Censorship was brought to an end, men and women were declared equal before the law, racial discrimination was declared a crime, higher education was free of governmental control, private monopolies were banned, workers were assured a forty-hour week, payment in coupons was forbidden, and labour unions were legalized.
Juan Jose Arevalo won the first elections and attempted to begin an age of reforms in Guatemala. Arevalo described himself as a "spiritual socialist". He implemented sweeping reforms by passing new laws that gave workers the right to form unions. This included the 40, Guatemalans who worked for the United Fruit Company. He asked the political lobbyist Tommy Corcoran to express his fears to senior political figures in Washington.
Corcoran began talks with key people in the government agencies and departments that shaped U. He argued that the U.
He therefore appealed to Arbenz, who was still committed to the democratic system, to defend his elected government. Arbenz supplied Arevalo with the names of young officers who he knew to be loyal to the idea of democracy. Arevalo then ordered these officers to arrest Arana. Caught crossing a bridge, Arana resisted arrest, and during the resulting gunfight, Arana and several others were killed.
Juan Jose Arevalo then made the mistake of not telling the country about the attempted coup. Instead he claimed that Arana had been killed by unknown assassins.
This resulted in another coup attempt by army officers loyal to Arana and the United Fruit Company. However, some members of the armed forces remained loyal to Arevalo. So did the trade unions that had originally overthrown the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. Once again Arbenz had become a national hero and his election to the presidency was ensured. The following year Arbenz defeated Manuel Ygidoras to become Guatemala's new president. In the spring of , Corcoran went to see Thomas C.
Corcoran asked Mann if he had any plans to prevent Arbenz from being elected. Dulles assured Corcoran, however, that whoever was elected as the next president of Guatemala would not be allowed to nationalize the operations of United Fruit. Arbenz's first action was to order the construction of a government run port to compete with United Fruit's Puerto Barrios. Another measure was to build a national hydroelectric plant to offer a cheaper energy alternative different from the American controlled electricity monopoly.
Arbenz also proposed a new system of progressive income tax. Corcoran arranged for La Follette to lobby liberal members of Congress. The message was that Arbenz was not a liberal but a dangerous left-wing radical. This strategy was successful and Congress was duly alarmed when on 17 th June, , Arbenz announced a new Agrarian Reform program. He said that the country needed "an agrarian reform which puts an end to the latifundios and the semi-feudal practices, giving the land to thousands of peasants, raising their purchasing power and creating a great internal market favorable to the development of domestic industry.
This included expropriating idle land on government and private estates and redistributed to peasants in lots of 8 to 33 acres. The Agrarian Reform program managed to give 1. Among the expropriated landowners was Arbenz himself, who had become into a landowner with the dowry of his wealthy wife. Around 46 farms were given to groups of peasants who organized themselves in cooperatives.
Arbenz's agrarian reform was approved in This empowered the government to expropriate uncultivated portions of large plantations. Farms smaller than acres were not subject to this law.
The expropriated lands would be distributed only to landless peasants in plots not bigger of The Agrarian Reform managed to give 1. The main opponent to Arbenz's reforms were the United Fruit Company. This included the claim that Guatemala was the beginning of "Soviet expansion in the Americas". Tommy Corcoran contacted President Anastasio Somoza and warned him that the Guatemalan revolution might spread to Nicaragua. Somoza now made representations to Harry S. Truman about what was happening in Guatemala.
Part of this plan involved Tommy Corcoran arranging for small arms and ammunition to be loaded on a United Fruit freighter and shipped to Guatemala, where the weapons would be distributed to dissidents. When the Secretary of State Dean Acheson discovered details of Operation Fortune, he had a meeting with Truman where he vigorously protested about the involvement of United Fruit and the CIA in the attempted overthrow of the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz. Eisenhower appointed John Peurifoy as ambassador to Guatemala.
Walter Bedell Smith was moved to the State Department. Smith told Corcoran he would do all he could to help in the overthrow of Arbenz. He added that he would like to work for United Fruit once he retired from government office. This request was granted and Bedell Smith was later to become a director of United Fruit.
Allen Dulles became the executive agent and arranged for Tracey Barnes and Richard Bissell to plan and execute the operation. This influence will probably continue to grow during The political situation in Guatemala adversely effects U. Due to the proximity of Guatemala to the United States the fear of the Soviets creating a beachhead in Guatemala created panic in the United States government during the Cold War.
The year old president was walking to the palace dining room with his wife when he was slain. Lasting 36 years, the Guatemalan Civil War began in as the poor of Guatemala rebelled against government oppression. As president, he and his military stripped the poor of their rights, which caused them to rebel.
The Guatemalan Revolution began in due to the unhappines of the people under the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. The revolution began with the overthrowing of Ubico and the stepping up of Juan Jose Arevalo; who was later succeeded by Jacobo Arbenz.
In a coup , it is the military, paramilitary, or opposing political faction that deposes the current government and assumes power; whereas, in the pronunciamiento, the military deposes the existing government and installs an ostensibly civilian government.
By the s the company owned 3. All political parties, labor unions, and peasant organizations were outlawed. In histories of the period, Castillo Armas has been referred to as a dictator. Castillo Armas's junta drew support from individuals in Guatemala that had previously supported Ubico. Before releasing this document to the public, the CIA deleted every name, leaving only the rows of numbers to indicate how many people were targeted. Cullather, now a diplomatic historian at the University of Indiana, worked on contract for one year with the CIA, where he was given access to thousands of agency records and secret operational files in order to produce this overview.
The result is a surprisingly critical study of the agency's first covert operation in Latin America. Beginning with a review of the political, economic and social forces that led to Arbenz's presidency in , the document is an intimate account of how cold war concerns convinced President Eisenhower to order the removal of the democratically-elected leader by force.
It also provides countless new details of a covert mission plagued by disastrous military planning and failed security measures: according to Cullather, "Operation Success" barely succeeded. The CIA scrambled to convince the White House that it was an unqualified and all but bloodless victory, however. Dulles, and his senior covert planners into a formal briefing of the operation.
Cullather's account now reveals that the agency lied to the president, telling him that only one of the rebels it had backed was killed. And it was. But negotiations were not finalized for another two years.
The military used murder, torture, eviction of people from their land, forced disappearances, and rape in their battle against civilians. The Guatemalan government targeted indigenous communities because they were considered to be recruiting grounds for guerrillas.
Four to five areas where the government felt indigenous people were capable of organizing were specifically targeted. The government goal was to completely wipe out the people in these areas. Students, intellectuals, priests, leftists, and anyone who opposed the government or military was taken from their homes or right off the street, never to be seen again. They were tortured, executed, and disposed of, often in mass graves.
Some graves have been exhumed, but tens of thousands of Guatemalans still do not know what happened to their family members or where their remains are. The United States was complicit in supporting a genocidal government from the beginning of the war, and the American corporation United Fruit Company was just as responsible for starting the year war.
President Jacobo Arbenz initiated land reform policies that set out to purchase, at fair prices, the idle land owned by the United Fruit Company and to redistribute it to peasants and indigenous farmers. United Fruit launched a propaganda campaign to convince the U. Virtually every major official involved in plotting the coup had a family member or business connection to United Fruit, and in President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the CIA to arm, fund, and train the men who would overthrow the government the next year.
The U S continued to provide funding to the government until President Jimmy Carter took office in an d cut off military aid because of human rights abuses. The subsequent Reagan administration increased aid, citing human rights improvements. This was clearly not the case, as the s was one of the deadliest periods of the genocide. Nearly all of the aid was going to the rural highlands where Mayans were most targeted.
Despite the overwhelming role of the U. The genocide itself did not receive much coverage by the U.
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