mala," which ousted Arbenz's government and land reform and forced Arbenz into exile. Part of the Operation inclu ded aerial bombing of Guatemala City. Galeano cites ten officials of the Eisenhower administration who oversaw the coup and who had been or would be board members and advocates for United Fruit on one hand or Cold Warriors on the other.
The de facto American expropriation of Guatemala's national identity can be seen as a main conflict embedded into Guatemala's politics from 1954 onward, and it seems difficult to overestimate the exploitation of capital resources on the part of United Fruit Company, very much in cooperation with landed and other conserva tive political elites in Guatemala. The interests of the tradi tional ruling classes in modern Guatemala appear to have been bound to the objectives of America's United Fruit Company and the ancillary capitalist interests. Instrumental for those interests was the conservative wing of the Guatemalan army, though military elites achieved real power. Galeano appears to believe that it was a combination of bribery and cowardice motivating Guatemalan military officers supposedly loyal to the duly elected government of the country to essentially fall before a mercenary army cros sing into Guatemala from a United Fruit plantation in Honduras (3:153). In other words, it was the role of the Guatemalan mili tary to enable the traditionalist agenda, bound up with the financial agenda of foreign interests, of what Galeano refers to as the "reconquest of Guatemala" (3:153). Ameri can-trained Guatemalan Colonel Castillo Armas assumed the presidency when the coup was completed. Another strand of activ ity from foreign interests can be seen in the fact that the 1954 Guatemalan coup appears to have radicalized one Ernesto "Che" Guevara, after his abortive attempt to organize a citizen militia in Guatemala City. Indeed,
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