Modern Era · North America · Politics
1954
CIA overthrows Arbenz in Guatemala
June 27, 1954
Worried about United Fruit's banana plantations and land reform, the CIA helped engineer the overthrow of Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Arbenz. The coup ushered in four decades of military rule and civil war that killed perhaps two hundred thousand. A young Argentine named Che Guevara was in Guatemala City and radicalized.
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