CIA activities in Guatemala
[2] Exploiting laws and finding weaknesses within Guatemalan politics, communism could be found in most areas of the government and thus, establishing a pro-communist foundation in Congress, legislators, and the Supreme Court.
He was elected in 1950, "to continue a process of socio-economic reforms... [are disdainfully referred to by the CIA] in its memoranda as 'an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the 'Banana Republic'".
[9] The United States government was fearful that the political movements of the Arbenz administration and the allowing of the communist party within Guatemala would create an easy access for the Soviet Union to infiltrate the US.
[11] The coup was considered primarily as a deterrent against fears regarding the possibility of a Soviet beachhead in the Western Hemisphere, from which the USSR could conceivably be able to fire mid-range ballistic missiles at the United States.
As early as February of that year, CIA Headquarters began generating memos with subject titles such as "Guatemalan Communist Personnel to be disposed of during Military Operations," outlining categories of persons to be neutralized "through Executive Action"—murder—or through imprisonment and exile.
On September 9, 1952, President Truman authorized the operation PBFORTUNE with a budget of $225,000.The plan also enlisted arms and air support from Nicaragua and Honduras to aid Carlos Castillo Armas.[8].
In the later months of 1952, shortly after Operation PBFortune was terminated, the CIA continued to monitor events in Guatemala and collected information that suggested assassination plots were still being concocted by Guatemalan dissidents.
[25] According to Document Number: 0000141590, in a memo of five points appraising the situation in Guatemala, on March 27, 1953, an unnamed source describes how three countries (El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua) were actively calling up reserves and sending them to the Guatemalan border.
The program's goal was to psychologically condition its target audience during the pre-attack period, convince it that the anti-communists were successful during the attack, and encourage underground partisan cells to organize against the Guatemalan government.
[9] The dissident leaders wanted to take the psychological warfare in a more violent direction at one point, recommending that eliminating a top communist official would help the resistance movement.
In nineteen pages, now-anonymous drafters offered advice such as "The simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination," and "falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation.
[37] The CIA claimed it intervened because it feared that a communist government would become "a Soviet beachhead in the Western Hemisphere;"[42] however, it was also protecting, among others, four hundred thousand acres of land the United Fruit Company had acquired.
CIA historian Nicholas Cullather stated that the success of PBSuccess "confirmed the belief of many in the Eisenhower administration that covert operations offered a safe, inexpensive substitute for armed force in resisting Communist inroads in the Third World.
"[52] The memorandum also provides a detailed cost breakdown of how $3 million USD in CIA funds were allocated for operations in Guatemala: As president, Armas restricted voting rights on the illiterate and banned all political parties and labor unions.
Among these sympathizers were young impressionable men, such as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, who watched the Guatemalan incident and “learned…the importance of striking decisively against opponents before they could seek assistance from outside,” experience that would help them rise to power in Cuba.
Newspapers in England such as The London Times criticized America's intrusive covert operations as “modern forms of economic colonialism.”[29] Protests erupted in the capital city of Myanmar (present day Burma), with dissenters throwing rocks at the American Embassy.
[29] Mentions of PBSuccess began to surface during the early 1960s; people involved in the operations and planning of the mission, including Dwight D. Eisenhower and Allen Duells, spoke publicly about their roles to Congress and in the media.
In July 1966, president Julio Caesar Mendez Montenegro signed a pact which gave the army and security services the green-light to apply "any means necessary" in fighting insurgents and internal opposition groups.
The Army General Staff subsequently assumed all control over the security forces and appointed Vice-Defense Minister, Col. Manuel Francisco Sosa Avila as the main "counterinsurgency coordinator".
Initially formed by the extreme-right MLN party as a paramilitary front in June 1966 to prevent President Méndez Montenegro from taking office, the MANO was quickly coopted by the army as an auxiliary force.
[72] During the period of counterinsurgency and police militarization under Col. Sosa Avila, the PN worked closely with the USAID Office of Public Safety (OPS), which largely operated as a front for the CIA.
[74] When asked about the origins of the death squads in Guatemala in a subsequent interview, General Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores (military president from 1983 to 1986) stated that they were initiated "in the 1960s with the CIA".
As high-ranking intelligence officer Col. Otto Perez Molina (later president from 2012 to 2015) stated in a 1993 interview, the Arana-period marked the beginning of a period of "good intra-group relations and the most successful in combating urban insurgency".
[78] In the 1974 election of Gen. Kjell Eugenio Laugerud Garcia, MLN party leader Mario Sandoval Alarcon - one of the CIA's most important assets in Guatemala - was appointed Vice-President of the Republic.
Shortly after the Laugerud regime renounced aid in 1977, the CIA reportedly sent a large shipment of arms to Guatemala from Puerto Rico by way of a proprietary airline service the Flying Tiger - a sister organization of Air America.
The New York Times journalist Leslie Gelb explained that "Argentina would be responsible, with funds from North American intelligence, of attacking the flux of equipment which was transiting Nicaragua to El Salvador and Guatemala".
[88] In the latter stages of the thirty-six-year Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), however, the CIA helped reduce the incidence and number of the violations of the human rights of Guatemalans; and, in 1983, thwarted a palace coup d’ état, which allowed the eventual restoration of participatory democracy and civil government; the resultant national election was won by Democrácia Cristiana, the Christian Democracy party, and Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo became President of the Republic of Guatemala (1986–91).
According to a CIA analysis document reporting on the increase rate of assassinations and disappearances these deaths and kidnappings were intended to suppress political opposition within Guatemala on each side.
[83] In 1993 the CIA helped in overthrowing President Jorge Serrano Elías who attempted a self-coup and had illegally suspended the constitution, dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court, and imposed censorship.
[92] The report states that a significant amount of the agency's Guatemalan allies, including the D-2 and the Presidential Department of Security, were believed to have been involved with numerous "reprehensible" human rights violations in the region.
