USA overthrows Democratic Socialists in Guatemala

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Uploaded by on Jul 8, 2010

1954 Guatemalan coup d'état
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état was a covert operation organized by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the democratically-elected President of Guatemala.

Árbenz's government put forth a number of new policies, such as seizing and expropriating unused, unfarmed land that private corporations set aside long ago and giving the land to peasants. The U.S. intelligence community deemed such plans communist in nature. This led CIA director Allen Dulles to fear that Guatemala would become a "Soviet beachhead in the western hemisphere". Dulles' concern reverberated within the CIA and the Eisenhower administration, in the context of the anti-communist fears of the McCarthyist era.

Árbenz instigated sweeping land reform acts that antagonized the U.S.-based multinational United Fruit Company, which had large stakes in the old order of Guatemala and lobbied various levels of the U.S. government to take action against Árbenz. Both Dulles and his brother were shareholders of United Fruit Company.

The operation, known by the code name Operation PBSUCCESS, lasted from late 1953 to 1954. The CIA armed and trained an ad-hoc "Liberation Army" of about 400 fighters under the command of a then-exiled Guatemalan army officer, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, and used them in conjunction with a complex and largely experimental diplomatic, economic, and propaganda campaign. The CIA established the Voice of Liberation radio station, located across the border in Honduras relaying programming originating in Miami, and pretended to be the spontaneous voice of patriots opposed to the elected government. The operation effectively ended the experimental period of representative democracy in Guatemala known as the "Ten Years of Spring", which ended with Árbenz's official resignation. Following the coup, the Guatemalan Civil War began, a civil war involving some of the most brutal counterinsurgency of its time (including years of massacres of Maya Indians, since characterized by Historical Clarification Commission as genocide).

The operation was preceded by a plan, never fully implemented, as early as 1951, to supply anti-Árbenz forces with weapons, supplies, and funding, Operation PBFORTUNE. Afterwards there was an operation, Operation PBHISTORY, whose objective was to gather and analyze documents from the Árbenz government that would incriminate Árbenz as a Communist puppet. This Operation found no evidence to support such a strong claim; the Árbenz government was found to not have been "infiltrated" by communists, but simply allowed communists the democratic right of party-formation and political participation.

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  • @mwe91

    It's an excerpt from a BBC documentary series called "The cold war".

  • who made this video

  • WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!

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