Originally posted by marg6043
In 1954, a CIA-orchestrated coup ended what Guatemalans call the "Ten Years of Spring,"

Jacobo Arbenz, elected in 1950
The United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) (UFCo) protested when unused portions of its vast holdings were expropriated and distributed to land-less peasants.

The Guatemala goverment paid the tax value of the land to the US company. But two of the stock holders were the Dulles brothers, Secretary of State and head of the CIA in the Eisenhower administration.

Talking about US goverment involment does this ring a bell.

Colonel Castillo Armas became the new president and the the U. S. Ambassador furnished Armas with lists of radical opponents to be eliminated and the arrest and tourture began.

Some 140,000 people have been killed and another 45,000 disappeared in a U.S. backed scorched earth campaign to wipe out dissidents, rebels and activists for peace and social justice in Guatemala.

Clearly US does not show any compashion when it comes to big money interest corruption in the goverment (sound like Haliburton and Cheney in Iraq) as long as profits are made. This things are kept quiet and sometimes the goverment has a way to keep it that way.

I got my sources from

www.geocities.com...

[edit on 20-8-2004 by marg6043]

CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents
The first CIA effort to overthrow the Guatemalan president--a CIA collaboration with Nicaraguan dictator Anastacio Somoza to support a disgruntled general named Carlos Castillo Armas and codenamed Operation PBFORTUNE--was authorized by President Truman in 1952. As early as February of that year, CIA Headquarters began generating memos with subject titles such as "Guatemalan Communist Personel to be disposed of during Military Operations," outlining categories of persons to be neutralized "through Executive Action"--murder--or through imprisonment and exile. The "A" list of those to be assassinated contained 58 names--all of which the CIA has excised from the declassified documents.

PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953, carried a $2.7 million budget for "pychological warfare and political action" and "subversion," among the other components of a small paramilitary war. But, according to the CIA's own internal study of the agency's so-called "K program," up until the day Arbenz resigned on June 27, 1954, "the option of assassination was still being considered." While the power of the CIA's psychological-war, codenamed "Operation Sherwood," against Arbenz rendered that option unnecessary, the last stage of PBSUCCESS called for "roll-up of Communists and collaborators." Although Arbenz and his top aides were able to flee the country, after the CIA installed Castillo Armas in power, hundreds of Guatemalans were rounded up and killed. Between 1954 and 1990, human rights groups estimate, the repressive operatives of sucessive military regimes murdered more than 100,000 civilians.