The fallout from President Eisenhower’s 1953 authorization of Operation PBSUCCESS is still being felt and explains a lot about why we are seeing Guatemalan kids show up in droves at our borders seeking entry. A slightly different history helps explain why they are showing up from Honduras, too.
Some of you may know CIA names like David Atlee Phillips, Howard Hunt, David Morales, Henry Hecksher, and Anne Goodpasture not from the 1954 coup in Guatemala, but from one or more of the following: The Bay of Pigs, the JFK assassination, the assassination of Che Guevera, the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile on September 11, 1973, and the Watergate break-in. But those folks were the core of the team that crushed democracy in Guatemala and caused forty years of civil war and a legacy that lingers on to this day.
They may have thought that they were patriots protecting the country from communism, but their lawless and thoughtless actions are still bedeviling us today.
This is just perfectly true.
But its all over the world, we toppled an Iranian democracy, installed the Shah, and then what do you know, 30 years later, the Iranians are mad at us! Over and over.
Why does patriotism so often seem to be based on willful ignorance?
they just define success differently than you do. They achieved exactly what they intended — oligarchy there and increased power of the intelligence agencies here.
OK, we ran a coup in Guatamala 60 years ago, 2 years after my birth.
Your contention is that this is still the problem today.
OK, how exactly is that? You can chant “Yanqui go home” all night, but if you want to be taken seriously, you have to connect the dots.
First, this is one of those posts where I want people to follow the links so they can learn on their own w/o me having to explain everything.
So, yes, I expect the question you asked to pop into people’s heads. And then I want them to go chase the answers.
Second, my point in bringing the characters involved in PBSUCCESS is show how the same small cast of characters fucked everything up for a few decades running and how we’re still dealing with their legacy.
Try doing the following. Look at the people behind PBSUCCESS and then see how they factor in to the following travesties:
At this point, the original cast of characters had all retired, but they had proteges.
As to Guatemala specifically, the current situation grew out of 40 years of civil war that these folks caused for no defensible reason. Also, remember that the folks who carried out PBSUCCESS were highly thought of and influential for most of the next thirty years, so they continued to exercise American foreign policy unilaterally in Central America far after 1954, and came back to the fore during the Ford administration and again in the Reagan administration.
A fair reply, and a challenge to the reader. Still, I hope you have something prepared beyond a bunch of links. I’ll follow some of these, in between my learning python.
You’re on a roll, Boo.
For the right-winger who doesn’t mind killing others in far-away lands, you’ll never get through. Especially those who literally brag about deriving their income from the industry that profits from killing others in far-away lands.
Nice run-down, but a true shill doesn’t care about facts. They care about money.
Well, this is one of the reasons to study history. You can point to things a lot further back than the coup in Guatemala that are still causing problems today, like slavery or the holocaust. It really isn’t uncommon at all.
Yes, the but the shill in question derives their income from the industry that kills those poors and browns in far-away places.
History, reality, politics and everything else doesn’t matter.
Just wealth.
It is never just one thing. As a few other posters noted. It’s bad action after action after action, until there is wreckage, then maybe we stop for a little while, because it’s so embarrassing.
Look at the Middle East, it’s NEVER one thing that happened 60 years ago. It’s a never-ending parade of Cluster-f**k’s and blowback.
I can tell you for sure that in Los Angeles, when the Contra War was really rolling there were huge floods of refugees into many neighborhoods. These guys ended up joining gangs and many are deported back in El Salvador making life miserable there. It happened all over Central America, and it seemed especially bad with Reagan, or at least I saw at that time first hand the impact in California during the 80’s. Freedom Fighters and all that crap.
○ The U.S. Re-militarization of Central America and Mexico (2013)
○ Is Obama White House Finally Admitting Lanny Davis and Jim DeMint Duped Them WRT Honduras? (2012)
○ The Most Dangerous City in the World Is Not Where You Think It Is
OK, why don’t you start with this?
22 Jan 2009 – State Dept. Volume on Guatemalan Coup: A new volume in the Foreign Relations of the US series, 1952 – 1954, Guatemala, is now online. This volume documents Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA-sponsored overthrow of the Arbenz government. PBSUCCESS alumni include David Atlee Phillips, Howard Hunt, David Morales, Henry Hecksher, Anne Goodpasture, and other names familiar to those who study the JFK assassination.
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=145047
http://www.soaw.org/category-table/3873-guatemala-rios-montt-and-the-soa
Armitage also got a free pass for outing Plame. Never quite understood why.
Now on the Board of the American-Turkish Council. (Armitage at State when Sibel Edmonds was translating covert FBI recordings of Turkish diplomatic and political targets. The mind reels with the possibilities.)
Libya ponders international help after Tripoli airport hit by heavy shelling
Another reason to revisit the Truman-era legislation that allowed this to happen.