The Guatemalan Civil War ( 1960 – 96 ) involved the government, right-wing paramilitary organizations, and left-wing insurgents.

The arms purchase was a response to the US arms embargo ; the Árbenz Government resupplied the Guatemalan armed forces, because it was convinced that a U. S .– sponsored paramilitary invasion was imminent.

The 1954 Guatemalan coup d ’ état ( 18 – 27 June 1954 ) was the CIA covert operation that deposed President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán ( 1950 – 54 ), with Operation PBSUCCESS — paramilitary invasion by an anti-Communist “ army of liberation ”.

The paramilitary invasion of Operation PBSUCCESS ( 1953 – 54 ) featured El ejército de liberación, an army of liberation recruited, trained, and armed by the CIA, composed of 480 mercenary soldiers under the command of Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, an exiled, right-wing Guatemalan army officer.

1954 Guatemalan coup d ’ état: the memorandum that describes the CIA ’ s organisation of the paramilitary deposition of the Guatemalan government of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, in June 1954.

Because of the continual bureaucratic postponements of the paramilitary invasion, the CIA worried that their Guatemalan army of liberation, or any other Guatemalan armed rebel-group, might prove over-eager and prematurely launch a coup d ’ état.

A case officer said that the Central Intelligence Agency did little to hide knowledge of its paramilitary invasion of Guatemala from the American public, “ The figleaf was very transparent, threadbare .” The New York Times celebrated the Guatemalan coup d ’ état as “ the first successful anti-Communist revolt since the last war .” Moreover, in the same newspaper, Milton Brackersan misinformed readers, that “ there is no evidence that the United States provided material aid or guidance ” to the anti-Communist freedom fighters, and that “ the overturn meets only part of the problem of Communism.

CIA intelligence analyses, of some 150, 000 pages of Guatemalan Government and Labor Party documents, found no substantiation of the key geopolitical premise ( Soviet political involvement ) that justified the secret US paramilitary invasion of Guatemala, and the deposition of the elected Árbenz Government.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld ( 1953 – 61 ), said that the paramilitary invasion by which the US deposed the elected Guatemalan government violated the human-rights stipulations of the UN Charter ; moreover, the usually pro – US newspapers of West Germany, condemned the Guatemalan coup d ’ état.

* MANO, a former Guatemalan paramilitary group

After Belize achieved independence in 1981 the United Kingdom maintained a deterrent force ( British Forces Belize ) in the country to protect it from invasion by Guatemala ( see Guatemalan claim to Belizean territory ).

The Árbenz Government originally meant to repel the invasion by arming the military-age populace, the workers ’ militia, and the Guatemalan Army ; yet, public knowledge of the secret, cash-and-carry arms-purchase compelled the President to supply arms only to the Army ; which the Guatemalan senate perceived as a political rift, between the President and the Military Establishment.

On 20 May 1954, the US Navy began air and sea patrols of Guatemala, under the pretexts of intercepting secret shipments of weapons, and the protection of Honduras from Guatemalan aggression and invasion.

As psychological warfare, the course of the 1954 Guatemalan coup d ’ état invasion was meant to provoke popular panic, by giving the populace the impression of strategically insurmountable odds against successfully defending Guatemala, which, the CIA believed, would compel the national populace and the Guatemalan Army to side with, rather than repel and defeat, the invaders led by Col. Castillo.

Although the mercenary army of the CIA were not a significant military threat, the President and the military commander did fear US military intervention if the Guatemalan military decisively defeated the CIA invasion.

Case number CSI-1998-00005 p. 5 “ reconnaissance flights were made on 27 and 28 of October ( 1960 ) over the Swan Islands and the Guatemalan Caribbean coast — areas where the “ invasion " forces are allegedly being assembled .”

Belize was contested between the Spanish Empire and the British Empire, a dispute that continued after the independence of Guatemala, who considered Belize to be a Guatemalan department.

The central ceremonial center of Kaminaljuyu was however protected by the Guatemalan government and is now a park within the city.

The Guatemalan region of Mesoamerica was dominated by the Maya civilization ( 2, 000 BC – AD 250 ), before the Spanish arrived in the 16th century ; although most of the great, Classic-era ( AD 250 – 900 ) Maya cities of the Petén Basin region, in the northern lowlands of Guatemala, had been abandoned by the year AD 1, 000 ; however, the states in the Guatemalan central highlands, flourished until the arrival of Pedro de Alvarado, the Spanish Conquistador who began subjugating the Indian states of Guatemala in 1525.

As a result, the Guatemalan government was often subservient to the interests of the UFC.

In 1944, General Jorge Ubico ’ s thirteen-year dictatorship ( 1931 – 44 ) of Guatemala was overthrown by the October Revolutionaries, a group of Guatemalan nationalists — politically dissident military officers, university students, and liberal professionals — who were politically empowered, by the almost-simultaneous revolutions that deposed superannuated dictatorships in Venezuela, Cuba, and El Salvador.

The killing of a school teacher by a Guatemalan Army soldier culminated the civil unrest that precipitated the coup d ’ état ; the moral outrage of the Guatemalan national populace was manifested with a general strike that halted the national economy and stilled the country.

Arbenz together with Arévalo further promoted the progressive social change that characterized the latter's presidency, clearing much of the old restrictions on political parties and labour unions, while also purging the army brass of its remaining pro-Arana officers — one of whom was Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas ; a man who would play a major role in Guatemalan politics in the coming years.

They had estimated it as high as Q 15, 854, 849, which was almost twenty times more than what the Guatemalan government had offered.

The Guatemalan government had to fight the pressure because although U. S. had recognized, in words, that Guatemala had the right to conduct their own politics and business, U. S. representatives also claimed that they had to interfere because UFCo was their company that had brought in a lot of profit and harming the interests of that company was harming the U. S. economy.

He claimed that Guatemalan government was not prepared to make an exception for U. S. concerning decree 900.

The coup was supported by CIA radio broadcasts and so the Guatemalan army refused to resist the coup, Arbenz was forced to resign.

Participation was in theory voluntary, but in practice, many rural Guatemalan men ( including young boys and the elderly ), especially in the northwest, had no choice but to join either the PACs or be tarred as guerrillas.

The most notable human rights abuses of this period were the brutal slaying of Bishop Juan José Gerardi two days after he had publicly presented a major Catholic Church sponsored human rights report known as REMHI, and the disappearance of Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, also known as Comandante Everardo, who, it was later revealed, was tortured and assassinated in 1993 without trial by Guatemalan Army officers on the payroll of the CIA.

An important part of that prehistory was the Mayan presence around the city of Copán, in western Honduras which is near the Guatemalan border.

The study was sponsored by the Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health and the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau ( now the World Health Organization's Pan American Health Organization ) and the Guatemalan government.

Although Guatemalan claims to Belize delayed independence, full independence was granted in 1981.

In that same year, due to his relationship with his brother Allen Dulles, the Director of CIA and a former member of the Board Of Directors of the United Fruit Company, based in Guatemala, Foster Dulles was pivotal in promoting and executing the CIA-led Operation PBSUCCESS that overthrew the democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

The racial makeup of Stanislaus County was 337, 342 ( 65. 6 %) White, 14, 721 ( 2. 9 %) African American, 5, 902 ( 1. 1 %) Native American, 26, 090 ( 5. 1 %) Asian ( 1. 5 % Indian, 1. 1 % Filipino, 0. 7 % Cambodian, 0. 5 % Chinese, 0. 3 % Vietnamese, 0. 3 % Laotian, 0. 1 % Japanese, 0. 1 % Korean, 0. 1 % Cambodian ), 3, 401 ( 0. 7 %) Pacific Islander, 99, 210 ( 19. 3 %) from other races, and 27, 787 ( 5. 4 %) from two or more races ; Hispanic or Latino of any race were 215, 658 persons ( 41. 9 %); 37. 6 % of Stanislaus County is Mexican, 0. 6 % Puerto Rican, 0. 5 % Salvadoran, 0. 2 % Nicaraguan, and 0. 2 % Guatemalan.

On August 22 2012, the Popol Vuh was declared intangible cultural heritage of Guatemala by the Guatemalan Ministry of Culture.

A young Guatemalan woman, Alejandra Maria Torres, was lynched by a mob in Guatemala City on December 15, 2009.

Donors ' response to the need for international financial support funds for implementation of the Peace Accords is, however, contingent upon Guatemalan government reforms and counterpart financing.

On 4 December, a contingent of 58 Kaibiles ( the elite special forces commandos of the Guatemalan Army ) was flown into the area.

With assistance from the Guatemalan historian and archivist Juan Gavarrete, Scherzer copied ( or had a copy made ) of the Spanish content from the last half of the manuscript, which he published upon his return to Europe.

The jailing of the CIA ’ s Guatemalan secret agents rendered them operationally ineffective ; thus, the CIA then relied upon the ideologically-fragmented Guatemalan exile-groups, and their anti-democratic allies in Guatemala, to realize the coup d ’ état against President Árbenz.

In December 1953, the CIA established the operational headquarters of their Guatemalan army of liberation in suburban Florida ; then recruited aeroplane pilots and mercenary soldiers, supervised their military training, established the radio station La Voz de la Liberación ( The Voice of Liberation ) to broadcast disinformation and propaganda ; and arranged for increased diplomatic pressure upon Guatemala to reverse Decree 900 — especially as it applied to the United Fruit Company.

The Guatemalan coup d ’ état much depended upon psychological warfare, because the 480-soldier Guatemalan army of liberation was over-matched by the Guatemalan Army ; thus, deception by feint was most important.

Post – War, the Guatemalan organisation for national truth and reconciliation, the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico ( CEH, Historical Clarification Commission ), established with a remit to investigate and report the human rights violations perpetrated by the government and the insurgents ( January 1962 – December 1996 ), reported that the influence of the Guatemalan military upon the civil government occurred in stages throughout the civil-war years.

Nonetheless, in contradiction, Howard Hunt, a case officer in the Guatemalan coup d ’ état, said that the political influence of the United Fruit Company upon the Eisenhower Administration was instrumental to the CIA ’ s overthrowing the progressive Árbenz Government, in order to protect the national security of the US, and the international security of the Western Hemisphere against the hegemony of the USSR.

In 2003, the US State Department confirmed that the 1954 Guatemalan coup d ’ état, resulted from the CIA ’ s mistaken geopolitical perceptions that the civil unrest consequent to the nationalization of foreign-owned farmlands was the work of the Guatemalan Labor Party and its communist influence upon President Árbenz.

In 1953 he moved briefly to Bolivia upon being named Guatemalan consul in La Paz.

In 2006, Casa Alianza in Guatemala received the Order of the Quetzal award, which is the highest award that the Guatemalan government bestows upon those doing humanitarian work in Guatemala.