Great Britain's Latin American Dilemma: The Foreign Office and the Overthrow of ‘Communist’ Guatemala, June 1954

Abstract

In regent years Anglo-American relations have been periodically disturbed by Washington's policy towards its Latin American neighbours. Since 1973, the overthrow of the president of Chile, Salvador Allende, US posture towards El Salvador and Nicaragua, and the invasion of Grenada all have fed British doubts about the foreign policy of the United States, and led to condemnation from the Labour left, and sometimes (at least in the case of Grenada) to strained relations between the two governments. The first time Washington acted to overthrow a 'pro-Communist' regime in Latin America, however, was twenty years before, in June 1954, when the president of Guatemala, Jacoba Arbenz, was toppled in a CIAbacked invasion. Then too, the voice of Labour rose against US 'imperialism', unflattering parallels with Hitler and Mussolini were drawn, and the British government was forced to defend US policy in the house of commons. The full story of CIA involvement has been known, and fully discussed, by US historians since the 1970s.1 Now, however, newlyreleased documents from the Public Record Office show how strongly the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, and his officials at the foreign office then objected to US policy, and how striking are the parallels between the events in Guatemala thirty years ago, and those in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Grenada today.