Guatemala

Three decades earlier, however, Guatemala occupied center stage in the Cold War. The rise of a leftist government there prompted great anxieties within the Eisenhower Administration's foreign policy and national-security leadership, and U.S. involvement in Guatemala reached a high point when a coup, organized and carried forward with the support of the CIA, overthrew the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and established the first of a succession of military regimes.

From a U.S. perspective, Arbenz Guzman's overthrow was obtained all but effortlessly, and the events left little lasting impact on American public opinion. As Richard H. Immerman notes in The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (1982, p. 6), "most [Americans] forgot even the overarching issue of Co

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elopment theory calls a "takeoff." The effect was instead to produce a strong element of foreign dependency, and it is in this role that the United Fruit Company entered the picture. In Immerman's view, the role of the United Fruit Company was not a simple transaction in which the CIA overthrew a government to ensure the company's interests. Instead, he suggests, the United Fruit Company produced, or at least typified, the filter through which U.S. policy makers viewed Central America, a region about which they knew and cared rather little. This filter was one which transmitted to the United States a picture of Guatemala through the eyes of the elite, an elite threatened by the reformist governments of the 1940s and early 1950s (Immerman, 1982, pp. 75-82). Immerman's work appears to be thoroughly researched; it includes 55 pages of notes and 18 pages of bibliographical references. But how reliable is his use of these materials? As a test case, we may consider an 1954 incident in which a rightist general named Arana, suspected of plotting a coup, was assassinated. The victim's car was stopped and riddled with submachine-gun fire. After the 1954 coup, Arbenz Guzman was accused of masterminding the assassination. Immerman
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Approximate Word count = 1630
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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