Operation PBSUCCESS (1954) was the CIA-organized covert operation that overthrew the democratically-elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. The CIA armed and trained an ad-hoc "Liberation Army" of about 400 fighters in Nicaragua. Under the command of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, the Liberation Army invaded Guatemala via Honduras on June 18, and Arbenz resigned on June 27. The coup ignited decades of repressive government and civil conflict. With factions of the Guatemalan Army and the influential landowning upper class opposed to Arbenz's policies, some have speculated that his left-wing reformist government would not have lasted even if the CIA had not intervened; nonetheless, the event has become a focus of criticism regarding American covert operations during the Cold War.

A U.S. State Department report released in 2003 states that social unrest within Guatemala and Arbenz's alleged Communist ties were the reason the CIA first drew up a contigency plan to oust Arbenz, entitled Operation PBFORTUNE (later changed to Operation PBSUCCESS.) The plan was drafted in 1951, before the U.S.-based United Fruit Company's landholdings had been expropriated. [1]

External links

• Guatemala -- 1954: Behind the CIA's Coup
• Guatemala Documentation Project - Provided by the National Security Archive.
• CIA's declassified documents on Guatemala CIA Documents Chronicling the 1954 Coup
• Foreign Relations, 1952-1954: Guatemala
• American Accountability Project: The Guatemala Genocide

Further reading

• Immerman, R. H., The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention, University of Texas Press: Austin, 1982.
• Kinzer, Stephen and Schlesinger, Stephen. 1999. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• Miguel Ángel Asturias, Week-end in Guatemala, 1956, is a fictional account of these events.
• Vidal, Gore, Dark Green, Bright Red, Ballantine Publishing Group, 1950, revised 1968. Gore's fiction uncannily presages the Guatamalean coup d'etat.