What this paper attempts to do is deconstruct and examine the reasons and motives behind U.S. intervention in Guatemala. The majority of the material used to formulate this analysis was secondary. However, many of the sources used included detai

The efforts of the UFCO and the growing disdain for the "Communist threat in Guatemala" that was emanating from the State Department culminated in June of 1954, when after months of CIA training in Honduras, a group of Guatemalan exiles lead by Castillo Armas crossed into Guatemala and began to advance on the capital. Although the raid was complemented by a series of radio broadcasts by the CIA which announced, "The time has arrived to overthrow Arbenz;" nothing happened. The fact that Guatemalans had no cause to support Arbenz''s upheaval, in addition to the fact that Castillo''s 150 man force was no match for Guatemala''s military, meant that the revolution had little chance of succeeding. As the State Department watched its revolution fail, they called on President Eisenhower to help the revolution succeed, which he managed by ordering the commission of third party aircrafts to strafe Guatemala''s countryside and major cities and scare the public into action. While only dropping dynamite, and no real bombs, Eisenhower''s tactic worked. Soon a scared Arbenz, after a failed attempt at rallying a peasant military, resigned the presidency at which point the U.S. micromanaged the power struggle into the hands of Armas, who assumed the role of dictator and took little time in restoring the property rights of the UFCO and revoking Arbenz''s Agrarian Reform Law. Guatemala had been, in effect, restored to the position it held a decade earlier, where the interests of U.S. business took precedent over the needs of Guatemalan citizens.

The last and probably most important group that the UFCO sought to convince of Guatemala''s Communist intentions was the State Department, where United Fruit was especially gifted with respect to connections. The head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, had been a member of the UFCO''s board of trustees. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and his former law firm, had long represented the UFCO. In the years preceding the U.S. invasion, meetings with United Fruit officials produced comments such as, "......the international communist conspiracy to destroy free governments was prejudicing the independence of Guatemala," despite a deficit of evidence proving that Guatemala''s government had direct ties to Moscow or the international Communist movement. Additionally, Eisenhower''s personal secretary was married to Ed Whitman, the UFCO''s top public relations official and producer of much of the propaganda that the UFCO used to influence the American public. The eventual result of pressures from the UFCO and observations of continued land expropriation was a paradigm of intervention that was embodied in the words of a State Department official at Dartmouth College in 1953, when he stated, "The suppression of communism, even by force, in an American country would not constitute intervention in its internal affairs;" the UFCO had effectively convinced the State Department that training troops to depose a foreign government was not intervention. This attitude was fortified in the form of U.S. foreign policy when in March of 1954, just months before the scheduled invasion of Guatemala, the U.S. proposed a collective security agreement to the countries of Central America that outlined the United States'' right to intervene in any nation that faced domination by the forces of international Communism. The language of the document and the ideology behind it are largely symbolic of the UFCO''s tactics of creating the Communist illusion and the hysteric climate the Cold War had created in the U.S.; attention to detail in determining the link between Moscow and Guatemala was abandoned to a fear of Communism that lead to intervention three months later.

led primary source information that was of great assistance in forming an objective study of Guatemala-U.S. relations. These sources were used to examine the motives of the UFCO and the State Department in their construction of the Communist illusion in Guatemala, and to etc

Some common words found in the essay are:
United Fruit, Cold War, United States'', Central American, Central America, Latin America, Reform Law, Castillo Armas, Company UFCO, President United, united fruit, central america, guatemala''s government, united states'', international communism, intervention guatemala, cold war, united fruit company, foreign policy, communist illusion, fruit company, law forced rental, creating illusion communism, agrarian reform law, international communist movement,
Approximate Word count = 4354
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page double spaced)