Global Policy Forum

Iran and Guatemala, 1953-54

By Stephen Kinzer

Soon after the C.I.A. installed him as president of Guatemala in 1954, Col. Carlos Castillo Armas visited Washington. He was unusually forthright with Vice President Richard M. Nixon. "Tell me what you want me to do," he said, "and I will do it."

What the United States wanted in Guatemala — and in Iran, where the C.I.A. also deposed a government in the early 1950's — was pro-American stability. In the long run, though, neither Colonel Castillo Armas nor his Iranian counterpart, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, provided it. Instead, both led their countries away from democracy and toward repression and tragedy.

How did this happen? From the perspective of half a century, what is the legacy of these two coups? Several dozen scholars, including leading experts on Iran and Guatemala, gathered in Chicago this month to consider those questions. Their conclusions were grim. All agreed that both coups — the first that the C.I.A. carried out — had terrible long-term effects.

"It's quite clear that the 1953 coup cut short a move toward democracy in Iran," said Mark J. Gasiorowski, a historian at Louisiana State University who began studying that coup in the 1980's. "The United States bears responsibility for this." Iranians wrote a constitution and elected a parliament early in the 20th century. Their progress toward democracy stopped after the Pahlavi dynasty took the throne with British help in 1921, but resumed after World War II. By the time of the 1953 coup, Iran was more free than at any time before or since.

The verdict on Guatemala was even harsher. Within a few years after the 1954 coup, Guatemala fell into a maelstrom of guerrilla war and state terror in which hundreds of thousands of people died. "The C.I.A. intervention began a ghastly cycle of violence, assassination and torture in Guatemala," said Stephen G. Rabe, a historian from the University of Texas at Dallas and author of "Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism." "The Guatemalan intervention of 1954 is the most important event in the history of U.S. relations with Latin America," Mr. Rabe said. "It really set the precedent for later interventions in Cuba, British Guiana, Brazil and Chile. The tactics were the same, the mindset was the same, and in many cases the people who directed those covert interventions were the same."

President Harry S. Truman authorized creation of the C.I.A. in 1947, and during his administration it carried out covert actions. Truman refused, however, to authorize the overthrow of governments. That changed when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953.

On Aug. 19, 1953, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran became the first victim of a C.I.A. coup. Ten months later, on June 27, 1954, President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala became the second.

The recent Chicago meeting, at Northeastern Illinois University, was the first time scholars have considered these two coups together. Some of the participants have taken anti-interventionist positions in the past, but all are respected scholars in their fields. Several have devoted years to studying either the Guatemala coup or the one in Iran. Some now see them as constituting a single historical moment, the beginning of an era of C.I.A.-backed coups around the world.

Eisenhower ordered these coups for a combination of economic and political reasons. Elected Iranian and Guatemalan leaders had challenged the power of large Western corporations, Mr. Mossadegh by nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and Mr. Arbenz by forcing the United Fruit Company to sell some of its unused land for distribution to peasants. American officials charged that both were leading their countries toward Communism, but recent research suggests that the likelihood of Communist takeovers in Iran and Guatemala was exaggerated.

Mr. Mossadegh pursued a neutralist foreign policy and cooperated with Communist members of parliament to win approval of social reforms, but was not inclined to socialism. American officials who were assigned to monitor Communist movements in Iran during the 1950's admitted years later that they had routinely overstated the strength of these movements.

Mr. Arbenz was more sympathetic to socialist ideas, and bought weapons from Czechoslovakia after Washington blocked access to other sources. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sought to link him to a Soviet bid for influence in the Americas. "Fifty years later," Mr. Rabe said, "still no link has been established."

After installing friendly leaders in Iran and Guatemala, the United States lost interest in promoting democracy in either country. "There was no democratic agenda," asserted Cyrus Bina, an economist from the University of Minnesota at Morris. Both countries fell into dictatorship and bloody upheaval.

In Iran, the shah's regime imprisoned dissidents and alienated religious leaders by imposing secular reforms. Many democrats and leftists made common cause with fundamentalist clerics. "The only way they were able to develop was in the mosque," Mr. Bina said. Fariba Zarinebaf, a historian at Northwestern University, said the most profound long-term result of the 1953 coup may be that it led many Iranian intellectuals to conclude that although Western leaders practiced democracy at home, they were uninterested in promoting it abroad. "The growing disillusion of Iranian intellectuals with the West and with Western-style liberal democracy was a major development in the 1960's and 70's that contributed to the Islamic revolution," she said.

If the overthrows in Iran and Guatemala marked the beginning of the coup era 50 years ago, this year's invasion of Iraq suggests that the era has ended. Governments like Saddam Hussein's learned to protect themselves against coups, participants at the conference said. "Conditions in the world are more constricting today and it is more difficult, I believe, to pull off coups," said Douglass Cassel, a Northwestern University law professor. In Iraq this year, the United States invaded instead. That option would probably have been closed during the cold war, when the Soviet Union was likely to have opposed it.

During the Clinton administration, American leaders expressed regret for past actions in Iran and Guatemala. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright conceded that the 1953 coup "was clearly a setback for Iran's political development," and that "many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America." President Clinton said the United States had been wrong to support Guatemalan "military forces and intelligence units engaged in widespread repression," and pledged that it would "never repeat" this mistake.

Susanne Jonas, a professor of Latin American studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz, said the United States should help Guatelamans implement the "truly visionary" peace accords signed there seven years ago after talks sponsored by the United Nations, with American support. Ms. Jonas urged the Bush administration to give more financial and moral support to the United Nations mission in Guatemala, which oversees the peace process, and to use its influence over Guatemala's military "to push along the agenda of replacing the old repressive apparatus with a new kind of security system." "This is the only opportunity Guatemala has had since 1954," she said, "and the best one it will have over the next half century."

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