Guatemala - 1954
The successful CIA-orchestrated operation in 1954 to overthrow the Guatemalan ruler Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, PBSUCCESS, resulted in long-term problems for the United States. The overthrow of the Arbenz regime led to Civil War in Guatemala, a war that lasted 36 years and created more than 100,000 casualties and 1,000,000 refugees. Despite countless mistakes made during the operation, the CIA believed the operation should be a model for future operations, a belief that led to disastrous results in Cuba seven years later. Operation PBSUCCESS resulted from the CIA’s erroneous belief that the Soviets were using the democratically elected government of Guatemala as a communist beachhead into the Americas. America’s role in overthrowing the Arbenz regime resulted in political condemnation worldwide, damaged the United States’s reputation in Latin America, angered American allies, and drew criticism from the United Nations.
BACKGROUND
The Cold War escalated in the late 1940s and early 1950s. President Truman, in a speech to a joint session of Congress on 12 March 1947, announced what became known as the Truman Doctrine, “…that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”1 In August 1949, the USSR became a nuclear superpower and, after the USSR backed-invasion of South Korea by the North Korean army in 1950, the United States feared that conventional or nuclear warfare with the Soviet Union was unavoidable.2
In 1944, as World War II drew to a close, Guatemalans overthrew the dictatorial regime leading the country in favor of democracy. Jacobo Arbenz was one of the military heroes in the Guatemalan Revolution. In 1949, he played a key role in putting down a military rebellion led by Major Francisco Arana and in 1950 he detained Arana’s protégé, Castillo Armas, for his failed role in another attempted coup. Armas bribed his way out of prison and fled to Honduras. In 1950, Jacobo Arbenz won the Guatemalan Election and took power March 1951.
According to CIA historians, Operation PBSUCCESS was the CIA’s most successful and ambitious project ever. It used an intensive paramilitary and psychological campaign to overthrow the popular, elected government of Arbenz and replaced it with Castillo Armas.3
LONG-TERM RESULTS ON GUATEMALA
The overthrow of the Arbenz regime led to Civil War in Guatemala, a war that lasted 36 years and created more than 100,000 casualties and 1,000,000 refugees. A peace treaty was finally ratified by the government in 1996, establishing a Constitutional Democratic Republic.4
During this civil war, Guatemala suffered through countless dictators. The CIA-installed leader, Castillo Armas, was assassinated in 1957, three years after gaining control of Guatemala. During his tenure as the leader of Guatemala, he reversed many of the progressive reforms that Arbenz had implemented to help the Guatemalan people. Following Armas’s assassination, there was a period of political unrest before the legislature appointed General Miguel YdÃgoras Fuentes president in 1958.
In 1960, Fuentes faced a rebellion sponsored by Fidel Castro. Although the rebellion was unsuccessful, the rebels escaped into the mountains and formed the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR). Fuentes was overthrown in March 1963 and was replaced by General Enrique Peralta Azurdia, who held power until 1966. During Azurdia’s reign, right-wing terror groups were formed to wage war against the FAR guerillas.
The military allowed a civilian-led government to rule Guatemala from 1966 to 1970, on the condition that the military had free reign in the tactics used against FAR. Various military leaders controlled Guatemala from 1970 to 1982 as rebel forces, including the FAR and PGT (communist party) joined together to form the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). In 1982, a military coup installed General EfraÃn RÃos Montt as the Guatemalan leader. Montt initially offered the URNG amnesty, but when they refused his offer, he launched the most intensive military campaign against them to date. This intensified the Civil War, requiring the forced service of indigenous labor and the destruction of more than 400 indigenous villages.
Montt was ousted by the military in 1983. In 1985, the military allowed civilian leadership of Guatemala for the first time in 15 years. This was not enough to end the civil war, however, and the human rights abuses continued by the military. In 1990, the US cut off most military aid to Guatemala for civil rights issues.
Jorge Serrano ElÃas became president in 1991. With the support of the army, Serrano seized dictatorial control of the government in May 1993, but protests forced him to resign. In 1996, the Guatemala government and the rebel forces signed a peace treaty putting an end to the civil war and returning Guatemala back to a stable democracy.5
THE CIA’S MISTAKES
Despite countless mistakes made during the operation, the CIA believed the operation should be a model for future operations, a belief that led to disastrous results in Cuba seven years later. Richard Bissell, the CIA Deputy Director of Plans (DDP) was the driving force behind both the Cuba operation as well as the Guatemala operation. According to Marlise Simons, “The language, arguments, and techniques of the Arbenz episode were used in Cuba in the early 1960s, in Brazil in 1964, in the Dominican Republic in 1965, and in Chile in 1973.”6 It was not until much later that the CIA recognized the fatal flaws the Guatemalan operation faced. The CIA’s classified report, published in 1992, was the first in-depth look at all of the factors that contributed to the success and near failure of operation PBSUCCESS.
The operation in Cuba relied heavily on civilian uprisings to overthrow the Castro government. Bissell expected the mass amphibious landing of Brigade 25067 to inspire a string of uprisings and defections that would lend paramilitary support to the exile brigade and force the overthrow of the Cuban leader. Bissell believed this was one of the successful components of PBSUCCESS and that it would work again in Cuba.8 CIA reports indicate that although recruits did join the rebel forces in Guatemala, it was only in areas where they met no military resistance. When the rebels engaged in combat, there is no evidence of recruits joining the rebel forces. In contrast, the exile forces in Guatemala had high desertion rates in combat.9 Bissell’s apparent disregard for this knowledge played a large role in the military defeat of Brigade 2506.
The CIA’s inability to keep secret its involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion proved counterproductive to the operation. It gave Castro credibility for withstanding an American attempt to overthrow his government. Castro’s spies knew about the training of anti-Castro exiles in Guatemala as early as November 1960. On 9 April, eight days before the Cuban invasion, the New York Times ran a front-page story proclaiming “Anti-Castro Units Trained to fight at Florida Bases.”10 Bissell’s overconfidence of his operational security may be attributed to similar instances in Guatemala. During PBSUCCESS, a double-agent gave near-complete details of the operation to Jacobo Arbenz. However, when Arbenz published detailed papers of PBSUCCESS in Guatemalan newspapers, it was treated by the Guatemalan people as a ploy to improve Arbenz’s reputation.11
ERRONEOUS ASSESMENT OF COMMUNISM IN GUATEMALA
Operation PBSUCCESS resulted from the CIA’s belief that the Soviets where using the democratically elected government of Guatemala as a communist beachhead into the Americas. Recently declassified reports have proven this untrue.
The Guatemalan Communist party, Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT), had less than 4,000 members and less than 200 active members in a country of nearly 3,000,000. PGT members held only four of the 61 seats in the Guatemalan congress. They held no more than six or seven sub-cabinet positions, heading the state’s media and social security administration. They held no major military positions. Although the PGT held no positions in Arbenz’s cabinet, Arbenz was close personal friends with a number of the PGT’s founding members.12
The CIA believed that the PGT was working in conjunction with the USSR to create a communist foothold in the Americas. They believed that the land reforms Arbenz enacted were influenced by the PGT as a way to gain influence.13 In fact, the land reforms Arbenz implemented were similar in nature to the reforms the United States was sponsoring in Japan and Formosa after World War II. Investigations of the documents found in the PGT’s headquarters after Armas gained power showed no evidence that the PGT had any Soviet influence but that they were working alone.14
Arbenz’s regime offered Guatemala everything the US hoped future rulers would be able to offer. According to Nick Cullather, the CIA historian who wrote the CIA’s report on PBSUCCESS in 1992, “The overthrown Arbenz government was not, many contend, a Communist regime but a reformist government that offered perhaps the last chance for progressive, democratic change in the region.”15 Piero Gleijeses, professor of American Foreign Policy and Latin American Studies at The School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and author of Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, describes the benefits the Arbenz regime offered to Guatemala:
The Guatemalan revolution - Jacobo Arbenz above all, with his Communist friends - challenged this culture of fear. In eighteen months, from January 1953 to June 1954, 500,000 people (one-sixth of Guatemala’s population) received the land they desperately needed. For the first time in the history of Guatemala, the Indians were offered land rather than being robbed of it. The culture of fear loosened its grip over the great masses of the Guatemala people. In a not unreachable future, it might have faded away, a distant nightmare.16
IMPLICATIONS
America’s role in overthrowing the Arbenz regime resulted in political condemnation worldwide, damaging the United State’s reputation in Latin America, angering American allies and drawing criticism from the United Nations. The CIA’s failed attempt at keeping the Guatemalan operation covert led to enduring American resentment throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. It directly damaged the stability of not only Guatemala but all of Latin America. According to historian James Dunkerly, “The Guatemala intervention shaped the attitudes and stratagems of an older generation of radicals, for whom this experience signaled the necessity of armed struggle and an end to illusions about peaceful, legal, and reformist methods.”17
Internationally, the US was condemned by enemies and allies alike. Newspapers in Britain and Germany published scathing attacks on America’s “modern forms of economic colonialism.” The UN Secretary General charged that the United States actions went against the UN charter.18
The CIA’s attempt to repeat PBSUCCESS in Cuba helped move the Castro regime from borderline communism to a full alliance with the Soviet Union. The air bombings preceding the invasion of Brigade 2506 led Castro to declare Cuba as a communist state on 16 April 1961. Fearing a second attempt to overthrow his government, Castro signed a military alliance with the Soviet Union in 1962. Castro’s acceptance of Soviet SA-2 missiles on Cuba led to the Cuban Missile Crisis and put the world on the edge of a nuclear war.
NOTES
1Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), p. 168
2Ibid. p. 191
3Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala 1952-1954 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p.7
4The CIA World Factbook (Washington DC: CIA, 2001), p. ‘Guatemala’
5Encarta Encyclopedia, ‘Guatemala’
6Marlise Simons, “Guatemala: The Coming Danger.” Foreign Policy 42 (summer 1981), p. 94
7Each brigade member was given a number when they joined. Brigade 2506 derived its name from the number for Carlos RodrÃguez Santana, the brigade’s first casualty, who was killed in training in Guatemala.
8Peter Kornbluh (ed.), Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on The Invasion of Cuba (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 6-7.
9Cullather, Secret History, pp 95-96
10Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, p. 2
11Cullather, Secret History, p. 56
12Ibid. pp 21-22, 24-25
13Ibid. p. 25-27
14Ibid. p. 107
15Ibid. p. 8
16Ibid. p. XX
17James Dunkerly, Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America (London: Verso, 1988) p. 429
18Cullather, Secret History, p. 111
Originially posted in 2002, this is my only original contribution to history. Originally written for a history of US Intelligence class, I’m finally reposting it here on the new site. So far, this article has received feedback from the CIA, the UN and French diplomats.
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