Killing Democracy: United States Imperialism, Civil War and Genocide in Guatemala 1954-1996

Abstract

The United States in 1954, under the thin veil of fighting communism and defending “American” interests, led a coup d’etat in Guatemala to overthrow democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz and his immediate predecessor Juan Jose Arevalo initiated substantial social programs that brought needed and popular changes to a rising urban working class and rural peasants that for 133 years were ruled by paternal autocrats that in Latin America were called caudillos. Beginning in the twentieth century Guatemalan rulers encouraged foreign corporations, enticed with generous governmental inducements to plunder the nation and keep labor costs at rock bottom. By 1944 the Guatemalan people began to pushback against the caudillos who ruled for benefit of the oligarchy and US corporations. The US onslaught against the Arbenz government set the stage for US imperialist interventions throughout Latin America for the next 65 years. Indeed, for the US Central Intelligent Agency (CIA), the operations in Guatemala and Iran (1953), served as a blueprint for CIA led interventions around the globe. During the four decades subsequent the US-led destruction of the ambitious Guatemalan 1944 Revolution, Guatemala was once again beset with vicious and corrupt dictators. The dreams of the poor and working class of a liberal government in Guatemala were violently swept away and replaced by four decades of Civil War and governmental policies of scorched earth cruelty and genocide under the guidance, military training and acquiescence of the highest reaches of the US government. These horrors, that claimed more than 200,000 lives, 93 percent of the deaths at the hands of the Guatemalan military, culminated in the 1996 peace accord under the auspices of the United Nations. The peace accord ended a horrific and sustained wave of repression and slaughter and established a Commission on Historical Clarification to study the atrocities and their causes. This paper examines the US-backed overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected government at the behest of corporate profits and the decades of savagery that supported tyrants who unleashed unspeakable horrors against their own populations during the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War.