The 1954 Coup in Guatemala is More Complicated Than American “Economic Imperialism”

Jacobo Árbenz and his wife in exile in June 1955

The events of June 1954 that led to the downfall of the Leftist government of Guatemala serve, in the minds of many critics of American foreign policy, as an archetypal story of capitalist and “imperialist” nefariousness, with power abused by the U.S. government at the behest of U.S. corporations to remove a democratically-elected government that was improving the lot of its people but cutting into the margins of U.S. businesses.

According to such critics, the U.S. “banana republic” policy in Guatemala exposes the hypocrisy of the American claim that it was defending democracy in the Cold War or acting defensively at all against a tide of Revolution, and instead shows that the U.S. was no better than the Soviet Union—both sides aggressively pursued their own selfish interests, rather than upholding any matter of principle, and used the same methods to achieve their ends, including not only supporting dictatorships but imposing such governments on democratic countries that defied superpower wishes.

History rarely furnishes neat morality stories that buttress one specific ideological worldview, and it should, therefore, not be surprising that this two-dimensional story is not quite true.