Burning books, part of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, had strong support from local allies. Guatemala, after the fall of Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, points to a common practice in Central America: the violent repression of the free discussion of ideas necessary for democracy.
A recent feature on El Faro English was a translation of a piece by José Cal, first published by El Faro in 2015, which accompanied their chronicle, The Massacre of a Trial for Genocide, in which U.S. intelligence reporting on the Guatemalan military provided key insights at the trial of retired General Benedicto Lucas García. That the violent repression of the free discussion of ideas necessary for democracy continues even in so-called democratic states suggests that this is not a historic anomaly.
Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán resigned as president of Guatemala on June 27, 1954. Operation PBSUCCESS, led by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), achieved its primary objective of overthrowing another inconvenient government prone to communism. Frank Wisner (1910-1965), head of the agency’s new Directorate of Plans — which had scored successes in overthrowing the nationalist regime of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 in Iran, and now that of Árbenz in Guatemala— instructed his collaborators to dismantle the infrastructure of this operation by removing the “surgeons” (agents) and “nurses” (diplomats) who had worked on it months earlier.
However, the agency’s work on behalf of him and his bosses was not over. The political and military Cold War gave way to the cultural Cold War: a war of ideas in which U.S. agents justified their actions on the basis of the threat to the free world posed by the Soviet strategy of penetrating and expanding communism in Latin America. Their approach was that the enormous amount of propaganda, documents, and books that Árbenz’s followers had been unable to destroy had to be recorded and analyzed in order to understand the Guatemalan communists’ relations with Moscow. Beginning on July 4, two CIA agents and two agents from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research collected and recorded the documentation. Almost three weeks later, on July 23, 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sent a telegram to Ambassador John Peurifoy requesting him to urgently select documentation that could be used to reconstruct the pattern of communist influence in Guatemala, and to compile essential biographical intelligence data.
Operation PBHISTORY had begun.
You can read the full article, with photos and links, including to the Spanish original, here, The Books the CIA Burned in Guatemala.
Categories: Corruption, Guatemala, Human Rights, Impunity, Military, Report, Violence
Guatemala Solidarity Network 
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