Guatemala: CIA's Banana Revolt
WELL, BOYS," Ambassador John E. Peurifoy told his assembled staff, "tomorrow at this time we'll have ourselves a pig party."
The scene was the American Embassy on Octava Avenida in Guatemala City, and the unlikely ambassadorial quote was clearly recalled by one of the participants in the meeting. The date was June 18, 1954. The CIA's coup against the Communist-dominated regime of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman had begun. That afternoon, Colonel Carlos Castillo-Armas, a U.S.-trained Guatemalan exile, had crossed the border from Honduras with about 150 men. Now the invasion was on. It had the full advance approval of President Eisenhower.
Peurifoy, a tough but soft-spoken South Carolinian, was overly optimistic. His party to celebrate Arbenz's downfall had to be postponed for two weeks. What the CIA had planned as an overnight coup dragged on for twelve difficult days. Before it had ended, Peurifoy was deeply involved in political cloak-and-dagger maneuvering. And the President of the United States, over the objections of the State Department, found it necessary, clandestinely, to send in three more fighter planes to bailout the CIA's banana revolt.
Unlike the Bay of Pigs, the 1954 Guatemalan operation succeeded. Like Iran the year before, Guatemala was one of the CIA's early triumphs in the field of overthrowing governments. Some of those who participated have begun to say so openly.
On June 10, 1963, in Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower made a little-reported but extraordinary speech. The former President for the first time conceded, for all practical purposes, that the United States had overthrown the government of Guatemala in 1954. "There was one time," he said, "when we had a very desperate situation, or we thought it was at least, in Central America, and we had to get rid of a Communist government which had taken over, and our early efforts were defeated by a bad accident and we had to help, send some help right away." 1
Eisenhower did not mention Guatemala by name, but his meaning was perfectly clear, particularly since he shared the speaker's platform with Allen Dulles, his Director of Central Intelligence.
What the ex-President was referring to was this: Four days after Peurifoy's ebullient prediction to the embassy staff in Guatemala City, Eisenhower was told that disaster had overtaken the CIA's modest air force, which consisted of a few World War II P-47 Thunderbolts. One had been shot up in action, and another had crashed. The Thunderbolts had been bombing Guatemala City to encourage Arbenz to vacate the Presidential Palace.
Allen Dulles wanted the planes replaced immediately. Henry F. Holland, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, was aghast. Providing the CIA with planes for Castillo-Armas was one thing before the invasion had actually started. But doing so now, Holland felt, would expose the United States to the hated charge of intervention in Latin American affairs. News of the President's action might leak out, Holland reasoned.
Allen Dulles, however, felt there could be no stopping now. Many months of careful preparation had gone into the Castillo-Armas invasion. Jerry Fred DeLarm, a World War II American fighter pilot who was flying one of the P-47s for the CIA, had enjoyed astonishing success in his raids on Guatemala so far.
A White House meeting was scheduled in the afternoon to discuss the question of the planes.
"Now different people, including Mr. Dulles and a member of the State Department and so on, came into my office to give their differing views," Eisenhower recalled in his 1963 speech.
"And the man [i] who opposed going any further was very vehement in his representation and he wanted no part. He thought we should stop right there, wash our hands of the thing and let it stand right there. Well, Mr. Dulles was on the other side. And when all of the views were presented, I decided we would go ahead and the orders went out [to send more planes].
"... I said to Mr. Dulles ... before I made this decision I said 'What are the chances that this will succeed?' Well, he said he thought about twenty percent. I told him later, 'If you'd have said ninety percent, I'd have said no, but you seemed to be honest.'
"He told me later, 'Well, you know, I knew that my opponent had lost the argument because he came in your office with three law books under his arm.'"
While campaigning in the 1960 and 1962 elections, Senator Thruston B. Morton, the Kentucky Republican, had spoken just as freely about Eisenhower's role in the Guatemala coup. Morton's remarks in Kentucky did not gain national attention, however, until he repeated them at a party dinner in Baltimore in February, 1963, and on a television program.
Whiting Willauer, Ambassador to Honduras during the Guatemala coup, had openly discussed the CIA's role as far back as 1961. In little-noticed testimony before a Senate Committee 2 Willauer said that after the Guatemala coup, "I received a telegram from Allen Dulles in which he stated in effect that the revolution could not have succeeded but for what I did. I am very proud of that telegram."
Then the questioning went as follows:
Q. Mr. Ambassador, was there something of a team in working to overthrow the Arbenz government in Guatemala, or were you alone in that operation?
A. There was a team.
Q. Jack Peurifoy was down there?
A. Yes, Jack was on the team over in Guatemala; that is the principal man, and we had Bob Hill, Ambassador Robert Hill, in Costa Rica ... and we had Ambassador Tom Whelan in Nicaragua, where a lot of the activities were going. And, of course, there were a number of CIA operatives in the picture.
Q. What was Mr. Dulles' involvement in that area?
A. Mr. Allen Dulles?
Q. Yes.
A. Well, the CIA was helping to equip and train the anti-Communist revolutionary forces.
Q. Would you say you were the man in charge in the field in this general area of all these operations?
A. I certainly was called upon to perform very important duties, particularly to keep the Honduran Government -- which was scared to death about the possibilities of themselves being overthrown -- keep them in line so they would allow this revolutionary activity to continue, based in Honduras.
The former ambassador was amazingly explicit in his testimony about the coup in Guatemala, a land best known to the outside world for coffee, bananas and the quetzal, which is both its national bird and the name of its monetary unit.
About 60 percent of Guatemala's population of 3,800,000 is Indian. The Indians are Mayas, descendants of the highly sophisticated culture that flourished a thousand years before the Spanish conquistadors came and ruled all of Central America from the Guatemalan city of Antigua. The rest of the population is of mixed Spanish and Indian descent. These are the ladinos. The Indians are largely illiterate; they provide a cheap labor force and have little communication with the ladinos.
Guatemala is a truly feudal state. About 2 percent of the population owns more than 70 percent of the land. For decades the most important two words in Guatemala have been la Frutera, the United Fruit Company. The American banana company owned and ran as a fiefdom hundreds of square miles of land in Bananera and Tiquisate. It was also a major stockholder in the country's railroad -- and a ready-made gringo political target.
When Arbenz took office in March, 1951, one of the first demands he faced came from coffee workers, who insisted that their minimum wages be doubled. This might seem unreasonable except for the fact that their pay was forty cents a day. The labor unions also demanded more for United Fruit's banana workers, who were paid $1.36 a day.
A bold student revolt had ousted Dictator Jorge Ubico in 1944. After that, President Juan Jose Arevalo, a socialist who turned violently anti-American, paved the way for Arbenz and the Communists.
Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, a professional Army officer, was the son of a Swiss father who migrated to Guatemala and became a druggist. (It was later rather widely whispered that Arbenz himself took drugs.) As President, Arbenz in 1952 tried to do something about the country's lopsided land ownership. He pushed through a land-reform program, but, predictably, it ended with small farmers, large finca owners and the United Fruit Company up in arms.
With his high-pitched voice and bad temper, Arbenz was no crowd-pleaser. And the students, always a powerful factor in Latin America, ridiculed him. The students had an annual lampooning parade, the Huelga de Dolores (grievance strike) of which Guatemalan officials lived in horror. Not long before Arbenz's fall from power, the students paraded by with a float that showed Uncle Sam poking a Guatemalan Indian lady with a banana; Arbenz and his hypodermic needle lurked behind a Russian bear, prodding the Guatemalan lady from the other direction. It about summed up the political situation.
For the bear was loose in the banana groves, all right. To maintain his power, Arbenz turned more and more to the Communists. Just as there is debate over whether Castro started out a Communist or became one later, there has been some dispute over the political evolution of Arbenz. But there is little dispute that by 1954 the Communists were running Guatemala. They had gained a foothold and a base in the hemisphere.
Arbenz made one fatal mistake, however. He trusted the Guatemalan Army, an essentially peace- loving organization little inclined to unnecessary strife and combat. Unlike Castro, Arbenz did not penetrate the Army politically, and when he needed it most, it turned on him. Late in the game he had placed spies, popularly known as orejas (the Ears), in various Army posts, but it was too late.
He made one other big mistake -- he expropriated 225,000 acres of United Fruit's best Pacific-slope holdings. Later the Arbenz regime charged that the United States had supported the Castillo-Armas invasion to protect la Frutera's $40,000,000 investment in Guatemala.
In the era of the Cold War, keeping Soviet power and influence out of the hemisphere, and particularly out of the Panama Canal area, was far more important to Washington than old-style banana diplomacy. But certainly the seizure of United Fruit's holdings without adequate compensation forced Eisenhower to take action. And it was one more indication of the direction things were taking in Guatemala.
Although a shipment of Czech arms to Guatemala in May, 1954, was later widely cited as the reason for the CIA-organized coup, the fact is that the machinery to topple Arbenz had been set in motion long before that.
Late in 1953 John Emil Peurifoy arrived on the scene. Peurifoy, known as "Smiling Jack" around the embassy in Guatemala (although not to his face), was a small-town boy from Walterboro, South Carolina, who had enjoyed a phenomenal rise in the State Department. This may not have been unrelated to the fact that his father was once an associate of the powerful James F. Byrnes, who was a senator at the time Peurifoy landed his first job with the State Department in 1938.
Peurifoy was proud of the fact that he once ran the Capitol elevator and equally proud of his small- town background. "Why, that town was so small," he was fond of saying, "you could drive right through it and not know you had been theah."
Beneath his courtly Old South exterior, Peurifoy was tough. He had been through hard times in the depression years. He quit West Point, knocked about the country for a while, became assistant manager and cashier of the Childs restaurant chain in New York, ran the elevator in Congress, watered plants at Washington's Botanical gardens and held a variety of other odd jobs before becoming a diplomat.
He never bothered to learn foreign languages, although in Guatemala he would occasionally wave to the crowd, smile and say "Amigo!" Fresh from Greece, where he had helped shore up that country after its war with the Communists, Peurifoy was just the man to have on the scene if there was to be trouble in the land of the quetzal bird.
And there was to be trouble. It was already brewing. Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, who later became Guatemala's President, was in exile in El Salvador early in 1954. In his recent book, Ydigoras wrote:
"A former executive of the United Fruit Company, now retired, Mr. Walter Turnbull, came to see me with two gentlemen whom he introduced as agents of the CIA. They said that I was a popular figure in Guatemala and that they wanted to lend their assistance to overthrow Arbenz. When I asked their conditions for the assistance I found them unacceptable. Among other things, I was to promise to favor the United Fruit Company and the International Railways of Central America; to destroy the railroad workers labor union; ... to establish a strong-arm government, on the style of Ubico. Further, I was to pay back every cent that was invested in the undertaking." 3
By late 1953 Eisenhower had reached his decision: Arbenz must go. To implement this decision, he turned to the CIA and Allen Dulles. A plan was evolved.
Peurifoy's assignment to Guatemala was part of it. Eisenhower's election had left Peurifoy without any political backing. His diplomatic career seemed over. The CIA went to Peurifoy and persuaded him to join the operation as Ambassador to Guatemala. At first, Peurifoy was leery of the idea, but a persuasive CIA official convinced him that the operation offered him his big chance to revitalize his career. Peurifoy said yes; the CIA arranged his ambassadorial appointment. In February, 1954, Eisenhower called in a former high United States diplomat to serve as a secret civilian adviser to the operation. The President had also asked his brother, Dr. Milton Eisenhower, to join the clandestine operation, but Milton, pleading his wife's serious illness at the time, did not participate.
Henry Holland, as the State Department Latin Chief, was privy to the operation. So were the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So was Senator Thruston B. Morton, then Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations.
Although Dulles and his deputy, General Cabell, were in charge of the CIA's participation, the major immediate responsibility for carrying out the Guatemalan operation was placed in the hands of Frank G. Wisner, the Mississippi-born CIA deputy director for plans. (He was Bissell's predecessor.)
Wisner, a dedicated and hard-driving "black" operator, was an old hand in the intelligence business. In World War II he had been the OSS mission chief in Istanbul and Bucharest. He also worked for the OSS in Germany. After the war, commuting from his home in the suburbs to his Manhattan law firm, Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, seemed dull compared to the days of wartime intrigue along the Bosporus. On November 12, 1947, it was announced that Frank Wisner had been named Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.
Now, in Guatemala in 1954, what Wisner and the CIA needed was someone to serve as a leader of the coup and a focal point around which anti-Arbenz Guatemalans could rally. The man chosen was Colonel Carlos Castillo-Armas, a dapper, dedicated and ascetic-looking career officer who had tunneled his way out of prison to freedom after leading an unsuccessful revolt against Arbenz in 1950.
Castillo-Armas set up headquarters in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and with the CIA's help, began plotting to return to his homeland. A onetime classmate of Arbenz at the Escuela Politecnica, Guatemala's military school, Castillo-Armas had spent two years just after World War II at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The first evidence that the plot was afoot came on January 29, 1954, when Guatemala released intercepted correspondence between Castillo-Armas and Ydigoras.
The Guatemalan charges had a basis in fact, because the two exile leaders had been in touch and had signed a Pacto de Caballeros (gentlemen's agreement) at the border between El Salvador and Honduras. The pact provided that there would be a coup, and then free elections.
Guatemala charged that the plot was centered in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, and enjoyed the support of President Anastasio Somoza and of General Rafael L. Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. The Arbenz government also surmised that the "government of the North" had endorsed the plan.
It charged that the operation was known by the code name El Diablo (the Devil) and that training of rebels was going forward at El Tamarindo, President Somoza's plantation, at Puerto Cabezas (which became the air base for the Bay of Pigs operation seven years later) and on the island of Momotombito in Lake Managua.
The Guatemalan Government also charged that a "Colonel Carl T. Struder" who "was retired" from the U .S. Army, was training the sabotage teams. It said that arms were coming from H. F. Cordes & Company, in Hamburg, West Germany. State Department officials in Washington said they would not comment because that would "give the story a dignity it doesn't deserve."
But the training of Castillo-Armas' forces was in fact taking place on Momotombito, a volcanic island (actually the top of a volcano) which had earned its sonorous name from the sound the Indians thought it made when it rumbled. And "Tacho" Somoza, Nicaragua's President, was indeed heavily involved in the plans to overthrow Arbenz. In Nicaragua the training was directed by a CIA officer who went under the name of "Colonel Rutherford."
The most powerful military element in the coup was the CIA's air force. The handful of P-47 Thunderbolts and C-47 transports operated out of Managua International Airport. The pilots were Americans. The most dare-devil of these, as events later proved, was Jerry Fred DeLarm, a slim, short, hawk-featured man who liked to lay a .45 down on the table in front of him when talking to a stranger.
DeLarm, a native of San Francisco, was a barnstorming, adventurous flier well known in Central America. He had been flying in the area since he was nine, with his father, a pioneer pilot named Eddie DeLarm. Jerry DeLarm spoke Spanish fluently. When World War II broke out, he was flying in Panama City. During the war he shot down two Japanese Zeros over Saipan. He was discharged as a captain and shortly thereafter set up an airline in Costa Rica.
DeLarm's wife was related to Dr. Rafael Calderon-Guardia, the former President of Costa Rica. In 1948, when Otilio Ulate was elected President of that highly democratic nation, Calderon-Guardia tried to block him from taking office. In the revolt that followed, Jose Figueres battled Calderon- Guardia, and emerged as head of a victorious junta.
DeLarm fought on the losing side, for Calderon-Guardia. He flew a DC-3 rigged up with a machine gun in the co-pilot seat and another poking through the floor of the rear bathroom, for ground strafing.
After Costa Rica, DeLarm moved on to Guatemala. During the election of 1950 he took a job doing sky-writing and aerial broadcasts for Arbenz. He was promised $20,000 by the man he later helped to overthrow, and was understandably disturbed when the money did not come through after Arbenz won. That, DeLarm reflected later, was when he first began to suspect Arbenz was a Communist.
By 1954 DeLarm was flying for Castillo-Armas and the CIA. Until shortly before the invasion, he remained behind in Guatemala City, giving flying lessons and using this and an automobile dealership as cover. He had the code name "Rosebinda."
Meanwhile, events were moving in the public arena as well. John Foster Dulles and Henry Holland led the American delegation to the tenth Inter-American conference at Caracas in March. Dulles pushed for an anti-Communist resolution aimed squarely at Guatemala. Arbenz's foreign minister, Guillermo Toriello, angrily accused Foster Dulles of trying to create a "banana curtain." But the American resolution passed, seventeen to one, with Guatemala in opposition.
In May matters began moving to a climax. The CIA learned that a shipload of Czech arms, delivered through Poland, was on its way to Guatemala. The estimated 2,000 tons of rifles, machine guns and other armaments were aboard the Swedish freighter M/S Alfhem, en route from the Polish port of Stettin on the Baltic Sea.
The Alfhem operated out of Uddevalla, Sweden, and her owner was Angbats, Bohuslanska & Kusten, Inc. But Czech funds paid for a "straw charter" of the Alfhem, through the British firm of E. E. Dean in London. And the ship was taking a route to Guatemala as roundabout as its intricate charter arrangements. It sailed first to Dakar, then to Curacao, then to Honduras and finally to Puerto Barrios, on the east coast of Guatemala, where it docked on May 15.
The CIA had a difficult time tracking the arms ship across the vast Atlantic. At the time, it knew everything about the ship except its name: Alfhem. That made tracking difficult, since the freighter was playing hide-and-seek. Although the CIA had the help of the Navy, the agency lost the ship as it was going south along the African coast. It didn't catch up with the Alfhem until it turned up at dock side in Guatemala.
The State Department revealed the arms shipment on May 17. A week later the United States announced that as a countermeasure, it had begun shipping arms to Nicaragua in giant Globemaster planes. At least fifty tons of small arms and machine guns were flown in to "Tacho" Somoza.
But Eisenhower's efforts to get the Western Allies to join a quarantine on arms shipments to Guatemala met with less than a rousing success. The United States drew a protest from the Dutch when it searched the freighter Wulfbrook at San Juan, Puerto Rico. Britain refused to allow its ships to be searched.
On June 7, with the invasion date approaching rapidly, a strange event took place in Guatemala. It was disclosed that Ferdinand F. Schupp, identified as a "former deputy chief of the United States Air Force Mission" in Guatemala, had fled the country along with Colonel Rodolfo Mendoza Azurdia, the ex-chief of the Guatemalan Air Force.
The United States Embassy announced that Schupp had "resigned" his embassy post in 1952 to go into a "farming project" in southern Guatemala. Later, Schupp turned up in Guatemala City, like Jerry DeLarm, giving flying lessons. It is believed that Mendoza took off in a private plane on a seemingly routine flight and stopped off in a pasture to pick up Schupp. The two landed in El Salvador and asked for "asylum."
The CIA's air operation was drawing closer to readiness. Mendoza and Schupp had escaped to join it. A few days before Castillo-Armas crossed the border, DeLarm also slipped out of Guatemala, aboard a regular Pan American flight.
On June 8 Foster Dulles branded "totally false" Guatemalan charges that the United Fruit Company was at the heart of the dispute between Guatemala and Washington. Dulles said the Communist problem would remain even "if they gave a gold piece for every banana."
A couple of days before the invasion commenced the Secretary of State invited Thruston Morton to a White House meeting. As Assistant Secretary for Congressional Relations, Morton was aware of the CIA operation, since it had been his task to brief a few key senators about its true nature.
"You' d better come along," Secretary Dulles told Morton, "because if this thing blows up and goes wrong, you're going to have to straighten things out for us on the Hill."
Morton went along. The breakfast meeting with Eisenhower took place in the second-floor dining room of the White House. Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers, representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other aides were present, as Morton later recalled it. He said Eisenhower had asked the men around the table: "Are you sure this is going to succeed?" Told that it would, Eisenhower responded: "I'm prepared to take any steps that are necessary to see that it succeeds. For if it succeeds, it's the people of Guatemala throwing off the yoke of Communism. If it fails, the flag of the United States has failed."
It is generally agreed by the participants, however, that at no point in the invasion planning did Eisenhower ever discuss sending in United States armed forces should the CIA operation fail.
On June 18 Castillo-Armas and his small "Army of Liberation" crossed the border into Guatemala from Honduras. He drove in a battered station wagon, leading his men down the road to Esquipulas. Before dawn the P-47s had bombed San Jose, Guatemala's major port on the Pacific coast.
In Guatemala City the government announced the invasion had begun. In Washington the State Department said it had been in touch with Peurifoy. It added blandly: "The department has no evidence ... that this is anything other than a revolt of Guatemalans against the government."
Newsmen from all over the world converged on Guatemala and Honduras -- only to discover that there was no war to cover. Castillo-Armas and his Liberation Army settled down six miles over the border in Esquipulas, the site of the Church of the Black Christ, the country's major religious shrine. The strategy was to wait for the Arbenz regime to collapse. Then the invaders would march triumphantly into Guatemala City.
With the Army of Liberation bogged down just inside the Guatemalan border, "Tacho" Somoza decided to invite Ydigoras to lunch with him at the Presidential Palace in Managua to discuss the situation. "Tacho" introduced Ydigoras to "Colonel Rutherford," and added: "He is just back from Korea."
"Tacho" was standing in front of a map with pins in it showing the disposition of the Castillo-Armas columns. Four of the pins were in the shape of airplanes. The Nicaraguan President was bitterly complaining about how slowly the freedom forces were advancing.
"What kind of a crummy military school did Castillo Armas go to?" Somoza asked.
"The same one I did," Ydigoras replied mildly.
The most active of the planes represented by the pins on "Tacho's" map was that of DeLarm. On the first day of the invasion he dropped propaganda leaflets on Guatemala City, but had orders not to fire or drop any bombs. On subsequent raids on the capital, however, he bombed and strafed several targets, effectively demoralizing the government leaders.
The CIA's planes became known among the Guatemalan populace as Sulfatos -- the Guatemalan word for laxative -- because of the alleged effect their appearance had upon the Arbenz officials.
Then disaster struck the CIA's force of P-47s, when one was shot full of holes and another cracked up. On June 20 the Guatemalan Government charged in the UN that two American fliers had crash-landed in Tapachula, Mexico, after having bombed the Guatemalan city of Coban. [ii]
On the same day the Guatemalan Government was voicing its charge in the UN about American fliers, Henry Cabot Lodge, the United States Ambassador to the world organization, denied categorically that his government was behind the invasion. "The situation does not involve aggression but is a revolt of Guatemalans against Guatemalans," he stated.
It was about this time that Allen Dulles mafe an urgent appeal for more airplanes. This led to the meeting of Eisenhower, Allen Dulles and Henry Holland, whose legalistic objections were overruled.
What Eisenhower did not say in his speech relating to this incident, is that the planes had to be "sold" by the U.S. Air Force to the government of Nicaragua in order to mask United States participation, which was surfacing at the UN. As cover for the transaction, Nicaragua had to put down $150,000 in cash to purchase the planes. After some interesting financial legerdemain, Nicaraguan Ambassador to Washington Guillermo Sevilla-Sacasa managed to come up with cover payment, and the new planes were dispatched to Nicaragua. Ultimately, it was CIA money that paid for them. The planes were flown down unarmed, to be armed upon arrival.
At one point during the trouble over the airplanes, General Cabell, the CIA deputy director, learned that one of the P-47s had been shipped to Nicaragua minus a landing-gear wheel. The plane could not operate without it. The U.S. Air Force rushed the part down and the Thunderbolt flew in the invasion.
On June 24, two days after the secret White House meeting, a P-47 swooped over Guatemala City, strafed gasoline stores and knocked out a radio station. It was not, as luck would have it, the Communist station, but a Protestant missionary station operated by Harold Yon Broekhoven, an evangelist from Passaic, New Jersey.
In New York, a spokesman for the United Fruit Company said that banana harvesting was at a standstill because of the war. He said they were keeping in close touch with the company manager in Guatemala City, Mr. Almyr Bump. The spokesman added confidently: "It is classical in these revolutionary movements down there that they confine themselves to national versus national, and Americans who stand on the sidelines and keep out of the way should be in no great danger."
American newsmen were certainly in no great danger. Castillo-Armas, as New York Herald Tribune correspondent Homer Bigart reported, clearly did not want them hanging around Esquipulas. Bigart had to retreat across the frontier to Nueva Ocotepeque, Honduras, which the newsmen referred to more conveniently as "New Octopus."
Defying the Army of Liberation ban, Evelyn Irons, a correspondent for the London Evening Standard, rented a mule and loped down the road to Esquipulas. There, Castillo-Armas stopped her. He would not allow her to proceed to the front, which had by now moved to Chiquimula. Nevertheless, Miss Irons had scooped her competitors, and mule prices in Nueva Ocotepeque soared.
But under the air attack, Arbenz was losing his nerve. The defection of Mendoza, the Air Force chief, was proving to be a key factor, because it demoralized the Guatemalan Air Force. It became so unreliable that Arbenz grounded his own planes.
At the front, Arbenz' reluctant Army commanders sent back messages saying that their forces were being overwhelmed by the invaders. It wasn't true, but it had a psychological effect on Arbenz. The CIA was reading the traffic from the front, and it knew what messages Arbenz was receiving. CIA clandestine radio operators intercepted the military communications and fed back false messages on the same wave length to further confuse the situation.
On June 25 a P-47 raided Guatemala City again. On June 27 Arbenz capitulated, following a long day of maneuvering by Peurifoy. The American ambassador first met at the palace with Foreign Minister Toriello. Then he conferred with Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz, the chief of the Guatemalan armed forces, and a group of ranking colonels. By nightfall Arbenz was on the air broadcasting his resignation. Colonel Diaz became head of the junta that took over. He made an immediate tactical error.
Diaz, whose nickname was Pollo Triste (Sad Chicken), went on the air and announced: "The struggle against the mercenary invaders of Guatemala will not abate. Colonel Arbenz had done what he thought was his duty. I shall carry on."
This would never do. Diaz was operating on the radical assumption that it was his duty to fight when his country was invaded.
Peurifoy instantly recognized that this would be a disaster. If the junta, to which the State Department's ambassador had given at least his tacit blessing, went out to fight the CIA's Army of Liberation, it would be a fine spectacle. What would Henry Holland and Frank Wisner say?
Peurifoy put on a "siren" suit, strapped a .45 to his belt, and began maneuvering to topple Diaz. The CIA, which of course wanted Diaz out, nevertheless felt that Peurifoy was making himself entirely too conspicuous for the good of the operation.
The next day Jerry DeLarm bombed Guatemala City in earnest. He knocked out the radio station (the right one) and then dropped two bombs right in the middle of Fort Matamoros, the major installation of the Guatemalan Army.
That did it. Diaz, President for one day, was ousted at the point of machine guns (according to one account) by Colonel Elfego Monzon. With two other colonels, Monzon took over as head of a new, less bellicose junta, acceptable to Peurifoy.
The war was over.
But the CIA and the State Department were worried that it might break out again at any moment. Peace talks between Monzon and Castillo-Armas were scheduled to take place in El Salvador. Washington gave Peurifoy carte blanche to bring the junta and the CIA's Castillo-Armas together.
"They want me to go over there to El Salvador," Peurifoy confided to an aide, "and knock heads together."
With the Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Gennaro Verolino, the American ambassador flew off to El Salvador for the talks. On July 2, with tearful if cautious embraces, Monzon and Castillo-Armas signed a peace pact. It left Monzon top man, but only until the junta voted formally on a chief. The deal was signed in the Hall of Honor in the Presidential Palace. Castillo-Armas then flew back to Chiquimula to convince his followers that it was not a sellout to Monzon.
The next day Castillo-Armas came home to a huge welcome in Guatemala City. He arrived not at the head of his conquering troops, however, but in Peurifoy's embassy plane.
Meanwhile John Foster Dulles addressed the United States on radio and television. He said the struggle in Guatemala exposed the "evil purpose of the Kremlin" to find "nesting places" in the Americas and added: "Led by Colonel Castillo-Armas, patriots arose in Guatemala to challenge the Communist leadership -- and to change it. Thus the situation is being cured by the Guatemalans themselves." 4
If the CIA's coup had routed Communism in Guatemala, democracy is not what followed in its wake. As its first act, the ruling junta canceled the right of illiterates to vote, thereby disenfranchising in one stroke about 70 percent of Guatemala's population -- almost all the Indians.
The junta elected Castillo-Armas as its President on July 8. In August the liberator suspended all constitutional guarantees. The ideological basis of the coup was further undercut when the chief CIA man in Guatemala quit the agency and went into the cement business there. The free election Castillo-Armas had promised when Arbenz fell turned out to be "si" or "no" vote on whether to continue Castillo-Armas as President. Castillo-Armas won.
In rapid succession, the new regime set up a Robespierre-like Committee for Defense Against Communism with sweeping police-state powers. The government took back 800,000 acres of land from the peasants, returned to United Fruit the land Arbenz had seized, and repealed amendments to a 1947 law that had guaranteed rights to workers and labor unions.
Within a week of Castillo-Arrnas' election as head of the junta, the new government announced it had arrested 4,000 persons on suspicion of Communist activity. By August it had passed the Preventive Penal Law Against Communism. This set up the Defense Committee, which met in secret and could declare anyone a Communist with no right of appeal.
Those registered by the committee could be arbitrarily arrested for periods up to six months; they could not own radios or hold public office. Within four months the new government had registered 72,000 persons as Communists or sympathizers. A committee official said it was aiming for 200,000.
Castillo-Armas was generally regarded as an honest, proud and rather simple man who genuinely loved his country. But he had a covey of advisers, and some of them were less dedicated than their chief. After the 1954 coup American gambler types began drifting into Guatemala, and certain of the liberator's lieutenants were cut in. Castillo-Armas could not bring himself to realize that some of his followers were treacherous. A gambling casino was built in which various Army officers shared a heavy financial interest with the Americans.
Castillo-Armas closed down the casino, and shortly afterward, on July 26, 1957, he was assassinated by a member of the palace guard. The crime was first blamed on Communists, then on Castillo-Armas' enemies within the government. It has never been solved.
The following year, Ydigoras was elected President and settled down for a term that was at least never dull. At one point, when rumors of official corruption were rife, he went on television with his ministers. Like a schoolteacher, Ydigoras went down the line, saying, "Now, Mr. Minister, you wouldn't steal from the treasury, would you?" One by one, the ministers said no, they certainly would not.
Another time, a newspaperman accused Ydigoras of being a viejo enclenque, or enfeebled old man. Ydigoras went on television again, repeated the charge and said: "I will show him." Then he proceeded to skip rope and juggle Indian clubs before the amazed Guatemalan audience.
Still, Ydigoras was nobody's fool. When the CIA came to him in 1960 asking for Guatemalan bases for the Bay of Pigs training, he said yes -- although fully aware that he was risking his political neck. In fact, the November, 1960, uprising (which CIA pilots helped to put down) was partly blamed on the issue of the Cuban training bases in Guatemala.
On March 31, 1963, Ydigoras was ousted by Colonel Enrique Peralta in one of the first of a series of military coups in Latin America that threatened to make a mockery of the political reforms at the base of the Alliance for Progress. Colonel Peralta's regime was recognized by Washington in less than three weeks.
If any efforts were made by Washington to save the legally elected Ydigoras government -- which had risked its future to provide bases for the CIA for the Cuban invasion -- they were certainly not effective. There is, in fact, no available evidence that any such efforts were made.
And so, a decade after the CIA's liberation of Guatemala from Communism in 1954, the lot of Guatemalans was about the same. The finca owners prospered. The 2,000,000 Indians, still largely illiterate, toiled on for wages still ridiculously low. (Eighty cents a day is considered generous in many areas of the country.) And another military junta was in the saddle.
As is so often the case, the Invisible Government had moved in, accomplished its task, and moved on. The yoke of Communism had been thrown off but in its place there remained the yoke of poverty and an indifferent oligarchy. The abysmal conditions that led to Arbenz in the first place were as apparent as ever.
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Notes:
i. Henry Holland, the State Department's representative at the meeting.
ii. That same day William A. Beall, a thirty-year-old American flier from Tyler, Texas, showed up in Mexico City saying he had crash-landed his plane in the Pacific Ocean off Guatemala two days before. He had flown to Mexico City from Tapachula. Beall said two other American fliers had crashed off Guatemala a few days earlier, but had been rescued "by the United States Navy."