... The CIA is assigned the responsibility of carrying out the crimes and atrocities. And then if anything goes wrong, you can blame it on the CIA, sort of rogue elements out of control.
But that’s a joke. It’s very hard to find a case where the CIA acted outside presidential authority. And this is a clear case. Eisenhower gave the orders. The beachhead story doesn’t mention the fact that Eisenhower knew perfectly well that his administration had been trying very hard to force Guatemala to accept East European arms. Guatemala had a democratic government. In fact, it was a brief interlude. A Guatemalan poet called it years of spring in a history of tyranny, or something like that. There was a brief interlude of democracy, to which the U.S. was strongly opposed.
After the dictatorship was overthrown in 1944, Guatemala gradually got an authentic democratic government, which had enormous popular support. Schlesinger and Kinzer didn’t know at the time they wrote their book, but since then CIA and other documents have been released. They make it clear that the great fear in the U.S. administration was the enormous popular support that the democratic government had because of its progressive social policies. It was mobilizing peasants for the first time to participate in the political system. And that was just considered a terrible crime, because a real democracy was developing, which might even influence others. So Dulles and Eisenhower, in secret discussions, were profoundly concerned. The main threat they could see in Guatemala was that it might be supporting strikes in nearby Honduras or it might be supporting Jose Figueres, the leading figure of Central American democracy, who was trying to overthrow a dictatorship in Costa Rica, and it might be that Guatemala was supporting it. So those were the threats.
They threatened Guatemala very clearly with attack. Guatemala tried to get military aid from Europe. The U.S. blocked that. Finally, Guatemala made the tactical mistake of accepting military aid from the only country that would give it to it. It happened to be Czechoslovakia. And the U.S. triumphantly discovered that Czech arms were going to Guatemala to defend itself from an attack by the hemispheric superpower, and that was trumpeted as a threat to the U.S. How can the U.S. survive if Guatemala gets a rifle from Czechoslovakia? And it was used as the pretext for the invasion, which of course was covered up. It wasn’t called a U.S.-backed invasion, although that’s in fact what it was.
Incidentally, although we have an enormous amount of information about Guatemala, it is nevertheless limited. Part of the reason is that the Reaganites, who were not conservatives, they were extreme statist reactionaries, believed in a powerful interventionist state, which intervenes massively in the domestic economy and in international affairs. They also had to prevent the public from knowing what it was doing. So one of the achievements of the Reagan administration was to block the regular release of archival records. There are U.S. laws that require the State Department to declassify and release records after a thirty-year period. There are some constraints, but basically to release them. The Reagan administration for the first time blocked that because they didn’t want the public to know what had happened in Guatemala and Iran. So either they destroyed them or they hid them, but they didn’t release them. That was considered so outrageous that the State Department historians, who are a pretty conservative bunch, resigned in protest and made a public protest about it.
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http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200408--.htm
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