Jacobo Árbenz with his wife, 1955.
Photo: Public domain / Arquivo Nacional (Brazil), BR_RJANRIO_PH_0_FOT_09300_002

In the sweltering heat of June 1954, as Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas’s ragtag army of a few hundred men crossed into Guatemala from Honduras, few could have predicted the catastrophe about to unfold. What appeared to be a minor Central American insurgency was, in fact, a meticulously orchestrated CIA operation that would topple a democratically elected government and unleash one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern Latin American history.

When bananas meant everything

By the early 1950s, the Boston-based United Fruit Company had turned Guatemala into what critics called a “banana republic” in the most literal sense. The agricultural giant owned 600,000 acres of Guatemalan land – much of it lying fallow – along with the country’s railways, ports, and telegraph system. It was, as historians would later observe, virtually a state within the state.

This cosy arrangement faced its first serious challenge when Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán won Guatemala’s presidency in 1950. A former army officer turned social democrat, Árbenz had witnessed his country’s grotesque inequality firsthand: a tiny elite controlled vast estates while indigenous peasants scraped by on subsistence plots. His solution was Decree 900, a modest land reform programme that would redistribute unused plantation land to landless families.

The reform was hardly radical by European standards. It affected just 1,700 of Guatemala’s 340,000 farms, targeting only large properties that lay idle. But those estates represented roughly half the country’s arable land – and a direct threat to United Fruit’s business model.

When Árbenz moved to expropriate some of United Fruit’s unused holdings, offering compensation based on the company’s own tax declarations, the corporate response was swift and furious. The government offered $1.2m; United Fruit insisted the land was worth $16m. The company had, it emerged, been systematically undervaluing its assets to avoid taxes – a common practice that now backfired spectacularly.

The propaganda machine

What happened next would become a template for corporate influence campaigns. United Fruit hired Edward Bernays, the so-called “father of public relations”, to orchestrate a media blitz painting Guatemala’s elected government as a communist menace. Major American publications – Time, Newsweek, the New York Times – suddenly discovered an urgent threat in America’s backyard.

The campaign found receptive ears in Washington, where McCarthyist paranoia had reached fever pitch. Senator Joseph McCarthy was destroying careers with wild accusations of communist infiltration, creating what one contemporary observer called a climate where “if you step off the curb with your left foot, they accuse you of being a communist”. Even Charlie Chaplin, the beloved British comedian, found himself effectively exiled from America on suspicion of leftist sympathies.

United Fruit’s connections to power ran deep. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had worked for the company’s law firm, as had his brother Allen, now director of the CIA. Both men were “hardly neutral parties”, as historians would later note, when it came to Guatemala policy.

Operation Success

In August 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower authorised Operation PBSUCCESS – a $2.7m covert programme to overthrow Árbenz. The plan reflected the CIA’s growing confidence in “psychological warfare”, a new science that promised to topple governments through propaganda and subterfuge rather than open military intervention.

The operation was ambitious in scope: economic pressure to strangle Guatemala’s imports and exports; black propaganda radio broadcasts spreading panic and disinformation; recruitment of sympathetic elements within the army and church; and preparation of a small invasion force to provide the military fig leaf for what was essentially a destabilisation campaign.

The CIA was particularly enamoured with radio propaganda, having seen its effectiveness in Iran the previous year. The agency created a rebel radio station – the “Voice of Liberation” – that would broadcast false reports of massive armies converging on the capital and imminent government defections. The goal was to create an “outsized illusion” of rebel strength that would panic Árbenz’s supporters into surrender.

Ten days that shattered a democracy

The coup unfolded with devastating efficiency. On 18 June 1954, Castillo Armas’s forces seized a few border towns while CIA-piloted planes conducted terror bombings of military bases and civilian targets. The psychological impact far exceeded the military damage: government forces, bombarded with disinformation and facing what appeared to be overwhelming rebel strength, began to crack.

Inside Guatemala City, conservative military officers pressured Árbenz to resign rather than fight what they believed would be a hopeless war against American-backed forces. On 27 June, the democratically elected president took refuge in the Mexican embassy. A triumphant CIA cable declared: “Success”.

The human cost was immediate and severe. Over 9,000 Guatemalans suspected of supporting Árbenz – politicians, union leaders, peasant organisers – were arrested in the coup’s aftermath. The new regime outlawed political parties and trade unions, dismantled the land reform, and handed expropriated property back to United Fruit and the traditional elite.

The price of intervention

What followed was one of the most tragic chapters in Latin American history. Guatemala’s brief democratic experiment gave way to decades of military dictatorship. When leftist guerrillas took up arms in the 1960s, the response was overwhelming state terror: death squads operating from unmarked vehicles, bodies dumped in public as warnings, systematic campaigns of torture and disappearance.

The violence reached genocidal proportions in the 1980s, when the military waged scorched-earth warfare against indigenous Maya communities suspected of supporting rebels. Entire villages were wiped out; survivors spoke of helicopters dropping mutilated corpses to terrorise the population.

By the time peace accords were signed in 1996, more than 200,000 Guatemalans had been killed or disappeared – over 90% at the hands of US-backed security forces. A UN truth commission would later conclude that the military had committed acts of genocide against the country’s indigenous population.