CIA-Backed Coup Overthrows Guatemala's Arbenz
- Date
- 1954
- Category
- Politics & governance
- Region
- Latin America (Guatemala)
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
On 27 June 1954 the democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz resigned under pressure from a CIA covert operation code-named PBSUCCESS, ending a decade of democratic reform and installing a military dictatorship.
Arbenz had enacted an agrarian reform that expropriated large tracts of uncultivated land, much of it owned by the United Fruit Company, whose interests were closely tied to senior US officials including CIA director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. A small force of exiles under Carlos Castillo Armas, backed by CIA psychological warfare, radio propaganda, and the threat of air power, was enough to unnerve the army and topple the government. The coup installed the first in a long line of US-backed authoritarian rulers, reversed land reform, and helped trigger a brutal civil war that killed some 200,000 people over the following decades. It became a defining example of Cold War intervention in Latin America and radicalised a generation of the region's leftists, among them a young Argentine named Che Guevara who witnessed the events firsthand.
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Empires active in 1954
- Soviet Union1922 CE – 1991 CE
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
Related politics & governance events
- Founding of the People's Republic of China1 October 1949
- Establishment of Apartheid in South Africa1948
- Construction of the Berlin Wall13 August 1961
- Independence and Partition of British India14–15 August 1947
- Iranian RevolutionJanuary–February 1979
- Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika1985–1991 (from 11 March 1985)
Also relevant
Further reading
The wider story
The Americas: A Hemispheric History
Brisk single-volume history of the whole hemisphere since European contact.
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