This is just a simplified guide. The questions are not central to the discussion in this class, but rather basic starting points.
Prof. Jorge Majfud
- What did happen in Guatemala in 1954? Why was this event so relevant for the generations to come?
- Who was President Jacobo Arbenz, and what was he trying to do in Guatemala?
- What happened in the following 40 years in Guatemala after the 1954 coup?
Operation PBSuccess; the United States and Guatemala 1952 (CIA declassified doc)
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom
«Congress, the CIA, and Guatemala, 1954» (CIA Web page)
«Congress, the CIA, and Guatemala, 1954» (CIA Web page)
Congress, the CIA, and Guatemala, 1954
UNCLASSIFIED
Sterilizing a «Red Infection»
Congress, the CIA, and Guatemala, 1954 (originally published by CIA)
David M. Barrett
congress-cia-guatemala.pdf
Declasified CIA doccuments:
PBSuccess.pdf
Operation PBSUCCESS (1954): Former CIA Case officer, USMC Major John R Stockwell speaks (1987)
From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.
The US Sexually Transmitted Disease Experiments in Guatemala
The US Sexually Transmitted Disease Experiments in Guatemala
Berta was a female patient in the psychiatric hospital. Her age and the illness that brought her to the hospital are unknown. In February 1948, Berta was injected in her left arm with syphilis. A month later, she developed scabies (an itchy skin infection caused by a mite). Several weeks later, [lead investigator Dr. John] Cutler noted that she had also developed red bumps where he had injected her arm, lesions on her arms and legs, and her skin was beginning to waste away from her body. Berta was not treated for syphilis until three months after her injection. Soon after, on August 23, Dr. Cutler wrote that Berta appeared as if she was going to die, but he did not specify why. That same day he put gonorrheal pus from another male subject into both of Berta’s eyes, as well as in her urethra and rectum. He also re-infected her with syphilis. Several days later, Berta’s eyes were filled with pus from the gonorrhea, and she was bleeding from her urethra. On August 27, Berta died.3
Schlesinger, Stephen; Kinzer, Stephen (1999). Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01930-0.
1https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3828982/
Beginning in 1946, the United States government immorally and unethically—and, arguably, illegally—engaged in research experiments in which more than 5000 uninformed and unconsenting Guatemalan people were intentionally infected with bacteria that cause sexually transmitted diseases. Many have been left untreated to the present day.
Although US President Barack Obama apologized in 2010, and although the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues found the Guatemalan experiments morally wrong, little if anything has been done to compensate the victims and their families.
We explore the backdrop for this unethical medical research and violation of human rights and call for steps the United States should take to provide relief and compensation to Guatemala and its people.
American Journal of Public Health (ajph) December 2013
Related: Che Guevara radicalization
«[…] just after that tour around Latin America, where he first began to develop a pan-American consciousness, [Ernesto «Che» Guevara] wound up in Guatemala, a country that at the time was undergoing a profound democratic revolution. Che practiced social medicine in the country’s rural highlands, ministering to the country’s most marginal. He was in Guatemala during the CIA’s 1954 coup that ended that country’s democracy, and he saw firsthand the U.S. role in restoring a regime that would go on to kill hundreds of thousands of its citizens. He always cited his experience in Guatemala as a turning point. Prior to the coup, the Latin American left, including Communist groups, still believed it was possible to work with a country’s national bourgeois to achieve social democratic reform. Afterwards, it was increasingly difficult to do so. Che himself would go on to taunt the United States, saying “Cuba will not be another Guatemala” to justify the restrictions of civil liberties in Cuba, since it was through the subversion of the press, the Church, and independent political parties that the CIA did its work in Guatemala, and subsequently elsewhere.
Herper’s Magazine
http://harpers.org/blog/2007/09/six-questions-for-greg-grandin-on-ches-legacy/
Chiquita’s ‘Banana Republic’ History Is Why It’s Lobbying Against a 9/11 Victims Bill
Chiquita’s ‘Banana Republic’ History Is Why It’s Lobbying Against a 9/11 Victims Bill
Back in 2007, Chiquita was found to have given $1.7 million in a series of payments from 1997 to 2004 to a paramilitary group in Colombia, one designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. The company was forced to pay a $25 million fine in a guilty plea with the federal government. Chiquita claims the company was being extorted for funds by the group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.
Related: another recent example of tragic propaganda
Related: another recent example of tragic propaganda
How misleading marketing got America addicted to opioids
Purdue Pharma, through an unprecedented, aggressive and multifaceted marketing campaign that ran from 1996 until the early 2000s, persuaded doctors to prescribe OxyContin heavily — and kick-started the nation’s current opioid crisis. Here’s how.
Guatemalan ex-soldier gets 5,130-year sentence for 1982 massacre
Guatemalan ex-soldier gets 5,130-year sentence for 1982 massacre
A handful of other «Kaibiles» have been convicted, each receiving a sentence of more than 6,000 years in prison. Three others convicted for the slaughter were jailed in the US for immigration violations. Several others are believed to reside in the US.
The massacre occurred during the rule of Efrain Rios Montt, who himself was indicted on charges of genocide and died in April.
Montt allegedly ordered the murders of 1,771 indigenous Ixil-Maya people during his short reign in 1982-83, which came at the height of the 36-year civil war.
According to the United Nations, about 200,000 people died or were made to disappear during Guatemala’s war, which ended in 1996.
NPR audio): Former Guatemala’s dictator and genocidal died unpunished
(NPR audio): Former Guatemala’s dictator and genocidal died unpunished
Efrain Rios Montt, Former Guatemalan Dictator, Dies At 91
3:54
On Sunday, Guatemala’s former dictator Efrain Rios Montt died at 91. NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly speaks with professor Victoria Sanford of the City University of New York about Rios Montt’s role in the Guatemalan civil war, and the troubled legacy he leaves behind.
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.
1950. Homosexuality is communism
Washington, DC. April 19, 1950—The CIA not only hires notorious Nazis and scatters them across various U.S. government departments, some responsible for genocide (like Klaus Barbie, sent to Bolivia to support dictatorships in the name of the anti-communist struggle), but Senator Arthur McCarthy, in his crusade against supposedly un-American Americans, also hires Nazis to pursue his adversaries. He manages to have the patriotic pledge that children repeat every year in schools, invented and promoted by socialist Francis Bellamy in 1891, modified to include the phrase “one nation under God“, something neither Thomas Jefferson nor the Constitution itself would have accepted.
After a brief period of a few years where Nazi racism was the primary strategic enemy, everything returns to normal with a new foe. Now it is the ideology that promises equality among races and among anything else, like sex. On April 19, on its page 25, the New York Times reports on the dogma of the new prophet, Senator Joseph McCarthy: “in recent years, sexual perversion has infiltrated our government and is just as dangerous as communism.”
McCarthy also convinces the renowned director of the FBI, John Edgar Hoover, to pursue all homosexuals and lesbians, who were not only defined as “mentally ill” by science but were now considered by Washington politicians to be “a threat to national security.” On April 29, 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower signs an order banning all homosexuals from the possibility of working for the government, due to their inclination to share secrets with the enemy. After a heart attack in 1955, he will become furious when his doctor reports that the president has “good bowel movement.” A few years later, he will undergo surgery for an intestinal obstruction.[1]
The new witch hunt had begun in 1948 with the publication of the book Sexual Behavior in The Human Male by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, known as the Kinsey Report, in which the author claimed to have discovered that 37 percent of American citizens had had some type of homosexual experience. Conservative politicians raised an outcry and declared this perversion as a disease even worse than cancer, one that would destroy the nation chosen by God. The “Lavender Scare” begins (the color violet is located at the opposite end of the color spectrum but very close to red in human perception), and thousands of gays and lesbians, who try to keep their private lives confined to their homes, are investigated, pursued, and interrogated by the FBI. In the United States and Canada, various machines are invented that measure the size of pupils and the way individuals react to certain images to detect homosexuals, lesbians, and other types of “strange” people, all deemed traitors to their sex and their country.
Edgar Hoover hires a trusted man of McCarthy, Roy Marcus Cohn, to harass and fire all homosexuals from the U.S. government and from any other type of job or, directly, send them to prison for their crimes against morality. Roy Cohn was homosexual, known to Hoover, an assistant to McCarthy, and future lawyer for real estate businessman Donald Trump when Trump is accused of racism in 1971 and then in 1978 for preventing Black people from renting in his buildings. Roger Stone, convicted for lying to Congress and strategist for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2015, met Cohn while working for Ronald Reagan’s campaign. According to Stone, Cohn was not gay. He just liked to surround himself with blond people and have sexual relations with men. Gays are weak and effeminate. He was more interested in power.”
In 1954, the young lawyer Roy Cohn had to appear repeatedly before television cameras and the entire country alongside his client, Senator McCarthy, who was habitually drunk after five in the afternoon, during the trial against him for illegally interfering with the Army in his search for infiltrated communists.
During the 1950s and 1960s, gay men were arrested and interrogated for their lack of interest in women, and women were questioned for their masculine traits. Just as in revolutionary Cuba of the 1970s, thousands lost their jobs for not being heterosexual enough, since, according to American conservatives, gays and lesbians, like Black people, profess the communist ideology of equality.
The director of the FBI and arguably the most powerful man in the United States for half a century, from 1924 until his death in 1972, Edgar Hoover, was also gay. His partner, Clyde Tolson, secretly accompanied him until his death. This obsession with sexual repression may stem from Protestant and Victorian ethics, but in the 1950s it was articulated from Senator McCarthy to the secret agencies of social manipulation. Until 1947, Latin America was monitored by FBI spies. The most astute Latin Americans suspected and feared that any American businessman in their countries might be an FBI agent. When Hoover learned that Henry Truman intended to replace his agency with another specialized in international affairs, independent of the police and the military, he ordered the destruction of all his files, as the CIA would do twenty years later before the Church and Otis Pike Senate committees began an investigation into this agency’s systematic assassinations. In the 1950s, the CIA and its officials had to start from scratch. Or almost. Among their interrogations to recruit new spies, particularly members of the Communist Party in desperate economic situations, they subjected them to truth tests. To confirm their loyalty, they asked if they were homosexuals or if they ever felt any kind of attraction toward men.
Until well into the 21st century, citizenship tests in the United States will continue to include the question, “Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Not a word about the Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, or similar fascists. The persecution of homosexuals was also forgotten without reparations. In fact, in the 21st century, it was all blamed on Iran, to justify economic and military harassment of a country that supposedly does not understand tolerance and imprisons its homosexuals. Saudi Arabia does the same, but strategic allies are not mentioned.
In Latin America and Africa, the solution to “stop the advance of communism” will be brutal and bloody dictatorships (which, in reality, will not differ at all from the brutal and bloody dictatorships imposed by Washington in Latin America since the 19th century, when no one waved the flag of the communist threat). In the United States, however, and despite the supposed advance of communism in the country, no one ever proposed a military dictatorship to mitigate the possibility. The reasons are numerous and all too obvious.
1953. Public opinion is a consumer product
Washington DC. August 15, 1953—President Dwight Eisenhower signs the authorization for Operation PBSuccess, through which the CIA has decided to overthrow the president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, by inventing the story of the 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, Mohamed Mossadegh, “Guatemala will be another Iran.” In Guatemala, only four of the 61 elected congress members are communists, and their influence in the military, as in any other Latin American army, is zero. Not without irony, it is the communists who advise the president on the option of a capitalist reform, meaning that the lands to be expropriated should not go to the government but to the Guatemalan farmers.
On December 3, 1953, the CIA approves a budget of three million dollars for this operation, to which they will later add another four and a half million.[2] In support, John Foster Dulles appoints John Peurifoy as the ambassador to Guatemala, a failed West Point student who dreamed of becoming President of the United States and who, with that goal in mind, had secured the position of elevator operator at the Capitol through a special favor from a known congressman. Dulles senses that the former elevator operator has what he needs: a reliable paranoia about “the red danger.” In December, shortly after the arrival of the new ambassador Peurifoy, the deputy chief of the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala and surviving diplomat, William L. Krieg, completes his report and states that the reactionary and oligarchic forces are “first-class vagabonds… parasites who only think about money,” while the communists “work hard, have ideas, and are aware of the purpose of their work,” in addition to being “honest and committed.” The tragedy, adds Bill Krieg, is that “the only people who are committed to hard work are those who, by definition, are our enemies.”
As fate would have it, nearly everyone involved in planning the coup against Árbenz are investors in the United Fruit Company: the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles; the 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; the senator and ambassador to the UN, Henry Cabot Lodge; President Eisenhower’s secretary, Ann Whitman, wife of Edmund Whitman, the CIA’s press director; Walter Bedell Smith, Undersecretary of State, who will join the board of directors of the United Fruit Company.
The economic reasons are profound and extensive, but easy to understand. In 1936, the current Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, as a lawyer for the firm Sullivan & Cromwell, had matured the banana monopoly of the United Fruit Company for Guatemala on Wall Street, all with the invaluable assistance and support of the then-dictator, General Jorge Ubico.[3] Since then, John had also been the representative for Railways of Central America and Electric Bond & Share. Now, alongside his brother, the CIA director Allen Dulles, he wields the powerful apparatus of the world’s greatest superpower to prevent the poor in some remote corner of the world from acquiring a tiny piece of their own land to produce basic food and threaten the authority of the successful Northerners. The United Fruit Company’s party in Guatemala had ended in 1944 when the philosophy professor Juan José Arévalo and his “Spiritual Socialism” inspired by Franklin Roosevelt won the country’s first free elections. With the newfound democracy, a rare period of reforms began, putting limits on land giveaways and tax exemptions that had benefited The Octopus during Jorge Ubico’s dictatorship. Resorting to his classic method of making others say what he wanted the people to repeat, just as he had once put a cigarette in the mouths of opera singers, the mercenary propagandist Edward Bernays puts a banana in the hands of Hollywood stars and begins the whitewashing of The Octopus. As always, Bernays’ propaganda campaign is a resounding success.
It’s not just about reducing production costs through subsidies and starvation wages. The ideology of business requires psychology and ethics in its service. The near-total dependence of workers on companies like the United Fruit Company prevented the poor from retiring to their own land, ceasing to be wage workers and desperate consumers. Long before its massacres in Latin America, the United Fruit Company knew it had to inoculate its southern wage earners with a desire for material goods. This was not a new idea at all. A century earlier, to decree the abolition of traditional slavery in their Caribbean possessions, the English had designed a form of slavery desired by the new slaves. On June 10, 1833, a member of Parliament, Rigby Watson, had put it very clearly: “To make them work and to create 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 labor. There is progress from the possession of necessities to the desire for luxuries; once these luxuries are attained, they will become needs in all social classes. This is the kind of progress through which the Negroes must pass, and this is the kind of education to which they must be subjected.” The United Fruit Company took note and put it into practice. In 1929, their most promoted journalist (and friend of Henry Ford), Samuel Crowther, reported that in Central America “people work only when forced. 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 the common people, because when a magazine is discarded here, people pick them up and the advertising pages appear as decorations on the walls of straw huts. I have seen the interiors of cabins completely covered with pages of American magazines… All of this is having its effect in awakening the desire for consumption in the people.” Samuel Crowther considered the Caribbean to be the lake of the American Empire, which protected and guided the destiny of its countries for the glory and development of all.
But development does not come; on the contrary, it does not. Nor does the desire for material consumption arrive with the force with which the desire for freedom and democracy sweeps through Latin America, and at this point, it has already toppled several dictatorships. With the election of Jacobo Árbenz, a captain from the upper class but with that peculiar tendency of some to look downward, the reforms of Professor Arévalo were continued without becoming radicalized. During his administration, hundreds of committees of poor peasants had been formed to discuss and manage the new lands, which was then seen as an unequivocal sign of communism or something equally dangerous. When Árbenz assumed the presidency, 70 percent of the population was illiterate, a figure that rose to 90 percent among the indigenous population, meaning more than 60 percent of Guatemalans were subjected to forced labor with no compensation by tradition and a life expectancy of 38 years. Between the United Fruit Company and the Creole oligarchy, two percent of the population owned 72 percent of the land in a country whose economy was almost exclusively based on agriculture.
The tension and conflict of interests created by the democratic period of 1944-1954 led to the deaths of two landowners, but this was not enough to stop the country’s democratization process. In 1950, Árbenz had begun a land reform plan that affected 1.3 percent of the land available for agriculture. The reform included the expropriation of a smaller fraction of unproductive lands owned by the United Fruit Company, lands that the company had received from the dictatorships before Arévalo.[4] The Octopus refused to accept payment based on the value it had declared on its taxes ($2.98 per acre) and instead demanded $75 per acre.
Once the democratic president was overthrown and replaced by General Castillo Armas, one of the many puppets who are never difficult to find, Edward Bernays, the CIA, and the Eisenhower administration would continue their efforts to improve the image of the jittery little dictator. Before the successful coup d’état, the general with the Hitler-style mustache was known to Washington. In 1946, he had completed a training course at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and in 1950, he had failed in his attempted coup against Arévalo. In 1953, the CIA had located him in Honduras and brought him to a training session in Opa-Locka, Florida. Then they had paid him $3,000 a month ($29,000 in 2020 value) plus supplies for his 140 men. Every action in which Castillo Armas and his men participated ended in defeat and with several deaths. The CIA never cared because this group was not operational; it only represented 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 government of Árbenz, overthrown by the Guatemalan people, who never accepted the lie and foreign intervention (the background scenery will show a cross as Saint 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 immediately.” In the years and decades to come, the successive dictatorships of Guatemala will not be able to hide the hundreds of thousands massacred as a result of Washington’s savior plans. One of these, the dictator Efraín Ríos Mont, will order the massacre of 18,000 indigenous people in 1982. Shortly after, during his visit to the tropical hell, President Ronald Reagan will praise the genocidal maniac as an example of the fight for freedom in Guatemala and against the “regime” of the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua. The most powerful churches in the United States, such as the Club700, will also support the evangelical brother until his death in 2018.
Despite the brutal campaign, the CIA acknowledges that, both in Guatemala and in Latin America, the communists are a minor force. The same diagnosis will be made by the Agency and some Latin American armies, such as the Argentine one, before embarking on the adventure of saving their countries with more coups. In 1954, out of the 61 Guatemalan legislators, only four are communists. Except in the workers’ unions where, for obvious reasons, they hold some prominence. As has been the case for a century, the central issue is not communism but disobedience, which is conveniently labeled as communism. Before Árbenz was elected president, the U.S. Embassy had sent a list to President Juan José Arévalo with names that needed to be removed from his government, but the president, in an unusual move, ignored the request. Threatening the profits of a U.S. company under the guise of a law passed by some banana congress was another clear demonstration of insubordination. The same CIA history department researcher, Professor Nicholas Cullather, will conclude decades later that the United Fruit Company routinely reported profits and values far below the real ones to evade taxes, but Edward Bernays convinced the U.S. Congress and public opinion otherwise: “it wasn’t about bananas but communism.” From the start, the idea was very convincing. “Wherever you see people talking or criticizing the United Fruit Company, you should substitute the company’s name with the country, the United States.” Some reports describe Jacobo Árbenz as a conservative politician. The U.S. military in Guatemala also sees no “communist danger,” but, as in the invasion of Mexico 110 years earlier, they act against their own opinions in the name of efficiency, duty, and honor. Until decades later, some begin to have a change of conscience and start speaking their minds.
At this moment, Edward Bernays is the advisor for the company in question (the United Fruit Company), the most important propagandist of the century and inventor of modern Public Relations. He personally selects the journalists he considers the least informed from the Times, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune and sends them to Guatemala fully paid by the United Fruit Company to “report on communist activities” in Central America. During the trip to Guatemala, over cigars and plenty of whisky, the organizers ensure the dogma is solidified among the journalists: they were all going to cover events in a country that had been taken over by a Marxist dictatorship. Russians prefer vodka. Once indoctrinated, upon arriving in the actual country, the reporters’ vision aligns with the dogma, not reality, and quickly translates into headlines in the U.S. press and in the Public Opinion of the Free Country.
The only journalist who dares to mention the reasonable land reform of President Jacobo Árbenz and the population’s discontent with the U.S. transnational is Sydney Gruson of the New York Times. Shortly afterward, the business director of the New York Times will receive a visit from his friend, the CIA director, Allen Dulles, and Sydney Gruson will be pulled from the Central America beat.
Without ever setting foot in Guatemala, Bernays understands what it’s all about. That’s his job: not just to know what others don’t but to make them believe what his clients want them to believe. Bernays is an old mercenary and so skilled that his annual salary (one hundred thousand dollars, not counting extras) is higher than that of any U.S. president. Nephew of Sigmund Freud, his interest lies not so much in studying others’ minds but in the money derived from manipulating them. In 1924, he had convinced President Calvin Coolidge to cook pancakes for his supporters during his re-election campaign, a populist tradition that survives as a dogma into the 21st century. In 1927, with his “Torches of Freedom” campaign, he had successfully encouraged women to take up smoking to increase the profits of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Even unsuspecting feminists fell into his trap. The great Bernays is also responsible for Americans eating eggs and bacon for breakfast, which he achieved to boost sales of bacon for his client, the Beech-Nut Packing Company of New York. He is also one of the masterminds behind selling wars and coups d’état, like this one in Guatemala. Not only had Adolf Hitler read with admiration the book The Passing of the Great Race (The Defeat of the Superior Race) by the American Madison Grant, whom he wrote thanking for providing him with his political bible, but his future Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, also kept Edward Bernays’ books in an accessible place in his library (yes, Goebbels also had Jewish friends). In the forties, Bernays had been hired by the United Fruit Company, known for its tentacles as The Octopus, a multinational that ruled over the Caribbean and Central America since the 19th century with budgets larger than any of the banana republics in which it operated freely.
Now, the strategy is clear: it’s necessary to shake the ghost of communism once again. There’s no shortage of resources, and nothing is dismissed. It’s very easy to be a genius when there’s plenty of money. The powerful CIA agent Howard Hunt Jr. visits the Catholic bishops of the United States and convinces them of the Guatemalan danger, so the bishops waste no time condemning the communism of President Árbenz. On April 9, 1954, a pastoral letter reaches the hands of Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arellano, and later, more elaborate ones are sent to the bishops of Guatemala, warning of the dangerous forces “enemies of God and the Fatherland.” Rossell y Arellano will be decisive in the destruction of democracy and the rule of law in his country and will leave his post as archbishop, as often happens, when he dies in 1964. Shortly before the coup d’état, on April 4, 1954, he will commission a wooden Jesus, later reproduced in bronze, which will be baptized as the Christ of Esquipulas. Thus, Jesus, who in life detested weapons as much as he preferred the poor and marginalized, will be used as “Commander in Chief” of the fascist forces of the National Liberation Movement against the government of Árbenz and in favor of the American empire, without considering that Jesus was executed by the ruling empire as a mere criminal, alongside 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 (anticommunist Christianity) continues its shameless advance in our country, disguising itself as a social reform movement for the most needy classes… Every Catholic must fight against communism by their very condition as Catholics… They are people without a nation, scum of the earth, who have repaid Guatemala’s generous hospitality by preaching class hatred with the aim of plundering and completely destroying our country.” The talking points work flawlessly in Spanish. Catholic fanaticism closely resembles its old enemy, Protestant fanaticism.
Less powerful, the main unions of Guatemala still support the president. Even if Árbenz wasn’t a communist, even if, as in any Latin American country, the communists were a very small minority, convincing people in the United States and in Guatemala that he was, poses no problem.[5] The right of other peoples to be whatever they choose to be, even communists, isn’t even on the table. Without the slightest proof, radios 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 an ultra-secret agency like the CIA always knows more than the rest of mortals and reserves the right to provide evidence “for security reasons.”
At the OAS, Guatemala’s representative, Guillermo Toriello Garrido, protests against the organization’s resolution about the right of other nations to intervene if communist influence is confirmed. The resolution is presented at the behest of the CIA director, Allen Dulles, who in the same Caracas meeting praises the Venezuelan dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez as exemplary. Amid the international noise, Toriello could clearly see what millions cannot and never will: “it is deeply regrettable that any nationalist or independent movement must be labeled as such [as communist], just like any anti-imperialist or anti-monopoly action… And the most critical thing of all is that those who label democracy in such a way do so in order to destroy that very democracy.”
Mexico, Argentina, and Uruguay are the only ones who support Toriello’s arguments, criticize all forms of interventionism, and oppose the “Declaration of Caracas.” But they abstain from voting. Guatemala is left alone. Resolution 93, pushed by Washington, is unequivocal and aims to “adopt the necessary measures to protect the political independence [of the American countries] against the intervention of international communism, which acts in the interests of foreign despotism, and reiterate the faith of the people of America in the effective exercise of representative democracy.” The political literature of power, known as Realism or Realpolitik, is endowed with an infinite freedom of patriotic imagination.
Meanwhile, in Opa-Locka, Florida, the fictional campaign of Radio Liberación continues preparing public opinion for the final stage, while pretending to be a rebel radio operating from the Guatemalan jungle. As a complement, and as will become a long tradition on the continent, the CIA and the USIA plant, with the force of dollars, at least 200 articles in various Latin American newspapers denouncing the communist danger in Guatemala.[6] This is just part of the plan. Although U.S. officials consider Árbenz’s policies to be “democratic and conservative,” Guatemala doesn’t even secure loans from the World Bank to carry out its agrarian reform. Some Guatemalan landowners are furious and seek help from the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, who, during his visit to President Truman at the White House in April of last year, had informed him, in his good English: “just send me the weapons, and I’ll clean up Guatemala for you in one swift move.”
Since Árbenz’s victory in the 1950 elections, Washington has refrained from selling arms to the new government. A terrible sacrifice but for a good cause. In 1953, it had blocked the purchase of defensive material from Canada and Germany, but now it hands the best weapons to Guatemalan exiles in Honduras and Nicaragua. On February 9, in collaboration with the FBI, the CIA carries out its Operation Washtub, through which it plants Soviet weapons on the coast of Nicaragua to be discovered by fishermen and the Somoza dictatorship can accuse Guatemala of communist plans in the region.
With no other options, President Árbenz (as Patrice Lumumba will do in the Congo, seven years later) turns to Czechoslovakia. On May 5, 1954, the Scandinavian ship MS Alfhem will arrive at Puerto Barrios with a cargo of weapons that will turn out to be obsolete and a new excuse for Washington’s intervention. In June, the CIA will bomb the British ship Springfjord with Napalm at Puerto San José, which will turn out to be a shipment of cotton and coffee from the American company Grace Line, making it one of the few mistakes for which the CIA will be sued. On May 27, 1954, the friendly dictator Anastasio Somoza informs the press that, apart from the weapons found, there are photographs of the Soviet submarine that carried them, destined for Guatemala.
In 1987, Major John R Stockwell, a CIA officer involved in the operation, will acknowledge that “the massacre of 85,000 Guatemalans at the hands of U.S.-backed governments has not made new friends for this country, I can assure you… In the end, UFCo went bankrupt and its president committed suicide”. Another CIA agent, actively involved in the operation in Guatemala, Navy Colonel Philip Clay Roettinger, is in charge of training soldiers in Honduras and bringing General Castillo Armas, “that jumpy little man”, to the presidency. In 1986, Roettinger will acknowledge that “no one in the government thought Guatemala could be 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 will leave everything behind and move to Guanajuato, Mexico.[7]
Things didn’t turn out very well for the new dictator, General Castillo Armas either. Before being assassinated in 1957, General Hitler-mustache will be honored by Columbia University with an honorary doctorate for his “fight for democracy” (a reason why Rómulo Gallegos will return his own degree conferred by the same institution). Castillo Armas will visit Washington and participate in a television program with Vice President Richard Nixon. Set against the backdrop of a hammer and sickle pierced by the relentless spear of the cross, Nixon will say: “Guatemala’s was a rebellion of the people against a communist regime… in other words, the regime of Jacobo Árbenz was not a government of Guatemala but one controlled by foreign forces.” The general and supreme dictator of Guatemala, Castillo Armas, responds to everything with “yes, yes.” He doesn’t understand English nor does he understand anything else. He only knows that his repressive force comes from members of the regime of Jorge Ubico (an unabashed Nazi in a country of Indians), that his regime has banned the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky for being subversive, and that a few years ago someone told him that, perhaps, the United States could help him become president after losing the election to the cursed 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 the cultivable land in Guatemala. 200,000 people will have been murdered under successive military dictatorships, 93 percent of them executed or massacred by the Soldiers of the Homeland. In 1999, President Bill Clinton will visit the country and acknowledge his country’s responsibility in the destruction of democracy in 1954 and the subsequent support for genocidal militaries. “The support of the United States to the Guatemalan army and intelligence involved in the violence in Guatemala was a mistake that must never happen again,” he says. The same tears will fall in 2010 when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledges the barbarity committed by Washington in conducting experiments with syphilis and gonorrhea on the poor of Guatemala in the 1940s. As always, everything, when it no longer matters to anyone nor has any consequences for the victims. Nor for power.
Or almost.
1954. He who does not know how to deceive does not know how to govern
Guatemala City. June 27, 1954—President Jacobo Árbenz is forced to resign and goes into exile, putting an end to a rare decade without military dictatorships in the region. His sin was trying to fulfill his electoral promises of nationalizing a small portion of the country’s land to return it to peasants who were not fortunate enough to work for starvation wages for the American international UFCo. Hurt by the complicit passivity of the national army, the ousted president says: “Perhaps the greatest mistake I made was the total trust I had in the Guatemalan Army and the fact that I transmitted this trust to the people and the popular organizations. But I never imagined that, in the face of a case of foreign aggression, in which the freedom of our homeland, its honor, and its independence were at stake, the Army could betray us.”
Neither the United States nor in the Wild Frontier do the media use the word ‘invasion.’ Words matter more than bombs. The coup is a copy of the manual recently written by the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected secular government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, a year before, and for the same reasons. Convinced by the British oil company BP, the CIA had injected a million dollars into Mossadegh’s opponents and hundreds of thousands of dollars into the clergy of the time and the local press to convince the people of the danger of the elected president. Mossadegh was another independentist president who supported the nationalization of national resources like oil, which for half a century had left the country with a meager 16 percent. As hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed to ‘protesters’ on the streets of Tehran, The New York Times, Newsweek, and other influential media repeated the stories about ‘the dictator Mossadegh’ and his ‘regime.’ The CIA’s manual would be repeated in the Congo when the amateur journalist, elected president, and national hero Patrice Lumumba failed to garner Washington’s support to maintain the recently achieved independence. The only reasons for the refusal were economic: Wall Street businessmen were committed to the Belgian colonizers. 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, killer of Lumumba (and, as often happens, a former officer of the rebel leader), would erect a monument to his own victim, to the delight of the people, and would rule the Congo for decades, to the satisfaction of civilization and the development of the superior race.
In his penultimate radio address, Árbenz declares: “Our only crime has been the act of giving ourselves our own laws; our crime has been the application of these laws to United Fruit… It is not true that communists are seizing power in our government… We have not imposed any regime of terror; on the contrary, the Guatemalan friends of Mr. John Foster Dulles are those who wish to impose terror among Guatemalans by attacking children and women from pirate planes.”[8]
The Guatemalan Army, still subordinate to the constitution, achieves a small victory by shooting down one of those pirate planes from the United States. A significant portion of the population is not swayed by Radio Liberation 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 the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza to facilitate non-American planes. The CIA pilot Jerry DeLarm, alias Rosebinda, bombs Guatemalan military bases and public radio with grenades and Coke bottles filled with fuel while loudspeakers installed in the United States embassy simulate a war that never happened.
Guatemala requests a UN investigative commission, but on June 25th, the United States ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, vetoes the resolution. He does not accept any investigation. The CIA continues bombing oil supplies for three days and drops NTN bombs on Chiquimula, Gavilán, and Zacapa. Árbenz puts his last resort on the table: arming the peasants. But it is already too late.[9]
On June 27, 1954, Árbenz reads his final message on public radio: “We all know how they have bombed and machine-gunned cities, slaughtering women, children, 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 pain, but holding firm to my convictions. Protect what has cost so much. Ten years of struggle, tears, sacrifices, and democratic achievements… I have not been cornered by the enemy’s arguments, but by the material means they possess to destroy Guatemala“.
These farewell words of Árbenz will be echoed nearly twenty years later when in Chile, 1973, Salvador Allende must do the same. Similarly, the declarations of innocence by Secretaries John Foster Dulles in 1954 and Henry Kissinger in 1973 will be repeated as if written on tracing paper, another sign 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 of the Guatemalans against their government.”
Once the coup d’état is accomplished, the same John Foster Dulles, the religious fanatic guided solely by the moral rectitude of the Scriptures, after organizing the plot based on repeated lies, announces on the radio: “The government of Guatemala and its communist agents around the world have insisted on obscuring the truth—that of imperialism communist— denouncing that the interest of the United States 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 of the Guatemalans.”
With the 1954 coup d’état, the UFCo not only regained its nationalized lands but also saw the privatization of several areas of public property. The army generals involved in the coup also received lands, a kind of reverse agrarian reform. Meanwhile, now without resistance from any union or dissident journalist, The Octopus will continue paying 50 dry centavos per day to each worker and reporting an annual profit of 65 million dollars, double the budget of the Guatemalan government.[10] As is and will continue to be a historical pattern, Washington will invest millions of dollars in Guatemala under dictatorship (14 million in the next five years alone) to demonstrate to the world the effectiveness of the obedience they will call, for some reason still unclear, democracy.
It goes without saying that the final cost of Anglo-Saxon fanaticism will infinitely exceed the price of the lands disputed by a legitimate agrarian reform law. The persecution and demonization of dissidents, the prohibition of almost all popular organizations will, by themselves, be too high a price. But the tragedy of Guatemala just began there. Thousands of peasants will refuse to abandon the lands (public and expropriated) granted by Árbenz and will be forcibly displaced or, simply, executed. Another 200,000 Guatemalans will be killed or massacred by the military dictatorships that will continue until the 1990s. President Ronald Reagan will call them “friendly dictatorships” and will hold them up as models of freedom and democracy.
Sam Zemurray (Samuel Zmurri), promoter of other coups in the region since the early 20th century, major shareholder and president of the UFCo., will die in 1961. In 1972, the company, then registered under other names, will be accused of corruption in Honduras. On February 23, 1975, its president, Eli Black (the Polish rabbi Elihu Menashe Blachowitz), overwhelmed by bribery accusations and the company’s debts, will leap into the void from his office on the 44th floor of the modern Pan Am building in New York. The United Fruit Company will survive as Chiquita Bananas. In the coming century, it will be accused by the U.S. government itself of financing paramilitaries in Colombia. On March 14, 2007, Chiquita will lose the lawsuit and will have to pay Washington (not the Colombian victims) 25 million dollars for supporting terrorism.
1954. Our main weapon doesn’t spit bullets but words
Guatemala City. September 9, 1954—After 73 days of refuge in the Mexican embassy, the deposed President Jacobo Árbenz is informed that it would be best for him to leave the country. At La Aurora Airport, the briefed press follows the man who was until recently the most popular president in the country. At eleven at night and for forty minutes, in front of the cameras, his wife, and his children, immigration authorities force him to strip to verify that he carries neither jewels nor any foreign ideology. The people, represented by a dozen distinguished ladies and gentlemen of standing, shout at him, “Traitor! Out communist!” One of the few communists in the country, coincidentally, travels that same night. According to former CIA agent Philip Agee, Carlos Manuel Pellecer (alias Linlick) is a CIA infiltrator within Guatemala’s 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 for an urgent meeting in Miami.[11] Phillips’ new mission was to destabilize and ensure that the President of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, relinquishes power. Decades later, in his 1977 memoirs, he would recall 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 prove in his memoirs The Night Watch that he had an invaluable secret information bank, but he failed to realize that he did not understand how the Agency he worked for operated; his knowledge had a ceiling, and his superiors did not allow any of their agents to surpass it. It didn’t matter if Phillips had seen the CIA director, Allen Dulles, in a brief meeting in Washington. He also applied the same method to those below him: fragmenting information, compartmentalizing knowledge so that any leak could be limited to a small area that would then prove inconsequential (like placing barriers in a domino setup to prevent the entire system from collapsing). Decades later, on June 31, 2016, The Washington Post will reveal how one of the Agency’s methods, known as Eyewash, involved lying to its own officials so that no one is ever sure if something is true or false.
—This operation could lead Guatemala into a bloody civil war —Phillips insisted—Many people could die…
—True —responded agent Tracy Barnes, who would also participate in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba—. That’s why we’ll try to do it in a way that avoids a major massacre, if possible.
The coup in Guatemala had been planned with the 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 execute it, the U.S. government hired a frequent collaborator in other manipulations, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays.
Phillips didn’t know this. Nor did he know that the primary reason wasn’t a supposed communist threat, but rather that Árbenz had decided to fulfill his electoral promises to nationalize a small portion of Guatemalan land owned by the United Fruit Company. As was customary in other countries of the region, the banana company had received tax exemptions and land gifts from previous dictatorships, such as that of Jorge Ubico, and neither the Company nor the Agency nor the U.S. government were willing to tolerate such defiance. And if that weren’t reason enough, the higher-ups, from the CIA to the U.S. government, owned shares in the UFCo. Its operating budget exceeded that of the banana republics that protected it with their armies and laws in its favor, laws approved by governments and parliaments—when they existed—under coercion or direct corruption, one based on the notorious “bomber diplomacy” and the other on the more recent “dollar diplomacy” (pressure from U.S. banks for countries to take rescue loans followed by the dispatch 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 the democratically elected president of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq, who had had the audacity to attempt to fulfill another electoral promise: the nationalization of his country’s oil. The strategy of social destabilization through freedom fighters (“luchadores por la libertad,” used earlier to wrest Panama from Colombia half a century before and on other occasions, such as supporting the Contras in Nicaragua thirty years later) wasn’t immediately known, and neither the Iranian people nor the people of Guatemala could be informed and warned of this manipulation. As the friendly dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo (Caligula to his friends), liked to say, “Those who cannot deceive cannot govern.”
In Mexico City, David Phillips’s boss, Howard Hunt, ordered him to enter the Guatemalan embassy, located two blocks from the U.S. embassy. The resources employed were typical of the CIA: a month earlier, one of its agents had befriended the guard and studied his weaknesses. The night the agents were to infiltrate the foreign embassy, this good friend brought him a bottle of tequila and a deck of cards, which kept him occupied for hours. During that time, CIA agents managed to photograph all the documents they found in the safe boxes, and within hours, the microfilm was on its way to Washington. The operation went unnoticed, but it wasn’t the first harassment of Guatemala, nor of a disobedient government. In September 1952, then-President Truman had already ordered Operation PB-Fortune, which aimed to destabilize the new Árbenz government through coordination with the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and General Castillo Armas.
Of course, there’s always a black sheep. In Guatemala, the head of the CIA, Birch O’Neil, had disagreed with the plan for a military coup in the country due to the dramatic long-term consequences it could bring, which is why Allen Dulles removed him from his position immediately. That same month, in March 1954, Phillips recruited several Guatemalans whom he took to the cabarets of Miami and, shortly after, created the clandestine radio station “Radio Liberación” on 6370 KZ shortwave, which pretended to broadcast from Guatemala.[12] Every day, the hosts introduced themselves, with the Guatemalan national anthem playing in the background, as the heroic “clandestine station of the Guatemalan Liberation Movement, from a secret location in the Republic… Between songs, we show you the palpable crime of communist domination and the unstoppable force of our liberation crusade.” The CIA had decided to broadcast on shortwave due to its reach and because Guatemalans, even in the most remote rural areas, often tune into that frequency, especially at night. Within just six weeks, the results were devastating. The commotion caused in 1938 New York by Orson Welles’ radio program about an alien invasion is barely an irrelevant anecdote in comparison.
One day before D-Day, on June 18, Washington decided that Carlos Castillo Armas, the puppet colonel with the little Hitler-style mustache, should enter Guatemala and stay near the border awaiting further orders. Pepe and Mario, the main hosts of Radio Liberación, had fun spreading fake news. They dedicated a program to a heroic Russian pilot who dared to flee to the West with his plane. Shortly after, a Guatemalan pilot did the same. Pepe and Mario’s team managed to locate him and pressured him to record his adventure, but the pilot got scared because, he said, he had family in Guatemala. Correctly advised by Phillips, Pepe and Mario invited him out one night with the best Scotch whiskey and filled his glass over and over while a hidden recorder captured his tirades against the government of Jacobo Árbenz, which would later be broadcast without his approval on Radio Liberación.[13] To avoid further incidents, President Árbenz suspended flights by his own air force and, later, resorted to cutting electricity at night to prevent potential invaders from identifying their targets. Radio Liberación invented that the liberation air force’s bombs would fall on areas with no light, so that night Guatemalans began lighting fires outside their homes while cursing the government.
The fabrication of fake news reached the major press in the United States. Life and the New York Times reported that the heroic radio was broadcasting from the jungles of Guatemala while Pepe and Mario faked government armed attacks that, supposedly, left numerous dead and non-existent responses led by Colonel Castillo Armas, who, hidden and trembling a few kilometers from the border, was actually awaiting new orders with just 150 men.
In Guatemala, the opposition began accusing the government of Jacobo Árbenz of operating the clandestine radio to sow terror among the population. Some bombings are real. The rebels, who have pilots with little understanding, enter Guatemala in U.S. planes from World War II and drop bombs anywhere in the capital. One of the bombs accidentally destroys an evangelical radio station opposed to the government, and another sinks a British ship loaded with coffee and cotton. Unfortunately, the ship had been insured with Lloyd’s of London, which would file a lawsuit against the CIA for damages, for which Guatemala would end up paying nearly a million dollars (over nine million at 2020 value) to avoid the lawsuit and a potential scandal.
President Árbenz, harassed and suffocated, sent a message to the U.S. embassy requesting a meeting with President Eisenhower with the intention of negotiating Guatemala’s internal policy. Naturally, he never received a response. Not even a No. “The country, which up until then had been quite peaceful and serene,” agent Phillips would recall twenty-five years later, “in five weeks was in a state of chaos.” The democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, will resign on June 27 and, after seeking refuge for months in the Mexican embassy, will go into exile, where he will die from alcohol abuse in 1971. The plan has been a complete success. Euphoric, the CIA and the U.S. government are confident in repeating the same formula in other countries, such as Cuba, seven years later. Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas will become the de facto dictator, and Guatemala will plunge into a series of military regimes supported by successive U.S. governments.
Shortly after the coup d’état (spy David Phillips would recall), Pepe would be shot in the head in front of his family, and Mario would be riddled with machine-gun fire. The new liberation regime will burn the books of the future Nobel Prize winner, Miguel Ángel Asturias. Castillo Armas will be assassinated by his own guard three years later. To add a detail, 200,000 Guatemalans, mostly indigenous people, will be killed in the decades of terror that the world will not remember with any painful name. It will hardly be remembered. The rest of the population will be terrorized 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 people of Guatemala“ and by the influential televangelist and friend Pat Robertson as “an honest man, persecuted by the left.”
Hours after the coup d’état in Guatemala was completed, agent David Atlee Phillips began a data file on an unknown Argentine doctor named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, who had also sought refuge in the Mexican embassy in Guatemala. Phillips commanded the operation that resulted in the ousting of President Árbenz, not only thanks to all the secret information he possessed but because he knew that ordinary people easily believe the lies he himself invents. But all his knowledge of the facts always ends at an abrupt line that he never crosses, not even in his memoirs. It doesn’t matter if he personally knew the Director of the Agency, Allen Dulles. The Agency fragments information so that no one has full knowledge of how things work in their entirety. Or almost no one.
According to the CIA, Guatemala was to be a new Iran. Phillips’ chief and friend, Howard Hunt, will sum it up in an unsurpassable way when he published his memoirs in 2007 under the title American Spy: “Our main weapon didn’t spit bullets, but words.”
And Guatemala was a new Iran.
[1] For some reason, the intestinal issues that ended the lives of several presidents, like the diarrhea of Andrew Jackson, James Polk, and Zachary Taylor, or the hemorrhoids of Franklin Roosevelt and George H. Bush, or the anal fissures of President James Garfield (in addition to the 81 days of anal feeding he had to endure before dying from the shots of a narcissistic schizophrenic named Charles Guiteau), were treated with strict state discretion.
[2] In total, $73 million at 2020 value.
[3] American companies had dominated the politics and economy of the region since the previous century. By the mid-20th century, Samuel Zemurray, founder of 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”.
[4] The government had proposed nationalizing 95,000 hectares gifted by dictator Jorge Ubico to UFCo, just double the area of American President Lyndon Johnson’s ranch in Chihuahua in the 70s, against Mexican law and constitution.
[5] As in most Latin American countries of the time, the Soviet Union did not have an embassy, and its presence paled in comparison to the omnipresent (legal and illegal, governmental and private) presence of the United States, insignificant and irrelevant. Like Patrice Lumumba in 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, when it was already too late.
[6] Planting opinion pieces in major Latin American media will not be the only recurring practice of the CIA. Another practice that would be discovered by researchers many decades later included the introduction of weapons into friendly or enemy groups to be uncovered by the unsuspecting local press.
[7] According to CIA archives in a “Declassified Copy” in 2011 of an article from March 16, 1986, Colonel Roettinger would write that Árbenz was more capitalist than socialist, a president who aimed to transform dependent capitalism into a “modern capitalist state”, that is, too independent. In “For a CIA Man, It’s 1954 Again” Roettinger would lament, “our success led to 31 years of military dictatorship and 100,000 people killed, aside from destroying the necessary economic and social reforms in that country… now President Ronald Reagan tells us the same thing that the then CIA director, Allan Dulles, told us in Florida, that our struggle is against communism…”
[8] Paradoxically, the most detailed surviving documents from that era are the transcripts and reports from the CIA itself, meticulous to the point of paranoia, which is why it is often necessary to translate into English words that were originally spoken in Spanish.
[9] This strategy had prevented the 1952 Bolivian revolution from being destroyed by the United States (until Eisenhower convinced the Bolivian president, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, to rebuild the national army and disarm the revolutionary militias, which, naturally, would lead to a new coup in the country). This same strategy of arming the population had been ordered by Ernesto Che Guevara, before the failed US invasion of the Bay of Pigs, in 1961, after assuring that “Cuba will not become another Guatemala“.
[10] 65 million in 1954 would amount to 696 million in 2020, but its power in the region and over the lives of its inhabitants in 1954 extends far beyond any inflation adjustment.
[11] It is likely that the meeting took place in Opa-Locka, Florida.
[12] Howard Hunt was the one who recruited Phillips in Chile and is proud of his disciple, whom he considers the most professional among professionals. However, when Phillips published his memoirs in 1977, Howard Hunt would criticize this line about the cabarets in Miami. According to Hunt’s memoirs, published in 2007 shortly before his death and after Phillips had already passed, his old friend had confessed that it had been just a bit of color and spice suggested by his book editor. Nothing that changes history and nothing that wasn’t commonly done.
[13] According to agent Howard Hunt, the pilot was Colonel Rodolfo Mendoza and had been recorded drunk by the Latino CIA agents in El Salvador. Hunt and Phillips would agree that their words had been broadcast without their consent. A detail.
The Wild Frontier. 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Fanaticism in Latin America
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