June 27, 1954: A CIA backed coup deposes Jacobo Árbenz,...

June 27, 1954: A CIA backed coup deposes Jacobo Árbenz, president of Guatemala.

In March 1951, Jacobo Árbenz succeeded Juan José Arévalo Bermejo as president of Guatemala, its second to be democratically elected after a 1944 popular uprising removed Jorge Ubico from power. Ubico was one (and it seemed for a brief moment of blazing optimism, the final) in a long line of authoritarian leaders of Guatemala. Among its neighbors, Guatemala appeared to be flourishing by the time Árbenz took office, boasting the highest GDP and most stable currency in Central America. However, for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, Guatemala’s economic growth, like that of other young Latin American Republics, fluctuated according to forces outside its own borders, its prosperity pinned to Western demand for its primary commodities and the auspices of foreign capital. At the end of Ubico’s administration, the New Orleans-based United Fruit Company was Guatemala’s largest private landowner and largest employer. Control over land and labor alone could not ensure the UFCO’s chokehold on the Guatemalan economy without the means with which to reliably communicate and transport, and to organize this massive productive venture; the UFCO also maintained control over the country’s telegraph system, two of its three ports, and through its subsidiary, International Railways of Central America (IRCA), 95% of the railway lines crossing Guatemala.

Like many of his predecessors and counterparts across the continent, Ubico was content to allow the acute problem of asymmetrical land ownership fester, orienting the state’s stance as far away from reform and revolution as possible and toward the loving arms of the UFCO and the United States. The authoritarian regime tilled fertile ground for the UFCO’s domination of the Guatemalan economy, quashing economic barriers such as taxes and tariffs while suppressing wages and labor organization. (At home, interestingly enough, UFCO head Sam Zemurray was something of a ‘progressive,’ at least insofar as he was a New Deal supporter and policy contributor.) 

By 1950, 2% of landholders controlled 72% of Guatemala’s arable land. In a primarily rural country where most common people practiced subsistence farming, such an imbalance was not simply unfair - it was deadly, in particular for the historically disenfranchised and impoverished indigenous populations. Large banana and coffee plantations, whose product was picked and stamped for Western corporations and shipped out to Western consumers, dominated Guatemala’s agricultural sectors. Shortly after taking office in 1951, Árbenz decried this state of affairs:

All the riches of Guatemala are not as important as the life, the freedom, the dignity, the health and the happiness of the most humble of its people. How wrong we would be if — mistaking the means for the end — we were to set financial stability and economic growth as the supreme goals of our policy, sacrificing to them the well being of our masses… Our task is to work together in order to produce more wealth… But we must distribute these riches so that those who have less — and they are the immense majority — benefit more.

Árbenz, in short, acknowledged Guatemala’s relatively favorable economic position relative to its neighbors. But what did GDP growth on paper matter to the great masses of Guatemalans deprived of land, food, and the political weight to confront the power of the economy’s largest stakeholders invested in such an impossibly entrenched inequitable arrangement? In June 1952, the administration issued Decree 900, whose goal was to “liquidate feudal property in the countryside and the relations of production that it originates in order to develop the form of exploitation and capitalist methods of production in agriculture and to prepare the way for the industrialization of Guatemala.”

The clear Marxist logic (laying out a productive and social transition from feudalism to capitalism) underlying the language and spirit of the Decree was not accidental. Unlike his predecessor, ‘accusations’ of communist sympathies levelled at Árbenz were not at all unfounded. While Arévalo had moderately suppressed domestic communists and touted instead his own third-way brand of anti communism, Árbenz and his wife, though not communist party members, were behind closed doors “convinced that socialism was the wave of the future.” 

Whether those underlying sympathies were publicly known at the time or not, Árbenz’s administration appeared to morph before American eyes from a vaguely threateningly reformist regime into a rogue land-expropriating revolutionary communist Soviet satellite in a matter of months. Under Decree 900, the Guatemalan government would redistribute hundreds of thousands of acres of “idle,” uncultivated land under lease by the UFCO to landless and near-landless peasants, most of them indigenous people. It also promised state investment in livestock, fertilizer, and technical assistance and increased access to credit and capital to newly-landed peasants. The lands’ previous holders would be compensated, but dispute over the compensated value of these lands became a point of dispute between the state and large stakeholders.

The specter of American hard power had always loomed in the background in support of the UFCO’s ventures in Guatemala and American business ventures throughout Latin America. But it had only directly intervened intermittently in Guatemala until Decree 900, which was an apparently brazen challenge of foreign entitlement to Guatemala’s land, natural riches, and the labor of its people. Intense lobbying within the halls of the U.S. bureaucracy, and in particular the influence of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, gave way in June 1954 to the CIA’s Operation PBSUCCESS to depose Árbenz and install Carlos Castillo Armas, a political exile-turned U.S.-backed caudillo and the first in an ensuing line of Guatemalan dictators. Both John Foster and CIA director Allen Dulles sat on the Board of Directors of the United Fruit Company while serving under the Eisenhower administration, and they and other lobbyists worked to convince the administration that toppling the Árbenz government was prudent in the name of Cold War-era national security.

On June 27, 1954, Árbenz resigned his office and fled Guatemala; he participated in public events in revolutionary Cuba (by some historical accounts it was famously the events that toppled Árbenz in Guatemala that fully radicalized Che Guevara) and rejected overtures from Guatemalan leftists to return home before his death in exile in Mexico City in 1971. Armas’ regime, and the series of military dictatorships that followed, terminated and undid Guatemala’s nascent reformist programs, swinging Guatemala back into the good geopolitical graces of the United States. The domestic situation in Guatemala quickly dissolved into a decades-long civil war.