THE GUATEMALAN COUP, 1954 term paper

For over a century, Guatemalan dictators, supported by the army, the Roman Catholic Church, American businesses, and a small landowning oligarchy, ruled the country. In 1944 Juan José Arévalo,a non-Marxist socialist, was elected president and promised a policy of land reform and progressive social legislation as enacted in a new constitution in 1945. Although Arévalo had widespread support among the peasantry, he immediately won the enmity of the landowners and American companies, especially the powerful United Fruit Company (UFC).

In 1951 Jacobo Arbenz Guzman succeeded Arévalo as president. Arbenz had close ties with the Guatemalan military and was expected to scrap his predecessor’s social policy, but he did not. He continued to implement social legislation, worked closely with labor unions, and in 1953 announced a new agrarian reform law. The new law provided for the expropriation of 234,000 acres of uncultivated land from UFC. Arbenz offered to pay UFC $1 million for the land, but the company insisted upon $16 million. Arbenz refused. He pointed out that UFC owned 42 percent of all Guatemala, controlled all of the country’s railroads, and owned the largest electrical generating stations.

UFC cried foul. In a well-orchestrated public relations campaign, UFC insisted that communists had infiltrated Arbenz’s government, that he was “soft” on communism, and that only American intervention could prevent Guatemala from falling to communism. Caught in the grip of the Cold War, the Eisenhower administration was quite sympathetic to UFC’s argument. President Eisenhower’s personal secretary was married to the UFC’s chief public relations officer. Before becoming Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles worked for the New York law firm that represented UFC. Allen Dulles, brother of the secretary of state and director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had been a member of UFC’s board of trustees.

Allen Dulles was quite confident his CIA could remove Arbenz from power. He chose Colonel Carlos Castilo Armas, an American-educated officer, to lead a coup and spent about $7 million to train a ragtag army of 200 soldiers. Following orders from his American advisors, on 18 June 1954 Armas launched his coup from a UFC plantation in Honduras. The Guatemalan military refused to support Arbenz, and on 27 June he resigned. Armas, escorted by U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy, entered the capital and took control. Armas returned all lands to UFC and set about executing hundreds of peasants and labor leaders. Although the Eisenhower administration claimed the 1954 coup prevented a communist Guatemala, there is no evidence for this. As a result of the 1954 coup Guatemala has endured more than four decades of brutal military rule during which more than 100,000 Guatemalans have been killed.
Suggestions for Term Papers
1. How was it possible for a business like the United Fruit Company (UFC) to wield as much power as it did in Guatemala? Investigate the growth of the UFC and write a paper analyzing its influence on twentieth-century Guatemala.
2. In the two decades prior to the 1954 coup the United States prided itself on being a “good neighbor” in its relations with Central America. What was the Good Neighbor Policy and why was it eventually discarded?
3. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was convinced that communism was such a threat to Guatemala that President Arbenz should be replaced. Evaluate the extent of a threat of communism in Guatemala in the early 1950s.
4. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, was very confident his agency could execute the coup quickly and professionally. Assess the role of the CIA in Guatemala and write a paper commenting on its planning and execution of the 1954 coup.
5. Do a research project on the role played by Edward L. Bernays, the public relations expert hired by the UFC to improve its “image” and to raise fears about communism in Guatemala. To what extent was he successful, and why (see Suggested Sources)?
6. Evaluate the role played by John Peurifoy, United States ambassador to Guatemala, in the coup. Research Suggestions

In addition to the boldfaced items, look under the entries for “Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, 1959” (#57), “The Overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, 1973” (#76), and “The Sandinistas and the Contras in Nicaragua, 1981–1989” (#88). Search under Cold War, human rights, and liberation theology.

SUGGESTED SOURCES

Primary Sources

Hunt, E. Howard. Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent. New York: Putnam, 1974. Although Hunt gained more notoriety for his Watergate caper, this is a revealing look at his CIA role in Guatemala.

Secondary Sources

Cullather, Nick. Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Makes use of the declassified secret internal history of the CIA’s activities in Guatemala in the 1950s.

Immerman, Richard. The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Based on a large number of interviews with CIA operatives, this is the best study of the CIA’s role.

———, ed. John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Good introduction and a penetrating chapter on Latin American communism.

Lafeber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. A reliable study by a premier diplomatic historian.

Rabe, Stephen. “The Clues Didn’t Check Out: Commentary on the CIA and Castillo Armas.” Diplomatic History 14 (1990): 87–95. An update of the historiography of the CIA’s role in the coup.

Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. New York: Doubleday, 1982. The single best study, it remains the most incisive analysis of the coup.

Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. New York: Crown, 1998. Revealing portrait of how the image of the communist threat was used by the CIA.