Guatemalan Coup of 1954: The CIA's Operation PBSuccess

The Guatemalan coup of 1954 overthrew the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz in a covert operation organised by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), code-named PBSuccess. Between 18 and 27 June 1954 a small rebel force invaded from Honduras, backed by air raids and radio propaganda, and the Guatemalan army forced Arbenz to resign. The coup ended a decade of reform and opened a long period of military rule and civil war.

Background: the Guatemalan Revolution

In October 1944 a popular uprising ended the long dictatorship of Jorge Ubico and his short-lived successor. The new president, Juan José Arévalo, elected in 1944, introduced a labour code, social security and wider political freedoms. Guatemalans call the years from 1944 to 1954 the “Ten Years of Spring”.

Land was the country’s central problem. A small elite and foreign companies owned most of the farmland, while most rural people, many of them Indigenous Maya, had little or none. The largest landowner was the US-based United Fruit Company, which also controlled the main railway and the port of Puerto Barrios.

Jacobo Arbenz, an army officer and former defence minister, won the presidential election of 1950 and took office in March 1951. He promised to modernise the economy and reduce dependence on foreign companies. His plans included a state-built highway to the Atlantic coast and a new port at Santo Tomás, designed to break the monopolies held by United Fruit and its associated railway company over transport and exports.

Land reform and United Fruit

In June 1952 Congress passed Decree 900, the Agrarian Reform Law. It allowed the government to expropriate uncultivated land on large estates and distribute it to peasants, paying compensation in bonds based on the value owners had declared for tax purposes. An estimated 500,000 people received land in less than two years.

United Fruit kept most of its plantations idle as reserves, and hundreds of thousands of acres were taken. The government offered compensation of about 627,000 dollars, matching the company’s own tax declarations; the US State Department, on United Fruit’s behalf, demanded nearly 16 million dollars.

The company had close ties to the Eisenhower administration and ran an effective public relations campaign in the United States portraying Guatemala as a Soviet foothold. Arbenz did allow the small communist Guatemalan Labour Party to operate and some of its members were among his advisers, although communists held no cabinet posts.

Planning PBSuccess

An earlier CIA plan, Operation PBFortune, was cancelled in 1952 under President Truman. In August 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a new operation. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, saw it as a test of the policy of containing communism, an extension of the Truman Doctrine.

The CIA chose Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, an exiled officer, to lead a “liberation army” trained in Honduras and Nicaragua. In March 1954 the United States won a broad anti-communist resolution at the Inter-American Conference in Caracas. In May 1954 the Swedish ship Alfhem delivered a cargo of Czechoslovak weapons to Guatemala, which Washington presented as proof of Soviet involvement.

What happened

On 18 June 1954 Castillo Armas crossed from Honduras with a force usually estimated at around 480 men. Militarily it was weak, and some of its columns were quickly defeated. The CIA’s main weapons were psychological. A clandestine radio station, the Voice of Liberation, broadcast reports of large rebel armies, and a handful of CIA-supplied aircraft bombed and strafed targets including Guatemala City.

Guatemala appealed to the United Nations Security Council, which on 20 June called for an end to the fighting. A further proposal to send an investigating mission was blocked, with the United States arguing that the matter belonged to the Organization of American States. On 27 June a CIA-supplied plane sank the British cargo ship Springfjord at the Pacific port of San José, wrongly believing it was carrying arms or fuel for the government.

The decisive factor was the Guatemalan army. Its officers feared that defeating Castillo Armas would lead to a direct US invasion, and they refused to arm civilian militias loyal to the president. Under pressure from the army and from US ambassador John Peurifoy, Arbenz resigned on 27 June 1954 and announced his decision on the radio.

Power passed through several short-lived military juntas. With Peurifoy’s mediation, Castillo Armas joined the ruling junta in early July and soon became president.

Key people

• Jacobo Arbenz (1913–1971), son of a Swiss immigrant pharmacist, was one of the young officers who led the 1944 revolution. As president he made land reform the centre of his programme.
• Carlos Castillo Armas (1914–1957), an army colonel who had led a failed revolt in 1950, was chosen by the CIA to head the rebel force and became president after the coup.
• John Foster Dulles (1888–1959), US Secretary of State, regarded Guatemala as a dangerous communist beachhead in the Western Hemisphere. His law firm had earlier done work for United Fruit.
• Allen Dulles (1893–1969), director of the CIA and John Foster’s brother, oversaw PBSuccess, with Frank Wisner, the head of covert operations, directing it in detail.
• John Peurifoy (1907–1955), US ambassador to Guatemala from late 1953, pressed the army to abandon Arbenz and mediated between the juntas that followed.

Consequences

Castillo Armas reversed the land reform, returning most expropriated land to its former owners, including United Fruit. Thousands of people were arrested, unions and peasant leagues were dissolved, and illiterate people were stripped of the vote. Castillo Armas was assassinated in July 1957.

Arbenz took refuge in the Mexican embassy and left the country later in 1954, humiliatingly searched before he boarded his plane. He lived in exile in Europe, Uruguay and Mexico, where he died in 1971. In 2011 the Guatemalan government formally apologised to his family.

Guatemala fell into a cycle of military rule, guerrilla insurgency and repression. The civil war from 1960 to 1996 killed or disappeared an estimated 200,000 people, most of them Maya civilians, according to the UN-backed Historical Clarification Commission.

Legacy

In Washington, PBSuccess was seen as a cheap success after the 1953 Iranian coup, and its methods were reused in planning the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, which failed. Across Latin America the coup fed lasting suspicion of US intervention. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who witnessed the coup in Guatemala City, drew the lesson that reformist governments needed armed support.

Declassified CIA records, released from the late 1990s onwards, confirmed the agency’s central role, including planning that considered the assassination of Guatemalan officials.

Timeline

• 1944, October: A revolution overthrows the Ubico regime.
• 1951, 15 March: Jacobo Arbenz becomes president.
• 1952, 17 June: Decree 900, the Agrarian Reform Law, is passed.
• 1953, August: Eisenhower approves Operation PBSuccess.
• 1954, 15 May: The ship Alfhem lands Czechoslovak arms at Puerto Barrios.
• 1954, 18 June: Castillo Armas’s force crosses from Honduras.
• 1954, 27 June: Arbenz resigns.
• 1957, 26 July: Castillo Armas is assassinated.
• 1960: The Guatemalan civil war begins, lasting until 1996.

Why it matters

The 1954 coup ended Guatemala’s first experiment with democratic reform and land redistribution and opened decades of authoritarian rule and violence. It was one of the clearest Cold War cases of covert US intervention in Latin America, and its memory still shapes debates about sovereignty, land and foreign influence in the region.