THE modern history of Sweden has been one characterised by a state of continuous peaceful existence. No participation in any war since 1814, neutral in both world wars, no political assassinations in the country for nigh on two centuries following the murder of King Gustav III in an aristocratic coup attempt in 1792. This remarkable irenic run, free of political violence, was shattered on the night of 28th February 1986 with the seemingly unfathomable murder of Sweden’s incumbent Democratic Socialist prime minister, Olof Palme＊.
Sveavägen murder scene 🔻 (Photo: Anders Holmström/Svenskt Pressfoto)
“Clouseauesque” policing The Swedish PM’s shooting in Sveavägen, one of Stockholm’s busiest streets, by a single assassin, was followed by an amateurish investigation that was a complete shambles from the start. An initial mix-up over phone calls meant the police were slow to respond to the crime, losing precious minutes while the murderer made good his escape. On arrival, they failed to cordon off the murder scene properly, allowing onlookers to contaminate potential forensic evidence; key witnesses were allowed to leave the scene without being questioned. Established crime protocol—a street-by-street search of the area (ie, a dragnet)—was not implemented [“Olof Palme: Sweden believes it knows who killed PM in 1986’, BBC News, 100-Jun-2020, www.bbc.com/]. Another injudicious move on the police’s part was the ignoring of witnesses who had key information.
🔺Head of investigation, H Holmér (Image: www.news.sky.com)
The police investigation was headed by Chief Commissioner Hans Holmér who assumed more or less from day one that the crime was politically motivated, eventually becoming fixated on the Kurdish militant group the PKK as the likely perpetrators, to the neglect of other, more tangible leads. After a haul of locally-based Kurdish immigrants were arrested and then released for lack of solid evidence, the prosecutors and media turned against Holmér’s handling of the case, forcing him to resign [‘“Murder Most Foul” – the Death of Olof Palme’, (Jan Lundius), Inter Press Service,30-Jun-2020,www.ipsnews.net; BBC News]⦿.
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The cast of suspects and the conspiracy theories◘ In the 39 years since the Palme shooting the police have conducted 10,000+ interviews and more than 134 people have confessed to the murder. Aside from the PKK, another international suspect was the white South African regime. Palme was a charismatic figure in world politics but also a controversial and polarising one, as a foreign policy-minded social democrat he elicited criticism from both left and right, including from both superpowers. In addition, his high-profile anti-apartheid stance was a thorn in the side of the Pretoria government. One theory suggests a conspiracy between South Africa’s security and intelligence forces and right-wing extremist mercenaries within Sweden to execute Palme. The view gained some traction but Swedish investigators have never satisfactorily connected the dots between these elements. Not unexpectedly, CIA involvement in Palme’s murder was also suspected by some.
🔺 Stockholm: Intersection of Sveavägen and Tunnelgatan
Palme’s economic reforms, especially those geared towards promoting worker control, did not endear him to the capitalist class in Sweden. More specifically there was Palme’s strong stance against the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors who was illegally selling weapons to several proscribed nations. When Iran was blocked from receiving a shipment one scenario advanced is that an Iranian hitman liquidated the Swedish PM [‘Sweden’s Bofors Arms Scandal’, Directorate of Intelligence, 04-Mar-1988, www.cia.gov/].
Political pressure for “a result” Refocusing domestically on individuals, the spotlight turned to Christer Pettersson who had a criminal record including manslaughter. Pettersson was dubiously convicted of Palme’s murder in 1989, in part because Palme’s widow, prompted by police officers, picked him out in a police lineup. The seriously compromised verdict was easily overturned on appeal (lack of a murder weapon or motive) [‘Who killed Sweden’s prime minister? 1986 assassination of Olof Palme is finally solved – maybe’, (Andrew Nestingen),The Conversation, 11-Jun-2020, www.theconversation.com]. The investigation team’s eagerness to ‘fit’ Pettersson for the crime despite the absence of hard evidence, reflects the pressure exerted by the ruling Social Democratic Party on the police to secure a quick resolution of the crime “acceptable to the public” [‘Who killed the prime minister? The unsolved murder that still haunts Sweden’, (Imogen West-Knights), The Guardian, 16-May-2019, www.theguardian.com].
Another, more ‘political’ suspect to attract the police’s interest early on was Victor Gunnarsson. Gunnarsson was an activist with connexions to various right-wing groups, especially the European Workers Party which held grudges against Palme. Gunnarsson was briefly detained by Holmér but the case against him however dissolved when witnesses failed to locate him at the murder scene at the time of the crime. Gunnarsson later emigrated to the US where he himself ironically became a homicide victim [‘Victor Gunnarsson’, People Pill, www.peoplepill.com].
“Skandiamannen”✪ Another name on the person of interest list of police was Stig Engström. Engström willingly offered himself up to police as a ‘witness’ at the time of the assassination and though questioned, the police eventually discounted him as a serious suspect. But some 20 years after the murder, a new theory, originating in a book by Lars Larsson and developed by journalist Thomas Pettersson, gained traction. The case put by Pettersson that Engström was the killer rested on a conjunction of factors—the “right timing, the right clothing, (he had) unique information, he had close access to guns of the right type, he was right wing and Palme unfriendly” [‘After 34 Years, Sweden Says It Knows the Killer of Olof Palme’, (Thomas Erdbrink & Christina Anderson), New York Times, 10-Jun-2020, www.nytimes.com]. Petersson handed over his findings to the police in 2016, leading to a reopening of the investigation.
Palme, then Swedish communications minister, appeared in the controversial 1960s “erotic-drama” ‘I am Curious – Yellow’ (below with the film’s star, Lena Nyman)🔻
”Resolved” but left up in the air? In 2019 the state prosecutor announced that he had come to the conclusion that Engström was probably Palme’s killer, but, given that Engström himself died in 2000, he promptly closed the case. Not everyone in Sweden is satisfied by the conclusion to the Palme case, many questions remain unanswered about the inconclusiveness of the evidence…eg, no DNA match, where is the missing murder weapon and what was the motive? (BBC). To paraphrase one antagonistic perspective on the case resolution: “it settles none of the unanswered questions”, instead it “underlines the determination of powerful political forces to continue the cover-up surrounding Palme’s murder” [‘Decades-long cover-up continues of assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme’, (Jordan Shilton), World Socialist Web Site, 13-Jun-2000, www.wsws.org/].
Endnote: Palmology and parallels with the JFK conspiracy saga The collective trauma felt by Swedes with Olof Palme’s 1986 assassination—many expressing a sense of lost national innocence, no longer immune from political violence◘—recalls the devastating effect the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 had on the American psyche (Lundius). Both leaders’ violent deaths triggered a runaway train of conspiracy theories, some plausible and some highly implausible◕. In the years since 1986 Sweden’s national obsession with the unsolved murder, labelled Palmessjukdom (“Palme sickness”) has inspired a raft of plays, films, television and musical works on the topic. It has even been cited as a contributing “factor in the worldwide explosion of Scandinavian (noirish) crime fiction”. ‘Palmology’ has spawned a veritable Swedish industry of privatspanarna – a legion of private investigators (such as Thomas Pettersson) conducting independent inquiries into the baffling crime…some have been serious researchers, others espousing “crackpot theories” (West-Knights).
🔻 PM Palme (source: www.cnbc.com)
——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪 ＊ not however the country’s last political murder, in 2003 Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh, was assassinated by another “lone wolf” assassin ⦿ marginalising SÄPO (Säkerhetspolisen – the state secret police) from the investigation didn’t make the task any easier ✪ Engström was dubbed “Skandia Man” by Lars Larsson because he worked in the Skandia Insurance Co tower building which fronts on to Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan ◘ and perhaps in some measure jolting Swedes out of a lingering outlier complacency ◕ among the considerable number of suspects ‘fingered’ for the hit on the Swedish PM was the Swedish police, the Yugoslav secret service, even Palme’s own wife, Lisbet!
When the assortment of Malay Peninsula states and the British colonies in Singapore and Borneo joined together to form the Federation of Malaysia in 1963, it’s large neighbour to the south, Indonesia responded by launching a policy of Konfrontasi (“Confrontation”) against the newly-formed state. The Konfrontasi took the form of both a diplomatic offensive and acts of military aggression against Malaya/Malaysia, targeted at it’s territory in northern Borneo.
An Asian subset of the Cold War
Various outside countries took sides in the Konfrontasi in an East/West alignment of powers transforming the conflict into yet another local arena for a proxy playing-out of the Cold War
▪ Malaysia was backed militarily by Britain and the Commonwealth (Australia and New Zealand), and diplomatically and materially by the US and Canada
▪ Indonesia got support from the two major communist powers, the USSR and mainland China, and from the Philippines and North Vietnam
Bung Karno rhetoric in full flight (Source: indoleft.org)
Indonesia’s initiation of the Confrontation with Malaysia should be seen in the context of nation-building and the regional ambitions of the former Dutch colony‘s leader. President Sukarno, father of Indonesian independence, AKA Bung (“Brother“) Karno, saw the new Malaysian state as a neo-colonial appendageⓐ, a plot by the British to destabilise Indonesia (The Philippines held a similar view of Malaya). Sukarno’s own brand of socialism and his anti-western bent was sharpened by western complicity in sectional insurrection movements against the Indonesian state (giving aid to Permesta and Darul Islam rebels in their struggle against the government). Sukarno-inspired invective spoke of “crushing Malaysia” (Indon: Ganyang Malaysia).
Indonesia Raya, a Pan-Malay Union?
Indonesia’s nationalists had long nurtured a dream of Indonesia Raya, the creation of a “Greater Indonesia” uniting all the territories of ethnic Malays (see Endnote)… Sukarno’s objective was to wreck the Malaysian Federation and drive the British forces out, the realisation of which, it was hoped would allow Djakarta to establish a Greater Malay hegemony in the region led by Indonesia [Hindley, Donald. “Indonesia’s Confrontation with Malaysia: A Search for Motives.” Asian Survey 4, no. 6 (1964): 904–13. https://doi.org/10.2307/3023528]. An allied objective was territorial expansion, having earlier secured Irian Jaya through assertive brinkmanship diplomacy, Djakarta also harboured designs on adding northern Borneo to the republic [DVA (Department of Veterans’ Affairs) (2021), The Indonesian Confrontation 1962 to 1966, DVA Anzac Portal, accessed 24 May 2022, https://anzacportal.dva.gov.au/wars-and-missions/indonesian-confrontation-1962-1966].
Australian combat troops in Borneo (Photo: National Museum of Australia)
An undeclared war
The Indonesia-Malaysia conflict never broke into open warfare but remained a limited engagement, a series of low-intensity border actions between the combatants. The military strategy adopted by the Indonesians comprised campaigns of infiltrations across the (Kalimantan/Borneo) border to make sorties on the Malaysian side. The Sultanate of Brunei—also viewed by Indonesia as a British puppet—was another target of Djakarta‘s subversive measures. Eventually the British retaliated with ”Operation Claret”, a sequence of counter-raids by small forces penetrating Indonesian Kalimantan which managed to keep the Indonesian forces on the back foot. Later Indonesia extended the conflict to the southern Malaysian mainland with a series of paratroop and seaborne raids.
Suharto (Source: Indonesia at Melbourne)
Removing Sukarno
The conflict drifted into a stalemate through 1964 and 1965 while Japan, Thailand and the Philippines strived unsuccessfully to broker a peace deal [‘Konfrontasi (Confrontation) Ends’, HistorySG, www.eresources.nlb.gov.sg]. The ultimate circuit-breaker was domestic in origin, an ongoing power struggle involving the president trying to juggle the growing demands of the Indonesian Army on one side and the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) on the other came to a climax in October 1965 with a failed palace coup. Army leaders used the incident as a pretext to carry out a mass purge of PKI (communist) members and leftist sympathisersⓑ – at least half a million were liquidated! President Sukarno was consequently discredited owing to his alleged close association with the PKI and eventually forced to relinquish power to General Suharto. Sukarno’s downfall took the heat out of the conflict…by August 1966 with Suharto’s “New Order” running the shop in Djakartaⓒ, Malaysia and Indonesia settled their differences with a peace treaty, bringing the Konfrontasi to a close with the sweetener of of desperately-needed US aid for the Indonesian state.
Endnote: Maphilindo, a still-born S.E. Asian association
The eruption of the Konfrontasi in 1963 killed a promising regional initiative stone dead. Filipino president, Diosdado Macapagal, convened a summit in Manila that year to propose a non-political confederation of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines called “Maphilindo“…a long-held dream of Filipinos for union of states in the Malay Archipelago (Melaya irredenta – cf Indonesian aspirations)ⓓ. Suharto’s unilateral and uncompromisingly aggressive move squashed any hopes for close fraternal relations and mutually-advantageous cooperation in the region but Maphilindo did signpost the way to ASEAN which became a reality in 1967 [Pauker, G. J. (1964). Indonesia in 1963: The Year of Wasted Opportunities. Asian Survey, 4(2), 687–694. https://doi.org/10.2307/3023576].
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ⓐ when attempts were made to reach a resolution of the conflict Djakarta refused to negotiate directly with the “ puppet state“ of Malaysia
ⓑ a task facilitated for the army by invaluable CIA assistance (supplying communications equipment and lists of suspected communists to Sukarno) [‘What the United States Did in Indonesia’, Vincent Bevins, The Atlantic, 21-Oct-2017, www.theatlantic.com]
ⓒ and well and truly Cold War-aligned now with America in the anti-communist camp
ⓓ in the tri-state agreements Djakarta secured a coup getting Kuala Lumpur and Manila to agree that any Western bases (of which there were some on both Malaysian and Filipino soil) would not be be an indefinite fixture (Pauker)
A fortnight after Jacobo Árbenz Guzman fell on his sword, resigning the presidency of Guatemala, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who had led the so-called “Army of Liberation”—the US-financed and trained rebel force which had invaded the country—was made president of Guatemala’s ruling military junta. Despite Washington’s professed intention to rebuild Guatemala through comprehensive reforms into a “showcase for democracy”, the US’s ongoing preoccupation with the drive to eliminate communism in the region took precedence [Brockett, Charles D. “An Illusion of Omnipotence: U.S. Policy toward Guatemala, 1954-1960.” Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 44, no. 1, 2002, pp. 91–126. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3177112. Accessed 4 Aug. 2020].
Árbenz’s resignation speech ⍗
Doubling down on communismAmerica’s ‘Liberator’ for Guatemala however took a blanket approach to the communist witch hunt, his repressive crackdown targeted anyone suspected of opposing his increasingly dictatorial regime. Political opponents, labour leaders, remnants of the Árbenzista peasantry, were all rounded up (over 3,000 were arrested by Castillo Armas and an unknown number liquidated). Non-communists were routinely caught up in the purge, including ordinary farm workers from local agrarian committees. Árbenz’s agrarian land reform system was dismantled, the land appropriated from United Fruit Company (UFCo) was returned to it. Resistance to Castillo Armas’s removal of peasants from their lands acquired during the revolution was met with repression by the regime. Castillo Armas also had to deal with insurrections by disaffected left-wing Ladino officers (remnants of the military remaining loyal to Árbenz and Areválo), fighting a guerrilla insurgency from the highlands (Brockett).
Árbenz and his supporters spent 73 days in asylum in the Mexican Embassy before an inglorious exile ⍗
Armas’ presidency, which ended in 1957 when he was assassinated by an Árbenz sympathiser, was a disaster for a recovering Guatemala. The fallout from the Armas regime’s soaring debts and entrenched corruption was that it became almost completely dependent on US aid. The deteriorating situation under Ydígoras (the new president) led him to declare a “state of seize” in 1960, suspending civil liberties and establishing military rule. An attempt by a group of dissident military officers to overturn Ydígoras’ increasingly oppressive government triggered a civil war in Guatemala which lasted 34 years and claimed the lives of approximately 200,000 civilians, including a genocidal “scorched earth” policy conducted against the indigenous Q’eqchi Maya community [‘Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, American Republics, Volume V’, Office of the Historian,www.history.state.gov/]
⍐ the Guatemalan junta post-democracy
“Guatemala as domino” – a blueprint for coups in Latin America and the CaribbeanPost-1954 the US continued to provide Guatemalan security forces with “a steady supply of equipment, training and finance, even as political repression grew ferocious”. The type of practices rehearsed in Guatemala—covert destabilisation operations, death squad killings by professional intelligence agencies—were lessons learnt for dealing with future ‘maverick’ regimes trying to chart a different political and economic path to that acceptable to Washington [Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, (2011)].
The most tragic and wide-reaching legacy of the 1954 Guatemala coup is that it provided a model for future coups and instability in the region set off by a heightened Cold War. The US followed the Guatemala playbook in orchestrating the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by reactionary exiles in 1961 – albeit with a very different outcome. The US’ toppling, with British complicity, of the democratically elected Jagan government in British Guiana in 1964 had familiar reverberations to 1954: Washington’s fear of confronting a communist government in the hemisphere after the Cuban Revolution resulted in “an inflexible and irrational policy of covert subversion towards a moderate PPP government” in British Guiana [Stephen Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story, (2005)]. The CIA and right-wing dissidents within the Brazilian military colluded in a coup which overthrew the liberal government of João Goulart in 1964 (golpe de 64), replacing it with an uncompromising military junta. Washington’s involvement was prompted by Goulart’s plans to nationalise the Brazilian oil industry and other large private businesses. The same techniques and rhetoric were employed in the Dominican Republic coup/counter-coup in 1965. Most notoriously the Guatemalan putsch was to have echoes in the 1973 coup d’état in Chile which violently removed Marxist president, Salvador Allende. This was in response to Allende’s move to nationalise foreign businesses including US-owned copper mines and telecommunications giant I.T.T. US president, Richard Nixon, in fact had already tried to prevent Allende from taking office after the socialist won the Chilean elections fair and square in 1970❅ [‘Chilean president Salvador Allende dies in coup’, History, www.history.com/].
⍐CIA headquarters in Virginia, USA
CIA hit-list for Guatemala
CIA documents declassified in the 1990s reveals lists were compiled as early as 1952 of individuals in the Árbenz government “to (be) eliminated immediately in event of (a) successful anti-Communist coup”. Because the names were deleted during the agency declassification it can’t be verified if any of the assassinations were actually carried through [‘CIA and Assassination: The Guatemala 1954 Documents’, (Edited by Kate Doyle & Peter Kornbluh), The National Security Archive, www.nsarchive2.gwu.edu].
Footnote: the removal of Árbenz from Guatemala didn’t mean the CIA and Washington were done with the deposed president. The CIA continued its campaign to trash the reputation of Árbenz in exile, even though, personally, he was a politically impotent figure by this time. The CIA found it useful to continue to smear Árbenz as a “Soviet agent”, tying him to the ongoing US crusade against communism in the hemisphere✪ [Ferreira, Roberto Garcia. “THE CIA AND JACOBO ARBENZ: HISTORY OF A DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN.” Journal of Third World Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2008, pp. 59–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.og/stable/45194479. Accessed 6 Aug. 2020].
Nixon and Armas ⍗
PostScript: A mea culpa of sortsDecades later the US government through President Clinton issued an apology, not for the 1954 coup, but for the US’ role in the human rights abuses of the civil war in Guatemala, which slaughtered thousands of civilians. It wasn’t until 2011 that the Guatemalan government (under President Colom) apologised for the “historic crime” against Árbenz and his family [‘Apology reignites conversation about ousted Guatemalan leader’, (Mariano Castillo), CNN, 24-Oct-2011, www.edition.cnn.com; ‘Clinton apology to Guatemala’, (Martin Kettle & Jeremy Lennard), The Guardian, 11-Mar-1999, www.theguardian.com].
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❅ US I.T.T. (International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation) entreated the Nixon administration to wage “economic warfare” and take other covert measures against the Allende regime to ensure its ouster from power, ‘Papers Show I.T.T. Urged U.S. to Help Oust Allende’, New York Times, 03-Jul-1972, www.nytimes.com
✪ back in Guatemala, President Armas and the latifundios (rich conservative landowners opposed to the Árbenz agrarian policy) provided a in-synch chorus, echoing the US charges of communist collusion by Árbenz
With the go-ahead from incoming president Eisenhower in March 1953, Allen Dulles and the CIA continued the covert plot to undermine and destabilise the Árbenz government. The highly-orchestrated assault on the Árbenz regime took place on several fronts. Washington blocked a much needed loan from the World Bank to Guatemala and imposed an arms embargo on the country❈. The CIA forged an alliance of neighbouring states which were hostile or potentially hostile to Árbenz. The dictators running Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic and Venezuela didn’t require much persuading. Success by Árbenz in redistributing Guatemalan land could easily inspire the peasantries in their own countries to make similar demands, so the tiranos-caudillos were only too happy to get on-board with the CIA’s mission and pass on valuable intelligence about Guatemala to the US, and in the case of Nicaragua’s Somoza, Dominican Republic’s Trujillo and Venezuela’s Jiménez, help finance and arm the anti-Árbenz rebels.
⬆️Dulles Bros Inc
Within the turbulent atmosphere of Guatemala CIA pursued a strategy of divide-and-rule. The US dangled the carrot of future armaments before the country’s military high command – the arms withheld from them would be made available on the proviso that they were prepared to break with their loyalty to Árbenz. [Bowen, Gordon L. “U.S. Foreign Policy toward Radical Change: Covert Operations in Guatemala, 1950-1954.” Latin American Perspectives 10, no. 1 (1983): 88-102. Accessed July 28, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/2633365].
Peurifoy and anti-communism in one country
At the same time the US State Department also utilised diplomatic channels to lever pressure on the Guatemalan regime. The State Department purposefully chose John Peurifoy as the new ambassador to Nicaragua. Peurifoy came with the right credentials to ‘help’ in Guatemala. As US ambassador to Greece in 1950 he interfered in post-civil war Greece to consolidate an anti-communist climate in the country. As Washington’s man-on-the-ground in Guatemala Peurifoy played a key role in destabilising the Árbenz government. The ambassador approached the task of rooting out communists in Guatemalan politics very zealously, describing a meeting with Àrbenz thus, “I came away definitely convinced that if President is not a communist, he will certainly do until one comes along, and that normal approaches will not work in Guatemala” [‘The Ambassador in Guatemala (Peurifoy) to the Department of State, Office of the Historian, www.history.state.com/]⧆. The CIA’s anti-Árbenz propaganda campaign also secured the assistance of the Catholic Church in Guatemala, whose priests infused their sermons with censure of the government.
Washingtonparachutes ”anti-red troubleshooter” into Guatemala
(New York Times) ⬇️
Self-appointed gatekeeper of the Western Hemisphere
Historians have debated the reasons for Washington’s persistently determined pursuit of the Guatemalan democracy. In the early to mid-Fifties the mania of anti-communism was at its peak in America. Eisenhower had been elected in 1952 pledging to stop the spread of the “communist scourge” both at home and globally⌑. In such a charged climate the US Administration found itself very disposed towards seeing developments in Guatemala under Árbenz as evidence of a Soviet beachhead in the region, as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine◰, and therefore justification for Washington to intervene in Guatemala’s affairs [‘Upholding the Monroe Doctrine: American Foreign Policy in the 1954 Guatemalan Coup d’Etat’, (Nadjalisse C. Reynolds-Lallement), [Dr. Karen E. Hoppes HST 201: US History June 5, 2013], http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/].
A symbiosis of political and economic interests?The consensus among historians is that Cold War politics was the prime mover for the US, and that the economic interests and profitability of United Fruit Company (UFCo) in Guatemala always was secondary in the scheming – although as Gordon has argued, there was a reciprocal relationship between the two at play, the US’ government’s “Cold War and anti-communist hysteria provided public cover for government action on behalf of UFCo, (the company’s) personnel facilitated the CIA’s Cold War task of subverting the Árbenz government” [Gordon, Max. “A Case History of U. S. Subversion: Guatemala, 1954.”Science & Society 35, no. 2 (1971): 129-55. Accessed July 27, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40401561].
Notwithstanding the fact that local communists held some sway over the Guatemalan labour movement, their impact on decision-making within the Árbenz government was at best minimal. Árbenz’ objectives on taking control were not doctrinal but pragmatically liberal ones – political liberalisation, creation of a middle class, modernisation of the country, to free the Guatemalan economy from dependency on world coffee prices and from control by foreign corporations𝄪 (Gordon). Try as they may, US apologists arguing that the intervention was saving the country from communism have failed to make any plausible, even indirect, connexion between the Árbenz government and the Soviet Union✧. Immerman’s view is that the State Department confused communism and nationalism [cited in Bowen)❂.
⬆️ JF Dulles, Time’s “Man of the Year, 1954”
Isolating the Western Hemisphere’s outlier state With former UFCo lawyer John Foster Dulles guiding US foreign policy, the diplomatic isolation of Guatemala was complete when it cajoled the other members of the Organisation of American States (OAS) into accepting its anti-communist resolution in the region at the Caracas meeting early in 1954. The US, with assistance from the UK, also blocked Guatemala’s efforts to secure UN intervention against those seeking to destabilise its democracy.
⬆️ Rebel troops attacking Guatemala City
(Source: www.latinamericanstudies.org)
End-game: The putsch and its denouement
By late 1953 Eisenhower had given the “green light” to the invasion plan that became Operation PBSUCCESS in 1954. The US propaganda campaign intensified a few months later with saturation airdrops of anti-Árbenz leaflets across the country. Concurrently, the US Embassy in Guatemala City employedblocking equipment to jam the government’s official wireless channels and replace it with misinformation discrediting the Árbenz regime (Bowen). The CIA chose a renegade, expat Guatemalan officer on the outer with Árbenz to lead the coup attempt. From Honduras, Colonel Castillo Armas, with a small force of Guatemalan exiles and mercenaries and financed largely by the CIA, invaded the country. At first repulsed by Árbenz’s troops, the rebels fortunes turned around after Peurifoy persuaded JF Dulles to provided them with air cover. US-piloted planes duly strafed Guatemala City and other towns. American intimidation and terror had a telling psychological effect on the population. Guatemalan army commanders, fearful of a full US military intervention, defected from Árbenz, and refused to allow the president to arm the peasant militia to resist the invaders, this prompted a demoralised Árbenz to resign his office in June 1954 and seek asylum in the Mexican Embassy. After some jockeying for power within the country’s military junta Castillo Armas emerged as the new (US recognised) national leader, hurling Guatemala once again into the void of a crippling military dictatorship [RABE, STEPHEN G. “The U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: The Documentary Record.” Diplomatic History 28, no. 5 (2004): 785-90. Accessed July 30, 2020.www.jstor.org/stable/24914824.]
⬇️Mexican artist Diego Rivera’s graphic take on the Guatemalan putsch
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❈ forcing it to seek arms from Czechoslovakia, allowing the US to fling further mud, characterising it as an evidence of Árbenz’s ongoing collusion with communism
⧆ revealingly, the New York Times at the time described Peurifoy as “a man of action rather than a diplomat”, The New York Times, 18-July-1954
⌑as Moye has noted, the Guatemala crisis provided a convenient and fairly easy way for the Eisenhower administration to demonstrate its promised “victory over communism”[MOYE, LAURA. “The United States Intervention in Guatemala.” International Social Science Review 73, no. 1/2 (1998): 44-52. Accessed July 31, 2020.www.jstor.og/stable/23883544/].
◰a foreign policy position of the US, first enunciated in 1823, warning off European powers from interfering with the governance of existing countries on the American continent
𝄪at the time of Guatemala’s to transition to a democratic state, the US accounted for 77% of its exports of 65% of its imports. UFCo functioned in Guatemala (and elsewhere in the region) as a “state within a state”, controlling 42% of the Guatemalan land and benefitting from light tax and import duty burdens [‘Background on the Guatemalan Coup of 1954’, www.umbc.edu/].
✧ Marks offers a contrary view, that the Árbenz government did pose a genuine communist threat, had a tendency towards authoritarianism itself and that the president had lost the confidence of the majority of Guatemalans by 1954 [MARKS, FREDERICK W. “The CIA and Castillo Armas in Guatemala, 1954: New Clues to an Old Puzzle.” Diplomatic History 14, no. 1 (1990): 67-86. Accessed July 30, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/24912032]. Although Rabe et al have countered that Marks’ conclusions rely on early State Department documents that have been discredited
❂ Getchell contends that in fact the USSR were “unwilling to prop up what they considered a bourgeois-democratic revolution” [‘Revisiting the 1954 Coup in Guatemala: The Soviet Union, the United Nations, and “Hemispheric Solidarity”’, (Michelle Denise Getchell), Journal of Cold War Studies, 17(2):73-102. April 2015. DOI: 10.1162/JCWS a 00549]
From the late 19th century to the Second World War Guatemalan politics followed a familiar path to most states in Latin America at the time – dominance by caudillos – military strongmen who were favourably disposed towards foreign investment and economic exploitation, especially from the USA.Under General Jorge Ubico (president 1931-44), this practice intensified with massive concessions given to Guatemala’s biggest foreign investor, the US United Fruit Company (UFCo), and to the country’s wealthy landowning class.
⇑ Belize (to the west of Guatemala) was the colony of British Honduras till 1964
By 1944 the economy in Guatemala was effectively monopolised by a “Big Three” oligopoly of US corporations – UFCo, in commanding control of the banana industry, International Railways of Central America, with its stranglehold (together with UFCo) over the country’s rail and ports facilities, and Electric Bond and Share, which controlled over 80% of Guatemala’s electricity supply. Poverty among the bulk of the rural population was endemic, agricultural workers earned between five and 20 centavos a day. 72% of the country’s land was held by just 2% of the population and there was an over-reliance on food imports because of the under-utilisation of land. Ubico’s oppressive rule was iron-tight and likened by international visitors to a “police state” [Gordon, Max. “A Case History of U. S. Subversion: Guatemala, 1954.” Science & Society, 35, no. 2 (1971): 129-55. Accessed July 27, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40402561].
Guatemala. Izabal. Banana plantation.
(Source: AFAR)
The spring of democracy 1944-1954
In 1944 a coalition of middle class professionals, teachers and junior army officers❈, with the backing of trade unions, forced Ubico’s removal [Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, (2011)]. This “Guatemalan Revolution” paved the way for free elections and an overwhelming victory for liberal professor Juan José Arévalo. The Arévalo government followed a moderate reformist path, establishing civil rights, a social welfare apparatus and achieved considerable success in improving national literacy levels. Arévalo was succeeded in 1951 by another democratically elected government, this time led by former soldier and defence minister Jacobo Árbenz. The progressive Árbenz moved beyond his predecessor in introducing much-needed, comprehensive agrarian reforms, something Arévalo had carefully avoided for fear of antagonising Guatemala’s landed elite and being branded pro-communist [‘Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Guatemala’, Office of the Historian, www.history.state.gov/].
President Árbenz Guzman ⇓(www.wikia.org)
Decreto número 900This put the Árbenz regime on a collision course with UFCo and the US government. The government’s Agrarian Reform Law (Decree 900) allowed for the expropriation of all Guatemalan land more than around 600 acres in size that was not under cultivation (which nonetheless only added up to less than 5% of all private land-holdings). UFCo’s reaction was to complain to Washington that Árbenz’s land reforms threatened its monopolistic position in Guatemala. The Company’s resolve to resist the Guatemalan move was hardened by the government’s offer of about $627,000, a figure derived from UFCo’s own estimate of the land value for tax purposes. The US State Department then demanded compensation from Guatemala of over $15,800,000 for UFCo’s properties in the country [‘Decree 900’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/].
Árbenz’s ‘gift’ to the landless masses
(Source: Life Mag.) ⇓
Upturning democracy: the build-up to the coup
UFCo turned its energies to lobbying Washington to secure its assets and investments in the small Central American country. The US government however had its own (wider) agenda in mind. With America in the grip of the “Second Red Scare” of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, the US chose to see Árbenz’s anti-colonial land reforms (an attempt by the Third World agrarian country to extricate itself from a backward feudal mode of existence) as prefiguring an encroachment of communism onto the Guatemalan political landscape⍟. The US government, operating through the agency of the CIA⚄, initiated a smear campaign against the Árbenz regime, using misinformation and infiltration to try to undermine its legitimacy within the country and the region. By 1952 the decision had been made to intervene in Guatemala. President Truman authorised the CIA to launch Operation PBFORTUNE, with the complicit involvement of Nicaraguan dictator Somoza García (Snr), but when its cover was prematurely blown the operation was quickly aborted. Plans in Washington for the coup d’état were shelved – for the time being, and the CIA and its co-conspirators resumed the covert task of subverting and destabilising the increasingly isolated Guatemalan government.
⇑ Allen Dulles, CIA director
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❈ drawing inspiration from FD Roosevelt’s American “New Deal” and from Mexico’s nationalising Cárdenas regime
⍟ Árbenz has the support of the small Guatemalan Communist Party and some communists filled minor offices in the administration but there were no communist members in the ruling cabinet
⚄ which had connexions with UFCo through those arch-cold warriors, the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen
This week marked the 70th anniversary of the first shots fired in anger of probably the most consequential of the numerous forgotten wars in modern history – the Korean War (25th June 1950).
Prelude to the conflictTensions between the north and south of the Korean Peninsula can be traced back to the 1930s and the Japanese occupation of Korea. Japan’s dominance prompted a resistance movement which included future communist leader and dynasty patriarch of North Korea Kim Il-sung. Some Koreans willingly collaborated with the Japanese invaders including fighting for it against the Korean guerrillas trying to liberate the country (one such agent of the Japanese was a former South Korean president, Park Chung-hee, assassinated in 1979) [‘Collaboration with Japanese hangs over South Korea’, Taipei Times, 08-Mar-2019, www.taipeitimes.com].
(Photo: Bettman Archive/Getty Images)
At the end of WWII, Korea was divided into two zones of military occupation, north (with Kim as leader under the tutelage of the Soviet Union) and south (under US control☼ but eventually with right-wing strongman Syngman Rhee installed as president), with the demarcation line quite arbitrarily defined at the 38th Parallel (38° N) by two American officers . The leaders of both Koreas held ambitions for reunification of the peninsula but with very different kinds of political outcomes in mind. The US’ withdrawal of almost all its military forces from the South in the late 1940s decided Kim on putting the communist reunification plan into action. With USSR and China agreeing to support it, North Korean forces attacked the South in June 1950✧. The ensuing three years saw the opposing forces push each other back and forth along the peninsula (the South’s capital Seoul was captured on four separate occasions) resulting in a stalemate.
⇧ Chinese Volunteer Army crossing the Yalu River (Source: www.goodfreephotos.com)
The Korean War was both a Korean civil war and a proxy superpower war militarily pitting the US v Communist China – as well as an early chapter of Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union and America wrestling for influence over strategically-positioned Korea. The response to North Korea’s invasion was a UN-sanctioned “police action” comprising sixteen nations including Britain and Commonwealth countries but led by the US. After initial defeats and a re-consolidation of its position, the US army drove the North Korean forces back into the northern border with China—at one point the US army captured and held the communists’ capital Pyongyang for eight weeks—this prompted China to enter the conflict with a massive manpower commitment, throwing over 250,000 troops against the Americans and allies and forcing them back deep into South Korea [‘The US Army once ruled Pyongyang and 5 other things you might not know about the Korean War’, (Brad Lendon), CNN, 24-Jun-2020,www.amp.cnn.com].
⇧ MiG-15 fighter: the Korean War saw the first appearance of jet vs jet ‘dogfights’—American F-80s & F-86s fought Russian MiG-15s (manned, first by Russian, and later Chinese and North Korean pilots) with aerial combat taking place in a section of North Korea and the Yalu River that became known as “MiG Alley”
A heavy toll including civilians and MIAs
All together, somewhere between three and four million people died in the conflict. The US army lost nearly 37,000, the South Koreans nearly 138,000. The North Koreans lost up to 400,000 soldiers and the Chinese forces, over 180,000. The MIA tally (missing in action) was very high, over 300,000 from both sides combined. The toll on the civilian population was greatest – the US military unleashed a relentless bombing campaign on North Korea resulting in excess of 280,000 casualties. Virtually all of the modern buildings in North Korea werelevelled by the 635,000 tons of US bombs dropped (Lendon).
⇩ Picasso’s ‘Massacre in Korea’ (1951)
A Cold Warrior blueprint from the PentagonThe US’ involvement in Korea was a key plank in the overall strategy of containing communism in Asia – known in the Pentagon as “Forward Defence”. With the postwar map of Eastern Europe encompassed within the Soviet empire and China under communist rule, Washington saw intervention in the peninsula as fundamental and essential to prevent South Korea from becoming another fallen ‘domino’ to communist infiltration of Eurasia…the same logic that held sway a decade later when America stumbled into an infinitely harder regional conflict to disentangle itself from in Vietnam.
A “limited war”
Mindful of the risk that the Korean War might escalate into a wider Asia conflict or even into “World War III”, US president, Harry S Truman, ordered the US military not to extend it’s aircraft raids into Manchuria and Chinese territory, even though the Chinese were using its north-east provinces to amass its forces to enter the Korean war-zone. This also ruled out using atomic weapons in the conflict, Washington’s reticence to do this was sharpened by awareness of the Soviet Union’s recent demonstration of its own nuclear weapons capability [’Never Truly Forgotten: The Lethal Legacy of the Korean War’, (Rebecca Lissner), War on the Rocks, 25-Jun-2020, www.warontherocks.com].
Korea’s Cold War reverberations for America An armistice in 1953 brought an end to the hostilities on the peninsula but left the issue unresolved. A demilitarised zone (DMZ) was set up between the two Koreas – a ‘contained’ hotspot which threatens periodically to spill over and reignite hostilities. The conflict in Korea prompted a radical transformation in US defence thinking. To secure its regional forward defence perimeters the US in the early Fifties forged defence alliances with the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. And with this came a diverse mushrooming of US overseas military postings and bases in the Asia-Pacific region. Most significantly, the war reversed an earlier contraction of US defence spending, by 1951 it’s spending skyrocketed to $48.2 Bn, setting a pattern for future US military expenditure, including a large standing army in peacetime and an increasingly-funded CIA which expanded its surveillance activities across the globe (Lissner; Cummings).
⇩a US M-24 tank crew, Nakdong River, 1950
Out of sight …
Why was the Korean War consigned to history’s back pages so swiftly? Timing is part of the answer. WWII ended less than five years earlier, it was still fresh in people’s minds and they had had enough of war. The Korean War, when it came, was an unpleasant reminder of that world-shattering, traumatic episode [Eric McGeer, quoted in Toronto Sun, 21-Jun-2020]. Korea was “overshadowed by the global conflagration that preceded it and the nation-rending counter-insurgency campaign in Vietnam that followed it” (Lissner). But the Korean War’s unresolved conclusion has “kept it alive as a major influence on Asian affairs” [Shiela Miyoshi Jager, “5 US Wars Rarely Found in History Books’, ( Jessica Pearce Rotondi), History, 11-May-2020, www.history.com]. Since the ceasefire in 1953 the peninsula has remained a potential world hotspot, a state of tension persisting to the present thanks largely to the periodical bellicose threats of North Korea’s communist dictator Kim Jong-un to use nuclear warfare against South Korea and the US.
End-note:Perpetualstate of war
Though hostilities ceased on July 27, 1953, technically the Korean War has never ended as no peace treaty between the combatants was ever signed.
PostScript: A reprieve for Taiwan 🇹🇼The outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula presaged a change of fate for Taiwan. In 1949, Mao Zedong, having emerged triumphant from the Chinese Civil War against Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT, had amassed a force of troops on the mainland ready to invade and “take back” Taiwan. Korea turned that seeming fait accompli on its head! With fighting starting, Truman, fearful of the war spreading across east Asia, positioned the US 7th Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. Stymied, Peking jettisoned its plans to invade Taiwan and relocated the formation of soldiers to the Korean front (Lendon).
___________________________________________☼ during the three years of direct US military administration of South Korea to 1948, the US injudiciously misread the political situation and employed despised Korean officers of the former Japanese colonial police to impose security – leading to an open revolt in the country (Cumings).✧ although the conventional view is that Pyongyang was the aggressor and initiated the fighting by invading the South, some observers have noted that in earlier encounters on the border in 1949, South Korea arguably initiated the bulk of the fighting (Cumings)
Endnote: Maphilindo, a still-born S.E. Asian association The eruption of the Konfrontasi in 1963 killed a promising regional initiative stone dead. Filipino president, Diosdado Macapagal, convened a summit in Manila that year to propose a non-political confederation of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines called “Maphilindo“…a long-held dream of Filipinos for union of states in the Malay Archipelago (Melaya irredenta – cf Indonesian aspirations)ⓓ. Suharto’s unilateral and uncompromisingly aggressive move squashed any hopes for close fraternal relations and mutually-advantageous cooperation in the region but Maphilindo did signpost the way to ASEAN which became a reality in 1967 [Pauker, G. J. (1964). Indonesia in 1963: The Year of Wasted Opportunities. Asian Survey, 4(2), 687–694. https://doi.org/10.2307/3023576].
⍐ the Guatemalan junta post-democracy 
With the go-ahead from incoming president Eisenhower in March 1953, Allen Dulles and the CIA continued the covert plot to undermine and destabilise the Árbenz government. The highly-orchestrated assault on the Árbenz regime took place on several fronts. Washington blocked a much needed loan from the World Bank to Guatemala and imposed an arms embargo on the country❈. The CIA forged an alliance of neighbouring states which were hostile or potentially hostile to Árbenz. The dictators running Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic and Venezuela didn’t require much persuading. Success by Árbenz in redistributing Guatemalan land could easily inspire the peasantries in their own countries to make similar demands, so the tiranos-caudillos were only too happy to get on-board with the CIA’s mission and pass on valuable intelligence about Guatemala to the US, and in the case of Nicaragua’s Somoza, Dominican Republic’s Trujillo and Venezuela’s Jiménez, help finance and arm the anti-Árbenz rebels.
⬆️ Dulles Bros Inc
⬆️ JF Dulles, Time’s “Man of the Year, 1954”
⇑ Belize (to the west of Guatemala) was the colony of British Honduras till 1964
Guatemala. Izabal. Banana plantation.
