U.S. Foreign Policy toward Radical Change: Covert Operations in Guatemala, 1950-1954

Abstract

Gordon L. Bowen* In June 1954 the elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown, ushering in thirty years of dictatorial and pseudodemocratic government. How did the Guatemalan affair happen? What was behind the U.S. role in the coup? These are immediate concerns of this and other new research on the subject. At a rudimentary level, both internal and external forces were involved in the overthrow of the Arbenz regime. The pivotal role of the armed forces in that event can be attributed to their growing alienation from the governments of President Juan Jose Arevalo (1945-1951) and Arbenz. The initial resistance of the more traditional group within the armed forces, the line officers, to the institution of popular democratic government in 1944 was mollified under President Arevalo by the continuation of a leading older line officer, Colonel Francisco Xavier Arana, as chief of staff of the armed forces. But when Colonel Jacobo Arbenz succeeded Arevalo in 1951 (following a campaign in which Arbenz' opponent, Colonel Arana, was assassinated and a rebellion by Arana's supporters suppressed), he favored a group of younger, technically trained officers with rapid promotion into political and government positions. This not only antagonized the older professional officers, but also, ironically, diluted the military effectiveness of officers loyal to him by placing them in essentially civilian positions. At the same time, a growing body of scholarship (Schlesinger and Kinzer, 1982; Immerman, 1980-1981; Cook, 1981; Blasier, 1976; Jonas, 1974b) has documented that a significant role also was played by the government of the United States in the fall of Arbenz. But beyond the shared perceptions that the Guatemalan affair deeply influenced Guatemala and that international politics in the Caribbean-Central American region were affected, little consensus exists among scholars regarding the U.S. role. Much of the controversy in the new research concerns the degree of importance of the United States in the coup and the degree to which United States should be seen primarily as a capitalist actor, riding roughshod to

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