Arbenz Communism and U.S. Intervention in Guatemala

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Arbenz, Communism & U.S. Intervention in Guatemala 1954

The Textbook Narrative : 

The Textbook Narrative

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Former army captain Arbenz played an important role in the “October Revolution” of 1944 forcing the resignation of dictator Jorge Ubico He stepped aside to endorse Juan José Arévalo as elected president in 1945; both progressive social and agrarian reform followed In 1951 Arbenz was elected in a fair and honest election winning 65% of the popular vote on a platform of expanding Arévalo’s programs Controversially, Arbenz associated himself with the communist Guatemalan Party of Labor (PGT) to assist in establishing effective land reform Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán

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In 1945 it is estimated that 2% of the country’s population controlled 72% of all arable land but only a small fraction was being cultivated Indigenous workers were still held by debt labor for 150 days of the year and 95% of them were illiterate In 1950, the annual per capita income of agricultural workers was $87

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Arbenz pledged to convert the country from a dependent nation to an independent modern capitalist economy and raise the standard of living He said, Guatemala must exploit its own resources, increase the rate of employment, and develop a diversified economy that was technologically innovative and fiscally sound An all-encompassing legislative program included the transformation of practically the country’s entire economic infrastructure from factory construction, communication, transportation, banking modernization, and sweeping agrarian reform

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The Agrarian Reform Bill (1952) a.k.a Decree 900 was announced The law declared that uncultivated land on estates over 220 acres that had less than 2/3rds under cultivation was subject to expropriation and redistribution; bonds were issued to compensate the land owners Although Arbenz claimed that the Constitution of 1945 declared large estates to be illegal and authorized govt. intervention, the landowning elite immediately charged that the reform was communistic Decree 900

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As the State Department watched apprehensively, the Guatemalan govt. seized hundreds of thousands of acres of land claimed by the UFCO The largest single agricultural enterprise in the country, the UFCO unpopular among nationalists had tremendous economic power and political clout in Washington Arbenz pushed ahead with his program despite mounting pressure; the U.S. State Department upon investigation began to charge Guatemala with Communist infiltration and control United Fruit Company

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By late 1953, Arbenz argued that Honduras and El Salvador were encouraging exiles to attack Guatemala He repeatedly requested arms from the U.S. State Department which responded instead with an arms embargo President Arbenz turned to another source and in May 1954 a shipment of arms arrived from Czechoslovakia As far as Washington was concerned this was final proof that Guatemala had fallen under communist control

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In operation code-named PBSUCCESS, funded by the CIA , the U.S. Air Force equipped a small army under the command of exiled Colonel Armas On June 18, 1954, Castillo Armas and roughly 150 men the so-called “Liberation Army” crossed the border from Honduras into Guatemala penetrating 25 miles but engaging in no significant action The Arbenz government fell soon after but on account that the army refused to act and workers were not armed Carlos Castillo Armas

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Unmarked planes furnished by the CIA and flown by U.S. pilots blitzed Guatemala City while radio broadcasters jammed the airwave with rumors of government collapse The actions terrorized the population and broke the morale of the people U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy handled the changing of the government and with an enthusiastic endorsement, Washington installed Castillo Armas in the presidency Ambassador Peurifoy & President Armas

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The U.S. blatantly intervened in Guatemala violating U.N. and Organization of American States treaties & international law Secretary of State, John Dulles in a radio address in June 1954 informed the American people of the changes in the Guatemalan government “The events of recent months and days add a new and glorious chapter to the already great tradition of the American states.” We see coup Colonel Armas greeting Secretary of State Dulles, who is holding a bomb with the face of Eisenhower, surrounded by bananas and the dead; to his side US ambassador Peurifoy with some military officers and CIA director Dulles whispering in his brother’s ear; on the other side the archbishop Arellano of Guatemala can be seen blessing the act, while Guatemalan people protest. Diego Rivera’s “Glorious Victory”

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A year after the coup, Vice President Nixon wrote, “President Castillo Armas’ objective, ‘to do more for the people in two years than the Communists were able to do in ten years,’ is important. This is the first time in history where a communist government had been replaced by a free one. The whole world is watching to see which does the better job.”

The Enduring Controversy : 

The Enduring Controversy

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How important was PBSSUCCESS to Castillo Aramas’s victory? Did President Eisenhower know about the operation? If so, why did he order Arbenz’s removal? What role did the United Fruit Co. play in the intervention? Many Eisenhower administration officials, including Sec. of State Dulles and his brother Allen- head of CIA owned stock in UFCO; so, was the Liberation a conspiracy between public and private interests? Was Arbenz a communist and how influential was the communist threat in Guatemala? Did anticommunism serve merely as a pretext for overthrowing a national regime that threatened U.S. hegemony?

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The answers to the previous slide’s questions have both shaped and reflected the debate among realists, revisionists, and postrevisionists over the wellsprings and consequences of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War

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Concerned primarily with power politics, Realists have generally blamed the Cold War on an aggressive, expansionist Soviet empire They believe that Arbenz was a Soviet puppet and view his overthrow as the necessary rollback of communism in the Western Hemisphere Realists

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Placing a majority of the blame for the Cold War on the U.S. , Revisionists emphasize how Washington sought to expand overseas markets and promote foreign investment They allege that because the State Department came to the rescue of the UFCO, the U.S. intervention in Guatemala represents a prime example of economic imperialism

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A difficult group to define precisely, Postrevisionists incorporate both strategic and economic factors in their interpretation of the Cold War They tend to agree with Revisionists on the issue of Soviet responsibility, but they are much more concerned with explaining the cultural and ideological influences that warped Washington’s perception of the communist threat According to Postrevisionists, the Eisenhower administration officials turned against Arbenz because they failed to grasp that he represented a nationalist rather than a communist Dulles & Ike discuss Guatemala

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The Eisenhower administration as well as Castillo Armas and his followers asserted the Liberation represented a popular revolution against a Communist dictatorship The State Department also denied that its opposition to Arbenz could be traced to United Fruit’s financial woes Weeks before the invasion began, Secretary of State Dulles announced: “If the United Fruit matter were settled, if they gave a gold piece for every banana, the problem would remain as it is today as far as the presence of Communist infiltration in Guatemala is concerned” John Foster Dulles

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Arbenz and his supporters, by contrast, denigrated the Liberation as an international conspiracy masterminded by U.S. based multinational corporations In his resignation speech he explained, “Our crime is having enacted an agrarian reform which affected the interests of United Fruit Co. A 1955 study by the Guatemalan Communist Party identifiied the UFCO and various Rockefeller interests as the major culprits in the plot against Arbenz Guatemalan exiles portrayed Armas as a Wall Street lackey who received Washington’s backing after promising to return land to the UFCO Arbenz strip searched on his way to exile after 1954 coup

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To cover up PBSUCCESS, the State Department derailed an OAS investigation and issued several white papers on Guatemala that branded Arbenz a Communist U.S. journalists and reporters sensationalized Armas as the heroic “Liberator,” who saved the Guatemalan people from the tyranny of a communist dictator This disinformation campaign succeeded admirably in the U.S. but it flopped badly in Latin America

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In the 1950s, anticommunist scholars such as Daniel James, Ronald Schneider, and John Martz asserted that the Eisenhower administration was accurate in gauging the Communist threat in Guatemala According to these Realists, the U.S. and the rest of the hemisphere turned against Arbenz after U.S. intelligence revealed a secret shipment of arms from Czechoslovakia Armas’s supporters also glorified the Liberation as a heroic defeat of communism, but they made little or no mention of outside assistance

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Revisionists, by contrast, defended Arbenz as a nationalist and blamed his downfall on Yankee imperialism The financial ties between U.S. govt. officials and UFCO, the massacre of 1,000+ banana workers immediately following the Liberation, and Armas’s decision to return land confiscated under Decree 900 points toward a conspiracy in their opinion Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, who served as president from 1958-1963, published memoirs that in 1954 several CIA agents tried to recruit him to lead the Liberation on behalf of U.S. corporations invested in Guatemala

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The North American Congress on Latin America, a leftist think tank and proponent of the dependency school proposed that an “intervention lobby” had prodded the Eisenhower administration into deposing Arbenz The lobby, according to political scientist Suzanne Jonas, formed “part of a broad network of power on Wall Street and in Washington that included or had ties with nearly all interest groups involved in foreign policy formation…” At the center of this “intervention nexus” stood the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, a highly influential lobbyist for United Fruit…Dulles had been a senior partner in the 1930s and helped broker the deal that enabled UFCO to control Guatemala’s only railway

Conflicting Points of View : 

Conflicting Points of View

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The popularity of the Revisionist interpretation peaked in the early 1980s with the appearance of the book Bitter Fruit that described in detail how UFCO officials had conspired with the Eisenhower administration to topple Arbenz Authors Schlesinger and Kinzer assert that numerous ties between the company and govt. officials gave the UFCO major influence in Washington It received great acclaim in the mainstream press but critics allege that the study relied on selective and circumstantial evidence of which some is highly disputable

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Richard H. Immerman’s challenge to the conspiracy thesis was the first archival-based account of PBSUCCESS It defended the revisionist view the Arbenz regime did not pose a Soviet threat to the United States. The State Dept. he suggests failed to grasp that Arbenz was a “middle-class reformer” who had enacted land reform to actually prevent the spread of communism The study also revealed that while the CIA’s logistical assistance proved crucial to Armas’s victory, the Eisenhower administration’s decision to remove Arbanz was not because of lobbying pressure from United Fruit but because U.S. officials had confused communism with nationalism

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Postrevisionists employing archival research & critical theory attempted to correct and refine revisionist interpretation which in their view suffered from excessive counterfactual reasoning and economic determinism Cole Blasier, a former State Dept. official emphasized how exaggerated fears of communism distorted U.S. policymaker’s judgments during the Cold War According to one study, the tendency to divide the world into “good” and “evil,” or “prophetic dualism” enabled the Eisenhower administration to stifle debate over Guatemala

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This 1991 path-breaking account overcame postrevisionists exclusive focus on the U.S. documentary record by uncovering new sources such as interviews with Arbenz’s widow and high-ranking members of the Guatemalan Communist Party It was revealed that although Arbenz never joined the party he was influenced by their ideas which led to enacting land reform. Gleijeses also emphasizes that even though party members desperately sought Soviet advice and aid, Moscow wasn’t interested It verified the claim of postrevisionist studies that Eisenhower officials had viewed the UFCO’s plight as a “subsidiary” problem, secondary to the communism issue. Moreover, U.S. officials were more worried about the impact of land reform in terms of its influence on the peasantry who could be mobilized by the Communists and radicalized leading to possible spread and destabilization of Honduras & El Salvador

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In 1997, under CIA”s so-called new openness policy, it declassified new documentation that has helped to demystified the overthrow of Arbenz Historian Nicholas Cullather was hired to write the official account of PBSUCCESS which has since been published by Stanford University Press. Like the postrevisionists, it determines that it was the CIA rather than UFCO that persuaded the State Dept. to pay attention to Guatemala The CIA’s chief historian Gerald Haines also wrote a separate report that reveals that the CIA in its first covert plan PBFORTUNE had contemplated assassinating high-ranking officials in the Arbenz administration ; but, eventually ruled it “counterproductive”

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The CIA study also offers new evidence for why the agency chose Armas over other candidates General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes was considered to be too “ambitious, opportunistic, and unscrupulous” Juan Córdova Cerna was scratched because he served as legal counsel to United Fruit, which might have given credence to charges of banana imperialism Armas they felt appeared more innocent, likeable, and pliable and aside from anticommunism he had no clear political philosophy, and therefore could be told what to do Carlos Castillo Armas

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Some analysts have judged the CIA’s air support for Armas as the crucial component of PBSUCCESS; Richard Bissell considered air support as the most “decisive” factor in Arbenz’s downfall Cullather discounts the “agency legend” that the reason Arbenz resigned was because he lost his nerve in the face of the air attacks and radio propaganda Many analysts attribute the downfall of Arbenz to his army’s lack of loyalty. Most officers chose to abandon Arbenz because they were weary about the ethnic conflict land reform triggered and feared thwarting PBSUCCESS would only invite much larger U.S. military intervention

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There is still evidence to be analyzed and gaps in the historical record about U.S. intervention in Guatemala Certain portions of U.S. documentary record remains classified or sanitized and United Fruit Co. has yet to open its archives…but, if UFCO was so important, then why is there so little evidence of its influence in the U.S. declassified record? Any lingering controversy surrounds the reasons for the Eisenhower administration’s decision to topple Arbenz

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Some scholars address the issue of American responsibility for the violence that engulfed Guatemala after Arbenz’s departure Robert Pastor claims the policymakers who engineered PBSUCCESS were honest, sincere, and well-intentioned men even if they were wrong about Arbenz as a Communist Piero Gleijeses claims the Eisenhower administration pursued its hegemonic objectives in Guatemala with no regard for the fate of the people and is guilty of “wanton criminal negligence”

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The longstanding controversy over the U.S. intervention in Guatemala is not likely to be resolved by the discovery of new documents The evidence available today is far superior to that available 40 years ago leading to potential new theoretical approaches Stephen Streeter recommends that historians concentrate more on interpreting the evidence widely available than trying to uncover more of it

To Be Continued… : 

To Be Continued…