THOUGH NEARLY THE WHOLE COUNTRY LISTENED to President Jacobo Árbenz’s resignation on the radio, the two most extreme reactions must have been Ambassador Peurifoy’s euphoria—wasn’t this proof that his strategy of an institutional coup had been a success, and had gotten the communist out of office swiftly?—and Colonel Castillo Armas’s unfettered rage from his headquarters in Esquipulas, cursing and ranting while his subordinates listened in silence.
Ambassador John Emil Peurifoy hurriedly wrote a report to the State Department: Árbenz’s resignation meant that the entire army had turned its back on him. The army’s rise to power would facilitate the elimination of all those subversive elements entrenched in the administration, the disbanding of the belligerent unions, and the immediate revocation of the policies that discriminated against United Fruit. He would meet immediately with Colonel Carlos Enrique Díaz, the new president, to demand these measures be carried out.
Castillo Armas’s message to the CIA (or rather: to Mr. Frank Wisner, with a copy sent to Colonel Brodfrost) was very different in character. He was not in the least pleased with what had happened, and considered the Mute Árbenz’s stepping down to be a travesty meant to safeguard the worst excesses of the October Revolution—a farce carried out with the aid of Árbenz’s servant and accomplice, the chief of the army, Colonel Little Árbenz the Second. The proof was that he had allowed the president to broadcast that message on the radio insulting the Army of Liberation and Castillo Armas himself and accusing the United States of planning, supporting, and directing the invasion—repeating all the communists’ slander. He wouldn’t play along with this kind of political nonsense. If the U.S.A. was stupid enough to support Colonel Carlos Enrique Díaz, he would denounce the situation and return immediately to Honduras. From there, he would let the world know that once more, Guatemala’s communists had triumphed—now with Washington’s support!—with this pantomime of Árbenz’s resignation, which would allow everything to stay the same and permit the reds to go on destroying Guatemala. Hatchet Face urged the CIA, the State Department, and President Eisenhower not to let Ambassador Peurifoy deceive them and to demand the immediate abdication of Little Árbenz the Second. He would never negotiate with that communist, and would continue as long as it took as the head of the Army of Liberation. Last, he informed them that, after hearing Árbenz’s resignation, numerous Guatemalan officers had gotten in touch with him offering a truce and some even declaring their open support of the invasion.
Castillo Armas’s bluster wasn’t entirely idle. Hearing Árbenz’s resignation over the radio diminished faith in the revolution, which the majority of the officers in the armed forces had resigned themselves to more out of obedience than conviction. They felt they were free to choose. And the majority happened to believe that in this dawning period of disorder and uncertainty, joining Castillo Armas’s invasion, which had the support of the United States, was preferable to continuing to support a revolution whose victims would, sooner or later, as the indefatigable Ambassador Peurifoy assured them, include the Guatemalan army itself. For this reason, Colonel Víctor M. León, who oversaw the government forces defending Zacapa and had, up to then, resolutely fended off the invaders, sent an emissary to Castillo Armas on the night Árbenz stepped down asking for a truce to open peace negotiations. This decision, he conveyed, had the support of all the officers under his command.
Ambassador Peurifoy didn’t have the chance to celebrate his presumptive victory. Just a few hours after sending his report, he received a message in code from his boss, John Foster Dulles, who stated in the harshest terms that he was under no circumstances to accept Colonel Carlos Enrique Díaz stepping in to replace Árbenz as president: there was clear evidence of collusion between them, otherwise Díaz would never have allowed the former leader to depart from office with an address that insulted and defamed the United States and disparaged Castillo Armas and the Liberationists. The ambassador would have to demand that Colonel Díaz abandon the post, stepping aside for a truly independent military junta without ties to Árbenz; and he should pressure them, with the threat of a military invasion if need be, to negotiate with Castillo Armas, who was committed without reservations to repealing each and every one of the communists’ reforms.
Ambassador Peurifoy changed his position, adopting John Foster Dulles’s thinking as his own. He hastily requested an appointment with Colonel Díaz; he had a message from Washington he needed to convey in person. The new president agreed to see him at ten in the morning (it was already dawn on that endless day). Before going, Ambassador Peurifoy put on his thick shoulder holster with the ostentatious revolver that had always accompanied him on his negotiations with the Greek officers, who, incidentally, had struck him as more civilized than these Indians in uniform.
Their encounter took place in the General Staff’s main offices. Colonel Díaz was there with two other officers, Colonel Elfego H. Monzón and Colonel Rogelio Cruz Wer, head of the Civil Guard, a man unknown to the ambassador before then. The three of them received him in a celebratory mood: We’ve finally done what you wanted, Ambassador, Árbenz is gone and the hunt for the communists is underway. Once the greetings were over, Colonel Díaz told Peurifoy he had given orders to arrest the union leaders, affiliates of the Guatemalan Party of Labor, and other subversives throughout the nation.
“But unfortunately,” he added, “certain leaders of the Guatemalan Party of Labor managed to seek asylum at the Mexican Embassy. Ambassador Primo Villa Michel is in cahoots with them, and he granted it.”
“That’s your fault, Colonel Díaz, you’ve done your job poorly,” Peurifoy scolded him, convinced that he had to break the officers’ morale right from the first or he would lose. When the three men heard this, the joy drained from their faces.
“I don’t understand what you mean, Ambassador,” Colonel Díaz finally replied.
“You will soon, Colonel,” Peurifoy replied shrilly, wagging his index finger in the Guatemalan’s face. “Our agreement did not include Árbenz stepping down after giving a speech heard all over Guatemala that lavished insults on the United States, accusing us of conspiring against social reforms on behalf of United Fruit, attacking Castillo Armas and his men, ‘a band of mercenaries’ as he called them, one that had to be defeated—and that is something you have apparently agreed to do.”
Colonel Díaz turned ashen. Peurifoy didn’t give him a chance to speak. The other officers, very pale, said nothing. The interpreter translated the ambassador’s words swiftly, imitating his energy and his menacing gestures.
“Nor did we agree,” the diplomat proceeded, “to give Árbenz time to alert all the communists in the regime so they could seek asylum, not just in the Mexican Embassy, but also from Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, etc., etc. They’ve been going into hiding since last night, and neither the army nor the police have done anything to stop them. That was not what we agreed on. My government is offended and insulted by what has happened, and we will be taking all appropriate measures. Colonel Díaz, listen very closely. The United States does not find you acceptable as president of Guatemala. You cannot replace Árbenz. I’m telling you this in my official capacity. If you refuse to stand down, you will face the consequences. You know perfectly well what the situation in your country is. The United States Navy has Guatemala hemmed in on the Caribbean side and on the Pacific. The Marines are ready to disembark, and they’ll do in a matter of hours all that you’ve proven incapable of. Don’t drag your country into the flames. Renounce your right to preside over the military junta immediately and look for a way out of this impasse. You don’t want an invasion or a military occupation: if you get one, blood will flow, and the damage to Guatemala will be tremendous.”
He stopped talking now, and looked at the faces of the three colonels. They were rigid, mute, alert.
“Is this an ultimatum?” Colonel Carlos Enrique Díaz finally asked. His voice was quavering, and tears gleamed in his eyes.
“Yes, it is,” the ambassador replied resolutely. But then his expression and his words softened. “I am encouraging you to be a patriot, Colonel. Step down, and save Guatemala from an invasion that will leave thousands of dead and a country in ruins. Don’t wind up in the history books as a soldier so proud he allowed his country to be annihilated. With your resignation, we can try to agree on a junta of three or four men willing to negotiate with Castillo Armas and reach a deal acceptable to my government. One that will allow the United States to collaborate in Guatemala’s democratization and reconstruction.”
The three colonels were white-faced and silent, and Ambassador Peurifoy knew that he had won the game, just as he had in Greece. After looking back and forth at each other, the men nodded and forced somewhat macabre smiles. They asked the ambassador to take a seat, ordered coffee and mineral water, brought out their cigarettes. They smoked and talked, blowing the fumes in each other’s faces, and an hour later, they had agreed on the members of the junta, on the country to which they would send Colonel Carlos Enrique Díaz as ambassador, and on the text of the declaration that would inform Guatemalans of the nomination of a new military regime willing, in the spirit of peace and brotherhood, to negotiate an agreement with Colonel Castillo Armas in which neither party was winner or loser, thereby inaugurating a new era of freedom and democracy in Guatemala.
The diplomat departed the offices of the General Staff, and as soon as he’d reached the embassy, he called Washington and informed them of the meeting in detail. Clearly the problem now was Colonel Castillo Armas. He had demanded the immediate surrender of the government’s army and was trying to enter Guatemala City in a military parade, marching at the head of the Army of Liberation. That bastard’s the next one we’re going to have to bring to heel, Peurifoy told himself. He’s let this get to his head. He was exhausted, but as always, crisis exhilarated him, awakening a physical need for action and risk.
Following President Árbenz’s abdication, there were five military juntas, each of them closer to the United States than the last, all buckling under Peurifoy’s demands and machinations, each trying to outdo its predecessor in its willingness to persecute, capture, torture, and execute the communists. The leaders of the Guatemalan Party of Labor who hadn’t sought asylum at one of the embassies were able to hide out or flee to the mountains or the jungle thanks to warnings from Árbenz and Fortuny, but many others couldn’t, particularly the union leaders, the schoolteachers, young students, and mixed-race professionals who had mobilized—many of them brought into politics for the first time—after the October Revolution. The number of victims was never known, but there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, people from the hills, peasants without names or histories for whom a plot of nationalized land had been like a gift from heaven, and when the Agrarian Reform was repealed and they had to hand back what they already thought of as their property, they were left reeling. Some acquiesced, but others defended their holdings with bared teeth. They were tortured or killed, or spent long years in prisons without ever really grasping those strange shifts of fate of which they were first beneficiaries, then victims two or three years later.
The junta that endured the shortest time—no more than a few hours—was composed of Colonels Carlos Enrique Díaz, José Ángel Sánchez, and Elfego H. Monzón. When Castillo Armas failed to recognize them and refused to have any dealings with them, they lost all authority. He had grown arrogant because, after Árbenz’s resignation, many government troops sent to fight him near the Honduran border had gone over to his side instead. The more self-assured he felt, the more defiant he acted with the North Americans. Since the night Árbenz sought asylum, Peurifoy had been applying pressure, dangling the threat of an invasion by the Marines over the officers’ heads. Slowly, they all gave ground. Castillo Armas wasn’t satisfied with Díaz’s resignation. He demanded a big military parade, with him at the head, to welcome the Liberationist troops into Guatemala City. If he didn’t get it, there would be no negotiations between the government’s troops and himself. Ambassador Peurifoy went days without eating, nights without sleeping, in endless discussions, reaching agreements that would last hours or even just minutes before one or the other side rebelled violently against them, communicating with Washington to fine-tune accords, only to start over from the beginning.
While all this was happening, the soldiers, the police, and the officers in charge had unleashed a witch hunt unprecedented even in Guatemala’s violent history. The closures of the union halls and Agrarian Reform offices that had opened in all the villages were carried out in a hail of bullets, with the imprisonment of whoever was found inside at the time; there were blacklists with names supplied by anonymous informants. Many of those arrested, humble persons without influence or allies, were tortured, often to death, their bodies buried or burned and their families never told of their end. Panic seeped into every crack in Guatemalan society, particularly among those without means, and violent excesses went beyond any horror ever before seen. In the months that followed Castillo Armas’s rise to power, approximately 200,000 Mayans, terrified by the slaughter, managed to flee to Chiapas in Mexico. This is virtually the only figure verifiable from the days of repression, and it came to light through information issued by the Mexican authorities.
Not since the era of the Inquisition had political repression in Guatemala taken the form of burnings of pernicious and subversive documents, which occurred now on the military bases and in the public squares. Pamphlets, flyers, newspapers, magazines, and books—from an inscrutable selection of authors that included Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky—smoldered on bonfires around which children danced as if celebrating Saint John’s Eve.
The final negotiations between the Liberationists and what was left of the military on the government’s side took place in El Salvador, where president Óscar Osorio had, at the urging of Washington, offered to host the two parties. With his loaded revolver under his left arm, Ambassador Peurifoy was in attendance, not as an observer but as an “implicated witness” (to make a distinction he insisted on and only he understood). The Secretary of State had selected him to represent the United States in the talks, ordering him to take all necessary steps to assure Castillo Armas’s conditions were met. Guatemala had been severely damaged by events in the foregoing decade, and it was important to Eisenhower’s government that the country be led by someone whose political convictions and temperament would make him friendly to Washington and amenable to the North American companies operating in Central America.
The U.S. ambassadors to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras were there to offer their assistance, but Peurifoy took the active role in the discussions. In truth, he dictated them, supporting Castillo Armas against Colonels Elfego H. Monzón and Mauricio Dubois, who were there as representatives of the Guatemalan army. Eventually a deal was struck. A temporary junta was put in place, consisting of Castillo Armas, Monzón, José Luis Cruz Salazar, Mauricio Dubois, and Enrique Trinidad Oliva. It would be dissolved as soon as a new constitution was in place. There would be a unity parade in which the Liberationists and the armed forces would celebrate Victory Day together.
Castillo Armas had greeted the Cowboy coldly in San Salvador, but was cordial with him on the plane ride back to Guatemala, and thanked him for his support in the negotiations. You’ll be greeted as a hero in your country, Colonel, Peurifoy predicted. And so he was. But the United States ambassador, not the rebel colonel, was the first to step out of the plane at the airport in Guatemala City. During the enormous celebrations, with 130,000 people in attendance, Castillo Armas asked Peurifoy to address the Guatemalan people, and the diplomat showed a timidity unusual in a man best described as a human bulldozer, limiting himself to toasting to the country’s future. A huge mass of people, exhausted from the insecurity and violence of recent months, gathered at the airport and in streets across the city to salute Colonel Castillo Armas, who would thenceforth be recognized as the undisputed superior of all his colleagues and adversaries in the army. Washington had instructed Peurifoy to persuade the members of the junta chosen in San Salvador to step down and let Castillo Armas lead. It wasn’t easy. Colonel Cruz Salazar asked for the ambassador’s post in Washington and a large amount of money in exchange. Mauricio Dubois was no different. Both received a hundred thousand dollars in compensation. It is not known how the other members were rewarded, but all of them stood aside for the new leader.
In this way, following a hasty plebiscite in which he was the unequivocal victor, the head of the Army of Liberation became the new president of the Republic of Guatemala, with the mission of eliminating those lunatic antidemocratic measures put forward by the governments of Arévalo and Árbenz in their quest to turn Guatemala into a satellite of the Soviet Union. (Only once the imposing parade was over would Hatchet Face learn of the behavior of the cadets from the Politécnica who were in attendance, who had come to blows with the fleabag Liberationists.)
On July 4, Ambassador Peurifoy and his wife, Betty Jane, held a memorable reception for five hundred people at their residence in Zone 14, Guatemala’s most elegant quarter, with singing, toasts, congratulatory hugs, and countless words of praise for the hero of the day—not Castillo Armas, but the ambassador himself.
But the weary diplomat could not yet rest. No sooner were the festivities over than the State Department ordered him to collaborate with the CIA to erase, now that Árbenz was gone, all signs of the U.S.A.’s participation in Operation PBSuccess. It was imperative that not a trace of it remain, to put an end to the international campaign led by communists and fellow travelers—with none other than France among them—which accused the United States of invading a small sovereign country and overturning its democratically elected government to defend the privileges of a single multinational, the United Fruit Company. Fighting through his weariness, unwashed, unshaved, without even changing his shirt, Peurifoy arranged a return to America for the six hundred operators the CIA had brought in from Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, and Honduras to prepare the invasion. He also had to make the twenty planes of the Liberationist air force disappear. Several of them were given to Anastasio Somoza in thanks for the assistance he had granted to Castillo Armas’s mercenaries, letting them train in Nicaragua and offering them places to do so. Others Castillo Armas kept himself as the basis for a reconstructed Guatemalan air force.
Peurifoy and his family spent their last days in Guatemala (the State Department had made clear that a person as involved in Árbenz’s fall as he should leave the country as soon as possible, and he agreed) mailing packages and packing suitcases for his upcoming assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Thailand. Numerous Guatemalan landowners and businessmen had them over to say goodbye in person, telling them they would miss them a great deal. Peurifoy imagined that in the far-off Orient, he could finally get a bit of rest.
Before leaving for his next destination, he was able to make a hidden wish come true: he convinced the Mexican ambassador to allow him entry into that building full of asylum seekers whose journey into exile the Castillo Armas government had complicated with any number of pretexts. He didn’t see ex-president Árbenz, who refused to meet with him. But he did have the satisfaction of spending a moment with José Manuel Fortuny, a former member of Árbenz’s party and later secretary general of the Guatemalan Party of Labor. They spoke for a few minutes before the Guatemalan recognized the ambassador and went silent. He confessed he was still friends with Árbenz, and had collaborated closely with him on the drafting and execution of the Agrarian Reform law. Peurifoy saw him as a man defeated, his morale devastated. He had lost many pounds and spoke without looking, eyes red from sleepless nights and haunting visions. He stopped answering questions, as if he didn’t understand or hear them. In his report to the State Department, Peurifoy described how his old and dangerous adversary—a Soviet agent, without a doubt—was now a ruin, a man consumed by neuroses and probably secretly remorseful for his actions.
Wagging tongues said that Ambassador Peurifoy asked, when the State Department informed him his next stopping-point would be Thailand: “Is there a coup d’état on the horizon?” Whether he spoke in jest isn’t known. He had promised his children and Betty Jane that once there they would finally have the calm needed to live like a proper family. And they did enjoy a few months—not more—without political upheavals, and the ambassador at least learned something of the country’s famed traditional massage, a practice linked to the religious beliefs, the sports, and the sexuality of Thailand, and one of its national passions. On August 12, 1955, after less than a year at his post, Ambassador Peurifoy was driving, very fast as usual, with his two sons in his brand-new blue Thunderbird through the outskirts of Bangkok when a truck traveling in the opposite direction seems to have collided with him on a bridge. The ambassador and his younger son died instantly. A government plane was sent from America to repatriate their remains, and the State Department exerted no pressure to pursue the investigation into whether his tragic death had been a communist plot to punish the man who had fought so successfully against the expansion of the Soviet Union. The United States preferred that the matter be quickly forgotten. It was disturbed at the time by an international campaign denouncing Washington’s intervention in Guatemala and its role in the fall of the Árbenz government, which some had begun to defend, recognizing that Árbenz hadn’t been a communist of any sort, but rather an unsuspecting, well-intentioned man whose only wish was to bring progress, democracy, and social justice to his country, even if his methods were erratic and his advisers at times led him astray.
Peurifoy’s widow, Betty Jane, published a diary with many examples of her husband’s diplomatic achievements, presenting him as a hero. It sold modestly and wasn’t widely reviewed. The United States government paid it no attention whatsoever.
Meanwhile, in Guatemala, President Castillo Armas, elected in a plebiscite with no opponents on the ballot—his colleagues in the military junta had already resigned in his favor—worked to put an end to all the unpleasantries occasioned by the October Revolution. He abolished the unions, federations, foundations, and peasants’ and workers’ associations, closed the National Indigenous Institute, gave back to the landowners and United Fruit the fallow lands that had been nationalized, abrogated the law that required companies and latifundias to pay taxes, and filled the prisons with unionists, teachers, journalists, and students accused of being communists or subversives. In the countryside, there were scenes of violence, with massacres in some places equaling or perhaps exceeding in brutality those that had occurred in Patzicía (San Juan Comalapa) in the early days of Arévalo’s government in the fierce clash between the ladinos and the Kaqchikel Maya. Following the State Department’s instructions, the new U.S. ambassador, a more prudent man than John Peurifoy, tried to moderate to some degree Castillo Armas’s anticommunist fervor, and this led to friction, disagreement, and minor clashes between the U.S. and the leader the Eisenhower administration had made such efforts to enthrone. Around that time, people in Guatemala began to say that the United States had erred in choosing Hatchet Face as the new standard-bearer for freedom in Central America and the world. He was too extremist, and aroused less sympathy among the armed forces than they had earlier believed.