A Private Coup: Guatemala, 1954

The CIA-backed coup in Guatemala in 1954 installed a brutally authoritarian regime that sparked nearly four decades of genocidal civil war. As with Iran, whose democratic government was overthrown with CIA help in 1953, the reverberations of this coup still haunt today’s politics.

When people point to the US-influenced historical causes underlying emigration from Central America, Guatemala is one of the case studies. It’s also an example of the “private sources of US foreign policy,” as historian Max Holland puts it in his examination of businessman William Pawley’s role in the coup.

Pawley (1900–1977) had a “high-profile career as an international salesman, businessman, aviation entrepreneur, ambassador, financier, transit and sugar magnate, philanthropist, and special presidential envoy.” Less well known: his “covert activities on behalf (and sometimes despite) the U.S. government.” Official State Department documents about the Guatemala coup barely mention Pawley, who was instrumental in advocating for military action and in supplying coup forces with airplanes.

By then, Pawley was an old hand when it came to covert airpower. He was the real force behind the “Flying Tigers,” a much-publicized group of volunteer American aviators who flew for China during World War II. “Volunteer” was a convenient fiction: airmen and mechanics had US government permission to “resign” from the military without losing their rank and sign up as employees of Pawley’s Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company (CAMCO), Holland writes. CAMCO, meanwhile, was funded clandestinely by the US. Intended to engage the Japanese before Pearl Harbor, the Flying Tigers got a lot of publicity, didn’t actually fly combat missions until after the US declared war, and were eventually incorporated into the US Army Air Corps.

In India, the wealthy Pawley built the “principal maintenance and overhaul base” for the entire China-Burma-India theater of war, explains Holland. For his WWII contributions, Pawley received the Medal of Merit, the highest military honor given to civilians. A big funder of Democrats, Pawley was Truman’s ambassador to Peru and Brazil. But the “two-fisted” Pawley wasn’t very diplomatic. He thought of himself as a capitalist warrior, defending US investments abroad “as the cutting edge of the national interest.” In 1952, Pawley threw his money in support of the Republicans.

Both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations thought of Guatemala as the latest front in the Cold War: democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz’s government couldn’t be allowed to “go communist.” The Boston-based United Fruit Company, which dominated the Guatemalan economy and wanted to maintain its brutally exploitative labor practices and overweening control of fertile land, hired the “father of modern public relations” and a major Washington influence-peddler to hype the threat. Holland argues Eisenhower was more influenced by Soviet moves than concern for bananas—though, in another sign of business/government overlap, both Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and his Director of CIA, the Dulles brothers (John Foster and Allen, respectively), were financially linked with United Fruit.

Pawley was called in by Eisenhower to work with Operation PBSUCCESS, the plan to undermine the Arbenz government (PB and ES are the CIA’s cryptonym for Guatemala). They used psychological warfare, a Gulf of Honduras blockade, and a trained/funded force under Carlos Castillo Armas. Armas invaded Guatemala in June 1954. Pawley provided the invasion with its very modest air force. When bureaucracy threatened to slow down the acquisition of three planes from Nicaragua’s dictator, Pawley used a briefcase full of his own cash to pay for them.

“The [aircraft] assistance to Castillo Armas, minuscule though it was, represented a powerful asset, a force majeure,” Hollands writes. Ultimately, “[t]he aircraft helped give the Guatemalan Army, which was always going to be the crucial element in the success or failure of PBSUCCESS, the excuse to capitulate to an invading force that was decidedly inferior in the field.”

Without the officer corps behind him, Arbez resigned on June 27, 1954. Ten days later, Castillo Armas was dictator, beginning his reign of terror with the murder of thousands of Arbenz supporters—and the reversal of Arbenz’s progressive reforms. Castillo Armas, the murderer of Guatemalan democracy, would himself be assassinated by a member of his own presidential guard in 1957.

The Guatemalan Civil War lasted until 1996—nineteen years after Pawley shot himself (he was suffering from a debilitating disease)—taking at least 200,000 lives. Most of those killed were members of the indigenous Maya population, targeted by successive military dictatorships in a reign of genocidal terror. By replacing a democracy with a dictatorship, the US did inestimable damage to the country and its own reputation in the world, especially in Central America.

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