It was in January 1950 that Guatemalan Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, a rather unfamiliar figure at the time, headed for El Salvador, giving no sign that he would eventually become one of the most notorious antagonists in the destruction of the 1944-54 Guatemalan Revolution. Late in 1950, he and some 70 compatriots attacked Guatemala City's Base Militar, hoping to overthrow Juan José Arévalo's government and prevent Jacobo Arbenz from assuming the presidency. Though the assault failed and its participants were imprisoned, the dissident bribed his way out of jail and took into exile a newfound reputation as an influential conspirator.Footnote 1
During Operation PBSUCCESS in 1953–54, the US government, as part of its Cold War policy, provided crucial assistance to Castillo Armas. Pushed by the campaign of psychological warfare and the air-bombing of Guatemala City conducted by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a demoralized Guatemalan army ousted Arbenz, as US officials demanded Castillo Armas be installed as the country's dictator.Footnote 2 Prior to Operation PBSUCCESS, the future despot was not receiving support from the CIA; nor did the CIA know that in early 1950, as he was on his way to El Salvador and still planning the Base Militar attack, he was lobbying anticommunist patrons within the Caribbean Basin. In fact, US officials never knew that in San Salvador representatives of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo had given an audience to the then unknown counterrevolutionary.Footnote 3
Such encounters between dissidents and exiles from Guatemala and self-proclaimed anticommunist regimes in the Caribbean Basin have not been examined in the vast literature on the Guatemalan Revolution's collapse. Due to limitations on Latin America-based sources for the study of Cold War era dictatorships, there has been much reliance on materials produced in the United States. These yielded invaluable revelations into the devastating impact of US policy toward the region but inadvertently overlooked the role of inter-American conflicts.Footnote 4 Consequently, much of the literature on the Guatemalan Revolution has focused on its internal dynamics and US policy.Footnote 5 Looking at the period after the end of the Cold War, which also saw the fall of most Latin American dictatorial and military regimes, Greg Grandin pleads for studies “less preoccupied with what motivated United States policymakers and more concerned with identifying what was being fought over in Latin America itself.”Footnote 6 Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser encourage moving beyond international studies of the Cold War to consider “the gamut of multiform engagements that constituted the Latin American Cold War.” Joseph urges that these analyses utilize new sources and interpretative tools to identify the “‘Latin Americanization’ and the ‘transnationalization’” of the Cold War, while remaining “attuned to the logic of Latin American history.”Footnote 7 Examinations should take up how US resources contributed to—rather than unilaterally determined—indigenous counterrevolutionary processes and insurgent movements, in a manner akin to Tanya Harmer's depiction of the Latin American Cold War as involving multiple “regional proponents of communism and capitalism,” often acting independently of the Soviet Union and the United States.Footnote 8 Alan McPherson notes that the “Cold War was only one among a host of other important, often revolutionary, processes [in Latin America] occurring before, during, and after the years of the Cold War.”Footnote 9
Despite these historiographical suggestions and new methodological frameworks, scholarship on anticommunist opposition to the Guatemalan Revolution has yet to move beyond consideration of US policy. However, historians now have, after long denial, the privilege to access crucial archives and depositories that reveal how Latin American governments, organizations, and individuals pursued their own anticommunist policies, which variously intersected or conflicted with US officials’ goals. From Uruguay and Brazil to Chile and Mexico, these groups injected their own definitions of anticommunism into the larger debates and battles shaping the region during this era.Footnote 10 Whether showing how Brazilian and Chilean conservative women encouraged anticommunist policies or Salvadoran right-wing elites networked with like-minded allies abroad, such studies give insight into how these groups defined the stakes of both the Cold War and regional conflicts.Footnote 11
Still, only a couple of studies examine the strains of Guatemalan anticommunism in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote 12 Even though scholars are now delving into the international repercussions of Operation PBSUCCESS, there is as yet no work on regional anticommunist proponents fighting against Arévalo and Arbenz's governments that does not center on the US government.Footnote 13 Caribbean Basin dictators appear as marginal figures who supported Operation PBSUCCESS, while a coterie of Guatemalan exiles jockeyed for the US government's favor in the early 1950s.Footnote 14 More broadly, histories of the Guatemalan Revolution and exiles overlook dissidents active before the infamous CIA operations.Footnote 15 Whereas most scholarship treats prominent exiles such as Castillo Armas as tools or puppets of US imperialism, the memoirs and testimonies of his allies and defenders downplay or merely record their associations the CIA and other institutions and leaders outside Guatemala.Footnote 16
This article demonstrates that a loose coalition of Caribbean Basin dictators supported conspiracies mounted by Guatemalan exiles intent on undermining the Guatemalan Revolution in the late 1940s. Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, Honduran dictator Tiburcio Carías, and Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo conflated the Guatemalan Revolution with Mexican and Soviet communism, described Juan José Arévalo's government as a threat to the region's stability, and nurtured relationships with like-minded Guatemalan exiles. Because US officials had very little knowledge of these links, and such dissidents rarely admitted to receiving the dictators’ largesse, the literature has missed the important role of these figures as regional anticommunist proponents against the Guatemalan Revolution in the years before Operation PBSUCCESS.Footnote 17
The recent opening of archives in the Dominican Republic reveals that by early 1948 Somoza, Carías, and Trujillo promoted and shared intelligence on exiles’ plots to overthrow Arévalo's government.Footnote 18 Some of these plots forced the Guatemalan government to investigate domestic political organizations while suspending the constitution and civil liberties, actions that Guatemalan conservatives and moderates summoned as proof of the Guatemalan Revolution's Communist bent. Before US officials took up such considerations, regional opposition to the Guatemalan Revolution was spurred by these dictators and exiles, some of whom participated in Guatemala's 1950 presidential election and became vocal allies of Castillo Armas. When the US government ultimately intervened to halt the Guatemalan Revolution, the CIA tapped into these pre-existing counterrevolutionary friendships, which had strengthened during the years of networking and conspiring between dictators and exiles. In one of the first anticommunist coalitions in Latin America, the dictators played a significant role by encouraging these dissidents, years before the US government would become their leading financier during Operation PBSUCCESS. Throughout this process, these patron dictators and sponsored exiles made up a counterrevolutionary force whose ideas and actions shaped one of the most defining conflicts of the Latin American Cold War.
Anti-Communist Patrons: Helping Dissidents Combat Mexican and Soviet Communism
In the mid 1940s, Somoza, Carías, Trujillo, and Guatemalan exiles were already doing more than disseminating the standard anticommunist denunciations. These people insisted that the ideology allegedly dominating Guatemala did not originate solely from the Soviet Union, but also from Mexico. University students, middle-class leaders, and military officers unseated Guatemalan dictator Jorge Ubico in the summer of 1944. Over the next decade, during Arévalo and Arbenz's presidencies, Guatemala witnessed its first labor code to protect workers, an unprecedented expansion of democracy, and numerous other reforms.Footnote 19 The most celebrated achievement, the 1952 Agrarian Reform under Decree 900, drew support from multiple sectors of Guatemalan society.Footnote 20 Even as historians have reassessed the role of Marxism in the writing and implementation of Decree 900 and shown that multiple organizations endorsed and participated in the Agrarian Reform as part of a broader vision for Guatemala emerging from the social democratic ideals of the postwar years, scholarship has confirmed that the Soviet Union had no relationship with communists in Guatemala.Footnote 21
Regardless, conservative elites’ longstanding fears led to their referencing international, Soviet, and Mexican communism to denounce the Guatemalan Revolution. Literature on the regional and international implications of the Mexican Revolution has generally focused on leftists and intellectuals’ responses, yet Daniela Spenser notes that many Mexican conservatives conflated the Mexican and Russian Revolutions.Footnote 22 Amelia Kiddle finds that Guatemalan conservatives during Ubico's regime lambasted representatives and delegates from their northern neighbor in the 1930s, viewing them as personal envoys of Mexican communist labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano.Footnote 23 During Augusto Sandino's movement, Nicaraguan elites linked labor activism, anti-imperialism, and nationalism to the Mexican Revolution.Footnote 24 Similarly, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista's agents alleged that their opponents received economic and intellectual assistance from Lombardo Toledano and Soviet agents.Footnote 25 Although access to Russian archives has allowed historians to probe deeper into the connections between the Communist International and Latin America, no one has uncovered links to the Guatemalan Revolution.Footnote 26 Overall, no evidence has shown any connections between the Mexican Revolution, the Soviet Union, and the Guatemalan Revolution.Footnote 27
For dictators and Guatemalan dissidents in the mid 1940s, summoning Mexican communism gave them another ‘foreign’ bogeyman, deviously conspiring alongside the Soviet Union, to blame for the instability proliferating in the Caribbean Basin after the Second World War. In the immediate postwar years, social democracy and reform surged throughout the Caribbean Basin, removing multiple regimes and challenging a status quo dominated by nation-state dictatorships.Footnote 28 As might be expected, Somoza, Carías, Trujillo, and Guatemalan exiles cited the need to defend the region's traditional social order and Christianity against international communism. Conservative students, market women, and the Catholic Church inside Guatemala joined them over the next years.Footnote 29 However, despots and exiles frequently gave significant weight to the alleged Mexican and Soviet threats, citing regional security concerns and thereby bypassing questions about the dictatorships themselves. Between Guatemalan dissidents linked to Ubico's previous reign and the remaining despots, fearful of their own exiles, who were now building anti-dictatorial alliances nearby, a useful trope emerged: denounce Mexican and Soviet communism. These ideas were antinationalist and threatened not just their respective regimes but the security and peace of all countries in the Caribbean Basin, more evidence of communist machinations to dominate the Western Hemisphere and the globe.Footnote 30
In Nicaragua, Somoza's intolerance of the political turbulence he faced led to his “see[ing] the hand of Mexico” in Guatemalan affairs. The Nicaraguan dictator was “vehemently opposed to the spread of Mexican radicalism in Nicaragua and believe[d] it to stem from Moscow.”Footnote 31 He pointed to Arévalo's allowing anti-Somoza exiles to move freely in Guatemala as evidence of communist tactics. Addressing US officials, he stated that “the present Government of Guatemala, inspired by Mexico, was letting Central American exiles have a free hand in that country.”Footnote 32 Rumors lingered that Somoza sought to work alongside Carías and other regional leaders to intimidate Guatemala into not accepting Nicaraguan and Honduran exiles.Footnote 33
Carías's Honduran regime issued allegations against Soviet and Mexican communism as vociferously as did Somoza's. Honduran foreign minister Silverio Lainez in 1944 warned John Erwin, US ambassador in Tegucigalpa, of “a movement with communistic background … being established in Central America [and] originating in Mexico.”Footnote 34 When in the following year Lainez spoke again on the topic, Erwin interjected that “Dr. Lainez … probably looks under his bed each night for a Communist.”Footnote 35 Carías prohibited any communist literature or news bulletins from the Soviet embassy in Mexico from entering the country.Footnote 36 He claimed that Lombardo Toledano's “agents [were] busy in Central America” and that such “agitation [was] closely connected with the new regime in Guatemala.”Footnote 37 Discussing regional affairs, the dictator's son remarked “that Communism in Central America had received its impetus via Arévalo's action.”Footnote 38
The Dominican despot voiced similar concerns. On numerous occasions, Arévalo's government allowed anti-Trujillo exiles to protest and publish materials that excoriated the dictator.Footnote 39 When Guatemalan officials refused to capitulate to demands to censor these activities, Dominican officials launched their own tirades against Guatemala's purportedly communist government. After a dinner with Guatemalan foreign minister Eugenio Silva Peña, Dominican ambassador Roberto Despradel spent the night, “until five in the morning,” lecturing the minister on Guatemalan affairs. Despradel wrote to Trujillo personally, “I showed him the political incompetence of Arévalo and the great dangers for Guatemala due to the free hand that [Arévalo] allowed the communists throughout the country.”Footnote 40 In August 1946, he alleged that the new Guatemalan representative to the Dominican Republic “took his doctoral studies in communism in Mexico, under the direction of the great Bolshevik [Constantine] Oumansky.”Footnote 41 When Arévalo's government in 1947 suspended diplomatic relations with that nation and assisted the abortive Cayo Confites expedition to topple Trujillo, Dominican officials quickly produced reports reflecting the outlook held by Somoza and Carías's regimes: that Arévalo was the “Central American Delegate to implant communism” with Lombardo Toledano as the link between Guatemala and Moscow.Footnote 42 Trujillo joined Somoza and Carías as anticommunist allies against Arévalo's government and the Guatemalan Revolution.Footnote 43
Guatemalan exiles shared this worldview. These dissidents, many of whom had served the deposed Guatemalan dictator Ubico, also invoked Mexican and Soviet communism as the roots of the Guatemalan Revolution. Former Guatemala Foreign Service official Juan Pinillos warned of Arévalo's “connections with the Mexican leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano” and support from the “Soviet government.”Footnote 44 His tirades and threats provoked the attention of the Mexican government's Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales. Colonel Arturo Ramírez, Ubico's former chief of staff and later consul in New Orleans, often described Arévalo's government as showing “blind obedience to the Soviet [Union]” and falling under the “Mexican influence” of Lombardo Toledano.Footnote 45 General Federico Ponce, Ubico's successor, before his own ouster argued that communists had infiltrated student organizations in Mexico and Guatemala, threatening the “security of the Caribbean.”Footnote 46 Lawyer Luis Coronado Lira, Catholic leader José Calderón Salazar, Ubico's physician Carlos Padilla y Padilla, Ponce, Ramírez, and others distributed falsified letters purportedly exchanged between Arévalo and Vasili Yakubovsky, the Soviet chargé d'affaires in Mexico City, and prepared numerous pamphlets and newspaper articles comparing Arévalo's government to that of the Soviet Union.Footnote 47
Their shared anticommunist ideology led dictators in the years 1945 to 1947 to provide sporadic support to Guatemalan exiles. Somoza and Carías welcomed exiles such as Coronado Lira, Padilla, and Ramírez to Nicaragua and Honduras. In public and private pronouncements, the two dictators presented their acceptance of dissident Guatemalans as equivalent to Arévalo's sanctuary for anti-Somoza and anti-Carías exiles.Footnote 48 The Honduran minister to Mexico, Luciano Milla Cisneros, met frequently with Pinillos, and Carías supplied essential funds to a plot led by Padilla and General Roderico Anzueto, the former head of Guatemala's secret police.Footnote 49 Both dictators denied providing financial assistance to any exiles, yet experienced US officials knew that Somoza covered up his relationships.Footnote 50 Due to such deceptions, to Guatemalan exiles’ hesitance to publicly claim dictators as their patrons, and to the plethora of conspiracies against Arévalo's government, the source materials only hint at the depth of support Somoza and Carías granted exiles in the mid 1940s.Footnote 51 In contrast, files in the Dominican archive confirm that Trujillo ordered officials to meet with Guatemalan exiles. Even before the rupture in relations between Arévalo's government and Trujillo's regime, Dominican officials opened their embassies to Pinillos and Ramírez to discuss plots, and Trujillo directly authorized financial assistance in a venture by Ponce to air-bomb Guatemala City in mid 1947. It was deterred by Arévalo and the Mexican government only at the last minute.Footnote 52
A Transnational Counter-Revolutionary Friendship: Sharing Intelligence
Before the end of the 1940s, Caribbean Basin dictators and their officials began to meet to discuss the exiles’ conspiracies. From 1948 onward, exiles employed their brand of anticommunism to lobby Somoza, Carías, and Trujillo for money, arms, and more. In an effort to evaluate and encourage the best plots for ending the regime in Guatemala, the dictators and their officials corresponded, met with one another, and held audiences with notable exiles. With no input from the United States, this informal coalition served as a counterrevolutionary force against the Guatemalan Revolution. Although conspiracies financed by these dictators never succeeded, and rarely even materialized, they kept afloat numerous figures who became internal opponents in Guatemala, allying themselves with Castillo Armas in the 1950s, and eventually joining CIA operations. Most unexpectedly, the constitutional suspensions triggered by some of these plots left a pervasive scar on the Guatemalan Revolution. Not aware to the full extent of the myriad threats abroad and often at home, newspapers and organizations charged Arévalo's government with suppressing its critics and opponents, providing ammunition for additional charges of communist domination.
The spark for this anticommunist front was a new venture offered by Ponce. Following his air-bombing conspiracy, Ponce sent a letter through Joaquín Balaguer, then Dominican ambassador in Mexico City, to Trujillo, begging further economic assistance. Before responding, Trujillo decided to reach out to Somoza, his Nicaraguan counterpart. With orders to obtain Somoza's opinion, Dominican special ambassador Rafael Paíno Pichardo met in Washington with Nicaraguan ambassador Guillermo Sevilla Sacasa. These two officials, meeting in February 1948, evaluated the plot's cost and Ponce's reputation in the Guatemalan army. Sevilla Sacasa immediately warned Paíno Pichardo of Ponce's advanced age, that they knew far too little about his influence in Guatemala, and that “the requested economic assistance seemed very substantial.” To better understand the potential of this conspiracy, the Nicaraguan ambassador suggested that Balaguer meet again with Ponce to request a list of his contacts among influential Guatemalans.Footnote 53
The two officials did not restrict their conversation to Ponce's plot, however, for their questions into his proposed venture led into a deeper discussion of the Guatemalan army. As would become evident during Operation PBSUCCESS in the early 1950s, a plot could triumph only with the army's endorsement or, at the very least, ambivalence.Footnote 54 By 1948, Dominican and Nicaraguan officials had already recognized this dilemma and wanted to examine the links between Ponce and the army. For his Dominican colleague, Sevilla Sacasa recounted the fall of Ubico's dictatorship and Ponce's initial rise. On one hand, this history favored the plot, as Ponce was a “bitter enemy” of Arévalo with “friends among the military lot in Guatemala.” On the other hand, doubts persisted. The current strongman in the Guatemalan army, according to Sevilla Sacasa, was Col. Francisco Arana, whose “great loyalty” hindered internal conspiracies against Arévalo's government.Footnote 55 Just one year before Arana launched his own coup attempt, Dominican and Nicaraguan officials could have done nothing more than wish for such a destabilizing episode.Footnote 56
Rather than waiting for their own ‘Arana’ or taking another risk on Ponce, Somoza and Trujillo invested their resources in a different plot. The Nicaraguan dictator in March 1948 called on lawyer and anticommunist propagandist Luis Coronado Lira. Upon arriving in Managua, the Guatemalan must have been stunned, for Somoza offered far more than what Ponce in the previous month had solicited from Trujillo! The dictator guaranteed Coronado Lira armaments, money, and even his own men—on the sole condition that the exile “get busy and start a revolution in Guatemala as soon as possible.”Footnote 57 As usual, the US government's inquiries into the matter yielded nothing except proof of the dictator's deceit.Footnote 58 While Somoza was rebuffing US officials, Coronado Lira flew to Panama and then to the Dominican Republic.Footnote 59
There, likely with Somoza's blessings, Coronado Lira secured a meeting with Trujillo's highest officials and possibly met with the Dominican despot himself. Whatever the Guatemalan proffered resonated with his audience, for Trujillo's regime wanted more information. Across the Caribbean, in El Salvador, waited Coronado Lira's fellow propagandist and frequent co-conspirator, Carlos Salazar Jr. In early May, Trujillo's officials ordered René Malagón, the Dominican chargé d'affaires in San Salvador, not only to meet with Salazar but also to receive a compilation of documents intended for Coronado Lira.Footnote 60 Among the stack of papers were various newspaper articles and a memorandum authored by Salazar, all of which made their way from Salazar and Malagón in San Salvador to Coronado Lira and Trujillo's officials in Ciudad Trujillo in the span of a week.Footnote 61 Even as Guatemalan dissidents at home republished Coronado Lira's rants about Arévalo, who was supposedly succumbing to Mexican influence to give up Guatemalan claims to Belize, the exile and his compatriot abroad were receiving Somoza and Trujillo's assistance.Footnote 62
Salazar's memorandum painted a gloomy portrait of Guatemala, thereby suggesting that the moment was perfect for an uprising. The previous month Arévalo's government had claimed to have uncovered a coup attempt spearheaded by Col. Miguel Mendoza. In what had by now become a common occurrence, the government suspended the constitution during its investigations. As during Ponce's 1947 air-bombing conspiracy, the lack of evidence of these plots, many of whose patrons resided outside the country, seemed to legitimize conservatives’ fears that Arévalo was seeking to crush all opposition. “The atmosphere in Guatemala,” the exile wrote, was one “of unease and anxiety caused by the presence of soldiers and police that monitor neighbors and pedestrians inside and outside the capital.”Footnote 63
Not surprisingly, Salazar failed to mention his own role in the cycle of secretly obtaining funding from Caribbean Basin dictators for the very conspiracies that incited suspensions, fomented domestic criticism of Arévalo's government as suppressors of opposition, and generated new dissident conspiracies. He instead directed his attention to other matters. Alleging that his views dovetailed with those of the majority of Guatemalans, he warned of increasing class conflict and lambasted the new social security program, a recently passed rent law, and the growing strength of unions. A worker's association even received half an hour of airtime on the official radio station, La Voz de Guatemala, to proclaim that “only communism [was] capable of destroying capitalism, Yankee imperialism, and landowners’ feudalistic dominion of the lands.” Conservatives and dissidents like him, Salazar believed, spoke out about these disasters, while “newspapers d[id] not give any information regarding any of these problems.” In conclusion, the exile stated, “The political and economic situation is undisputedly chaotic.”Footnote 64
The exile's words hit their mark. First Somoza and then Trujillo offered Coronado Lira ample resources for his plans. In the two despots’ good graces, the Guatemalan headed to El Salvador to spend some months preparing the venture and then to work with a third patron, Carías in Honduras. Soon, though, disputes erupted. The dictators in August ordered another Guatemalan, Col. Carlos Humberto Ceballos, to coordinate with Coronado Lira. Because the schemers recognized that the success of an uprising would depend on the decisions of the Guatemalan army, bringing together this new exile's military experience with their own patronage and networking made sense.
However, the maneuvering and potential collaboration bore no fruit. When offered a military position, Ceballos saw it as “unacceptable” and rejected it outright. In addition, the newcomer failed what appeared to have been something of a test during his follow-up meeting in Tegucigalpa with Dominican chargé d'affaires Luis Bonetti. There, Ceballos proceeded to repeat Trujillo's claim that the Honduran dictator's unwillingness to act directly to overthrow Arévalo's government derived from his being a “communist” who secretly intended to support the Guatemalan president, not participate in any overthrow. Quickly, Bonetti rebuked this exile. Trujillo's words had been “put forth intentionally for the purpose of investigating the seriousness” of Ceballos's commitment—that is, as a test. Maybe it was true that the threat from Guatemala was more imminent for Nicaragua and Honduras than for the Dominican Republic, the official warned, but it was a “common issue for all three countries.” For those very reasons, Trujillo had ordered Bonetti at every chance “to strengthen cordial relations with the Honduran government as a good friend of the Dominican government.”Footnote 65
Although Coronado Lira's plot fizzled, the transnational counterrevolutionary friendships flourished with fresh conspiracies. The dictators’ embassies and legations throughout Central America continued to be hotbeds of activity, welcoming both seasoned and less familiar Guatemalan exiles, including Manuel Melgar de la Cerda. With years of service under Ubico as minister of the treasury, subsecretary of public education, minister of agriculture, and secretary to the president, Melgar de la Cerda's résumé resembled those of his compatriots; he was no stranger among dissident exile organizations in Mexico.Footnote 66 In late September 1948, Melgar headed to the Dominican embassy in Mexico City to meet with officials there. Following in the footsteps of Ponce, Coronado Lira, and others before him, the exile delivered a memorandum intended for Trujillo.Footnote 67
It was no surprise that Melgar's memorandum opened with a flurry of familiar charges against the Guatemalan Revolution. “Arrowheads, tangible and visible, of international communism” emanated from Guatemala, threatened the “consolidation of peace and prosperity” in Latin America, and jeopardized “American order.” Behind these “subversive forces” were “Soviet inspiration” and Mexican ex-president Lázaro Cárdenas, seeking to organize a confederation of “Socialist States of the Caribbean” that would envelop the Basin. Following reasoning often espoused by fellow counterrevolutionaries, Melgar justified violent assaults and external interventions against Arévalo's government as necessary measures to halt the insidious spread of un-American communism. He stated that the region's nations merely wanted to “preserve their own physiognomy as a concert of American peoples,” but that “red golpes throughout the world” threatened them. Thus, the region's governments had to unite, to express their “solidarity in goals, in principles, and in economic interests,” against this foreign menace. Expelled for their opposition to the revolution, Melgar and his exiled colleagues understood “the danger that Guatemala entail[ed] for the peace of Central America and the Caribbean.” He beseeched Trujillo directly, “The Dominican Republic knows from its own experience of these criminal onslaughts.” For these reasons, Melgar's conspiracy merited assistance. “It is obvious,” he concluded, “that the Republics of Central America and the Caribbean have a duty to fight, at all cost in order that in Guatemala … there exist governments that prepare the people in la americanidad against communism.”Footnote 68
Despite the anticommunist refrain, it was the plot that stood out. In contrast to other solicitations, Melgar's was the first that requested no economic or military assistance. His venture was more or less already prepared. During the upcoming annual religious pilgrimage at Esquipulas in the first days of January, exiles on the Guatemala-Honduras border would arm themselves and march for the interior. Melgar assured Trujillo that he had “adequate armaments” and “sufficient money,” but that was not all.Footnote 69 In addition, he claimed that “opposition forces” in the country, including the Guatemalan army and prominent exiles such as Col. José Enrique Ardón Fernández and Catholic leader José Calderón Salazar, endorsed the conspiracy.Footnote 70 While Ardón Fernández's role reflects the dissidents’ repeated attempts to reach the Guatemalan army, Calderón Salazar's participation suggests the escalating role of Catholic organizations and leaders in denouncing the Guatemalan Revolution in the late 1940s. It also hints at possible sources of funding for exiles’ plots.Footnote 71 After all, Melgar asked nothing from the Dominican despot directly. What he wanted was help from the Honduran dictator.
What the venture lacked was permission from Carías to operate on the Honduran side of the Guatemala-Honduras border. Melgar and his allies were ready to flash their weapons, but his preparations, resources, and alliances meant nothing without the requisite “hospitality and guarantees” from the Honduran dictator. So why, with these matters resting in the hands of Carías, had Melgar approached Trujillo in the first place? Melgar pleaded: “We consequently request of the government of the Dominican Republic that, standing upon its good relations of close friendship with the government of Honduras,” Trujillo encourage Carías to “open the border [so] that the revolution may have its start in Guatemalan territory.”Footnote 72 A Guatemalan exile was asking the Dominican dictator for help in dealing with the Honduran dictator; Melgar wished to take advantage of the transnational counterrevolutionary friendship between the two dictators.
Clearly, this friendship was forged in opposition to the Guatemalan Revolution, but Trujillo went beyond fulfilling Melgar's request. Dominican officials in Mexico City forwarded Melgar's memorandum to Ciudad Trujillo on October 1, 1948.Footnote 73 On receiving it, Trujillo contacted not only Carías but also Somoza. On October 11, Dominican officials sent a coded cable to their Nicaraguan counterparts requesting that they ask Somoza to intercede on behalf of the conspiracy and speak to Carías in favor of Melgar. In networking with the Nicaraguan dictator, Trujillo hoped to shore up regional support for Melgar's plot and expedite Carías's approval. Somoza gladly acceded. Col. Guillermo Rivas Cuadra, Nicaraguan ambassador in Ciudad Trujillo, contacted Trujillo's military and intelligence adviser General Federico Fiallo, and the Nicaraguan dictator replied the last week in October with his own coded cable. Somoza assured Trujillo: “I am following up with [the] President [of] Honduras [regarding] permission to pass. If [I] obtain [the] results, I will notify [you] immediately.”Footnote 74 No longer were the exiles alone in lobbying the dictators to support plots against Arévalo's government; the dictators, as counterrevolutionary friends, now lobbied each other.
The 1948 Venezuelan military coup and events in Costa Rica diverted his patrons’ attention away from Melgar's plot, but more schemes came along.Footnote 75 In January 1949, the infamous torturer and longtime conspirator General Roderico Anzueto invited Dominican consul José Aybár to a series of lunches at the Union League Club in San Francisco, and began building a relationship with him.Footnote 76 Of course, the rapport between the two men demanded the customary sycophantic veneration for Trujillo's regime. Boasting of years as the right hand of ousted Guatemalan dictator Ubico, and his own foresight in amassing enough fincas to sell tons of coffee in the United States before Arévalo's government could seize the lands, the dispossessed protégé shared a letter from the former despot himself, written from exile in New Orleans before his passing in 1946. Commenting on his “admiration for the good works” of Trujillo, Anzueto's old benefactor Ubico had promised to put his acolyte in touch with the Dominican dictator. His credentials and references firmly established, Anzueto turned to the subject at hand: “the revolutionary coup almost ready to crush the communist regime” of Arévalo. There were also links between exiles and the domestic Catholic opposition. Guatemalan Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arellano was head of a plot that was set to commence at any moment. Anzueto, thanks to the marriage between his son and the archbishop's nephew, offered to serve as an intermediary for Trujillo.Footnote 77 From this sideline position, the exile would be able to recover his lost estates and witness Arévalo's downfall.
When Col. Francisco Arana's coup attempt derailed Rossell y Arellano's scheme, Anzueto saw his opportunity to profit from the dictators’ largesse yet again.Footnote 78 The exile headed for Puebla to organize a new plot and contacted Dominican and Nicaraguan officials.Footnote 79 Earlier an eager patron, Trujillo this time put his interest and funds on hold. Before agreeing to send a representative for an audience with Anzueto in Mexico, the dictator insisted on vetting the exile beforehand and ordered Dominican ambassador Joaquín Balaguer to meet with Nicaraguan ambassador Alberto Sevilla Sacasa.Footnote 80 Although he had earlier lobbied Somoza to support Melgar's plot, the Dominican dictator now sought his fellow despot's input on Anzueto's conspiracy. Sevilla Sacasa, on behalf of his chief, vouched for the Guatemalan. He did warn that the exile would need funds to set the plans into motion, but the Nicaraguan ambassador was more than glad to be a middleman between Anzueto and the Dominican regime.Footnote 81
Sevilla Sacasa's encouragement elevated Balaguer's opinion of the exile's conspiracy. As had Melgar barely a year earlier, Anzueto in Cuernavaca proclaimed in September “that all [was] ready to give, in the course of this same month, a definitive golpe” to Arévalo's government. During Arana's failed coup, civilians and workers received weapons from the military's depots. This was Anzueto's moment. That most powerful institution, the Guatemalan army, was now found to “lack sufficient armaments” to handle an emergency. Tensions ran high throughout the country, so “it would not take a great effort in order to produce the desired change upon all the social classes,” “isolate the capital,” and bring down the government.
In addition to the Nicaraguan regime's approval and his vision of the weakening of the Guatemalan army, Anzueto had something else in his favor. Yes, he would need money to pay for “certain important services” for the scheme, but the one-time coffee baron promised to reimburse this assistance by tapping into confiscated lands and properties—that is, those he would take back upon his return to Guatemala.Footnote 82 Thus, Balaguer joined his Nicaraguan counterpart and endorsed the exile's plans. Spurred by Sevilla Sacasa's reassurances, the Dominican official explained to Trujillo that “it would be enough to provide Anzueto with a sum not to exceed 10,000 Dominican pesos and to promise him the elements that he would lack after the beginning of operations,” thereby committing the dictator to supporting the initial uprising and subsequent events.Footnote 83 In words that could have been written by the exile himself, Balaguer concluded, “It is evident that … little effort … would precipitate the fall of the already tottering regime in the neighboring country.”Footnote 84
Unfortunately for Anzueto, this glowing opinion was quite fleeting. Less than a week after his optimistic assessment, the ambassador warned Trujillo not to aid the exile. Over the previous days, Balaguer and Sevilla Sacasa had been busy making arrangements for Anzueto to travel to the Dominican Republic. Suddenly, the exile told the Nicaraguan official that he could not leave Mexico to meet the dictator in person. Balaguer was furious. After having vouched for Anzueto, he would have to attend yet another meeting. There, the once-enthusiastic counterrevolutionary thoroughly disappointed the ambassador. Balaguer found that Anzueto “put much emphasis on the economic subject,” repeatedly commenting on his poor financial situation and his family's dire circumstances. A vocal supporter only three days earlier, Balaguer now spared no sympathy for the exile's plight. Based on such excuses, he decided, Anzueto “could not comply with the instructions received through the Nicaraguan ambassador,” despite his original promises. “From this new interview,” the Dominican official fumed, “I was able to draw the conclusion that what Anzueto desired principally is to provide himself with some funds, and that, for him, the other question [of overthrowing the Guatemalan government] is secondary.” As might be expected, Balaguer disapproved of any assistance for the exile.Footnote 85
The dismal meeting with Anzueto was not the sole factor behind Trujillo's change of heart, for a good friend in “absolute confidence” whispered cause for further doubt in Balaguer's ear. To allay his doubts, Balaguer sought advice from yet another representative of anticommunist patrons, Gregorio Reyes Zelaya, the Honduran ambassador in Mexico City. Fortunately, Zelaya was “a sincere admirer” of Trujillo, “a sure opponent of the communist-sympathizing regime” in Guatemala, and well versed in networking with exiles against Arévalo's government. In fact, he personally knew of Anzueto and was able to warn his Dominican and Nicaraguan counterparts away from investing in the exile's conspiracy. Zelaya recounted how Carías had earlier financed the exile for the same purposes, yet Anzueto merely “wasted the sum [of money] put to his disposal” without having “realized the agreed-upon operation.”Footnote 86 Whatever faith Balaguer and Sevilla Sacasa had held in the plot was now dissipated.
Having dashed his colleagues’ original hopes for Anzueto's conspiracy, the Honduran ambassador did what any good friend would do: he suggested a new and supposedly better opportunity. A well-known counterrevolutionary exile, Col. Arturo Ramírez was preparing his own venture for the next year (1950). Zelaya also brought another transnational patron to join the three dictators: the Boston-based United Fruit Company (UFCO). The UFCO joined Zelaya and offered its assistance to the exile.Footnote 87 Scholarship on the UFCO has centered on its lobbying US officials against the Guatemalan Revolution, but its collaboration with Ramírez and Zelaya in 1949 reveals something else: how far the company's actions went beyond public relations and placating Washington to direct support of known Guatemalan conspirators and networking with the region's dictatorships.Footnote 88 Such intrigue speaks to the strength of these regional anticommunist patrons’ opposition to the Guatemalan regime, but out of all of this came an astounding commitment of $100,000 Dominican pesos, to be covered by Trujillo alone.Footnote 89 The cost, though, did not seem to faze anyone.
For his part, Ramírez swore to the “infallible efficacy” of his project and its usefulness for the countries of Central America and all of the Caribbean.Footnote 90 Zelaya continued championing Ramírez's fitness and absolute sincerity, deeming him one of the persons most capable of carrying out the mission that interested opponents of the Guatemalan Revolution.Footnote 91 Finally, the Salvadoran military junta joined the discussions; the chief of staff for the Salvadoran army, Col. Marco Antonio Molina, threw his support behind Ramírez. He claimed that the Salvadoran Army was ready to support fully any well-organized movement that sought to overthrow Arévalo. Offering airports, arms, and more, Molina focused his attention on the Guatemalan army. He questioned the Salvadoran military attaché in Guatemala various times regarding the strength of the Guatemalan army, and stated that Ramírez appeared to be the “true representative of the military class” and thus the person most suited to lead a plot against Arévalo's government that would win over that very army.Footnote 92 These very officials remained in close contact with Ramírez by the time they convened in January 1950 to discuss the same matters regarding Castillo Armas's plot.Footnote 93
Remaining Friends During the 1950 Presidential Election and After
In his January 1950 activity, Castillo Armas was not simply asking random dictators for arms and money for his Base Militar attack. Rather, he was lobbying a rather well-established coalition of anticommunist patrons whose members brought with them years of experience in financing various conspiracies and nurturing relationships with numerous exiles. As Castillo Armas admitted to US sources, the dictators represented potential sources of weapons for the upcoming attack, but he had to compete against other exiles with the same goal.Footnote 94 While he conspired, US officials received nothing but vague information on his activities. A couple of months before the attack, he would tell the CIA of his “working quietly for several months perfecting his plans for an armed revolt that would overthrow” Arévalo.Footnote 95 Nevertheless, with the exception of a handful of scattered reports, they knew relatively little about the counterrevolutionary's methods.
As the US government focused on other matters, Castillo Armas in San Salvador shared a list of “materials” and his plans for the attack with the Dominican chargé d'affaires Arturo Calventi, the Nicaraguan ambassador, and the chief of staff for the Salvadoran army, Col. Marco Antonio Molina. Most likely, the “materials” referred to the armaments necessary for the attack. The exile mentioned plans to show the list to Somoza in the coming weeks, but the Nicaraguan dictator feared that “it was not a convenient moment to receive” Castillo Armas “due [to the] international situation” following the breakup of Arana's recent plot.Footnote 96 Consequently, the responsibility for evaluating this dissident's solicitation fell upon Calventi, the Nicaraguan ambassador, and Molina, three officials with more than enough experience to handle the matter.
Unanimously, the three rejected the request. The Nicaraguan ambassador and Molina read Castillo Armas's documents but considered the petition excessive, with a cost possibly rising to approximately a million dollars. Price, however, was not the only factor. The representatives took into account the dissident's reputation, or lack thereof. As yet, Castillo Armas had attracted little fame or recognition, and the three found no signs of popular support from Guatemalan civilians for the counterrevolutionary. In addition, the three representatives highlighted the fact that they did not know what military support the planned attack might get from the Guatemalan army. As they had done since Ponce's early 1948 solicitation, the officials tried to determine how this conspiracy would resonate among leading army officers. Earlier, Molina had authorized the Salvadoran military attaché in Guatemala to “make contact with some [Guatemalan] military official.” However, following Arana's failed coup, any meeting now had become “impossible,” so Molina suggested deferring the visit until such time that the internal political situation in Guatemala cleared up. With the plot's high cost and no evidence of the exile's influence in the Guatemalan army or elsewhere, Calventi summarized the conclusion of the three by reporting that the movement proposed by Castillo Armas lacked a firm base of support.Footnote 97
The consequence of that decision would emerge later that year. Due to their experience in dealing with Guatemalan exiles, and possibly their leanings toward Ramírez at that time, the patrons refused to assist Castillo Armas. Absent significant sources of external funding, the dissident's November 1950 Base Militar attack failed miserably.
Even though the dictators’ representatives had collectively turned down Castillo Armas's solicitation, their influence reverberated inside and outside of Guatemala that year. One of the most active conspirators in the region was Juan Pinillos, who frequently introduced exiles to notable dictators and their officials. Pinillos made regular appearances at the various embassies and legations in Tegucigalpa, but this time his trips aimed at a different target: Guatemala's 1950 presidential election. Pinillos reminded the dictators of the moment's importance against the backdrop of actions by “international communists,” including those from Russia. Further, Pinillos talked up the candidacy of General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, Arbenz's primary electoral challenger.Footnote 98 The patrons’ involvement in Guatemalan affairs over the past year was quite apparent: the exiles did not even need to describe Ydígoras Fuentes's political views or capabilities, because everyone concerned was already quite familiar with the others. Ydígoras Fuentes, while serving as Guatemalan ambassador in London, had himself networked with Trujillo as early as 1947 and received at least $35,000 over the years.Footnote 99
The reach, or at least the funds, of the dictators went beyond Guatemala's leading opposition candidate and into the campaigns themselves. Ydígoras Fuentes's political party, Reconciliación Democrática Nacional, also called Redención, was composed of numerous local units dispersed through the country's districts and localities, but the organization itself was headed by Luis Coronado Lira and Carlos Salazar Jr., the party's first vice president and president.Footnote 100 The exiles had had their meetings with Somoza and Trujillo's officials, but now they were heading up a prominent political party within Guatemala. Years later, Trujillo would complain that the money given to Coronado Lira to overthrow Arbenz's government had not gone to purchase armaments.Footnote 101 More likely, the dissident had combined the dictator's largesse with other sources of funding obtained during his exile, and in 1950 tapped into what remained of this money, alongside new political donations, to produce the propaganda for Ydígoras Fuentes's election.
This propaganda did more than speak on behalf of Arbenz's opponent. Coronado Lira and Salazar's campaign broadsides and pamphlets tapped into the longstanding allegations of Guatemalan newspapers and other organizations that Arévalo's government had suspended the constitution not to investigate dissidents’ conspiracies, but to suppress legitimate democratic activities. In one manifesto, Coronado Lira and Salazar attacked the nation's electoral board for a resolution it had taken to criminalize Redención's activities. Quite simply, the electoral board, under Manuel Fortuny and his “international communist party,” had taken away their “political rights” and “constitutional rights.”Footnote 102 Salazar passionately reiterated that the government was wrong to characterize Redención as a terrorist band.Footnote 103 In 1948, he had managed to dodge any ‘terrorist’ implications of his own contribution to the cycle of patrons-fund-plots and suspensions-generate-dissidents; in 1950, he turned to hammering away at the government for targeting his party. It was the government that was limiting “sacred constitutional rights,” not him—he and his compatriots would never admit to receiving dictatorial funding or participating in the very plots that fed this cycle and provoked the crises.Footnote 104 Once having done so indirectly, these exiles now sought to capitalize directly on the fears and confusion of Guatemalan conservatives and moderates as the government attempted to protect itself.
In the years before Castillo Armas's attack, the dictators were providing moral support to newly emerging dissidents, most notably José Luis Arenas. Like Coronado Lira and Salazar, Arenas was one of the leaders of a prominent Guatemalan political party, the Partido de Unificación Anticomunista (PUA). A vocal opponent of Arévalo's government, Arenas had met Castillo Armas in prison, following Arana's failed coup.Footnote 105 Upon his release, Arenas sought asylum in the Salvadoran embassy before leaving the country, an event publicized by the PUA and fellow Guatemalan anticommunists as evidence of the government's persecution of legitimate democratic activists.Footnote 106 Back home, the PUA joined Redención to support Ydígoras Fuentes's candidacy and denounced the government's allegedly unwarranted harassment of both parties.Footnote 107
Meanwhile, in El Salvador, Arenas took up the tradition of fellow exiles before him and traveled the Caribbean Basin throughout 1950.Footnote 108 Barely a month into his exile, he was in Mexico City to meet with Mexican anticommunist organizations. In these meetings, the Guatemalan exile was cultivating transnational associations that his allies would tap into over the coming years. At the end of the month, he met with the Dominican ambassador in Mexico City for what he intended to be an exchange of ideas regarding a continental anticommunist campaign and an opportunity to gain sympathy and support for what he was doing in Guatemala. From there, he headed for the United States.Footnote 109 Just before Castillo Armas's failed uprising, Carías readily provided Arenas with a letter of introduction to meet with Trujillo, a pivotal moment taken for granted by dictators used to such networking.Footnote 110
Mirroring the dictators’ official reception and support of various dissidents over the years, there emerged a self-declared council of exiles whose aim was to encourage Castillo Armas's assault and welcome this latest counterrevolutionary into their ranks. Naming themselves the Consejo Supremo del Movimiento Revolucionario Anticomunista (Supreme Council of the Revolutionary Anticommunist Movement), the five leaders issued manifestos meant for the Guatemalan public. It is not surprising that longtime conspirators and beneficiaries of dictators’ funds made up the council's leadership, with Castillo Armas and Arenas's names joining those of Colonel Arturo Ramírez and Manuel Melgar's associate Col. José Enrique Ardón Fernández. The council and its activities provide further evidence of the exiles’ networking with the dictators, as well as with each other, in a common opposition to the Guatemalan Revolution. Likewise, the council's Manifiesto al Pueblo de Guatemala merely repeated the claims that exiles had been making since 1945. The opening lines of the manifesto were intended to legitimize the use of armed force against Arévalo's supposedly communist government. Castillo Armas and his compatriots had “to take up arms to save the country from the hands of communism that has taken foot in Guatemala,” for communism's “tragic claws” aimed “to destroy [their] democratic institutions and to destroy the religious and humanitarian sentiments” of the country. Pro-Arévalo parties, the communist newspaper Octubre, and the “implantation of Leninist-Stalinist doctrines,” they said, did not threaten their country alone. Arévalo wanted to “convert Guatemala into a forward base of operations for international communism” and against “American democracy.”Footnote 111 The council hoped that such words, which had brought together exiles and dictators over the past years, would resonate also with the Guatemalan public.
The Guatemalan people were not the only targets of the leaders’ supplications. The council issued a separate manifesto for the Guatemalan army—the institution exiles and dictators knew would determine the fate of coup plots. As always, the exiles justified their taking up of arms as necessary to cleanse their nation of a foreign ideology. Arévalo's government had “muzzle[d] and subordinate[d] the Guatemalan people,” and “destroy[ed] the people's sovereign will” in order “to make way for the dominion of armed communism.” Thus, the council took on the voice of the “unanimous will of the Guatemalan people.” Underlying such logic was the years of growing opposition within Guatemala to the plethora of constitutional suspensions directly or indirectly instigated by these very dissidents. The manifesto also attempted to link the armed movement against Arévalo's government and un-American communism with recent international events. “All the world's armies agree through their weapons with the United Nations decision to fight communism … on the Asian continent,” the leaders announced. These “great armies in these moments spill their generous blood in order to contain and destroy the invasion of communist forces that threaten to run over the old world to take on the American democracies.” The council beseeched the army to “prepare itself to combat and eradicate [the] communism that already finds itself in our land, uniting and making common cause with the Guatemalan people, whose cause our movement embodies.”Footnote 112 The Base Militar attack failed, but these dictators and exiles continued during the early 1950s to try to do what they always had: bring an end to the Guatemalan Revolution.
Throughout the middle and late 1940s, and through the 1950 presidential election and failed uprising, the dictators’ moral and financial patronage and Guatemalan exiles’ own efforts kept alive this transnational counterrevolutionary force. The experienced conspirators would be ready and well positioned by the early 1950s to make use of the US government's Cold War-oriented policy. Their years of activity shaped the CIA discussions going into the 1952 predecessor of Operation PBSUCCESS, Operation PBFORTUNE. The three primary leaders of Guatemalan exiles, Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, and Col. Arturo Ramírez, were all patronized at one point or another by the dictators.Footnote 113 The dictators had earlier lobbied each other on behalf of favored exiles; now Somoza championed Castillo Armas to the US government.Footnote 114 During PBFORTUNE, the dictators and their officials discussed and debated the plot in one another's embassies and offices in the Caribbean Basin and Washington, basically extending their activities of the recent past years to a larger sphere.Footnote 115 Their efforts even derailed the plans of the CIA. On their own initiative, the dictators brought in fellow anticommunist proponents in Colombia and Venezuela as well as more funding from UFCO.Footnote 116 Not only did the company's tentacles reach far beyond Washington and into the despots’ palaces. The regimes’ success in acquiring more and more aid for the plot scared off hesitant US State Department officials who were fearful of the US role becoming public knowledge.Footnote 117
When the US government moved to depose Arbenz during Operation PBSUCCESS, these dictators and exiles would play critical roles. Somoza, Carías, and Trujillo displayed the same animosity for the Guatemalan Revolution as they had for almost the past decade.Footnote 118 The CIA and the US military coordinated military assistance programs with the regimes to exacerbate regional tensions with Arbenz's government.Footnote 119 It was a combination of US resources and despots’ assistance that underlay the training of Guatemalan exiles in Nicaragua, the construction of military bases in Honduras, and more.Footnote 120 In the same vein, José Luis Arenas, José Calderón Salazar, and Carlos Salazar Jr took the CIA's money for personal meetings, leaflets, and newspapers articles in Mexico City and elsewhere to encourage fellow exiles to back Castillo Armas.Footnote 121 Arenas's earlier networking with Mexican anticommunists in 1950 paid off four years later when the CIA financed the Primer Congreso contra la Intervención Soviética en América Latina. Hosted by Jorge Prieto Laurens and his Frente Popular Anti-Comunista de México, Arenas and Luis Coronado Lira joined dozens of anticommunist representatives from throughout the Western Hemisphere in Mexico; word of this meeting and subsequent publications spread around Latin America.Footnote 122 The exiles’ activism did not stop there. Arenas and Coronado Lira traveled the Caribbean Basin and met with Cuban, Dominican, Honduran, Mexican, and Nicaraguan officials and anticommunist leaders well-versed in years of such machinations.Footnote 123 Years of traveling the region had given them the perfect experience to navigate diplomatic difficulties and acquire the required visas and travel documents.Footnote 124
The US government's intervention reshaped what had begun as a counterrevolution in Guatemala spearheaded by the dictators and their patronized exiles, a pattern scholars are now finding throughout Latin America during the Cold War. Although resembling the conspiracies of the past decade, the CIA's resources during Operation PBSUCCESS far dwarfed what Caribbean Basin regimes had offered. Most important, it would be the US government that accomplished what despots and dissidents had only dreamed of since the mid 1950s: the heart of Operation PBSUCCESS was the array of financial assets and psychological warfare that finally penetrated the Guatemalan army, eroded the morale of the country's soldiers and officers, and induced the disloyalty necessary for the 1954 coup.Footnote 125 In contrast to almost a decade of competition among exiles for patrons’ largesse, the CIA would demand unity and support Castillo Armas as the primary Guatemalan exile.Footnote 126 By taking over the regimes and the exiles’ counterrevolution, the US government realized what the region's own actors could not before. Scholars would reveal similar instances of US resources escalating what had started as local and regional conflicts, for example, the US government's financing of anticommunist opposition to Fidel Castro's Cuba, the Johnson administration's approving a military invasion during the Dominican Republic's civil war, and the CIA's assuming responsibility for the Contras against the Sandinista government. Ultimately, the US government's intervention in Guatemala was a force in and of itself, yet it built on a legacy of anticommunist activism on the part of Guatemalan dissidents patronized by Caribbean Basin dictators.
Although many exiles joined in support of Castillo Armas's regime after the 1954 coup, their positions did not derive only from the decisive role of the US government. From José Luis Arenas to Carlos Salazar Jr, exiles occupied numerous positions and dictated policy for the new government while all along receiving US officials. The same acquiescence would be seen under Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes's government after Castillo Armas's assassination, as was the case when Col. Arturo Ramírez served as the country's ambassador to the United States. However, the doors of these former exiles were open for representatives of Caribbean Basin regimes, a process US officials noted on learning that the one-time exile Juan Pinillos was traveling on Castillo Armas's behalf to shore up relations with Honduras, Venezuela, and Mexico.Footnote 127 Most prominently, Luis Coronado Lira, now Castillo Armas's personal secretary, was not meeting exclusively with US representatives; he also hosted representatives of those regimes that had supported Coronado Lira and his compatriots for the past years.Footnote 128 Even after Operation PBSUCCESS, these one-time exiles continued to acknowledge a debt of gratitude for the largesse of Caribbean Basin dictators.
