CIA INVOLVEMENT WITH LATIN AMERICA

MARI BOURBON

TIMELINE: GUATEMALAN COUP

1821Guatemala becomes

independent

1823Guatemala becomes

part of the United Provinces of Central

America

1844-1865Ruled by Rafael

Carrera

TIMELINE: GUATEMALAN COUP

1873-1885President Justo Rufino Barrios

1931President Jorge

Ubico

1941Declares war on the Axis powers

TIMELINE: GUATEMALAN COUP

1944President Juan Jose

Arevalo

1951Colonel Jacobo

Arbenz becomes president

1954Start of the Coup

RAFAEL CARRERA

President/Dictator 1844-1865

Conservative and Catholic

Tyrant who ruled mainly be decree, freedoms were unknown

PRESIDENT JUSTO RUFINO BARRIOS

• Instituted a number of reforms, including freedom of the press.

• Attacked the Catholic Church, limiting its power and confiscating its property.

• Elected President in May 1873.

• Barrios oversaw cleaning and rebuilding of Guatemala City

• Set up a new and accountable police force.

• Brought the first telegraph lines and railroads to the Republic.

• He established a system of public schools in the country.

• Develops the army and introduces coffee growing.

PRESIDENT JORGE UBICO • 14 February 1931 to 4 July 1944• Guatemala was in a depression• Assumed dictatorial power, considered himself another Napoleon • United fruit Company• Nation led a strike against him and he was forced to resign• Forced the committee to give his position to General Ponce who took orders from Ubico• While Ponce was still giving the orders of Ubico the public had another idea• Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, a teacher who had been fired and then went to El Salvador to

organize and group people to fight against Ubico finally saw his chance• In return for U.S. support he gave hundreds of thousands of hectares of highly fertile

land to the American United Fruit Company (UFCO)• October Revolution

PRESIDENT JUAN JOSE AREVALO

Spiritual Socialism

Communism

“Safeguarding the free will of citizens generates popular support for

governmental institutions”

Social Reform Policies

New Constitution

Increase in minimum wage

Reformist Labor Law

Benefits did not spread equally

Unions formed

PRESIDENT JACOBO ARBENZ

• Defense Minister of Guatemala from 1944 to 1951

• President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954

• The Arévalo government began a highly popular program of social reform, aimed at ending Guatemala's feudalistic labor system

• The centerpiece of his policy was an Agrarian reform law that granted cultivable land to poverty stricken peasants in an attempt to end the system of debt peonage

• Despite his policies being relatively moderate he was widely disliked by the United States government and the United Fruit Company

CODENAME: PBFORTUNE• The Guatemalan coup d’état began with Operation PBFORTUNE (September 1952), the partly implemented

plan to supply exiled, anti–Árbenz rebels with operational funds and matériel to organize a counter-revolutionary “army of liberation” to depose the Árbenz Government.

• Sent scouts- found nothing

• Nicaragua offered helped with the Dominican republic

• The CIA asked the Colonel for a plan for the invasion of Guatemala; he planned to launch simultaneous attacks from Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras

• Col. Castillo Armas requested money and matériel, yet nonetheless told the CIA that his army of liberation, El ejército de liberación, would invade Guatemala, with or without US support

• In conversation with other Central American heads of state, the indiscreet Nicaraguan President Somoza García had openly spoken about the CIA’s planned deposition of President Árbenz Guzmán

• Public knowledge of the betrayed secret-intervention would provoke diplomatic problems for the US — a signatory to the Rio Pact

• The liberation army matériel were stored, and the military caudillo services of Col. Castillo Armas were retained, for three-thousand weekly dollars, until the US required him to be El Presidente of Guatemala.

CODENAME: PBSUCCESS

• In the geopolitical context of the US–USSR Cold War (1945–1991), the secret intelligence agencies of the US misinterpreted liberal politics, agrarian reform, and resource nationalization as consequences of the communist infiltration of a Latin American government

• Started with President Eisenhower

• Had to choose a successor- Col. Castillo

• Used psychological warfare; propaganda, radio, pamphlets, newsletters

• CIA Mercenary Army of about 480 troops compared to 5000 Guatemalan troops

• US stopped selling arms to Guatemala forcing them to but from USSR

• US Navy began air and sea patrols of Guatemala, under the pretexts of intercepting secret shipments of weapons

• Operation HARDROCK BAKER, a blockade of Guatemala

CIA INVASION• 8:00 p.m. on 18 June 1954, Col. Castillo's Ejército de liberación invaded Guatemala; in four groups

• Ten saboteurs tasked with helping from the inside

• CIA ordered Col. Castillo to avoid fighting the Guatemalan Army

• Failure- because on foot and could not reach destinations fast enough

• The weakened psychological impact of the initial invasion allowed local Guatemalans to understand that they were not endangered

• Two out of the four groups were defeated and most soldiers were captured or killed

• The other two groups remained deep in Guatemala waiting

• Arbenz knew of their presence but feared US military intervention more

• 27 June 1954, a CIA Lockheed P-38M Lightning attacked Puerto San José and dropped napalm bombs on the British cargo ship, SS Springford, on charter to the US company W.R. Grace and Company Line, which was being loaded with Guatemalan cotton and coffee.

• CIA psychological warfare succeeded, and provoked an officers' revolt

• 21.15 hrs., on 27 June 1954, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán resigned the Presidency of Guatemala, for exile in Mexico.

PBHISTORY: TOK

Collect and analyze Árbenz

Government and Guatemalan Labour

Party documents that would be

evidence to support the CIA's

ideological and geopolitical belief

that, under Árbenz's presidency, the

Republic of Guatemala was a

Western-hemisphere Communist

puppet state in the hegemony of the

Soviet Union

Found no substantiation of the key

geopolitical premise (Soviet political

involvement) that justified the secret

US paramilitary invasion of

Guatemala, and the deposition of the

elected Árbenz Government

Some believed that the nationalism of

President Árbenz was a communist

threat to the business interests of

American multinational corporations,

and advocated and supported the

coup d’état against his government

The socialism practiced by the Árbenz Government was unrelated to the Cold War geopolitics of the US and the USSR

UNITED FRUIT COMPANY• The United Fruit Company was an American corporation that traded in tropical fruit (primarily bananas)

grown on Central and South American plantations and sold in the United States and Europe.

• In 1871, U.S. railroad entrepreneur Henry Meiggs signed a contract with the government of Costa Rica to build a railroad connecting the capital city of San José to the port of Limón in the Caribbean.

• When the Costa Rican government defaulted on its payments in 1882, Keith had to borrow £1.2 million from London banks and from private investors in order to continue the project. In exchange for this and for renegotiating Costa Rica's own debt, in 1884, the administration of President Próspero Fernández Oreamuno agreed to give Keith 800,000 acres of tax-free land along the railroad, plus a 99-year lease on the operation of the train route.

• UFCO claimed that hurricanes, blight and other natural threats required them to hold extra land or reserve land.

UFCO• UFCO relied heavily on manipulation of land use rights in order to maintain their market dominance

• For the company to maintain its unequal land holdings it often required government concessions

• The Company built extensive railroads and ports and provided employment, transportation, and created numerous schools for the people who lived and worked on Company land

• The directors of United Fruit Company had lobbied to convince the Truman and Eisenhower administrations that Colonel Arbenz intended to align Guatemala with the Soviet Bloc.

• UFCO was being threatened by the Arbenz government’s agrarian reform legislation and new Labor Code

• UFCO was the largest Guatemalan landowner and employer, and the Arbenz government’s land reform included the expropriation of 40% of UFCO land

• The relationship between the Eisenhower administration and UFCO demonstrated the influence of corporate interest on U.S. foreign policy

UFCO• Many individuals who directly influenced U.S. policy towards Guatemala in the 1950s also had direct

ties to UFCO.

• United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ law firm Sullivan and Cromwell had represented United Fruit and his brother Allen Dulles was the director of the CIA, and a board member of United Fruit.

• The brother of the Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican Affairs John Moors Cabot had once been president of United Fruit

• Ed Whitman, who was United Fruit’s principal lobbyist, was married to President Eisenhower's personal secretary

• The overthrow of Arbenz, however, failed to benefit the Company as they had hoped

• The Eisenhower administration proceeded with antitrust action against the company, which forced it to divest in 1958. In 1972, the company sold off the last of their Guatemalan holdings after over a decade of decline.

PRIMARY SOURCE

• http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/docs/doc05.pdf

O- Document by Nicholas Cullather, 1994.

P- The purpose was to analyze the documents of the CIA involvement with the Guatemalan Coup in 1954

V- The value is that he found some discrepancies within the files, such as lies and misconduct

L- The limitation is that they are told from an American point of view which limits the access of knowledge from only one side and not the whole story

WORKS CITED

• http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/docs/doc05.pdf

• Schlesinger, Stephen C., and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982. Print.