The most heavily attended funeral in Guatemalan history was for a man who had been dead twenty-four years. More than 100,000 people filled the streets of Guatemala City and jammed the cemetery. Many threw red carnations at the cortege and chanted, “Jacobo! Jacobo!” Some, especially those old enough to remember the statesman they were burying, were overcome with emotion.
“All I know is that there was no persecution during his government,” said a seventy-seven-year-old man in the crowd who struggled to hold back his tears. “Afterwards, people began dying.”
Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was the second of two presidents who governed Guatemala during the country’s “democratic spring,” which lasted from 1944 to 1954. For decades after the CIA overthrew him and chased him from his homeland, it was dangerous to speak well of Arbenz or lament his fate. He died alone and forgotten. Only when his remains were finally brought home to Guatemala and buried, on October 20, 1995, did his people have a chance to honor him. They did so with a fervor born of unspeakable suffering.
Arbenz took office in 1951, the same year another nationalist, Mohammad Mossadegh, became prime minister of Iran. Each assumed leadership of a wretchedly poor nation that was just beginning to enjoy the blessings of democracy. Each challenged the power of a giant foreign-owned company. The company howled in protest, and charged that the government was Communistic. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles agreed.
Few private companies have ever been as closely interwoven with the United States government as United Fruit was during the mid-1950s. Dulles had, for decades, been one of its principal legal counselors. His brother, Allen, the CIA director, had also done legal work for the company and owned a substantial block of its stock. John Moors Cabot, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, was a large shareholder. So was his brother, Thomas Dudley Cabot, the director of international security affairs in the State Department, who had been United Fruit’s president. General Robert Cutler, head of the National Security Council, was its former chairman of the board. John J. McCloy, the president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, was a former board member. Both undersecretary of state Walter Bedell Smith and Robert Hill, the American ambassador to Costa Rica, would join the board after leaving government service.
During the first half of the twentieth century, United Fruit made great profits in Guatemala because it was able to operate without interference from the Guatemalan government. It simply claimed good farmland, arranged for legal title through one-sided deals with dictators, and then operated plantations on its own terms, free of such annoyances as taxes or labor regulations. As long as that system prevailed, men like John Foster Dulles considered Guatemala a “friendly” and “stable” country. When a new kind of government emerged there and began to challenge the company, they disapproved.
For thirteen years during the 1930s and 1940s, United Fruit thrived in Guatemala under the patronage of Jorge Ubico, a classically outsized Latin American caudillo. According to one historian, Ubico “called anyone a Communist whose social, economic and political ideologies were more progressive than his own” and “trusted only the army, wealthy indigenous landowners and foreign corporations.” The most important of those corporations was United Fruit, which provided tens of thousands of full- and part-time jobs in Guatemala. Ubico showered United Fruit with concession agreements, including one in 1936 that his agents negotiated personally with Dulles. It gave the company a ninety-nine-year lease on a vast tract of land along the rich Pacific plain at Tiquisate, and guaranteed it an exemption from all taxes for the duration of the lease.
Guatemalans became restive as Ubico’s harsh rule wore on. An emerging middle class, inspired by the democratic rhetoric of World War II and the examples of reformist presidents Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States, began agitating for change. During the summer and fall of 1944, thousands of demonstrators, led by schoolteachers, launched a wave of street protests. As they reached a peak, young officers staged a lightning uprising and toppled the old regime. Guatemala’s own “October Revolution” was won at the cost of fewer than one hundred lives.
A few months later, Guatemalans went to the polls in their country’s first democratic election. By an overwhelming margin, they chose a visionary young schoolteacher, Juan José Arévalo, as their president. In his inaugural address, delivered to an expectant nation on March 15, 1945, Arévalo cited Roosevelt as his inspiration, and vowed to follow his example.
There has in the past been a fundamental lack of sympathy for the working man, and the faintest cry for justice was avoided and punished as if one were trying to eradicate the beginnings of a frightful epidemic. Now we are going to begin a period of sympathy for the man who works in the fields, in the shops, on the military bases, in small businesses. . . . We are going to add justice and humanity to order, because order based on injustice and humiliation is good for nothing.
President Arévalo laid a solid foundation for Guatemala’s new democracy, and did much to bring his country into the modern age. During his six-year term, the National Assembly established the country’s first social security system, guaranteed the rights of trade unions, fixed a forty-eight-hour workweek, and even levied a modest tax on large landholders. Each of these measures represented a challenge to United Fruit. The company had been setting its own rules in Guatemala for more than half a century, and did not look favorably on the surge of nationalism that Arévalo embodied. It resisted him every way it could.
Arévalo’s term ended on March 15, 1951. As thousands watched, he handed the presidential sash over to his elected successor, Jacobo Arbenz. It was the first peaceful transfer of power in Guatemalan history. Arévalo, though, was not in a celebratory mood. In his farewell speech, he lamented that he had not been able to do more for his people:
The banana magnates, co-nationals of Roosevelt, rebelled against the audacity of a Central American president who gave to his fellow citizens a legal equality with the honorable families of exporters. . . . It was then that the schoolteacher, ingenuous and romantic, from the presidency of his country, discovered how perishable, frail and slippery the brilliant international doctrines of democracy and freedom were. It was then, with the deepest despondency and pain, that I felt, with consequent indignation, the pressure of that anonymous force that rules, without laws or morals, international relations and the relationships of men.
The incoming president was destined to feel that pressure even more intensely. Arbenz was a thirty-seven-year-old colonel who had helped lead the 1944 uprising against Ubico, but he was by no means a typical Guatemalan army officer. His father was a pharmacist who had emigrated from Switzerland and had committed suicide while Jacobo was still a boy. That ended his hope of becoming a scientist or an engineer, but a friend in the tight-knit Swiss community arranged for him to be given a place at the Military Academy. There he compiled a brilliant academic record and excelled at boxing and polo. He was also strikingly good-looking, blue-eyed and fair-haired but with a Latin profile. At a Central American athletic competition, he met a young Salvadoran woman, María Cristina Vilanova, who, despite her upper-class background, was a passionate leftist. After their marriage, she encouraged him to develop a social conscience and political ambition. He showed both in his inaugural address, setting out “three fundamental objectives” for his presidency:
to convert our country from a dependent nation with a semi-colonial economy into an economically independent country; to convert Guatemala from a country bound by a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state; and to make this transformation in a way that will raise the standard of living of the great mass of our people to the highest level.
This was a sweeping agenda, and as soon as President Arbenz began to press it, he found himself at odds with all three of the American companies that dominated Guatemala’s economy. First he announced plans to build a publicly owned electric system, which would break a highly lucrative monopoly held by Electric Bond & Share. Then he turned his attention to International Railways of Central America, which owned nearly all the country’s rail lines, including the sole link between the capital and the Atlantic port of Puerto Barrios—most of which it also owned. Arbenz proposed to build a new deepwater port, open to all, with a highway connection to the capital. Then, confronting the cruelly unbalanced system of land ownership that was and is at the root of poverty in Guatemala, he won passage of a landmark law that threatened United Fruit itself.
The Agrarian Reform Law, which the National Assembly passed on June 17, 1952, was the crowning achievement of Guatemala’s democratic revolution. Under its provisions, the government could seize and redistribute all uncultivated land on estates larger than 672 acres, compensating owners according to the land’s declared tax value. This was a direct challenge to United Fruit, which owned more than 550,000 acres, about one-fifth of the country’s arable land, but cultivated less than 15 percent of it. The company said it needed these vast, fertile tracts for future contingencies. To citizens of a country where hundreds of thousands went hungry for want of land, this seemed grossly unjust.
The three interlocking companies most affected by Arbenz’s reforms had controlled Guatemala for decades. United Fruit was by far the country’s largest landowner and largest private employer. It held 46 percent of the stock in International Railways of Central America, thereby securing freight service and access to Puerto Barrios at highly favorable rates. Electric Bond & Share supplied power for the railways and banana plantations. Together, the three companies had more than $100 million invested in Guatemala. Arbenz subjected them to a host of new regulations, and many of their executives and stockholders came to detest him. So did the New York lawyer who represented all three of them, John Foster Dulles.
Early in 1953, the Guatemalan government seized 234,000 uncultivated acres of United Fruit’s 295,000-acre plantation at Tiquisate. It offered compensation of $1,185 million, the value the company had declared for tax purposes. United Fruit executives rejected the offer, asserting that no one took self-assessed valuations seriously. They demanded $19 million.
Most Guatemalans considered land redistribution a welcome step in a nation where democracy was beginning to bloom. It looked quite different from Washington. Many old friends of United Fruit had assumed influential positions in the Eisenhower administration just as the Guatemalan government was seizing the company’s land. They considered these seizures not only illegal and outrageous but proof of Communist influence. Since Guatemala is the traditional leader in Central America, they also worried that any reforms allowed to succeed there would quickly spread to other countries. In their minds, defending United Fruit and defeating Central American Communism fused into a single goal. They could achieve it only by overthrowing Arbenz.
United Fruit rose to its mythical status in Guatemala under the leadership of Sam Zemurray, the visionary “Banana Man” who had organized the overthrow of President Miguel Dávila of Honduras in 1911 and gone on to become one of the most powerful figures in Central America. Soon after Guatemala turned democratic, in 1944, Zemurray sensed that its reformist government would give the company trouble. The stakes were high, and he wanted to be sure that American public opinion was with him. He decided to hire an outside public relations expert. The new man was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and the dominant figure in his young profession.
Bernays was one of the first masters of modern mass psychology. He liked to describe himself as the “father of public relations,” and no one disagreed. His specialty was what he called “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses.” He proposed to Zemurray that United Fruit launch a campaign to blacken the image of Guatemala’s government. That, he argued, could decisively weaken it and perhaps set off events that would trigger its collapse.
“I have the feeling that Guatemala might respond to pitiless publicity in this country,” Bernays surmised.
Never before had an American corporation waged a propaganda campaign in the United States aimed at undermining the president of a foreign country. Zemurray was reluctant to make United Fruit the first. Then, in the spring of 1951, Bernays sent him a message with alarming news. The reformist leader of faraway Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, had just done the unthinkable by nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. “Guatemala might follow suit,” Bernays wrote in his note.
That was all Zemurray needed to hear. He authorized Bernays to launch his campaign, and the results soon began to show. First were a series of articles in the New York Times, portraying Guatemala as falling victim to “reds”; they appeared after Bernays visited Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Next came reports in leading magazines, most of them written, like the Times series, with helpful advice from Bernays. Then Bernays began organizing press junkets to Guatemala. They produced glowing dispatches about United Fruit and terrifying ones about the emergence of Marxist dictatorship in Guatemala.
Prominent members of Congress echoed these themes. Most outspoken among them was a Massachusetts senator with a familiar name, Henry Cabot Lodge, scion of two families that United Fruit had helped make rich. In the same chamber where his grandfather and namesake had helped secure American control of Cuba and the Philippines more than half a century before, Lodge delivered vituperative speeches depicting Guatemalan leaders as crypto-Communists. Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, the majority leader and future speaker, John McCormack—also from Massachusetts, where United Fruit had sustained generations of prosperity—rose regularly to deliver chilling warnings that Guatemala’s democratic leaders had become “subservient to the Kremlin’s design for world conquest” and were turning their country into “a Soviet beachhead.”
This rhetoric reached a new peak after the Agrarian Reform Law was passed. Powerful officials in Washington, products of the international business world and utterly ignorant of the realities of Guatemalan life, considered the idea of land redistribution to be inherently Marxist. “Products of the Cold War ethos,” the historian Richard Immerman has written, “they believed it axiomatic that no government would take such a radical measure against a United States business if it were not dominated by communists.”
Guatemala’s communist party was actually a modest affair. Even at its peak it had only a few hundred active members, no mass base, and no support in the foreign ministry or army. Communists never held more than four seats in the sixty-one-member National Assembly. None sat in Arbenz’s cabinet, although two gifted young Communist firebrands, one the leader of a labor federation and the other a charismatic peasant organizer, were among his closest advisers.
Arbenz was a leftist and intrigued by Marxist ideas. Often he irritated the United States with symbolic gestures, like allowing an official newspaper to charge that American forces were using germ warfare in Korea, or permitting the National Assembly to observe a minute of silence when Stalin died in 1953. He may have considered these incidents trivial. Officials in Washington, however, seized on them as proof that he had become an enemy.
If the first American error in assessing Arbenz was to believe that he was leading Guatemala toward Communism, the second was to assume that he was doing so as part of a master plan drafted in Moscow. Secretary of State Dulles in particular had not the slightest doubt that the Soviet Union was actively working to shape events in Guatemala. The fact that the Soviets had no military, economic, or even diplomatic relations with Guatemala, that no delegation of Guatemalans had ever visited Moscow, and that a study by the State Department itself had found the few Guatemalan Communists to be “indigenous to the area” interested him not at all. In the spring of 1954, he told a South American diplomat that although it was “impossible to produce evidence clearly tying the Guatemalan government to Moscow,” American leaders were acting against that government “based on our deep conviction that such a tie must exist.”
No evidence ever emerged to support that “deep conviction.” Not in the vast archive of files the CIA captured after its coup, nor in any other document or testimony that has surfaced since, is there any indication that Soviet leaders were even slightly interested in Guatemala during the 1950s. Dulles could not have fathomed that. He was convinced to the point of theological certainty that the Soviets were behind every challenge to American power in the world. So was the rest of the Eisenhower administration. It believed, as one historian has put it, “that it was dealing not with misguided, irresponsible nationalists, but with ruthless agents of international communism.”
Dulles and his colleagues came into office determined to rid themselves of the troublesome regime in Guatemala, but without a clear idea of how to do so. Kermit Roosevelt’s triumph in Iran showed them the way. They decided to design a Guatemalan version of Operation Ajax. To reflect their confidence, they code-named it Operation Success.
On December 3, 1953, the CIA authorized an initial $3 million to set the plot in motion. It would start with a propaganda campaign, proceed through a wave of destabilizing violence, and culminate in an attack staged to look like a domestic uprising. This operation, though, would be much larger in scale than the one in Iran. Allen Dulles’s idea was to find a suitable opposition leader among Guatemalan exiles; equip him with a militia that could pose as a full-scale rebel army; hire American pilots to bomb Guatemala City; and then, with the country in chaos, have the American ambassador tell military commanders that peace would return only if they deposed Arbenz.
The ambassador that Secretary of State Dulles chose for this job was John Peurifoy, a West Point dropout from South Carolina who had failed the foreign service examination and, eager to work in government, took a job as an elevator operator at the Capitol. He made friends easily and with the help of home-state connections landed a job at the State Department. In 1950 he became ambassador to Greece, where he showed himself to be a flamboyant figure, happiest when driving fast cars or denouncing leftists. His passion for the latter attracted Dulles’s attention, and at the end of 1953 he was named the new United States ambassador to Guatemala. The New York Times speculated that this choice would mean “a change in the asserted passivity with which the United States has watched the growth of Communist influence.”
On the evening of December 16, Peurifoy had his first and only meeting with Arbenz. It lasted for six hours, over an extended dinner at Arbenz’s official residence. When Arbenz began to discourse on United Fruit’s abuses, Peurifoy interrupted to say that the real problem in Guatemala was “commie influence.” The next day he sent Dulles a curt assessment of the man they had targeted: “If he is not a communist, he will certainly do until one comes along.”
“Normal approaches will not work in Guatemala,” Peurifoy added ominously. “The candle is burning slowly and surely, and it is only a matter of time before the large American interests will be forced out entirely.”
These were just the words Dulles wanted to hear. He brought the cable to Eisenhower, who read it gravely. By the time he finished, according to his own account, he had decided to give Operation Success his final approval.
Eisenhower’s order set the CIA off on its second plot against a foreign government. It was run autonomously within the agency, meaning that its coordinator, Colonel Al Haney, a former college football star who had run CIA guerrillas behind enemy lines in Korea, could report directly to Allen Dulles. Haney established a clandestine headquarters at a military airfield in Opa-Locka, Florida, on the outskirts of Miami; a transshipment post for weapons at France Field in the Panama Canal Zone; and a network of remote airstrips in Honduras and Nicaragua, both of which were ruled by dictators who fervently wished to see Arbenz overthrown. Allen Dulles found all of this “brilliant,” but Colonel J. C. King, the head of Western Hemisphere operations for the CIA’s directorate of plans, which carries out covert action, spoke up to dissent. King had no use for nationalists like Arbenz, but he worried about the long-term impact of Haney’s ambitious plan.
“He’ll be starting a civil war in the middle of Central America!” King protested.
Allen Dulles responded by inviting both King and Haney to his Georgetown estate, Highlands. Over cocktails, he told them they had no more reason to argue. The president and secretary of state had ordered that Arbenz be overthrown. It was the CIA’s job to carry out that order.
“Go to it, my boy,” Dulles said as he slapped his hands on Haney’s broad shoulders. “You’ve got the green light.”
Operation Success was now fully approved in Washington, and fully funded—with $4.5 million, more than the CIA had ever spent on a covert operation. It lacked only one essential element: a Guatemalan to play the role of rebel leader. After several false starts, the CIA settled on a former army officer, Carlos Castillo Armas, who had led an abortive uprising in 1950 and had become a familiar figure in Guatemalan exile circles. Agents found him in Honduras, flew him to Opa-Locka, told him they were working with United Fruit on an anti-Arbenz project, and proposed that he become its putative leader. He accepted immediately.
During the spring of 1954, Castillo Armas waited in Honduras while the CIA hired fighters, requisitioned planes, prepared bases, and secured the cooperation of Honduran and Nicaraguan officials. The CIA station on the fourth floor of the American embassy in Guatemala City buzzed with activity. So did the operational base at Opa-Locka.
One of the agents assigned to Operation Success, Howard Hunt, who later became notorious for his role in the Watergate burglary, came up with the idea of using the Roman Catholic clergy to turn Guatemalans against Arbenz. Catholic priests and bishops in Guatemala, as in other Latin American countries, were closely aligned with the ruling class, and they loathed reformers like Arbenz. Hunt visited the most powerful Catholic prelate in the United States, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, and asked him if he could bring his Guatemalan counterparts into the coup plot. Spellman assured him that would be no problem. Soon, as Hunt later recalled, CIA agents “were writing scripts or leaflets for the Guatemalan clergy, the Catholic clergy, and this information was going out in [pastoral letters] across the country and in radio broadcasts.” The most important of these pastoral letters, read in every Catholic church in Guatemala on April 9, warned the faithful that a demonic force called Communism was trying to destroy their homeland and called on them to “rise as a single man against this enemy of God and country.”
While the CIA was busily laying the groundwork for a coup in Guatemala, Secretary of State Dulles intensified his diplomatic campaign. In March he traveled to Caracas, Venezuela, for a meeting of the Organization of American States. Some foreign ministers came to Caracas with hopes of discussing economic development, but Dulles insisted that their “major interest” must be Communism. He introduced a resolution declaring that if a country in the Western Hemisphere fell under the control of “the international communist movement,” any other nation in the hemisphere would be legally justified in taking “appropriate action.” Guatemala’s representative, Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello, called this resolution “merely a pretext for intervention in our internal affairs.”
The plan of national liberation being carried out with firmness by my government has necessarily affected the privileges of foreign enterprises that are impeding the progress and economic development of the country. . . . They wanted to find a ready expedient to maintain the economic dependence of the American Republics and suppress the legitimate desires of their peoples, cataloguing as “communism” every manifestation of nationalism or economic independence, any desire for social progress, any intellectual curiosity, and any interest in liberal and progressive reforms.
More than a few delegates sympathized with this view, but Dulles was determined to win passage of his resolution. He remained in Caracas for two weeks, sitting through long meetings during which he fended off no fewer than fifty amendments. Finally and inevitably, he was successful. Sixteen countries supported the “Declaration of Caracas.” Only Guatemala opposed it, with Mexico and Argentina abstaining.
This outcome was a great success for the United States, and it deeply shook Arbenz. The Dulles brothers agreed to intensify their pressure on him until the time seemed right to strike him down. Before they could do so, he made an unexpected misstep that delighted them.
Until Guatemala turned to democracy, in 1944, the United States had been its main arms supplier. After the transition, the Americans stopped sending weaponry. They also pressured Denmark, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, and Switzerland to back out of arms deals with Guatemala. When the CIA began arming Guatemalan exiles, Arbenz became alarmed at the poor state of his defenses. He looked urgently for a country that would sell him weapons, and finally found one. On May 15, 1954, a freighter called the Alfhelm docked at Puerto Barrios and workers began unloading crates labeled “Optical and Laboratory Equipment.” Inside were arms and ammunition from Czechoslovakia.
Czech arms makers had demanded payment in cash, and most of the weaponry they shipped turned out to be obsolete, impractical, or nonfunctional. Still, they could not have sold weapons to Guatemala without approval from Moscow. The symbolism of the Alfhelm shipment was overwhelming. A vessel loaded with Soviet-bloc arms had landed in Guatemala. To Representative McCormack, this was “like an atom bomb planted in the rear of our backyard.” Secretary of State Dulles declared it proof of “communist infiltration.”
“That is the problem,” he told reporters in Washington, “not United Fruit.”
From that moment, it became almost impossible for anyone in Washington to defend Arbenz. Some might have tried if they had known what the State Department and CIA were intending to do. The coup in Guatemala, though, like the one in Iran, was conceived in great secrecy. No one outside a handful of men knew about the plan, so no one could object, warn, or protest. This attraction of covert “regime change” operations was not lost on the Dulles brothers.
Some doubts about the administration’s policy toward Guatemala did emerge, publicly and privately, but they were easily brushed aside. One came on the pages of the New York Times, where the reporter Sydney Gruson wrote several articles after the Alfhelm incident suggesting that Guatemalans were rallying around their government and that they were caught up not in Communism but in “fervent nationalism.” This was not what United Fruit and the Eisenhower administration wished Americans to hear. Allen Dulles arranged a dinner with his friend Julius Adler, the business manager of the Times, and complained. Adler passed the complaint on to Times publisher Arthur Flays Sulzberger. A few days later, Gruson’s boss pulled him out of Guatemala.
Allen Dulles also had to deal with a problem at his CIA station in Guatemala. The station chief, Birch O’Neill, did not like the idea of a coup. Like his counterpart in Tehran a year before, Roger Goiran, he warned that it would not work out well in the long run. Dulles responded by transferring O’Neill out of the country.
As Allen Dulles was removing these potential obstacles, his brother faced dissent from several State Department officials. One of them, Louis Halle, a member of the policy planning staff, circulated a lengthy memorandum asserting that Guatemala was in desperate need of social reform, that its government was “nationalist and anti-Yanqui” but not pro-Communist, and that the entire crisis was of United Fruit’s making. Another official, Deputy Undersecretary of State Robert Murphy, found out about Operation Success by accident and fired off an angry note to Dulles telling him that the idea was “wrong” and would probably be “very expensive over the long term.”
“To resort to this action confesses the bankruptcy of our political policy vis-à-vis that country,” Murphy wrote.
Secretary of State Dulles had long since made up his mind to overthrow Arbenz, and did not bother to reply to dissenters in his ranks. News of their protests, though, filtered through higher echelons of the State Department. Ambassador Peurifoy was concerned enough to ask his superiors if there had been a change in plans. In a return cable, Raymond Leddy, the State Department’s policy director for Central America, assured him that Operation Success was still on.
“We are on the road to settling this problem,” Leddy wrote. “There is a 100 percent determination, from top down, to get rid of this stinker and not to stop until that is done.”
Haney’s operation was already in full swing. He had recruited a mini-army of nearly five hundred Guatemalan exiles, American soldiers of fortune, and assorted Central American mercenaries and had sent them to camps in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Florida, where they were being given rudimentary training. His clandestine “Voice of Liberation” radio station, supposedly transmitting from “somewhere in Guatemala” but actually based in Opa-Locka, was broadcasting a stream of false reports about popular unrest and military rebellions. It was time for Haney to send his handpicked “liberator,” Colonel Castillo Armas, into action.
Soon after dawn on June 18, Castillo Armas summoned his men, packed them into jeeps and trucks, and led them northward in his command car, a battered old station wagon. They crossed the Honduran border without incident. Then, following the orders his CIA handlers had given him, Castillo Armas led his motorcade six miles into Guatemalan territory. There he stopped. This was the invasion.
Arbenz placed his army and police on alert but, on the advice of Foreign Minister Toriello, did not send troops to the border area. Toriello hoped to resolve this matter diplomatically. He wanted to show the world that foreign-sponsored troops were on Guatemalan territory, and did not want any government soldiers there to muddy the issue.
By mid-morning, Toriello was writing an urgent appeal to the United Nations Security Council. He asked the council to meet immediately and condemn an invasion of Guatemala launched “at the instigation of certain foreign monopolies.” While he wrote, the “Voice of Liberation” was broadcasting breathless reports of Castillo Armas’s supposed swift progress through the countryside. Two CIA planes buzzed low over the main military barracks in Guatemala City, firing machine-gun rounds and dropping a fragmentation bomb that set off a series of loud explosions. Ambassador Peurifoy, one of the few people in the country who knew exactly what was happening, heard them in his embassy office. He looked out his window, saw smoke billowing up from the barracks, and dashed off a gleeful cable to Dulles.
“Looks like this is it,” he wrote.
The air raids continued for several days. One plane shot up the airport in Guatemala City. Others hit fuel tanks and military posts across the country. They led to several injuries and some property damage, but their purpose was not military. Like the bogus radio broadcasts, they were aimed at creating the impression that a war was under way. Each time a plane strafed another town, Guatemalans became more insecure, confused, and fearful—and more willing to believe what they heard on the “Voice of Liberation.”
Secretary of State Dulles was receiving almost hour-by-hour reports on these events, from his brother and from Ambassador Peurifoy. His position, however, required him to dissemble in public. On the afternoon of June 19, the State Department issued a disingenuous statement saying it had news of “serious uprisings” and “outbreaks of violence” in Guatemala. Then it declared the lie that was at the heart of Operation Success.
“The department has no evidence that indicates this is anything other than a revolt of Guatemalans against the government,” it said.
Arbenz knew that was untrue. He had come to realize that the United States was behind this rebellion, which meant that he could not defeat it with armed force. This realization drove him first to drink, and then to a decision to address his country by radio. In his speech he declared that “the arch-traitor Castillo Armas” was leading a “United Fruit Company expeditionary force” against his government.
Our crime is having enacted an agrarian reform which affected the interests of the United Fruit Company. Our crime is wanting to have our own route to the Atlantic, our own electric power and our own docks and ports. Our crime is our patriotic wish to advance, to progress, to win an economic independence that would match our political independence. . . .
It is completely untrue that communists are taking over the government. . . . We have imposed no terror. It is, on the contrary, the Guatemalan friends of Mr. Foster Dulles who wish to spread terror among our people, attacking women and children by surprise with impunity from pirate airplanes.
In the days after that speech, things began looking better for Arbenz. The army remained loyal to him, and his popularity among ordinary Guatemalans was unbroken. At a meeting of the Security Council in New York, France introduced a resolution calling for an end to “any action likely to cause bloodshed” in Guatemala and directing all countries to refrain from “rendering assistance to any such action.” Castillo Armas was making no military progress. Most important, the air raids, which had driven much of the country to near-panic, were tapering off because one of the CIA’s four P-47 Thunderbolts had been shot out of action and a second had crashed.
From his command post at Opa-Locka, Al Haney sent an urgent cable to Allen Dulles. It said that Operation Success was on the verge of collapse and would probably fail without more air support. Dulles went immediately to the White House to ask President Eisenhower for permission to dispatch two more planes. Eisenhower readily agreed. Later he told one of his aides that he had seen no realistic alternative.
“If at any time you take the route of violence or support of violence,” he said, “then you commit yourself to carrying it through, and it’s too late to have second thoughts.”
Arbenz, who of course knew nothing of this, pressed his diplomatic offensive. He dispatched Toriello to New York, and there the foreign minister urged the Security Council to send an investigating team to Guatemala immediately. This was exactly what the Americans wished to prevent. The new United States ambassador to the United Nations—none other than former senator Henry Cabot Lodge—worked feverishly behind the scenes, and in a pivotal decision on June 25, the Security Council voted not to investigate what was happening in Guatemala.
While Lodge was holding the diplomatic fort, Haney sent his two new planes into action. His first round of raids had been for psychological effect, but now they took a more serious turn. For three days and nights, the planes strafed military bases, shot up fuel tanks, and dropped incendiary bombs on ammunition dumps. These attacks spread alarm and led hundreds of people to flee from their homes. On the day of the Security Council vote, in a last-minute appeal that was poignant almost to the point of pathos, Toriello sent a long cable to Dulles.
I regret to inform your Excellency that a savage attack with TNT bombs took place yesterday on the civilian population of Chiquimula, as well as the strafing of that city and the cities of Gualán and Zacapa. . . . Guatemala appeals urgently to your Excellency to communicate to you this painful situation, and asks that your enlightened government, always respectful of the human rights of which it has been the standard-bearer, be good enough to intercede with the Security Council.
Dulles ignored this appeal. He could afford to, because events were now turning his way. No outsider had discovered the great ruse of Operation Success. Most Guatemalans believed what the “Voice of Liberation” told them: that Castillo Armas was leading a rebel army through the countryside, that many Guatemalan soldiers had risen up to join him, and that the government was powerless to stop the juggernaut.
As the bombing campaign intensified, Arbenz began to lose his grip. At one point he considered calling the peasantry to armed resistance, but his military commanders would not hear of it. He was out of options. At midday on Sunday, June 27, he sent Toriello to the American embassy to arrange the terms of his surrender.
Ambassador Peurifoy, who had taken to wearing a flight suit and brandishing a pistol, told Toriello that if there was a “clean sweep” at the National Palace, he might be able to persuade “insurgent forces” to end their campaign. A few hours later, the army chief of staff, Colonel Carlos Enrique Díaz, invited Peurifoy to his home. When Peurifoy arrived, the four other senior Guatemalan military commanders were also there. Díaz began by complaining bitterly about what the United States was doing in his country. Peurifoy, by his own account, “replied sharply that if he had brought me to his house to make accusations against my government, I would leave immediately.” That reminded the Guatemalans who was in the stronger position. They reluctantly agreed to confront Arbenz and demand his resignation, but indignantly told Peurifoy that under no circumstances would they negotiate with Castillo Armas or bring him into a new government.
At four o’clock that afternoon, the commanders called on Arbenz. They told him they had constituted themselves as a military junta and were deposing him. He had no choice but to agree. His friends promised him two things: that they would never deal with Castillo Armas, and that they would allow him to deliver a farewell message over the radio. At nine-fifteen in the evening, Arbenz addressed his people for the last time.
Workers, peasants, patriots, my friends, people of Guatemala: Guatemala is enduring a most difficult trial. For fifteen days a cruel war against Guatemala has been underway. The United Fruit Company, in collaboration with the governing circles of the United States, is responsible for what is happening to us. . . .
I have not violated my faith in democratic liberties, in the independence of Guatemala and in all the good that is the future of humanity. . . I have always said to you that we would fight regardless of the cost, but the cost should not include the destruction of our country and the sending of our riches abroad. And this could happen if we do not eliminate the pretext that our powerful enemy has raised.
A government different from mine, but always inspired by our October Revolution, is preferable to twenty years of fascist bloody tyranny under the rule of the bands that Castillo Armas has brought into the country.
After Arbenz finished his broadcast, he left the studio and walked forlornly to the Mexican embassy, where he asked for and was granted political asylum. Colonel Díaz took the microphone. He officially accepted the reins of power, and then promised Guatemalans, “The struggle against mercenary invaders will not abate.” Ambassador Peurifoy’s jaw tightened as he listened over the radio. When Díaz was finished, the ambassador slammed his hand onto his desk.
“OK,” he spat, “now I’ll have to crack down on that s.o.b.”
The broadcast also upset the two principal CIA operatives in Guatemala, station chief John Doherty and agent Enno Hobbing, who had been sent from Washington to help oversee Operation Success. As soon as it was over, they agreed that their work was not yet complete. They decided to depose Díaz that very night and replace him with an officer they knew and trusted, Colonel Elfegio Monzón.
Doherty and Hobbing drove to Monzón’s home, gave him the good news that he was about to become president, and packed him into their backseat. Together the three drove to Díaz’s headquarters. It was midnight when they arrived.
Díaz, who had been in power for only a few hours, feared the worst. He began by trying to defend Arbenz’s reforms, but Hobbing cut him off.
“Let me explain something to you,” he said. “You made a big mistake when you took over the government.”
There was a long moment of silence as Díaz absorbed this message. Then Hobbing spoke again. “Colonel,” he told Díaz, “you’re just not convenient for the requirements of American foreign policy.”
“But I talked to your ambassador!” Díaz protested.
“Well, Colonel, there is diplomacy and then there is reality. Our ambassador represents diplomacy. I represent reality. And the reality is we don’t want you.”
“Can I hear it from the ambassador?” Díaz asked plaintively.
It was four o’clock in the morning when an irritated Peurifoy arrived at Díaz’s headquarters. They had a tense meeting. Díaz insisted that he would not resign without a guarantee that Guatemala would not be turned over to Castillo Armas. Peurifoy refused to give it. Finally he stormed out. Back at the embassy at dawn, he composed a pithy cable to Haney.
“We have been double-crossed,” it said. “BOMB!”
That afternoon, at a clandestine airstrip in Honduras, a CIA pilot named Jerry DeLarm stepped into the cockpit of a P-47. Accompanied by a fighter escort, he headed to Guatemala City. There he dropped two bombs on the parade ground of the main military base and several more on the government radio station.
Reality was closing in on Colonel Díaz. He summoned Peurifoy in the predawn hours of Tuesday, June 29, but as soon as they started talking he was called into a side room to consult with other officers. A few minutes later he emerged, with a tommy gun pointed at his ribs. Beside him was Colonel Monzón.
“My colleague Díaz has decided to resign,” Monzón said suavely. “I am replacing him.”
Monzón formed a three-man junta and, a few days later, flew to El Salvador for negotiations with Castillo Armas. They met under Ambassador Peurifoy’s supervision. His influence brought them to a speedy agreement. Within a few days, the two subsidiary members of the junta, reportedly encouraged by payments of $100,000 apiece, accepted diplomatic posts abroad. On July 5, Monzón followed them into retirement. Castillo Armas replaced him and proclaimed himself president of Guatemala. Soon afterward, Secretary of State Dulles addressed Americans by radio and told them that a great victory over Communism had been won.
The Guatemalan government and Communist agents throughout the world have persistently attempted to obscure the real issue—that of Communist imperialism—by claiming that the U.S. is only interested in protecting American business. We regret that there have been disputes between the Guatemalan government and the United Fruit Company. . . . But this issue is relatively unimportant. . . . Led by Colonel Castillo Armas, patriots arose in Guatemala to challenge the Communist leadership and to change it. Thus the situation is being cured by the Guatemalans themselves.
Dulles knew he was being untruthful when he asserted that “Guatemalans themselves” were responsible for overthrowing Arbenz, but he did not realize that the other claim he made in his victory proclamation was also false. He truly believed that Arbenz was a tool of “Communist imperialism” rather than what he actually was: an idealistic, reform-minded nationalist who bore Americans no ill will. By overthrowing him, the United States crushed a democratic experiment that held great promise for Latin America. As in Iran a year earlier, it deposed a regime that embraced fundamental American ideals but that had committed the sin of seeking to retake control of its own natural resources.