Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nick Cullather is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. He is the author of Illusions of Influence: The Political Economy of United States-Philippines Relations, 1942-1960 (Stanford University Press, 1994).

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Secret History

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition..........................................viiIntroduction: A Culture of Destruction.................................xiForeword to the CIA Edition............................................5Chapter 1: America's Backyard..........................................7Chapter 2: Reversing the Trend.........................................38Chapter 3: Sufficient Means............................................74Chapter 4: The Sweet Smell of Success..................................105Appendix A: PBSUCCESS Timeline.........................................127Appendix B: Bibliography...............................................133Appendix C: A Study of Assassination...................................137Appendix D: New Documents..............................................143Afterword: The Culture of Fear, by Piero Gleijeses.....................xxiiiIndex..................................................................xxxix

Chapter One

They would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas. Manuel Fortuny

The CIA'S operation to overthrow the Government of Guatemala in 1954 marked an early zenith in the Agency's long record of covert action. Following closely on successful operations that installed the Shah as ruler of Iran [ ] the Guatemala operation, known as PBSUCCESS, was both more ambitious and more thoroughly successful than either precedent. Rather than helping a prominent contender gain power with a few inducements, PBSUCCESS used an intensive paramilitary and psychological campaign to replace a popular, elected government with a political nonentity. In method, scale, and conception it had no antecedent, and its triumph 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. This and other "lessons" of PBSUCCESS lulled Agency and administration officials into a complacency that proved fatal at the Bay of Pigs seven years later.

Scholars have criticized the agency for failing to recognize the unique circumstances that had led to success in Guatemala and failing to adapt to different conditions in Cuba. Students of the 1954 coup also question the nature of the "success" in Guatemala. The overthrown Arbenz government was not, many contend, a Communist regime but a reformist government that offered perhaps the last chance for progressive, democratic change in the region. Some accuse the Eisenhower administration and the Agency of acting at the behest of self-interested American investors, particularly the United Fruit Company. Others argue that anti-Communist paranoia and not economic interest dictated policy, but with equally regrettable results.

CIA records can answer these questions only indirectly. They cannot document the intentions of Guatemalan leaders, but only how Agency analysts perceived them. CIA officials participated in the process that led to the approval of PBSUCCESS, but as their papers show, they often had little understanding of or interest in the motives of those in the Department of State, the Pentagon, and the White House who made the final decision. Agency records, however, do document the conduct of the operation, the [ ] how Agency operatives construed the problem, what methods and objectives they pursued, and what aspects of the operations they believed led to success. They permit speculation on [ ] whether misperceptions about PBSUCCESS led overconfident operatives to plan the Bay of Pigs. Chiefly, however, they offer a view other historical accounts lack-the view from inside the CIA.

Agency officials had only a dim idea of what had occurred in Guatemala before Jacobo Arbenz Guzmn came to power in 1950. Historians regard the events of the 1940s and 1950s as following a centuries-old cycle of progressive change and conservative reaction, but officers in the Directorate of Plans believed they were witnessing something new. For the first time, Communists had targeted a country "in America's backyard" for subversion and transformation into a "denied area." When comparing what they saw to past experience, they were more apt to draw parallels to Korea, Russia, or Eastern Europe than to Central America. They saw events not in a Guatemalan context but as part of a global pattern of Communist activity. PBSUCCESS, nonetheless, interrupted a revolutionary process that had been in motion for over a decade, and the actions of Guatemalan officials can only be understood in the context of the history of the region.

The Revolution of 1944

Once the center of Mayan civilization, Guatemala had been reduced by centuries of Spanish rule to an impoverished outback when, at the turn of the 20th century, a coffee boom drew investors, marketers, and railroad builders to the tiny Caribbean nation. The descendants of Spanish colonizers planted coffee on large estates, fincas, worked by Indian laborers. Coffee linked Guatemala to a world market in which Latin American, African, and Indonesian producers competed to supply buyers in Europe and the United States with low-priced beans. Success depended on the availability of low-paid or unpaid labor, and after 1900 Guatemala's rulers structured society to secure finqueros a cheap supply of Indian workers. The Army enforced vagrancy laws, debt bondage, and other forms of involuntary servitude and became the guarantor of social peace. To maintain the uneasy truce between the Indian majority and the Spanish-speaking ladino shopkeepers, labor contractors, and landlords, soldiers garrisoned towns in the populous regions on the Pacific coast and along the rail line between Guatemala City and the Atlantic port of Puerto Barrios.

When the coffee market collapsed in 1930, ladinos needed a strong leader to prevent restive, unemployed laborers from gaining an upper hand, and they chose a ruthless, efficient provincial governor, Jorge Ubico, to lead the country. Ubico suppressed dissent, legalized the killing of Indians by landlords, enlarged the Army, and organized a personal gestapo. Generals presided over provincial governments; officers staffed state farms, factories, and schools. The Guatemalan Army's social structure resembled that of the finca. Eight hundred ladino officers lorded over five thousand Indian soldiers who slept on the ground, wore ragged uniforms, seldom received pay, and were whipped or shot for small infractions. Urban shopkeepers and rural landlords tolerated the regime out of fear of both Ubico and the Indian masses.

Ubico regarded the ladino elite with contempt, reserving his admiration for American investors who found in Guatemala a congenial business climate. He welcomed W. R. Grace and Company, Pan American Airways, and other firms, making Guatemala the principal Central American destination for United States trade and capital. The Boston-based United Fruit Company became one of his closest allies. Its huge banana estates at Tiquisate and Bananera occupied hundreds of square miles and employed as many as 40,000 Guatemalans. These lands were a gift from Ubico, who...