The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état was back in the news recently, after Guatemala's current president made an official state apology to the family of Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically-elected president of Guatemala who was deposed in a CIA-backed coup and who died in exile in Mexico in 1971.
Apology reignites conversation about ousted Guatemalan leader
This incident didn't attract all that much attention at the time, but it continued to come up again and again as Guatemala spiraled into a vicious civil war that ran from 1960 to 1996, and left at least 200,000 dead.
And in 1997, an archival document release by the CIA included hundreds of papers related to "Operation PBSUCCESS," the CIA operation which trained a Guatemalan "liberation army" to depose Arbenz.
The basis of the coup was a 1952 land reform measure that seized some of the uncultivated lands held the United Fruit Company, with compensation based on the land values declared on UFC's tax forms.
However, the land values were intentionally misreported in order for UFC to evade taxes, and in short order, the US State Department demanded that the compensation be increased by a factor of 26.
When Arbenz balked, he was attacked by the CIA-trained coup army, with aid from a US Naval blockade (Operation Hardrock Baker). The prelude to the attack included the creation of a false-flag, CIA-operated radio station broadcasting from Miami, but claiming to be run from deep inside the Guatemalan jungle by members of the "liberation army."
The operation remains fascinating for many reasons - it was a testing ground for new propaganda techniques (such as the radio station) which would later reappear during future coups.
It also demonstrated the institutional autonomy of the CIA. It's unclear exactly what President Eisenhower was told regarding the "threat" posed by Arbenz, but he did doodle this depiction of himself on a briefing sheet as the operation got underway:
http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/3774/69160912.jpg (broken link)
Eisenhower's conception of the situation appeared to be that of a strong, beneficent America protecting a small country from a rogue Communist proto-dictator.
After the coup, the CIA launched a document-collection effort in Guatemala called Operation PBHISTORY, designed to bolster claims that Arbenz was indeed a crypto-communist. The effort was not, apparently, very successful.
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