies of propaganda and psychological warfare carried out through the press, which would serve as a model in other countries due to its high efficiency and low military cost. To carry it out, the U.S. government hired a frequent collaborator in other manipulations: Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays.

Phillips did not know this. Nor did he know that the main reason was not a supposed communist threat, but rather that Árbenz had decided to fulfill his campaign promises to nationalize a small piece of Guatemalan land owned by the United Fruit Company. As was customary in other countries in the region, the banana company had received tax exemptions and land grants from previous dictatorships, such as that of Jorge Ubico, and neither the Company nor the Agency nor the U.S. government is willing to tolerate such defiance. As if this were not reason enough, top officials—from the CIA to the U.S. government—hold shares in the UFCo. Its operating budget exceeds that of the governments of the “banana republics” that protect it with their armies and laws stacked in its favor—laws passed by governments and parliaments, when they exist, under coercion or direct corruption, the former based on the well-known “bomber diplomacy” and the latter on the more recent “dollar diplomacy” (pressure from U.S. banks for countries to take out bailout loans, followed by the deployment of Marines to collect unpayable debts).

A year earlier, the CIA and British intelligence services, at the insistence of Queen Elizabeth II, had succeeded in overthrowing Iran’s elected president, Mohammed Mossadeq, who had had the audacity to attempt to fulfill another campaign promise: the nationalization of his country’s oil. The strategy of social destabilization through freedom fighters (a tactic previously used to wrest Panama from Colombia half a century earlier and on other occasions, such as in support of the Contras in Nicaragua thirty years later) was not immediately known, and neither the Iranian people nor the people of Guatemala could have been informed or warned of this manipulation. As the dictator and friend of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo (Caligula, to his friends), liked to say, “whoever does not know how to deceive does not know how to govern.”

In Mexico City, David Phillips’s boss, Howard Hunt, ordered him to break into the Guatemalan embassy, located two blocks from the U.S. embassy. The methods employed were typical of the CIA: a month earlier, one of its agents had managed to befriend the guard and had studied his weaknesses. On the night the agents were to enter the foreign embassy, the guard’s “good friend” brought him a bottle of tequila and a deck of cards, which kept him out of the picture for several hours. During that time, the CIA agents managed to photograph all the documents they found in the safety deposit boxes, and within a few more hours, the microfilms were on their way to Washington. The operation went unnoticed, but it was not the first act of harassment against Guatemala, much less against a defiant government. In September 1952, then-President Truman had already ordered Operation PB-Fortune, which aimed to destabilize the new Árbenz government through coordination with Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and General Castillo Armas.

Of course, there’s always a black sheep. In Guatemala, CIA chief Birch O’Neil had disagreed with the plan for a military coup in the country due to the dramatic long-term consequences it could entail, so Allen Dulles immediately removed him from his post.

That same month, in March 1954, Phillips recruited several Guatemalans, whom he took to the nightclubs of Miami, and shortly thereafter, he created the clandestine radio station “Radio Liberación” on the shortwave frequency 6370 kHz, which pretended to broadcast from Guatemala. [11] Every day, the announcers introduced themselves—with the Guatemalan national anthem playing in the background—as a heroic “clandestine radio station of the Guatemalan Liberation Movement, broadcasting from a secret location within the Republic… Between musical segments, we expose to you the palpable crime of communist domination and the unstoppable force of our liberation crusade.” The CIA had decided to broadcast on shortwave because of its range and because Guatemalans, even in the most remote rural areas, tend to tune in to that frequency, especially at night. In just six weeks, the results were devastating. The commotion caused in New York in 1938 by Orson Welles’s radio program about an alien invasion pales in comparison—it is merely an irrelevant anecdote.

One day before D-Day, on June 18, Washington decided that Carlos Castillo Armas—the puppet colonel with the Hitler-style mustache—should enter Guatemala and remain near the border awaiting further orders. Pepe and Mario, the main announcers at Radio Liberación, had fun spreading fake news. They dedicated a program to a heroic Russian pilot who dared to flee to the West in his plane. Shortly afterward, a Guatemalan pilot did the same. Pepe and Mario’s team managed to track him down and pressured him to record his adventure, but the pilot got scared because, he said, he had family in Guatemala. With sound advice from Phillips, Pepe and Mario invited him over one night with the finest Scotch whiskey and kept refilling his glass while a hidden tape recorder captured his tirades against the government of Jacobo Árbenz, which would later be broadcast without his approval by Radio Liberación. ^[12] To prevent further incidents, President Árbenz suspended flights by his own air force and, later, resorted to nightly power outages so that potential invaders could not distinguish their targets. Radio Liberación fabricated the story that the Liberation Air Force’s bombs would fall on areas without light, so that night the Guatemalans began lighting fires outside their homes, all the while cursing the government.

The fake news hoax even reached the major U.S. media outlets. Life and the New York Times reported that the “heroic” radio station was broadcasting from the Guatemalan jungle while Pepe and Mario staged mock armed attacks by the government that supposedly left numerous dead and prompted nonexistent counterattacks led by Colonel Castillo Armas, who—hidden and trembling just a few kilometers from the border—was actually awaiting new orders with barely 150 men.

In Guatemala, the opposition began accusing the government of Jacobo Árbenz of operating the clandestine radio station to sow terror among the population. Some of the bombings were real.

The rebels, whose pilots lacked much experience, entered Guatemala in U.S. World War II-era aircraft and dropped bombs indiscriminately over the capital. One of the bombs mistakenly destroyed an evangelical radio station opposed to the government, and another sank a British ship loaded with coffee and cotton. Unfortunately, the ship had been insured by Lloyd’s of London, which would file a lawsuit against the CIA for damages; as a result, Guatemala ended up paying nearly one million dollars (more than nine million at 2020 values) to avoid the lawsuit and a potential scandal.

President Árbenz, under siege and suffocated by pressure, sent a message to the US Embassy requesting a meeting with President Eisenhower with the intention of negotiating Guatemala’s domestic policy. Naturally, he never received a reply—not even a “No.” “The country, which until then had been quite calm and peaceful,” Agent Phillips would recall twenty-five years later, “was in a state of chaos within five weeks.” The democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, would resign from office on June 27 and, after taking refuge for months in the Mexican embassy, go into exile, where he would die from alcohol abuse in 1971. The plan had been a complete success. Euphoric, the CIA and the US government were confident they could repeat the same formula in other countries, such as Cuba, seven years later. Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas would become the de facto dictator, and Guatemala would sink into a series of military regimes supported by successive US administrations.

Shortly after the coup (as spy David Phillips would recall), Pepe would be shot in the head in front of his family, and Mario would be riddled with bullets from a submachine gun. The new “liberating” regime would burn the books of the future Nobel laureate, Miguel Ángel Asturias. Castillo Armas would be assassinated by his own guard three years later. As if to add to the horror, 200,000 Guatemalans—most of them Indigenous—would be murdered in the coming decades of terror that the world would not remember by any painful name. It would barely remember them at all. The rest of the population will be harassed by the state terrorism of dictators like Efraín Ríos Montt, responsible in 1982 for the massacre of thousands of indigenous people and praised by President Ronald Reagan as “a man of moral integrity who has done much for the social justice of the Guatemalan people” and by the influential televangelist and friend Pat Robertson as “an honest man, persecuted by the left” .

Within hours of the coup d’état in Guatemala, agent David Atlee Phillips began compiling a dossier on an unknown Argentine doctor named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, who had also taken refuge in the Mexican embassy in Guatemala. Phillips led the operation that resulted in the ouster of President Árbenz, not only because of all the classified information he possessed, but also because he knew that ordinary people readily believe the lies he himself invents. But his knowledge of the facts always ends at a sharp line he never crosses—not even in his memoirs. It doesn’t matter whether he personally knew the Agency’s director, Allan Dulles. The Agency fragments information so that no one has a complete understanding of how things work. Or almost no one.

According to the CIA, Guatemala was to become a new Iran. Phillips’s boss and friend, Howard Hunt, would sum it up perfectly when he published his memoirs in 2007 under the title American Spy: “Our main weapon didn’t spit out bullets, but words.”

[1] A total of $73 million at 2020 values.

^[2] U.S. companies had dominated the region’s politics and economy since the previous century. In the mid-20th century, Samuel Zemurray—founder of the Cuyamel Fruit Company, architect of the 1911 coup in Honduras, and later director of UFCo—had acknowledged that “in Honduras, a legislator is worth less than a mule.”

^[3] The government had proposed nationalizing 95,000 hectares given away by dictator Jorge Ubico to UFCo—barely twice the size of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s ranch in Chihuahua in the 1970s—in violation of Mexican law and the Mexican Constitution.

^[4] As in most Latin American countries at the time, the Soviet Union did not have an embassy, and its presence was—compared to the omnipresent presence (legal and illegal, governmental and private) of the United States—insignificant and irrelevant. Like Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and other Third World leaders who were cornered by the foreign policies of Europe and the United States, Árbenz would turn to Czechoslovak aid—only when it was too late.

^[5] Planting opinion pieces in major Latin American media outlets would not be the CIA’s only recurring practice. Another tactic that researchers would uncover many decades later involved smuggling weapons into friendly or hostile groups so that they would be discovered by the unsuspecting local press.

[6] According to the CIA archives in a “Redacted Copy” from 2011 of an article dated March 16, 1986, Colonel Roettinger wrote that Árbenz was more capitalist than socialist—a president who sought to replace dependent capitalism with a “modern capitalist state,” that is, one that was too independent. In “For a CIA Man, It’s 1954 Again,” Roettinger lamented, “our success led to 31 years of military dictatorship and 100,000 people murdered, not to mention the destruction of the necessary economic and social reforms in that country… now President Ronald Reagan is telling us the same thing that the then-CIA director, Allan Dulles, told us in Florida: that our struggle is against communism…”

^[7] Paradoxically, the most detailed surviving documents from that era are the transcripts and reports of the CIA itself, meticulous to the point of paranoia, which is why it is often necessary to translate from English the words that were originally spoken in Spanish.

^[8] This strategy had prevented the 1952 Bolivian revolution from being crushed by the United States (until Eisenhower convinced the Bolivian president, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, to rebuild the national army and disarm the revolutionary militias—a move that, naturally, would lead to another coup d’état in that country). Ernesto Che Guevara had ordered this very same strategy of arming the population before the failed U.S. invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961, after asserting that “Cuba will not be another Guatemala.”

^[9] 65 million in 1954 would be equivalent to 696 million in 2020, but its power in the region and over the lives of its inhabitants in 1954 extends far beyond any adjustment for inflation.

^[10] The meeting likely took place in Opa-Locka, Florida.

^[11] Howard Hunt was the one who recruited Phillips in Chile and is proud of his protégé, whom he considers the most professional of professionals. However, when Phillips published his memoirs in 1977, Howard Hunt reproached him for this passage about the cabarets in Miami. According to Hunt’s memoirs, published in 2007 shortly before his death and after Phillips had already passed away, his old friend had confessed that it had been merely a bit of color and spice suggested by his book’s editor. Nothing that would change the story and nothing he wasn’t accustomed to doing.

^[12] According to agent Howard Hunt, the pilot was Colonel Rodolfo Mendoza and had been recorded while drunk by Latino CIA agents in El Salvador. Hunt and Phillips agreed that his words had been broadcast without his consent. Just a detail.

Back to Courses