A ‘50s Victim of the CIA Is Finally at Rest, With Honors : *Guatemala: President Jacobo Arbenz was toppled by a U.S.-directed coup; now even the military grants him hero status.

In June 1954, a military coup sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency overthrew Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles promptly went on U.S. television to congratulate the anti-Arbenz forces for having turned back an attempt by “the Kremlin to destroy the inter-American system.”

“The situation,” Dulles added, “is being cured by the Guatemalans themselves.”

Of all the hypocritical bromides uttered by both sides during the Cold War, that particular phrase still strikes me as one of the most cynically dishonest.

Four decades later, we know that the situation was not handled by Guatemalans. Several fine books--not all of them unsympathetic to the CIA--have documented how American CIA operatives trained the 150 men who invaded Guatemala from Honduras, broadcast phony radio reports that helped convince Arbenz that a major force was approaching the capital and, finally, drove him out. The CIA also provided the air support that kept the small band from being defeated.

And we also know that the “cure” administered by the CIA was worse than whatever disease Dulles thought Guatemala was suffering from. Most historians now cite 1954 as the beginning of the sporadic guerrilla warfare and political violence that has claimed 100,000 lives and plagues Guatemala to this day.

I had firsthand experience with Guatemala’s turmoil in the 1980s, when I would visit the country occasionally as a correspondent, usually after another military coup or phony election in which a civilian figurehead was picked to run things for Guatemala’s military.

A regular stop on those visits would be a U.S. Embassy briefing on the Guatemalan “situation.” I’ll never forget the briefing in March 1982, after a coup that marked the ascendancy of Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, one of the most brutal military men to run the country. Pondering the distasteful prospect of a Rios Montt government and fully aware of the irony, a U.S. diplomat told me: “What we wouldn’t give to have Arbenz back now.”

That rueful remark came back to me last week when I read an account of the return to Guatemala of Arbenz’s remains from El Salvador, where he was buried after dying in exile in 1971. The homecoming has become an occasion for Guatemala’s political factions to reassess his years as president. With the exception of a few strident voices on the extreme right, Arbenz is now seen as a hero.

A former army colonel, Arbenz was elected president in 1950 promising to carry out social and economic reforms that had begun under the previous president. The most important was land reform. It was also the riskiest, because it put him on a collision course with the United Fruit Co. In those days, United Fruit was the biggest landowner in Guatemala and controlled most of the country’s infrastructure, such as railroads and electric utilities.

Arbenz also had the misfortune of trying to carry out his reforms when the Cold War was in its early and arguably darkest days. So it is no surprise that Dulles and his brother Allen, who was then head of the CIA, decided to make an example of Arbenz. (Also well-documented now is the fact that both men had business ties to United Fruit.)

One wonders what the Dulles brothers would make of Arbenz’s hero status now.

They probably wouldn’t be surprised that leftist political parties campaign in Guatemala pledging to complete the work Arbenz began.

They might be a little surprised that conservative business leaders now say that the dams, ports and highways that Arbenz built to help break United Fruit’s stranglehold are admirable examples of “nationalist development.”

But they surely would be stunned to learn that the Guatemalan army decided to posthumously restore Arbenz’s rank and military honors when he was reburied. I certainly find it ironic, considering that the military has done more than any other institution in that country to keep democracy so weak for the past 40 years.

But that is the skeptical view of a North American who for too many years has seen too much bloodshed in a poor but beautiful country, and who still feels pangs of guilt that the most noteworthy U.S. achievement in Guatemala was a spy operation that overthrew a legitimate government and ushered into power one of the most brutally efficient gangs of uniformed thugs to ever run a so-called banana republic.

Of course, the CIA is no longer as powerful as it once was, thanks in no small part to recent scandals involving rogue CIA contacts in the Guatemalan army who murdered an innocent U.S. citizen. So maybe the Guatemalan military can finally be reined in, too. And who knows, maybe the “situation” in Guatemala can finally--and truly--be “cured” by the Guatemalans themselves.