The Foreign Service Journal, June 2004

assassinations included budgeting, training programs, creation of hit teams and transfer of armaments. The CIA has said it did not imple- ment the assassination strategy, but Kornbluh points out that the names of the targeted individuals were deleted from the declassified docu- ments, making it impossible to know whether any were killed in the after- math of the coup. The United States maneuvered to have Castillo Armas lead the new government, a choice viewed with revulsion by many military and non- military Guatemalans both because he had conspired with a foreign power against the sovereignty of the Guatemalan nation and because he lacked credentials to lead the coun- try. One of Castillo Armas’ first acts was to suspend the constitution. He also reversed the confiscation of United Fruit’s land. In 1956, the Eisenhower administration gave him a red-carpet welcome to Washington and arranged for a ticker-tape parade in New York. But Castillo Armas never won the affections of Guatemalans; he was assassinated by a member of the presidential guard in July 1957. A Terrible Legacy The United States paid a steep price internationally for its role in bringing Arbenz down, especially in Latin America. Adolphe Berle, the State Department’s troubleshooter for Latin America, told his diary: “We eliminated a communist regime at the expense of having antago- nized half the hemisphere.” Kalman Silvert, a Latin American studies specialist, reported in 1956 that a famous Mexican bookstore had sold thousands of books by Arbenz’s sup- porters, but only five copies of the most prominent book by a defender of the coup. About a decade later, a ferocious civil war began in Guatemala. Peasants, perhaps inspired by the Cuban revolution, launched an insurgency in response to increas- ingly extreme inequalities in income and a political system that ignored calls for reform. The conflict was to last 30 years. A 1999 report by the indepen- dent “Historical Clarification Com- mission” estimated that 150,000 Guatemalans were killed in the war and 50,000 more disappeared, almost all civilians; the army razed a reported 440 villages suspected of pro-guerrilla sympathies. Because most of the dead were indigenous Mayans, who represent more than half the country’s total population, the commission concluded that the state had committed “acts of geno- cide.” Although the war received scant international attention, the death toll exceeded the combined total of killings in the far more pub- licized Chilean, Argentine and El Salvadoran conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s. The fighting did not end until the 1996 signing of a peace agreement between the Guatemalan government and the URNG rebel group. The agreement was designed to lay the groundwork for significant reforms and lasting peace. It called for a reduction in the size of the mil- J U N E 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 55 Disingenuously, the State Department said Arbenz was the victim of a popular uprising.