Diego Rivera’s famous mural: “Gloriosa Victoria”, depicting the Dulles brothers, the American ambassador Peurifoy, and Eisenhower’s face on a bomb greeting Castillo Armas. The archbishop of Guatemala blesses their unholy coup while the men stand over the corpses of Guatemalan victims.
July 27, 1954
The democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, after receiving 65% of the vote, was overthrown by CIA-paid and -trained mercenaries. There followed a series of military dictatorships that waged a genocidal war against the indigenous Mayan Indians and against political opponents into the ’90s. Nearly 200,000 citizens died over the nearly four decades of civil war. Arbenz Guzmán wrote: “They have used the pretext of anti-communism. The truth is very different. The truth is to be found in the financial interests of the fruit company and the other U.S. monopolies which have invested great amounts of money in Latin America and fear that the example of Guatemala would be followed by other Latin countries.”
