27 June 1954: CIA and Assassinations

The Guatemala 1954 Documents

These documents, including an instructional guide on assassination found among the training files of the CIA's covert "Operation PBSUCCESS," were among several hundred records released by the Agency on May 23, 1997 on its involvement in the infamous 1954 coup in Guatemala. After years of answering Freedom of Information Act requests with its standard "we can neither confirm nor deny that such records exist," the CIA has finally declassified some 1400 pages of over 100,000 estimated to be in its secret archives on the Guatemalan destabilization program. (The Agency's press release stated that more records would be released before the end of the year.) An excerpt from the assassination manual appears on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Saturday, May 31, 1997.

The small, albeit dramatic, release comes more than five years after then CIA director Robert Gates declared that the CIA would "open" its shadowy past to post-cold war public scrutiny, and only days after a member of the CIA's own historical review panel was quoted in the New York Times as calling the CIA's commitment to openness "a brilliant public relations snow job." (See Tim Weiner, "C.I.A.'s Openness Derided as a 'Snow Job'," The New York Times, May 20, 1997, p. A16)

Arbenz was elected President of Guatemala in 1950 to continue a process of socio- economic reforms that the CIA disdainfully refers to in its memoranda as "an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the 'Banana Republic.'" {read more}

The "People's Soldier" Comes Home

From the Cerigua Weekly Briefs, Numbers 40-41, 27 October 1995

Guatemala City, October 20. Forty-one years ago, right-wing mercenaries stripped him of the presidency, his clothes and forced him from the country. Yesterday he returned to a hero's welcome.

Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, a hero of the 1944 revolution, was elected president in 1951 with the largest majority in Guatemalan history. But Arbenz's attempts to strengthen national independence, the expropriation (with compensation) of unused land belonging to US transnationals and the inclusion of communists in his government aroused the ire of the US State Department and Central Intelligence Agency. {read more}