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.
