In the 1980s, Guatemala was an unhappy bit player on the stage of U.S. policy in Central America. While the Reagan Administration was actively engaged in support of the government of El Salvador, and actively fomenting opposition to the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, the public image of successive Guatemalan regimes was so bad that that the Reagan Administration was forced to distance itself from events there. Insurgency and counterinsurgency thus went on in Guatemala, only loosely linked to events elsewhere in Central America, and Guatemala made the news in the United States only sporadically, and usually in the immediate wake of reports of mass repression and widespread slaughter there.
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 Communism, recalling the coup as only another banana revolt." This is perhaps an understatement. Certainly Guatemala has entered, if vaguely, into the lore of criticism of Cold War policies; an apt summary of what most people "know" about the events there might be that the CIA overthrew a government there at the behest of the United Fruit Company.
In The CIA in Guatemala, Immerman presents a more complex and textured story, but one that broadly supports t...