A Confederacy of Fear: The Role of Congress and the American Media in the Fall of Jacobo Árbenz

By David E. Lindwall

"A Confederacy of Fear" examines the developments that led American legislators and journalists to see the reformist regime of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (1951-1954) as a beachhead for international communism in the Western Hemisphere and an existential threat to American democracy. It draws on the archives of prominent Senators and Congressmen; press accounts; Guatemalan and American print sources; and the declassified files of the CIA, State Department, and Congress to provide a narrative of the vital role Congress and the Press played in pressuring Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to act against Árbenz.
This book draws heavily on the statements made by Senators and Congressmen on the floor of Congress and to members of the media regarding their fears, amplified by the Korean War and communist adventurism in Eastern Europe and Indo-China, that Guatemala was falling behind the Iron Curtain. Each development in Guatemala was analyzed by American legislators and news reporters through the lens of the confrontation with the Soviet Union and China across the globe. Letters from constituents retrieved from the personal archives of Senators and Congressmen show how Americans in the heartland feared that the potential installation of a pro-Soviet regime in Guatemala would lead to communists knocking at their front doors.
While rivers of ink have been spilled on the subject of the Guatemalan revolution of 1954, no author has approached this essential Cold War narrative specifically from the perspective of Congress and the American media. This gap in the Árbenz story has led to an incomplete understanding of Truman and Eisenhower's motivation to remove Árbenz and a misreading of the role Congress has in shaping foreign policy then and now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350906554

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©2023 David E. Lindwall All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 979-8-35090-654-7 paperback

ISBN: 979-8-35090-655-4 ebook

Table of Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter 1: The United States Media and the Rise and Fall of Árbenz

Chapter 2: Congress and the Cold War

Chapter 3: Arévalo and the Making of Jacobo Árbenz

Chapter 4: Congress Pressures Truman and Eisenhower to do

Something About Árbenz

Chapter 5: Senator Alexander Wiley’s Crusade to Remove Árbenz

Chapter 6: Growing Confrontation Draws More Legislators Into

the Fight

Chapter 7: Senate Resolution 91

Chapter 8: The Postmortem

Chapter 9: The McCarthy Effect

Chapter 10: Congressional Views of Jacobo Árbenz in the Early Years

After His Fall: A Symbol of the Perils of Communism and

the Need for US Action

Chapter 11: The Period of Bipartisan Questioning of the Árbenz Legacy

1961-1983

Chapter 12: The Period of Partisan Polarization - The Reagan Effect -

1983-1996

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Endnotes

Map of Guatemala

(Declassified Defense Intelligence Agency Map courtesy of NARA)

Introduction

Americans were scared! The fall of China to the communists, the successful detonation of the Soviet Union’s first hydrogen bomb, and now photographs in Newsweek and the New York Times of Guatemalans parading in front of the national palace with huge posters of Max, Lenin and Stalin convinced many Americans that the very security of the American homeland was imperiled. American soldiers were dying on the frozen battlefields of Korea and French troops were ceding ground daily to communist peasants across Indochina. As communist armies were gaining ground in Europe and Asia, there was a growing fear that expansionist communism could establish a beachhead in the Western Hemisphere from where it could easily invade the United States. That expected beachhead was Guatemala, where the 1944 revolution had brought in a succession of progressive governments whose communist advisors and a small cadre of communist officials were viewed with disproportionate alarm.

As the Cold War contest between the West and the Soviet Union played out in increasingly violent terms, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and the American press came to interpret the influence of communists over the government of Guatemala — first under President Juan José Arévalo and then more directly under Jacobo Árbenz — as presenting an existential threat to the United States and its hemispheric neighbors. Arévalo and Árbenz were both products of the 1944 revolution that had overthrown the military dictatorship of Jorge Ubico and were committed to liberalizing Guatemala’s political culture and instituting progressive reforms that would address the social and economic inequalities that had long marginalized and impoverished the vast majority of Guatemala’s citizens. Arévalo implemented historic institutional reforms by expanding labor rights, creating a social security institute that increased access to public health services and giving away land confiscated from German planters during World War II. Árbenz took the reforms to the next level by challenging the economic power and political influence of foreign monopolies that had long dominated Guatemala’s economy and by promising expanded land reform.

From the beginning of their administrations, Arévalo and Árbenz had relied on local and international advisors, many of whom belonged to Communist organizations, to design and implement their reform agenda. With Cold War fears weighing heavily on Americans of all political stripes, the influence of communist advisors to Presidents Arévalo and Árbenz generated considerable concern in the United States that the Soviet Union was trying to establish a satellite in the Western Hemisphere, halfway between the United States and the strategic Panama Canal. While neither Arévalo nor Árbenz were communists themselves, they gave their communist advisors outsized influence over policy, control of the official media and leadership of much of the government bureaucracy. This was enough to convince the American media, public and policy makers that the Iron Curtain was about to come down in Central America, less than 500 miles from the Rio Grande.

The story of United States involvement in the revolution that overthrew Árbenz in 1954 has been extensively documented, and the declassification of CIA and State Department files from that era has enabled scholars to plumb in great depth the role of the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department. The role of the United States Congress, on the other hand, has received considerably less attention and has been treated by historians of the 1954 revolution as marginal to the broader David and Goliath story of Eisenhower vs. Árbenz. While the exact weight of Congressional pressure on Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to remove Árbenz will never be fully known, it is clear from statements by American legislators contained in the Congressional Record and remarks made by Representatives and Senators to the press that Congress was alarmed by the prospect of a Soviet satellite in the Americas and played a consistent and consequential role in building the case for removing Árbenz. Seldom does the White House act alone in implementing foreign policy, and in the case of the overthrow of Árbenz, pressure from Congress was a factor that has long been underestimated.

What role did the United States Congress play in the overthrow of Árbenz and in his vindication 30 years later as violence once again consumed Guatemala? What factors forged a bipartisan consensus that Árbenz presented a security threat to the United States in the 1950’s and why did that consensus fall apart in the 1980’s when the Árbenz narrative became a convenient trope for the American right and the left in their disagreements over Ronald Reagan’s Central American policy?

A reading of the Congressional Record shows that in the first half of the 1950’s the United States Congress was seized with what legislators perceived as a spreading communist threat to hemispheric peace emanating from the Guatemalan regime, that threats to American business interests in Guatemala (specifically in this case the United Fruit Company) had dangerous implications for American investment throughout Latin America, and that on a bipartisan basis they called on both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to take action to neutralize the threat. And once Árbenz was out of power, Congress worked directly with the CIA to persuade the American people that the Árbenz government had been moving Guatemala in the direction of violent, godless communism and that America was safer now that the communist threat to the hemisphere had been excised. That construct of Árbenz persisted in Congressional discussions of Central America for nearly three decades until the climax of Guatemalan’s bloody internal conflict in the early 1980’s forced a reevaluation of Árbenz’s legacy. Whether this reevaluation was the product of a reappraisal of Árbenz’s record while he was in power or primarily a political argument used to hold the Reagan administration accountable for its support for violent military regimes in Central America in the 1980’s is still a subject of debate. The Congressional Record, transcripts of Congressional committee hearings, declassified CIA and State Department documents, National Security Council minutes from the Eisenhower Library, the personal archives of a number of American legislators and news accounts vividly demonstrate that Congress was an active player and not simply a bystander in the overthrow of Árbenz.

Members of Congress expressed concern about the expansion of communist influence in Guatemala even before Árbenz was inaugurated as President. The treatment of American investment in Guatemala — particularly the United Fruit Company (UFCO) and its subsidiary the International Railways of Central America (IRCA) — generated special concern from the Congressional delegation of Massachusetts (where UFCO had its headquarters). But the Boston-based Congressmen were not the only American legislators concerned about developments in Guatemala. After the nationalization of American oil interests in Mexico and Bolivia in the 1930’s, protecting American direct investment overseas was an interest of both Republican and Democratic legislators. Under both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, Congress did not believe the State Department was taking the threat from communism in Guatemala seriously enough, and legislators from both parties proposed concrete measures to be taken against Guatemala for its perceived role in global communist expansion. American legislators used their bully-pulpit frequently and passionately to hold the Truman and Eisenhower administrations accountable for protecting U.S. interests in Guatemala and their interventions were cited by both Administrations in internal debates over how to address developments in Guatemala.

Presidents Truman and Eisenhower needed congressional support for the extraordinary measures fighting the Cold War required and weighed congressional concerns regarding the Árbenz administration seriously. The extraordinary interest of Congress in Guatemala and strong, bipartisan calls for more vigorous U.S. action can only be seen as empowering Eisenhower to use the tools at his disposal in 1954 to overthrow Árbenz. This bipartisan pressure on the President to remove Árbenz from power stands in sharp contrast to the polarized positions of Republicans and Democrats in Congress in response to the Central American policies of Presidents Carter and Reagan three decades later.

The principal historical accounts of the fall of Árbenz were produced between 1980-1995 when the internal conflict raging in Guatemala polarized American politics around Central America and put an end to the bipartisanship that had characterized U.S. policy towards the isthmus. There has long been a debate in the literature regarding the relative influence of Cold War concerns and the protection of the investment of the United Fruit Company as primary motivating forces in the U.S. decision to remove Árbenz. While both were important to American Congressmen, the evidence suggests that fears of the Kremlin getting a foothold in the Americas were the primary driving force. The United Fruit Company helped stoke those fears through its effective public relations strategy. Intense lobbying of Congress by Corcoran, Youngman and Rowe, the United Fruit Company’s legal representatives in Washington D.C, undoubtedly also played a part in motivating legislators to get involved in the public debate over Guatemala.

Historians frequently link the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of Árbenz in 1954 with its success in removing reformist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh from power in Iran in 1953. The success in Iran emboldened both the CIA and the Eisenhower administration to believe that covert means could be used to remove Árbenz without much exposure and public outcry. But where the United States Congress was relatively uninterested in Mosaddegh — indeed, the matter of Mosaddegh’s expropriation of British oil interests in Iran only came up once in a Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearing (April 23, 1952) and a handful of statements in the Congressional Record in 1951-1953 mostly relating to U.S. access to Iranian oil — U.S. legislators began raising concerns about Árbenz even before he was sworn-in as President and didn’t stop until decades after his fall in 1954. Nearly a hundred interventions were made by Congressmen and Senators in the Congressional Record between 1950-1954 expressing deep concern over the expansion of communist influence in Guatemala and nine separate committee hearings were called on Guatemala, one of which lasted six days and produced 296 pages of testimony. Congress had an extraordinary interest in the situation in Guatemala and the Eisenhower administration in particular had reason to take Congress’s concerns into consideration in developing the policy that ultimately led to Árbenz’s forced resignation.

While Árbenz’s overthrow had unchallenged bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress during Árbenz’s presidency (1951-1954), the understanding of Árbenz after his fall from power and the controversial Central American policies of Jimmie Carter and Ronald Reagan was reinterpreted by American legislators over the years to fit diverging partisan agendas. An examination of the Congressional Record from 1955-1996 shows that President Jacobo Árbenz was a figure that emerged frequently in debates over U.S. policy towards Guatemala and Latin America more broadly. Guatemala was referenced in nearly 500 floor interventions and 80 committee hearings during that time period, and many of the interventions referenced contrasting versions of the Jacobo Árbenz story to buttress their arguments.

United States Congressmen and Senators reimagined the Árbenz legacy between 1954 (right after his removal from office) and the 1996 Peace Accords (that put an end to Guatemala’s long-running internal conflict) in ways that supported their increasingly diverging positions on how the United States should confront Cold War challenges in Latin America. The U.S. media’s interpretation of Árbenz evolved in ways that mirrored the changes in how American legislators used Árbenz as he became a symbol for the right and the left in the partisan battles that raged on Capitol Hill in the latter years of the Cold War. Statements by American legislators on the floor of Congress contained in the Congressional Record and minutes of Congressional committee hearings map out the evolution of the constructed identity of Árbenz from communist villain to progressive icon.

The story of the fall of Árbenz and his rehabilitation decades later is a study of the complex calculations that go into the making of foreign policy and the critical importance Presidents must give to the views of Congress and the media if their foreign policy is to succeed.

Prologue

No history of the Cold War in Latin America is complete without a retelling of the story of Jacobo Árbenz. Árbenz was a young Army officer who was one of the principal leaders of the 1944 revolution that overthrew the repressive 13-year dictatorship of General Jorge Ubico. Guatemala’s experience with democracy had been very limited and the elections that brought Juan José Arévalo to the Presidency in 1945 were unquestionably the most democratic elections Guatemala had had to that date. Arévalo, recognizing Árbenz’s extraordinary talent and ambition, and in acknowledgement of the role he played in bringing about the fall of Ubico, asked Capitan Jacobo Árbenz to be his Minister of Defense. At the same time, Major Francisco Arana, another hero of the 1944 revolution and head of the triumvirate that handed power over to Arévalo, was selected by the Superior Defense Council (Consejo Superior de Defensa - CSD, the group of senior Army officers who vote on promotions and leadership positions in the military) to be the Commander of the Armed Forces (Jefe del Estado Mayor).

Arévalo, a left-wing academic, used his popularity, his formidable oratorical skills and his mastery at building working majorities in Congress to pass landmark labor and social security legislation, arguably the most consequential social reforms since the Liberal Revolution of 1871. The landed elite, the conservative military, the Catholic Church and foreign business interests were nervous about the ultimate reach of his reforms, but Arévalo was careful to pace his reforms in such a way that he always maintained enough support to ward off coup plots from his large but divided opposition. His reforms, however, had the effect of polarizing Guatemalan politics and as the 1950 elections approached, the parties on the left and the right were lining up for what they believed would be an existential battle.

The affable and popular Arana, who by 1949 had been promoted to Colonel, was the favorite of the rightwing parties, though he had competition from civilian politicians on the right and it was uncertain if he could accede to the Presidency through elections. Many in the Army, where his control was extensive, and in some rightwing political circles were urging him to take over the government by force and cancel the elections. Following a car accident at the end of 1945 where President Arévalo was severely injured and nearly lost his life, the parties on the left — afraid of an Arana coup — offered Arana their support in the 1950 elections if he would ensure that Arévalo was able to complete his term as president. But by 1949 those same parties had doubts that Arana would continue to carry out Arévalo’s reformist agenda and quietly shifted their support to (by then) Colonel Árbenz. Arévalo, who had earlier convinced Árbenz to let Arana be the candidate in 1950, had also come to believe that Árbenz was better placed to continue the revolution. The mercurial and introverted Árbenz wanted to run for President but was less popular than Arana and his supporters feared that he would not succeed if Arana ran. The problem was solved, however, when on July 18, 1949, Colonel Francisco Arana’s car was ambushed on the Puente de la Gloria in Amatitlán and he was gunned down as he tried to get out of the car.

The shooting of Colonel Arana was by everyone’s account a watershed event¹ in the Guatemalan revolution. For critics of Árbenz, it was the original sin that foreshadowed the violent fall of the regime five years later. Long after leaving power, President Arévalo said that Arana had come to him on July 16 to demand that he replace several members of his cabinet with individuals loyal to Arana or else Arana would depose him. Arévalo asked for time and convoked his closest allies who urged him to arrest Arana. Among those calling for the arrest of Arana was Árbenz. On July 18 Arana told Arévalo that he was going to Amatitlán to pick up a cache of weapons that was being stored in the old Presidential weekend retreat. Arévalo told Árbenz, who hastily organized a group of his closest aides to arrest Arana on his way back from Amatitlán. Accounts on who shot first vary, but in the end Arana and his Aide de Camp were dead and Árbenz’s Aide-de-camp Alfonso Martínez was injured. Whatever the facts in the case, Guatemalans quickly came to the conclusion that Árbenz had ordered Arana’s murder so that he would have no viable competition in the 1950 election.² Many years later when Arévalo was asked who ordered Arana’s death, he responded (perhaps self-servingly) that only one man benefitted from Arana’s death and that all of Guatemala knew who had killed Arana, implying that it had been Árbenz.³

Within the hour of Arana’s death, his closest supporters in the military high command were summoned to the Palace and placed under arrest. Árbenz’s Personal Secretary Francisco Morazán, just back from Amatitlán, opened fire on the group of Arana supporters, killing Major Victor Manuel Archila, head of the Army’s tank division, and wounding several others. The Presidency ordered the closing of all the newspapers in order to try to buy time to come up with an explanation for Arana’s death and to keep citizens from protesting, but the testimony of Arana’s driver, Francisco Palacios, was already circulating widely and the palace could not contain the discontent.⁴ As word spread of Arana’s death, Army units around Guatemala City rebelled. Tanks fired on the National Palace and laid siege to the headquarters of the Presidential Guard (the Guardia de Honor). But with the senior Aranista officers wounded or detained, the rebellion lost steam and within 72 hours it was over. President Arévalo addressed the nation on July 21 and blamed rightwing reactionaries for the attack on Arana. Historian Piero Gleijeses said that few in Guatemala believed Arévalo’s account of Arana’s death and that many saw it as the beginnings of Árbenz coming to power ruthlessly and undemocratically.⁵ The military never forgave Árbenz for the killing of Arana and this impacted their support for him when Guatemala came under siege from a well-financed, if somewhat rag-tag, rebel army in June 1954.⁶

The polarization resulting from the death of Arana and from Arévalo’s reformist policies led to increasing political tension as the elections approached. Historian Diane Stanley quotes Manuel Galich (Árbenz’s Ambassador in Argentina) as saying the adoption of the Labor Code caused a deep rupture in the country, serving as the meridian line which separated the left from the right and caused confrontations first with words and later with violence.⁷ On November 5, one week before the 1950 elections, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas led a raid on La Aurora Air Base, hoping to mobilize popular opposition to the elections. He had been betrayed and his band of 40 attackers were surprised and most were killed. Castillo Armas only survived because he was bleeding profusely from several injuries and was transported to the morgue along with the dead. When it was discovered that he was alive, he was sent to the penitentiary with one other survivor of the attack. Six months later they both managed to escape from prison by digging a tunnel under the wall in what Guatemalan newspaper El Imparcial called an escape worthy of the Count of Montecristo.⁸

With Arana out of the way, Árbenz, now Acting Commander of the Armed Forces, was widely expected to win the presidency. He had the backing of the left and