Carlos Castillo Armas
Carlos Castillo Armas was the colonel the CIA chose to lead the overthrow of Árbenz in 1954, crossed into Guatemala from Honduras with a few hundred men and an aircraft or two while a radio station invented his victories, was flown to the capital in the American ambassador's plane to be made president, undid the land reform, and was shot by a guard in his own palace three years later. He was born in 1914 in Escuintla, illegitimate, went to the military academy, trained at Fort Leavenworth, and was on the losing side of the officers' politics after 1949. He led a failed assault on a barracks in 1950, was wounded and imprisoned, and tunnelled out of the penitentiary in 1951 to Honduras, where the fruit company and the Somozas helped him and the CIA found him. Operation PBSuccess gave him about four hundred and eighty men, a training camp in Nicaragua, a handful of aircraft with American pilots, and the Voice of Liberation broadcasting from Honduras that a liberation army was sweeping the country. His actual column crossed on 18 June 1954, took a border town and stopped, and one engagement went against it. The coup was won in Guatemala City, where the bombing, the broadcasts and the ambassador persuaded the army not to fight and Árbenz to resign on 27 June, and in the negotiations that followed, in which the ambassador removed each of the colonels who had replaced Árbenz until Castillo Armas was the one left. He was sworn in on 8 July. He annulled the land decree and gave the estates back, outlawed the parties and the unions, set up a committee that listed seventy thousand suspected communists, restored the fruit company's holdings, had himself elected in a plebiscite with ninety-nine per cent, and received Vice-President Nixon. On the night of 26 July 1957 a soldier of the palace guard named Romeo Vásquez shot him in a corridor and then himself, for reasons that have never been settled. The officers who followed him ran the country for thirty years and the war that began in 1960 lasted until 1996.
- Lived: 1914 CE – 1957 CE
- Nationality: Guatemalan
- Roles: president, army_officer
