Carlos Castillo Armas
| His Excellency Lieutenant colonel Carlos Castillo Armas | |
|---|---|
| President of the Republic of Guatemala | |
|
In office September 1, 1954 – July 26, 1957 | |
| Preceded by | Elfegio Monzón |
| Succeeded by | Luis González |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
4 November 1904 Santa Lucía Cotzumalguapa, Guatemala |
| Died |
26 July 1957 (aged 53) Guatemala City, Guatemala |
| Political party | National Liberation Movement |
| Spouse(s) | Odilia de Castillo Armas |
| Occupation | Military |
| Signature |
 |
Carlos Castillo Armas (November 4, 1904 – July 26, 1957) was a Guatemalan military officer who seized power in a United States-orchestrated coup in 1954. Castillo Armas had served in the Guatemalan army until 1944, when he supported the pro-democracy uprising against Jorge Ubico that began the Guatemalan Revolution. Arrested by the government in 1949, he was contacted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) upon his release, and played a part in several coup attempts. He led the CIA invasion force that toppled Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, and was named president soon after. He held the title of President of Guatemala from July 8, 1954 until his assassination in 1957. He was followed by a series of authoritarian rulers in Guatemala.
The 1944 Revolution
Prior to the 1944 Revolution, Carlos Castillo Armas served as an artillery instructor at Fort San Jose. During the 1944 Revolution, he strongly supported Francisco Javier Arana and friend Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, two members of the ruling triumvirate. For his support, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and joined the new General Staff. For seven months, between October 1945 and April 1946, Castillo Armas received training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, coming in contact with American intelligence officers.[1] After serving on the General Staff, he became director of the Escuela Politécnia in 1947 and later commander of Mazatenango in 1948.
After Arana's death in 1949, the Guatemalan government imprisoned Castillo Armas, only to release him months later. Upon his release, he came into contact with the CIA and launched a failed attack on the Aurora Base in 1950. Imprisoned once more, he escaped in 1951.[2]
Coup d'état
The United States was opposed to the nationalization efforts, the arrival of the Czech weaponry in Guatemala on May 15, 1954,[3] and Arbenz's perceived communism. This led to CIA support for Castillo (CIA codename: "Calligeris"[4]) and his army. The CIA, using the threat of communism and the Cold War, prepared a case in which accusations against Jacobo Arbenz's regime were made, indicating that he had alliances with communist emerging parties, and even with Russian communists. According to these claims, the security of the Western Hemisphere was threatened.[3]
In 1952, the Guatemalan Party of Labour had been legalized, and Communist politicians subsequently gained considerable minority influence over peasant organizations and labor unions, but not over the governing political party. In an election, the Guatemalan Labour Party (PGT) won only 4 seats in the 58-member senate of Guatemala, the governing body of the country. The CIA drafted Operation PBFORTUNE, ready to act in the event that Guatemala seemed poised to become a Communist puppet-state ties of the Soviet Union under President Árbenz Guzmán. The United Fruit Company had been lobbying the CIA to oust reformist governments in the Republic of Guatemala since the time of the Government (1945–51) of President Juan José Arévalo Bermejo; but it was not until the Eisenhower Administration (1953–61) that the CIA received attention from the White House. In 1954, the Eisenhower Administration was flushed with victory, from the 1953 Iranian coup d'état that deposed the Government of PM Mossadegh. On 19 February 1954, the CIA began Operation WASHTUB, the planting of a false Soviet arms-cache in Nicaragua, to publicly demonstrate Guatemalan Government ties to the Soviet Union.[5]
Operation WASHTUB proved unnecessary; in May 1954, surplus Wehrmacht weapons, from Czechoslovakia, secretly arrived to Guatemala, delivered by the Swedish ship Alfhem. The cargo manifest of the ship's cargo were false, and misrepresented the nature of the cargo it transported to Guatemala. The CIA intelligence analysts interpreted that subterfuge as proof of the Árbenz Government's links to the Soviet Union. In the Guatemalan–Czechoslovak arms deal, for cash money, the Communists supplied obsolete, barely functional German World War II-model weapons to Guatemala.[6] The arms purchase was a response to the US arms embargo; the Árbenz Government resupplied the Guatemalan armed forces, because it was convinced that a U.S.–sponsored paramilitary invasion was imminent. Previously, Guatemala had published White Paper accounts of the CIA's Operation PBFORTUNE, and of perceived U.S. sabotage actions, at the 1954 Organization of American States convention, in Caracas, presented as the preparations for US intervention to the internal politics of Guatemala. The Eisenhower Administration ordered the CIA to effect Operation PBSUCCESS, the coup d'état to depose the Árbenz Government of Guatemala. Afterwards, President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán resigned on 27 June 1954, and the installed military government (1954–57) of Castillo Armas allowed him, and others, to seek political asylum in the Mexican embassy, en route to leaving Guatemala.
After the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, CIA case officer Frank Wisner organised Operation PBHistory, meant to find and secure Árbenz government documents that might prove that the Soviet Union controlled Guatemala; and, in so doing, PBHistory meant to provide usable intelligence regarding other Soviet connections and Communist personnel in Latin America. Wisner sent two teams of document analysts who gathered 150,000 documents with the help of the Guatemalan Army and the junta of Castillo Armas, whom the U.S. installed as President of Guatemala. Ronald M. Schneider, an outside researcher who examined the PBHistory documents, reported that the documents did not indicate that the Republic of Guatemala was controlled by the USSR, and found substantial evidence that Guatemalan Communists acted independently, without orders or support from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in Moscow.[7] The contacts between the Soviet Union and the Árbenz government consisted of a Soviet diplomat negotiating an exchange of bananas for agricultural machinery; the business deal failed because neither party had refrigerated freight ships with which to transport the perishable fruit. The other evidence of Soviet–Guatemalan contact, found by the CIA after the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'etat were two invoices, for a total of $22.95, to the Guatemalan Party of Labour, from a book shop in Moscow.[6] However, Arbenz read and admired the works of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin; officials in his government euologized Stalin as a "great statesmen and leader....whose passing is mourned by all progressive men".[8] The Guatemalan Congress even paid a "minute of silence" tribute to Stalin.[9]
Árbenz took refuge in the Mexican embassy and resigned in favor of Carlos Enrique Díaz. Two days later, the army, under Colonel Elfego Monzón, deposed Díaz and established a military junta. On July 2, 1954, Carlos Castillo was invited to join the ruling junta. Six days later, on July 8, he succeeded Monzón.
Castillo Armas was given a ticker parade in NYC in the fall of 1954 for his coup. Columbia University gave him an honorary degree.
Military Government Board (1954)
- Colonel H. Elfego Monzón
- Colonel Enrique Trinidad Oliva
- Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas
- Colonel Mauricio Dubois
- Colonel José Luis Cruz Salazar
Presidency and assassination
On September 1, the remaining members of the military junta resigned, and Carlos Castillo was formally declared president, ushering in a decades-long period of dictatorial rule. Upon taking office, he disenfranchised more than half of Guatemala's voting population by removing the voting ability of illiterates. By the end of July 1954, Castillo had not only cancelled the law that facilitated the nation's land reform, Decree 900, forcing peasants to vacate their newly acquired lands, but, at the CIA's request, formed the National Committee of Defense Against Communism, which is generally acknowledged to be Latin America's first modern death squad. He purged the government and trade unions of people suspected of left-wing sympathies, banned political parties and peasant organizations, and restored the secret police force of the Jorge Ubico era. Towards the end of the summer of 1954, Castillo issued the Preventive Penal Law Against Communism, which increased the penalties for many "Communist" activities, including labor union activities.
In 1954, Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA and a member of the Board of Trustees for the United Fruit Company, applauded the victory of 'democracy' over communism and that the situation in Guatemala was 'being cured by the Guatemalans themselves'. A British official remarked that 'in places, it might almost be Molotov speaking about...Czechoslovakia or Hitler speaking about Austria.'[10]
In 1955, Castillo postponed the next year's presidential election. He did allow for congressional elections. However, only his own party, the National Liberation Movement (MLN) was allowed to field candidates. In Richard Nixon's Vice Presidential visit in 1955, he commented that "President Castillo Armas' objective, 'to do more for the people in two years than the Communists were able to do in ten years,' is important. This is the first instance in history where a Communist government has been replaced by a free one."Following this, in a 2-year period, Castillo received US$90 Million in financial support from the US Government.
In 1956 he implemented a new constitution and had himself declared president for four years. He was shot dead in the presidential palace by a palace guard, Romeo Vásquez, on July 26, 1957. It is still uncertain whether the killer was paid to assassinate Castillo, or had other motives. Vásquez was found dead a short while later in what is believed to be a suicide. Castillo was succeeded by Luis González. After the assassination, the United Fruit Company was returned land lost during nationalization undertaken under the previous Guatemalan President, Árbenz.
See also
References
- ↑ Cullather & 2006, pp. 12-14.
- ↑ Gleijeses 1991, pp. 81-83.
- 1 2 Ward 2004.
- ↑ Office of the Historian, US State Department 2003.
- ↑ Cullather 2006, p. 57.
- 1 2 Gaddis 1997, p. 178.
- ↑ Cullather 1997.
- ↑ Gleijeses 1992, p. 141-181.
- ↑ Gleijeses 1992, p. 181-379.
- ↑ Young, John W. (1986). "Great Britain's Latin American Dilemma: The Foreign Office and the Overthrow of ‘Communist’ Guatemala, June 1954". The International History Review 8 (4): 573–592 [p. 584]. doi:10.1080/07075332.1986.9640425.
Bibliography
- Cullather, Nicholas (23 May 1997). "CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents". National Security Archive Electronic. Briefing Book No. 4. National Security Archive.
- Cullather, Nicholas (2006). Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala 1952-54 (2nd ed.). Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804754682.
- Forster, Cindy (2001). The time of freedom: campesino workers in Guatemala's October Revolution. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 9780822941620.
- Fried, Jonathan L. (1983). Guatemala in rebellion: unfinished history. Grove Press. p. 52.
- Friedman, Max Paul (2003). Nazis and good neighbors: the United States campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II. Cambridge University Press. pp. 82–83. ISBN 9780521822466.
- Gaddis, John Lewis (1997). We Now Know, rethinking Cold War history. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0 19 878070 2.
- Garcia Ferreira, Roberto (2008). "The CIA and Jacobo Arbenz: The story of a disinformation campaign". Journal of Third World Studies (United States) XXV (2): 59.
- Gleijeses, Piero (1992). Shattered hope: the Guatemalan revolution and the United States, 1944-1954. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691025568.
- Grandin, Greg (2000). The blood of Guatemala: a history of race and nation. Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822324959.
- Handy, Jim (1994). Revolution in the countryside: rural conflict and agrarian reform in Guatemala, 1944-1954. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9780807844380.
- Immerman, Richard H. (1983). The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. University of Texas Press. ISBN 9780292710832.
- Koeppel, Dan (2008). Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. New York: Hudson Street Press. p. 153.
- Krehm, William (1999). Democracies and Tyrannies of the Caribbean in 1940s. COMER Publications. ISBN 9781896266817.
- LaFeber, Walter (1993). Inevitable revolutions: the United States in Central America. W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 77–79. ISBN 9780393309645.
- Loveman, Brian; Davies, Thomas M. (1997). The Politics of antipolitics: the military in Latin America (3rd, revised ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780842026116.
- Martínez Peláez, Severo (1990). La Patria del Criollo (in Spanish). México: Ediciones En Marcha. p. 858.
- McCreery, David (1994). Rural Guatemala, 1760-1940. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804723183.
- Office of the Historian, US State Department (2003). "Foreign Relations, Guatemala, 1952-1954; Documents 1-31". US State Department. Archived from the original on 2 February 2004.
- Paterson, Thomas G.; et al. (2009). American Foreign Relations: A History, Volume 2: Since 1895. Cengage Learning. ISBN 0547225695.
- Rabe, Stephen G. (1988). Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9780807842041.
- Sabino, Carlos (2007). Guatemala, la historia silenciada (1944-1989) (in Spanish). Tomo 1: Revolución y Liberación. Guatemala: Fondo Nacional para la Cultura Económica.
- Shillington, John (2002). Grappling with atrocity: Guatemalan theater in the 1990s. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. pp. 38–39. ISBN 9780838639306.
- Streeter, Stephen M. (2000). Managing the counterrevolution: the United States and Guatemala, 1954-1961. Ohio University Press. ISBN 9780896802155.
- Striffler, Steve; Moberg, Mark (2003). Banana wars: power, production, and history in the Americas. Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822331964.
- Ward, Matt (2004). "Washington unmakes Guatemala, 1954". The Council of Hemispheric Affairs. Archived from the original on 27 August 2004.
External links
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Media related to Carlos Castillo Armas at Wikimedia Commons
| Political offices | ||
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| Preceded by Elfego Monzón (Military Junta) |
President of Guatemala 1954–1957 (Military Junta) |
Succeeded by Luis González |
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