Stephen C. Schlesinger

I'm not sure how much I agree or disagree, because this is basically the only book I have read about the topic.
It is one of the few books I could find that dealt with Guatemalan history exclusively. I need to reread it now that I got the basics down, and maybe I'll get more of their particular point of view.

Their main thesis, as I remember it (because I write this 6 years after having read the book) is that the intervention in Guatemala in '55 was more due to the Arbenz government being a threat to the personal interests of some relevant officials than about a genuine threat to the US as a whole.

According to Kinzer and Schlesinger, the threat of a communist takeover of Guatemala was used to sell the intervention as vital to the American public interest, and the documented (also accepted by the authors) connections of Arbenz to leftist groups are explained away as simple alliance making in a government that had a strong opposition.

The main point that was unclear to me is how important the UFCO really was to US government officials, which seems to be the core of the argument of the book.

I cannot go into much more detail because I lack it, I read this book a long time ago.… (mehr)

The history of the United States’ involvement in Central American politics is not a happy one, as anyone with a passing knowledge of the area will tell you. This record of the CIA operation to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Jabobo Arbenz in 1954 is an incredibly well-told account of what is, sadly, just another tawdry chapter in the story of US abuses in this part of the world.

Schlesinger’s particular brilliance is to make the history seem, not bigger, but smaller. The key protagonists don’t feel like they’re just actors of some impersonal “grand history”, but real people who made stupid real-people mistakes, and did horrible real-people things.

In 2017, Guatemala has an ex-comedian as a President who previously posed in blackface and keeps provoking neighbouring Belize with a decades-old territorial dispute. But, good to be reminded that things have been worse.… (mehr)