Operation PBSUCCESS

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.
The whole article reads like an essay, not a WP article. WP articles must contain verifiable knowledge from reputable secondary sources. This must be made clear by citing sources and references.

The operation PBSUCCESS (including surgery SUCCESS ) was one in 1954 by the US foreign intelligence service CIA conducted covert operation with the aim of the democratically elected president of Guatemala , Jacobo Árbenz to, overthrow . It was the first major covert operation of the CIA, founded in 1949, in Central America and, because of its "success", initially seen in this way within the US government, became the model for further such activities in Latin America and in many countries around the world . A small part of the internal CIA files on the operation, which were kept under lock and key for a long time , are now publicly accessible.

The action went back, among other things, to the urging of the US food company United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International ), which owned extensive land in Guatemala and saw its interests endangered by the land reform planned by Arbenz . Thanks to the propaganda specialist Edward Bernays , UFCO director Sam Zemurray succeeded in defaming the western-oriented, honest president as a communist and a stooge of Moscow. The then CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles also worked as a lawyer and lobbyist for the company. The CIA trained an ad hoc “liberation army” of approximately 400 fighters in Nicaragua and supplied them with weapons. Under the command of Castillo Armas , it invaded Guatemala on June 18, 1954 via Honduras . Arbenz was forced to resign on June 27, 1954.

The coup that was brought about in this way caused considerable political instability in the country that was then in a stabilization phase or peaceful country and marked the beginning of four decades of repressive tyranny of various, mutually replacing military dictatorships , almost all of which were politically, militarily and secretly supported by the USA . During this so-called "civil war" in Guatemala by the end of 1996, at least 140,000 Guatemalans were murdered by the military and state-controlled, unofficial paramilitary death squads . A large number fell victim to the practice of enforced disappearance , also known as desaparecidos . Various human rights organizations estimate the number of victims to be even higher, at over 250,000.

Origins and backgrounds of the operation

Operation Success or PBSUCCESS was the first CIA company with the aim of overthrowing a foreign government with intelligence and paramilitary measures. Both operations marked a major change in the function of the CIA. In addition to her actual task as an intelligence service, she developed a paramilitary component for global influence through active measures. In Guatemala , this was done by setting up an invading army made up of exiled Guatemalans and Central and American mercenaries .

The reason for Operation Success were two factors. The president of Guatemala, elected in 1950, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán , a professional officer, pushed ahead with the land reform planned under his predecessor Juan José Arévalo in favor of landless smallholders, which particularly affected the United Fruit Company (UFCO). In addition, there was his open sympathy for the Communist Guatemalan Party ( Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo = PGT ; Guatemalan Labor Party). Although it was represented in parliament by only four of 57 members and did not have a minister in Arbenz 'cabinet, it had a strong influence in the Ministry of Agriculture, which was concerned with land reform.

But the Arbenz government was not only under pressure from the UFCO and its lobbyists in the US. The government of Honduras under President Juan Manuel Gálvez saw the Guatemalan land reform as a dangerous example for Honduras, in which the UFCO had an economic and political influence like in no other Central American state. The governments of Nicaragua under Anastasio Somoza García and the Dominican Republic under Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina were interested in toppling Arbenz, not for economic but for political reasons . Both dictators saw Arbenz's activities as a long-term threat to their own rule. The first concrete plan to overthrow Arbenz did not come from the US government under President Harry S. Truman or the CIA, but from Somoza.

Operation Fortune

Apparently in April 1952, on the occasion of a visit to the United States, Truman suggested an armed intervention in Guatemala. Over the next several weeks, the operation, code-named Operation Fortune, was planned by Somoza, Colonel Joseph Caldwell King of the CIA and the UFCO; The corporation's liaison to the CIA was Thomas Corcoran. Trujillo and the dictator of Venezuela, Marcos Pérez Jiménez , supported the plan financially. Somoza saw in the former Guatemalan Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas the ideal leader of the invasion force. However, the conspirators were well aware that the enterprise would only succeed if a coup by the Guatemalan military brought down Arbenz after the invasion of the “Liberation Army” . The company was discontinued in the fall of 1952 when the US State Department , which was not involved in the planning, learned that a ship with weapons was already on its way from New Orleans to Nicaragua. Secretary of State Dean Acheson intervened with Truman, who canceled the company.

Operation Success. The planning phase

After Dwight D. Eisenhower's victory in the US presidential election in November 1952 , a new strategy in the fight against communism was developed, the so-called rollback doctrine . While anti-communist paranoia in the United States , fueled by the press, steadily increased, Operation Success was launched in September 1953. The Pentagon was not involved as the CIA covered the military part of the company itself; mostly through our own employees or specially recruited former members of the American armed forces. Amazingly, the CIA's intelligence department, the Directorate of Intelligence, was not involved either, only the Directorate of Plans (DDP) under Frank Wisner .

Operation Success basically followed on from Operation Fortune. The aim was to move the Guatemalan military leadership to put in a coup against Arbenz by marching in an intervention force. The focus of the company was not on the military component, but on the psychological impact of the military operation. At no time did the planning staff assume that the troops of Castillo Armas, consisting of just a few hundred men, would survive a dispute with the well-trained Guatemalan army, with a good 5,000 men. In addition, the deployment of a force as a fifth column was planned to create unrest in Guatemala through sabotage and propaganda campaigns . A key figure in this psychological warfare was to be played by the new American ambassador to Ciudad de Guatemala , John Emil Peurifoy , who took up his post in October 1953. The embassy staff themselves had no knowledge of the company. Peurifoy had already maintained close contacts with the CIA on his previous post in Athens. Contemporaries saw him more as a politician than a diplomat.

The planning staff for Operation Success resided on the military airfield of Opa-locka in Florida , on which the flight operations were largely suspended. From here the transports to the bases in Nicaragua and Honduras were handled. Also involved in the planning was Howard Hunt , an intelligence officer and crime novelist and agent who later played a pivotal role in the Watergate affair . Military operations manager was Colonel Albert Haney. A key figure was Whiting Willauer , who already held a leading position in the Civil Air Transport Company of General Claire Chennault , the founder of the Flying Tigers .

In February 1954 the training of the first mercenaries began on a finca near the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa . At the same time, two training camps were set up in Nicaragua: on the small island of Momotombito in Lake Managua and in El Tamarindo, a private property between Managua and Leon . A runway was built near Puerto Cabezas on the northern Nicaraguan Caribbean coast to assemble the invaders' air force. It was about one to two dozen aircraft from the Second World War of the types Republic P-47 "Thunderbolt", North American P-51 "Mustang" and Douglas C-47 "Dakota". The pilots were almost exclusively Americans, hired by the CIA and possibly mediated by Willauer.

On May 6, 1954, the propaganda war against the Arbenz government, which had now started, was fueled when a large load of weapons was found on the Nicaraguan Pacific coast. A submarine of unknown nationality was reportedly sighted there days before. In fact, Somoza and the CIA had deposited the cargo there. This supposed propaganda coup, however, was not very credible. The installation of a radio station near Managua was more successful. The head of La Voz de la Liberación (“The Voice of Liberation”) was David Lee Phillips, a radio announcer who spoke fluent Spanish. The station went into operation on May 1st and influenced the Guatemalan listeners with cleverly prepared propaganda, interrupted by popular music.

The journey of the Alfhem

Unintentionally by the CIA, it happened to be offered another propagandistic pretext to promote Operation Success. The background was a Czechoslovak arms delivery to Guatemala.

As early as 1949 the USA had stopped its arms exports to Guatemala; from 1951 they prevented the purchase from third parties. Therefore Arbenz now resorted to the help of the PGT . In November 1953, its general secretary, José Manuel Fortuny , secretly traveled to Prague . There he was received by the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC) and later President Antonín Novotný . Presumably after consulting the Soviet government - apparently neither Prague nor Moscow had any deeper knowledge of Central American politics - the government of Czechoslovakia decided to deliver a larger load of arms to Guatemala. This was German, British and Czechoslovak material from World War II, including anti-tank guns (Pak), artillery pieces and machine guns . Allegedly, a large part of the program was unusable. The deal was actually handled by Arbenz's steward, 33-year-old ex-major Alfonso Martínez, who allegedly underwent an operation in Switzerland but actually flew to Prague.

The weapons load, a total of 15,424 boxes with a gross weight of 2,000 tons, was transported by the Czechoslovak foreign trade company Metrans to the Polish port of Szczecin in April 1954, where it was loaded onto the 5,000-ton Swedish freighter Alfhem . Although a CIA agent reported the motor ship's departure on April 15, 1954, his trail was temporarily lost on the high seas. After stops in Dakar and Curaçao , the Alfhem arrived four weeks later, on May 15, 1954, in Puerto Barrios on the Guatemalan Caribbean coast. With the purchase of arms, Arbenz probably had not only planned to equip his own army, but also workers' militias under the leadership of the PGT and the unions.

Alarmed by the arrival of the Alfhem , whose cargo was believed in the US to strengthen the morale of the Guatemalan army, the propaganda pressure on Arbenz increased. On May 23, two submarines left Key West , and on May 27, the US Air Force dispatched three Convair B-36 intercontinental bombers to Nicaragua. Gleijeses commented: The bombers flew over Nicaragua, but their shadows fell on Guatemala .

Final preparations

In the meantime, American politicians and the press created a hysteria in which they did not shy away from making absurd comparisons. Congressman McCormick compared the Alfhem's voyage to a Soviet ship that had secretly smuggled an atomic bomb into New York harbor, which could now be detonated at any time. Other politicians compared the ship's arrival to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 .

Another event fueled the mood in Honduras and the United States. The arrival of the Alfhem coincided with a strike of over 40,000 banana workers on the plantations of the UFCO and the Standard Fruit Company in northern Honduras; an unprecedented process in Central America, especially since there were no agricultural workers' unions in Honduras. From the north, the strike spread across the country. Honduras' President Gálvez asked the US government for two warships for the north coast, which, if necessary, should land marines to put down the strike. The State Department agreed. According to the American press, the strike was only possible through communist initiative and logistical support; the allegations were directed towards Guatemala. One MP already saw the Panama Canal in danger. Even the New York Times , in a May 23, 1953 article, believed that the Alfhem arms transport , the strike in Honduras, and the discovery of arms in Nicaragua were part of a Guatemalan conspiracy.

The purchase of arms turned out to be problematic for Arbenz. The Guatemalan military leadership was aware that the US purchase would by no means be approved. The army itself saw itself endangered in its role as the nation's bearer of arms by the possibility of setting up militias . Arbenz had only two alternatives, both of which had major disadvantages: if he set up militias with arms, he would get into a dangerous conflict with the army - if he renounced the militias and the army and then failed in the long-awaited invasion, would not only the land reform, but all the political and social gains of the 1944 revolution were in danger.

The US embassy under Peurifoy and the US military mission meanwhile exerted subtle pressure on the senior army officers and signaled that the US would intervene directly if necessary. A military conflict between the US and the Guatemalan army could only end in disaster. These considerations should determine the course of the conflict. Regardless of this, Arbenz was still recognized by the vast majority of the officer corps , even if his political course was far from being accepted by all.

The rumor mill was further heated up by the departure of the Honduran ambassador on May 25, 1954. The Central American press had only one explanation for this: Guatemalan troops armed with the weapons of the Alfhem were ready to invade Honduras. In Guatemala this was seen as an attempt to provoke an American invasion “to protect” Honduras. While this was never the actual US intention, the rumor served to fuel nervousness in Guatemala.

June 18, 1954: invasion

On May 20, the invaders launched their first military action. A commando unit trained in Nicaragua attacked a train near Puerto Barrios that was transporting Alfhem weapons from the port to the capital. The damage was minor, but an army soldier and a commando were killed. Two further attempts to stop the transports also failed.

While the US and Central American press portrayed Honduras as the innocent victim of an imminent communist invasion from Guatemala, it was an open secret in Guatemala and Honduras that an invasion force was being assembled in Honduras, as some of the company's participants were very revealing in public had expressed. The nervousness in the Guatemalan officer corps was increased again by the desertion of Rodolfo Menoza Azurdia, the most skilled aviator in the country. He escaped accompanied by the former US major and deputy head of the US Air Force Mission in Guatemala, Ferdinand Schupp. A few days later, both took part in the air raids on Guatemala.

A good three days before the start of the invasion, the forces trained in Nicaragua were moved by air to northern Honduras. On June 18, the so-called Liberacionistas began to march . The force initially consisted of only 250 men. The military plan consisted of taking the small town of Zacapa , an important railway junction a good 50 km as the crow flies from the border, and Puerto Barrios, the country's most important export port. At 8 a.m., the column of trucks from Castillo Armas crossed the border. Contrary to what Armas expected, however, there was no sign of a revolution against Arbenz that the invaders had expected; the population remained passive. Therefore, the air force was now deployed. These were by no means as effective as expected. Although leaflets were dropped over the capital and Puerto Barrios was "bombed" with a hand grenade and a stick of dynamite, three machines had already failed on June 20. CIA chief Dulles told President Eisenhower that day that the company's outcome was now uncertain; Colonel Haney saw the loss of the machines as a disaster. Finally, two more machines were sent by the US to continue the attacks.

The personnel weakness of the invasion force was also a reason for Arbenz not to set up any militias. Army chief Carlos Enrique Díaz had expressly warned the president against this, as the army command would take this as a serious insult. Regardless of this, Arbenz had to expect that in case of doubt the army would sabotage the distribution of weapons to possible militias. In the days that followed, his strategy was therefore to wage war on the diplomatic front in the capital and to leave the combat operations against Castillo Arma's troops to friendly officers: Colonels Victor M. León, Pablo Díaz and José Barzanella. These went to the front in Zacapa with a good 2,000 men of the best troops. Arbenz wanted to lead the fighting as far inland as possible so as not to give Honduras the opportunity to accuse Guatemala of an invasion and thus provoke the USA to take direct military action.

In fact, on June 20, 1954, there was the only major battle between the army and the invaders. The young lieutenant César Augusto Silva Girón, leader of a platoon of a good 30 men, fought in the small town of Gualán, a little northeast of Zacapa, for 36 hours against far superior units of the so-called liberation army and fought them back. 23 years later he described the events in his memoirs ( La Batalla de Gualán, junio 1954 , Ciudad Guatemala 1977). Silva's victory, in turn, reinforced Arbenz's belief that the military actions were irrelevant.

On June 21, the invaders suffered a second defeat when they tried to take Puerto Barrios with a good 100 men. They were beaten back by the local police and hastily armed civilians, mostly trade unionists. A schooner used by the invaders, the Siesta de Trujillo , was confiscated along with its weapons load and 20 prisoners were taken.

Interlude: The UN Security Council

Arbenz had relied on the diplomatic card from the start and therefore stayed in the capital because it was only from here that he had the communication lines to the UN in New York. But all attempts to win the UN for a commitment to Guatemala failed. On June 25, 1954, the Security Council held a meeting to decide whether the "Guatemala case" should be dealt with or not. Four members, the USSR, Denmark, Lebanon and New Zealand, were in favor, the rest against; Great Britain and France abstained due to massive pressure from the United States. With this result, Arbenz had failed completely on the diplomatic front.

The end of the invasion. The abdication of Arbenz on June 27, 1954

Despite the victories of Gualán and Puerto Barrios, the military leadership at the front remained completely passive. On June 23, it finally became clear that the leading officers were not ready to fight against the "Liberation Army" of Castillo Armas. The rebels therefore took Chiquimula with almost no resistance, although Lieutenant Colonel Hernández had 150 men. The only resistance was offered by a few dozen peasants who only had hunting weapons. The "Battle of Chiquimula" was inflated by the actors of Operation Success to a great military victory over the army.

However, the basic concept of the operation plan now worked. The army command assumed that if the invaders were defeated, the USA would actually intervene directly. Although this was never intended, the threatening backdrop that had been created was enough to persuade the officers to call on Arbenz to resign.

Arbenz's defeat at the UN on June 25, his complete isolation in Latin America itself, a completely passive population in the capital and the pressure from the officers led to his decision on June 27 to resign in favor of a military junta under Army Chief Enrique Díaz. Although the PGT and some unions asked him to set up militias, he refrained from making this suggestion. Arbenz hoped that his resignation as a personal sacrifice would be enough to end the invasion and secure the results of the 1944 revolution. This was also assured by Díaz. On June 27, 1954, Arbenz resigned.

But Operation Success was not created to leave a supporter of Arbenz in office. On July 7th - within eleven days, five provisional governments succeeded each other - Castillo Armas became the leader of a new junta. On September 1, 1954, the other members of that junta resigned and Castillo became president. He was murdered three years later, on July 26, 1957, in the presidential palace by a member of the palace guards who immediately killed himself. To this day it has not been clarified who the perpetrators of the attack were.

Reporting in Germany

Both the East and West German press reported very extensively on the events in Guatemala from June 18 to 28, 1954. Despite all the ideological differences in reporting, a basic problem applied to both of them: There was no reliable information, and the few who did received came from the USA.

It is therefore not surprising that newspapers as diverse as the conservative West German world and the flagship of the GDR press, Neues Deutschland , operated with completely unrealistic figures; allegedly 5,000 men fought on both sides. For example, while the world carefully avoided the term “mercenary” for the invading army, the central organ of the SED spoke quite openly of “air pirates”, with the air strikes and their effects being completely exaggerated. Der Spiegel published a very well-founded and pointed basic article in its edition of June 30, 1954: Guatemala. The big stick . On four pages, the unnamed author placed the attack on Guatemala in a larger context to the earlier policy of the US Big Stick in the Caribbean from the time before 1933. The "banana war" was quickly forgotten, especially in West Germany, even if it did in the widespread work The Wars of the Postwar Period by Christian Zentner (Munich 1969) in the chapter The Shadow of the Cuban was portrayed quite objectively.

aftermath

Today there is no doubt that Operation Success was the model for Operation Zapata in the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. The staff was partly identical; Frank Wisner and JC King were involved again. The military and political disaster in the Bay of Pigs was apparently due to the success of Operation Success, of all things. Because despite significant planning deficiencies and serious logistical errors, the company in Guatemala had practically fulfilled its purpose according to the script. Years later, this apparently led the CIA to ignore or suppress fundamental political and military differences in the situation in Cuba in 1960/61 and in Guatemala in 1953/54. And Fidel Castro Ruz, former pistolero of the militant student association MNR, participant in the filibuster company of Cayo Confites of the Caribbean Legion (Legión del Caribe) in 1947 and now an experienced guerrillero with a pronounced will to power, was the exact opposite of the distinguished professional officer Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, who in 1971 in Ciudad Mexico drowned in a bathtub.

Operation Success also left its mark on another protagonist of the Cuban revolution: Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, popularly known as Che Guevara . Guevara stayed in 1954 as a magazine seller or bookseller in Guatemala. Politically a supporter of Arbenz, he saw on June 25, 1954, how the attempt of the PGT and the trade unions to form militias and to take up the fight against the invaders failed. According to the current state of research, this experience is the reason why Guevara immediately urged in 1959 to purge the Cuban army of professional officers and to set up militias.

In the long term, Operation Success had devastating consequences for the US's reputation in Latin America. According to Mario Vargas Llosa , it was an historic mistake because it delayed "the democratization of the continent for decades and killed thousands of people" and sparked hatred of the United States among generations of Latin Americans.

In terms of military history , Operation Success is of extraordinary importance, as it was the first time in the history of modern times that a genuinely military operation against an independent state was planned, organized and carried out by a secret service without the regular military being involved. The use of mercenaries also belongs in this context. Here, for the first time after 1945, the blurring of military and secret service operations became apparent, which is also a challenge for military history, since military and intelligence service history overlap here, which not only raises the question of access to historical secret service files in Germany.

chronology

1952: The Nicaraguan government under the dictator Anastasio Somoza García develops the plan to overthrow the Arbenz government under the code name Operation Fortune. The American Secretary of State Dean Acheson can prevent the company, in which the United Fruit Company (UFCO) is also involved, by intervening with President Harry S. Truman . The UFCO had already provided a ship as a transporter.

March 1953: The government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán nationalized 234,000 acres , approx. 93,000 hectares , of uncultivated land from all plantations over 83 hectares in size. This affects the United Fruit Company (UFCO) in particular , which owns huge banana plantations in Guatemala, but apparently also coffee holdings by (West) German emigrants. The UFCO is demanding compensation of 15.8 million dollars from the Guatemalan state. The Arbenz government, on the other hand, offers only $ 600,000 in compensation because it uses the company's official tax assessment as its basis.

March 1953: A coup by right-wing officers against Arbenz is discovered. During the judicial interrogations it is revealed that the CIA and the UFCO were involved in the coup plan.

1953: Under the Eisenhower government, the CIA is given the task of a military or paramilitary intervention force as part of the so-called rollback policy, in addition to the function of a pure intelligence service. With Operation Ajax is in Iran a legitimate foreign government overthrown by intelligence agents for the first time in American history to 1945th

August 1953: The National Security Council makes the decision on Operation Success. A training camp for an invading army is being set up in Nicaragua with the help of the Somoza government. An arms embargo is imposed on Guatemala .

February 1954: Further measures by the Arbenz government increase the proportion of nationalized property to an area of ​​1,457 km².

April 1954: Due to the US arms embargo, the Arbenz government buys weapons in Czechoslovakia. These left the Polish port of Szczecin on April 15, 1954 on board the Swedish freighter Alfhem . On May 15, 1954, the ship reached the Guatemalan port of Puerto Barrios unhindered .

May 19, 1954: Eisenhower warns of the establishment of a communist dictatorship in a Latin American state.

June 18, 1954: The intervention force led by Castillo Armas crosses the Honduran-Guatemalan border.

June 20, 1954: Battle of Gualán between the invaders and a unit of the Guatemalan army led by César Augusto Silva Girón. The invaders suffer defeat.

June 21, 1954: The planned capture of Puerto Barrios by the invaders fails.

June 25, 1954: The UN Security Council rejects Guatemala's application for assistance. The army leadership calls on President Arbenz to resign and threatens to negotiate directly with Castillo Armas.

June 27, 1954: Arbenz resigns in favor of a junta led by Colonel Enrique Díaz. On the same day, the invaders' air force sank the British freighter SS Springfjord in the Pacific port of Puerto San José, which sank aground. The crew can leave the ship in good time.

July 7, 1954: A junta led by Castillo Armas takes over the government.

September 1, 1954: After the other members of the Junta have resigned, Castillo Armas becomes President.

Artistic processing

  • As early as 1959, the GDR writer Wolfgang Schreyer dealt with the CIA operation in his novel The Green Monster . The work saw numerous reprints under the title The Green Pope . The main role is played by a former German air force pilot who, blackmailed into cooperation by the invaders, takes part in the coup d'état as a pilot under the cover name “Antonio Morena”, but overflows to the government side during the operation for reasons of conscience. Schreyer also wrote the report Bananengangster in 1959 , which appeared for the first time in the anthology Alaska Foxes: Five Reports from Three Continents (Berlin 1959, pp. 237-316) and was published in 1970 as Meridian booklet no.
  • Schreyer's novel was filmed in 1962 by Deutsches Fernsehfunk (DFF) under the original title Das Grüne Ungeheuer in five parts with Jürgen Frohriep in the role of Morena and Erik S. Klein in the role of the agent of the United Fruit Company, “Steve Baxter” (director : Rudi Kurz , first broadcast December 16, 1962). The “exotic” outdoor shots were shot in Bulgaria, the indoor shots in the Babelsberg film studio . The broadcast was the DFF's first five-part TV series. In August / September 1994 the series was broadcast again by MDR and has since been edited on DVD .
  • Just one year after Schreyer's novel, the West German writer Karl Heinz Poppe published Bananenkrieg (Reinbek 1960), which was also published in the GDR in 1961 (Berlin-Ost 1961). In 1983 the work was reprinted under the new title Interventions or Twelve Days of War in Guatemala with an afterword by the Argentine writer Osvaldo Bayer , who was living in exile in West Germany at the time (Berlin-West 1983).
  • The Guatemalan Nobel Prize for Literature, Miguel Ángel Asturias, dramatized the invasion in 1956 in his novella Weekend en Guatemala , which appeared in German for the first time in 1962 ( Weekend in Guatemala , Berlin-Ost 1962) and describes the invasion from the perspective of an American pilot who worked as a mercenary for the company was hired.
  • In 1993, the Swiss documentary filmmaker Andreas Hoessli shot the 90-minute documentary Devils Don't Dream - Research on Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (Switzerland 1995) in Guatemala and Costa Rica . The film also contains interviews with those involved in Operation Success and uses extremely rare footage from, among others, Guatemala and the USA. It aired on October 11, 1998 on 3sat.
  • The fate of Árbenz Guzmán as the ousted President of Honduras is dealt with in Mario Vargas Llosa's historical novel Harte Jahre , published in German in 2020 .

See also

literature

  • Stephen Schlesinger , Stephen Kinzer : Bitter Fruit: the story of the American coup in Guatemala. 2., corr. and extended edition. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass. among others 2005, ISBN 0-674-01930-X . (German language edition: Banana War. CIA Putsch in Guatemala . Dtv, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-423-10536-4 )
  • Stephen G. Rabe .: The killing zone. The United States wages Cold War in Latin America. Oxford Univ. Press, New York, NY et al. 2016, ISBN 978-0-19-021625-2 .
  • Piero Gleijeses: Shattered Hope. The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954. 2nd Edition. Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ 1992, ISBN 0-691-07817-3 .
  • Nick Cullather: Secret history. The CIA's classified account of its operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954. 2nd Edition. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif. 2006, ISBN 0-8047-5467-5 .
  • Richard H. Immermann: The CIA in Guatemala. The Foreign Policy of Intervention. 5th edition. Univ. of Texas Press, Austin 1990, ISBN 0-292-71083-6 .
  • Peter Chapman: Bananas! How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World. Canongate, Edinburgh et al. 2007, ISBN 978-1-84195-881-1 .
  • Christian Zentner : The wars of the post-war period. Munich approx. 1969, pp. 237-242.
  • César Augusto Silva Girón: La Batalla de Gualán, junio de 1954. Ciudad Guatemala 1977.
  • Carlos Manuel Pellecer: Caballeros sin esperanza. Ciudad Guatemala 1973.
  • Bombs, I repeat: bombs. In: Tim Weiner : CIA: The whole story . Frankfurt am Main 2008, pp. 137–151, chapter 10.
  • Stephen Kinzer: Overthrow: America's century of regime change from Hawaii to Iraq. New York 2006 (German edition: Putsch !: On the history of American imperialism. Frankfurt am Main 2007).
  • USA take action against Guatemala. Ship controls required on the high seas - London refuses. In: The world. June 19, 1954, p. 2.
  • USA invades Guatemala. American bombs on Guatemala City, Puerto Barrios and San José / Intervents penetrated 15 km deep into the country / Guatemala appeals to the UN Security Council / War crimes of the Eisenhower, Dulles and "United Fruit Company". In: New Germany. June 20, 1954, p. 1.
  • War in Guatemala. "Liberation Army" from Honduras / Security Council convened. In: Frankfurter Rundschau. June 21, 1954, p. 1.
  • Guatemala - a serious mistake. In: ibid., P. 2.
  • World Security Council met. Desperate struggle by the government of Guatemala. Unrest in the capitals. In: The world. June 21, 1954, p. 1.
  • Matt Kenny: Focal Point Guatemala: How Did the Civil War Start? Special report for DIE WELT. In: The world. June 22, 1954, p. 2.
  • Civil war rages in Guatemala. Situation still opaque - counter-government under Armas? In: The world. June 23, 1954, p. 1.
  • Guatemala's army counterattacked. Mercenaries put to flight / Volunteers report / Salvador remains neutral / Parliament of Uruguay condemns aggression. In: New Germany. June 23, 1954, p. 5.
  • First bombing raid on the city of Guatemala. Invasion army rents motor vehicles and sets up headquarters 100 kilometers southeast of the capital. In: The world. June 24, 1954, p. 2.
  • Encircled US interveners wiped out. Further successes of the Guatemalan Army / Numerous prisoners and spoils of war. In: New Germany. June 24, 1954, p. 5.
  • Homer Bigart: Bombs on Coban. Tired war in Guatemala. Self-report of the world. In: The world. June 25, 1954, p. 2.
  • The uprising in Guatemala. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Morning edition. June 25, 1954, p. 1.
  • Guatemala: Rebel resistance is broken. Insurgents Report Air Strikes - The role of the United States in the civil war is unclear. In: The world. June 26, 1954, p. 2.
  • United States mercenaries in Guatemala decisively beaten. Interventions flood back towards Honduras / Numerous prisoners brought in. In: New Germany. June 26, 1954, p. 5.
  • USA bombs on the people of Guatemala. Air pirates rage like in Korea / Great civilian casualties / Interventions kill farmers' councils. In: New Germany. June 27, 1954, p. 5.
  • SOS calls from Guatemala report heavy casualties. Commander-in-chief of the "Liberation Army" orders intensified air offensive - Provisional government formed. In: The world. June 28, 1954, p. 2.
  • Peace Committee to Guatemala. Schlachtenglück turns in favor of the "Liberation Army". In: Nordwest-Zeitung. (Oldenburg) June 28, 1954, p. 2.
  • BRITISH SHIP SUNK OFF GUATEMALA. Rebels Bomb Small Freighter Loading Coffee and Cotton at Port of San Jose. In: New York Times. June 28, 1954, p. 1.
  • USA air pirates intensify terrorism. Serious crimes against women and children in Guatemala / Houses and churches bombed. In: New Germany. June 29, 1954, p. 5.
  • The big stick . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1954, pp. 14-17 ( Online - June 30, 1954 ).
  • Rebels gain the upper hand. In: Hamburger Abendblatt. June 28, 1954, p. 1. Rebels gain the upper hand in Guatemala / President Arbenz had to resign. ( Memento from August 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Main-Echo of July 4, 2020, p. 29.
  2. ^ Bob Harris: Guatemala: Bill Clinton's Latest Damn-Near Apology. In: Mother Jones . March 16, 1999.
  3. ^ Sabine Kurtenbach: Guatemala. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-39874-X , p. 114.
  4. ↑ Main-Echo of July 4, 2020, p. 29.
  5. ↑ Main-Echo of July 4, 2020, p. 29.