A coup in Guatemala, launched on 18 June 1954, deposed the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz (pictured in mural). The result of a covert operation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it ended the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944–1954, a period of representative democracy and liberal reform. The U.S. government was motivated by a Cold War predisposition to assume Árbenz was a communist, and by lobbying from the United Fruit Company for his overthrow. The CIA, authorized in August 1953 by Dwight Eisenhower to carry out the operation, armed, funded, and trained a force of 480 men led by Carlos Castillo Armas. Most of the offensives of the invasion force were repelled, but a heavy campaign of psychological warfare and the possibility of a U.S. invasion intimidated the Guatemalan army, which eventually refused to fight. Árbenz resigned on 27 June, and Castillo Armas became president ten days later, the first in a series of authoritarian rulers in the country. The coup was widely criticized internationally, and contributed to long-lasting anti-U.S. sentiment in Latin America. (Full article...)
