Amanda Doyle

In August 1953, the Dulles brothers presented the CIA plan to execute a covert coup to overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatemala.

and Eisenhower approved the coup, codenamed PB Success.

PB Success launched in June 1954 with the CIA recruiting and training armed rebel forces led by Armas, running psychological warfare operations, establishing fake radio propaganda broadcasts called Voice of Liberation, recruiting political allies, coordinating cross-border attacks and air raids on the Guatemalan targets, and

blocking Guatemala from purchasing weapons to defend itself, and preparing a list of individuals in Arbenz's government to, quote, eliminate immediately in the event of a successful anti-communist coup.

This list of political and labor leaders became tools of terror in the ensuing years.

The CIA propaganda machine claimed that massive rebel armies were advancing and they invented battlefield victories that never happened.

This pressured the Guatemalan military officers to abandon the president.

Facing military defections and political pressure, Arbenz resigned June 27, 1954, and the CIA-backed Armas was installed as the leader.

Armus outlawed unions and peasant organizations that had received the land, banned political parties, and initiated repressive intelligence networks and purges, arresting thousands of political opponents, and assassinating, kidnapping, and forcing into exile opposition leaders.

The coup and Armus's installation led to permanent militarization of Guatemala, which has never recovered democratic stability, leading to military dictatorships, death squads, targeting of students, union leaders, and indigenous activists,

and a 36-year civil war in which 200,000 people were killed or disappeared, over 80% of whom were indigenous Mayan people.

The UN-backed Truth Commission ruled it a genocide by the Guatemalan state, all of which is a key root cause of the migration that the current US government bemoans.

We only know all of this because of Freedom Information Act lawsuits filed in 1979, which led to the release of CIA operations, including the agency's, quote, study of assassination.

It's this 19-page assassination manual giving particular and specific instructions about how precisely to kill people.

It's really scary stuff.

Washington, D.C.

called the ouster of Arbenz and installation of Armas a victory for freedom and democracy.

Armis reversed land reforms, returning the land to UFC.

UFC's freedom to pursue profits unimpeded was restored.

Here's an interesting little epilogue to this particular story.