Guatemalas Nobel Prize-winning author Miguel Angel Asturias, a biting critic of United Fruit.42

Meanwhile, John Foster Dulles, who was accused by Toriello of seeking to establish a banana curtain in Central America,43 was concerned that some communists might escape retribution. In cables he exchanged with Ambassador Peurifoy, Dulles insisted that the government arrest those Guatemalans who had taken refuge in foreign embassies and that criminal charges be brought against them to prevent them leaving the country, charges such as having been covert Moscow agents . The Secretary of State argued that communists should be automatically denied the right of asylum because they were connected with an international conspiracy. The only way they should be allowed to leave, he asserted, was if they agreed to be sent to the Soviet Union. But Castillo Armas refused to accede to Dulless wishes on this particular issue, influenced perhaps by the fact that he, as well as some of his colleagues, had been granted political asylum in an embassy at one time or another.44

One of those who sought asylum in the Argentine Embassy was a 25-year-old Argentine doctor named Ernesto Che Guevara. Guevara, who had been living in Guatemala since sometime in 1953, had tried to spark armed resistance to the invading forces, but without any success. Guevaras experience in Guatemala had a profound effect upon his political consciousness. His first wife, Hilda Gadea, whom he met there, later wrote:

Up to that point, he used to say, he was merely a sniper, criticizing from a theoretical point of view the political panorama of our America. From here on he was convinced that the struggle against the oligarchic system and the main enemy, Yankee imperialism, must be an armed one, supported by the people.45

In the wake of the coup, the United States confiscated a huge amount of documents from the Guatemalan government, undoubtedly in the hope of finally uncovering the hand of The International Communist Conspiracy behind Arbenz. If this is what was indeed discovered, it has not been made public.

On 30 June, while the dust was still settling, Dulles summed up the situation in Guatemala in a speech which was a monument to coldwarspeak:

[The events in Guatemala] expose the evil purpose of the Kremlin to destroy the inter-American system ... having gained control of what they call the mass organizations, [the communists] moved on to take over the official press and radio of the Guatemalan Government. They dominated the social security organization and ran the agrarian reform program ... dictated to the Congress and to the President ... Arbenz ... was openly manipulated by the leaders of communism ... The Guatemalan regime enjoyed the full support of Soviet Russia ... [the] situation is being cured by the Guatemalans themselves.46

When it came to rewriting history, however, Dulless speech had nothing on these lines from a CIA memo written in August 1954 and only for internal consumption no less: When the communists were forced by outside pressure to attempt to take over Guatemala completely, they forced Arbenz to resign (deleted). They then proceeded to establish a Communist Junta under Col. Carlos Diaz. 47

And in October, John Peurifoy sat-before a congressional committee and told

them:.

My role in Guatemala prior to the revolution was strictly that of a diplomatic observer ... The revolution that overthrew the Arbenz government was engineered

and instigated by those people in Guatemala who rebelled against the policies and ruthless oppression of the Communist-con-trolled government.48

Later, Dwight Eisenhower was to write about Guatemala in his memoirs. The former president chose not to offer the slightest hint that the United States had anything to do with the planning or instigation of the coup, and indicated that his administration had only the most tangential of connections to its execution.49 (When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchevs memoirs were published in the West, the publisher saw fit to employ a noted Kremlinologist to annotate the work, pointing out errors of omission and commission.)

Thus it was that the educated, urbane men of the State Department, the CIA and the United Fruit Company, the pipe-smoking, comfortable men of Princeton, Harvard and Wall Street, assured each other that the illiterate peasants of Guatemala did not deserve the land which had been given to them, that the workers did not need their unions, that hunger and torture were a small price to pay for being rid of the scourge of communism.

The terror carried out by Castillo Armas was only the beginning. It was, as we shall see, to get much worse in time. It continued without pause for more than 40 years.

In 1955, the New York Times reported from the United Nations that The United States has begun a drive to scuttle a section of the proposed Covenant of Human Rights that poses a threat to its business interests abroad. The offending section dealt with the right of peoples to self-determination and to permanent sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources. Said the newspaper: It declares in effect that any country has the right to nationalize its resources ... 50

11. Costa Rica mid-1950s

Trying to topple an ally, part I

If ever the CIA maintained a love-hate relationship, it was with Jose Figueres, three times the head of state of Costa Rica.

On the one hand, Figueres, by his own admission in 1975, worked for the CIA in 20,000 ways ... all over Latin America for 30 years.1 I collaborated with the CIA when we were trying to topple Trujillo, he divulged, speaking of the Dominican Republic dictator.2

On the other hand, Figueres revealed that the Agency had twice tried to kill him.3 He did not elaborate, although he stated at the same time that he had tried for two years to get the Bay of Pigs invasion called off. This may have precipitated one or both of the assassination attempts.

The CIA also tried to overthrow the Figueres. government. In 1964, the first significant expose of the Agency, The Invisible Government, disclosed that:

in the mid-1950s CIA agents intruded deeply into the political affairs of Costa Rica, the most stable and democratic republic in Latin America. Knowledgeable Costa Ricans were aware of the CIAs role. The CIAs purpose was to promote the ouster of Jose (Pepe) Figueres, the moderate socialist who became President in a fair and open election in 1953.4

Figueres remained in office until 1958, in this his first term as president; he had headed a liberal junta in the late 1940s.

The Agencys major grievance was that Figueres had scrupulously recognized the right of asylum in Costa Rica-for non-Communists and Communists alike. The large influx of questionable characters complicated the agencys job of surveillance and forced it to increase its staff. 5

The CIAs problems with Figueres actually went somewhat deeper. Costa Rica was a haven for hundreds of exiles fleeing from various Latin American right-wing dictatorships, such as in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and Figueres was providing groups of them with material and moral support in their plans to overthrow these regimes.6 To Figueres, this was entirely in keeping with his anti-totalitarian beliefs, directed against the left as well as the right. The problem was that the dictators targeted for overthrow were all members in good standing of the United States anti-Communist, Free-World club. (The American attitude toward Trujillo was later modified-) Moreover, Figueres had on occasion expressed criticism of the American policy of supporting such dictatorships while neglecting the economic and social problems of the hemisphere.

These considerations could easily outweigh the fact that Figueres had established his anti-Communist credentials, albeit not of the ultra variety, and was no more a socialist than US Senator Hubert Humphrey. Although Figueres spoke out strongly at times against foreign investment, as president he was eminently accommodating to Central Americas betes noires, the multinational fruit companies.7

In addition to providing support to Figueress political opponents,8 the CIA, reported The Invisible Government, tried:

to stir up embarrassing trouble within the Communist Party in Costa Rica, and to attempt to link Figueres with the Communists. An effort to produce evidence that Figueres had been in contact with leading Communists during a trip to Mexico was unsuccessful. But CIA agents had better luck with the first part of their strategy-stirring up trouble for the Communists. They succeeded in planting a letter in a Communist newspaper. The letter, purportedly from a leading Costa Rican Communist, put him on record in opposition to the Party line on the [l956] Hungarian revolution. Unaware that the letter was a CIA plant, the leading officials in the American Embassy held an urgent meeting to ponder its meaning. The political officer then dispatched a long classified report to Washington, alerting top policy makers to the possibility of a startling turn in Latin American Communist politics.9

In 1955 the Agency carried out an action against Figueres that was more immediately threatening. A deep personal and political animosity between Figueres and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza had escalated into violence: an attempt against Somozas life, launched from Costa Rica with Figueress support, was countered by an invasion from Nicaragua by land and air. Figueress biographer, Charles Ameringer, has related that:

Figueres accused the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency of aiding the Somoza movement against him. He claimed that the CIA felt indebted to Somoza for the help he had given in overthrowing the Arbenz regime. He asserted that the same pilots and planes (the F-47) that had participated in the attack upon Guatemala, afterwards came from Nicaragua and machine-gunned eleven defenseless towns in our territory. According to Figueres, at the same time that the U.S. Department of State arranged the sale of fighter planes for Costa Ricas defense, CIA planes and pilots were flying sorties for the rebels.10