Guatemala was a practical colony of the United Fruit Company which controlled huge banana plantations in the south of the country (hence the term "banana republic") until the election of the vaguely leftist Arbenz government in 1950. Arbenz wanted to put an end to United's hold on the country but he could hardly be called a Communist. Recently declassified documents shed interesting light on the 1954 military coup, which the CIA had always trumpeted as a great success. It also reveals knowledge of and the possible abetting of assassinations of leftists and opponents of the new military regime which put the country under the thumb of various factions within itself and the elite for the latter half of the last century.
What was amazing about the CIA's operation in Guatemala was that it succeeded at all. It was only the fear on the part of Arbenz and the military that had formerly supported him that the US Marines were on their way that allowed the coup to happen at all. Nicholas Cullather was contracted in the mid-1990's by the CIA to write an official history of "OPERATION PBSUCCESS" which was said to have toppled Arbenz's democratically elected government. Cullather revealed a plan that went awry from the very beginning. It was however, reported to President Eisenhower as an "unblemished" success, revealing for the first time that the President was lied to by his debriefers, who claimed that only one of "theirs" had died during the coup when the number was actually at least forty. Perhaps the most tragic result of this coup was that it did provide the impetus for a guerrilla insurgency and gave the Guatemalan military (well-trained and supplied by their American sponsors) the excuse they needed to jail, exile and murder their political opponents for the next forty years. The result was more than 100,000 dead or disappeared and a peasant population, already near starvation in some areas, living in constant fear of attack. All this was virtually ignored by the American media.
