Word: arbenz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
June 1954 The CIA organizes a coup in Guatemala by COLONEL CARLOS CASTILLO ARMAS and other officers against leftist President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman...
...always considered Guatemala its private playpen. It was in Guatemala that the agency learned to overthrow Latin governments, engineering the 1954 coup that toppled leftist President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Administrations have come and gone. So has the cold war. But the freewheeling tradecraft the agency practiced in Guatemala has barely changed. "If you were going to pick a place where the CIA still has a cowboy mentality, it's there," says a former top official with the agency...
...case of Guatemala illustrates perfectly what befalls a country when its own policies oppose U.S. interests. In 1950, the State Department, beset with Cold War fever, grew frightened at the presence of a small number of Communists in the liberal coalition of popularly elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. After Arbenz under took a program of land reform in a country where two percent of the population owned close to 75 percent of the land, U.S. officials said they sniffed Communist influence. The Guatemalan government's subsequent confiscation of uncultivated land owned by United Fruit Company prompted the U.S. to begin...
...disgrace. For years, whoever happened to be sitting in the Oval Office rubber stamped the blatantly fixed elections of former Nicaraguan dictator Anastassio Somoza. A similar policy has prevailed for dealing with equally corrupt Guatemala since 1954, when a U.S.-instigated coup deposed the democratically elected, but leftist, Arbenz government. And the Reagan Administration points with pride to its role in conducting and monitoring the March 1982 elections in El Salvador certainly not the model of democratic procedure some have claimed they were since the ballots were numbered and the left was precluding from participating by the existence of government...
...involved in two important coups a few years later. In Iran, American influence was solidified by the overthrow of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh's Soviet-supported regime in 1953 and the installation of the Shah. When the Guatemalan government of left-wing President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán threatened to expropriate the property of the United Fruit Co. and other U.S. interests, he was toppled in 1954 and replaced by a pro-American regime. In both cases, the interventions were successful but left a legacy of anti-U.S. bitterness...