CIA Overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala (Operation PBSUCCESS)
The CIA overthrew an elected Guatemalan government in 1954 with a few hundred men, a radio station and some aircraft. Jacobo Árbenz had been elected in 1950 with 65 per cent and had continued the reforms begun after the 1944 revolution against a fourteen-year dictatorship: a labour code, social security, and in 1952 Decree 900, which expropriated uncultivated portions of large estates and redistributed them to some 100,000 families. Compensation was paid in bonds at the value the owners had declared for tax. The United Fruit Company, which was the country's largest landowner, its largest employer and the owner of its railway, port and telegraph, had undervalued its holdings for years and was offered what it had claimed they were worth. It also had close connections in Washington, including the Dulles brothers, who ran the State Department and the CIA. Operation PBSuccess supplied Carlos Castillo Armas with about 480 men, unmarked aircraft, and a radio station broadcasting from Honduras reporting an advance that did not exist. The force barely fought. What decided it was the army, which refused to arm the peasant militias Árbenz proposed and told him to resign, on the correct assumption that the United States would otherwise intervene directly. He resigned on 27 June and died in exile in a bath in Mexico in 1971. The land was returned, the reforms reversed, and Guatemala fought a civil war from 1960 to 1996 in which some 200,000 people died, most of them Maya. An Argentine doctor named Ernesto Guevara was in Guatemala City that summer and took from it the conclusion that a reforming government which does not arm its supporters will be removed. He met Castro in Mexico the following year.
- Year: 1954 CE
- Category: Covert
