1954 Guatemalan coup d'état
coup d'état in Guatemala
The democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz was deposed in a coup d'état in 1954, marking the end of the Guatemalan Revolution. The coup installed the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas, the first in a series of U.S.-backed authoritarian rulers in Guatemala. The coup was precipitated by a CIA covert operation code-named PBSuccess.
The Guatemalan Revolution began in 1944, after a popular uprising toppled the military dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. Juan José Arévalo was elected president in Guatemala's first democratic election. He introduced a minimum wage and near-universal suffrage. Arévalo was succeeded in 1951 by Árbenz, who instituted land reforms which granted property to landless peasants. The Guatemalan Revolution was an unwelcome development for the U.S. government, which was predisposed during the Cold War to see it as communist. This perception grew after Árbenz had been elected and formally legalized the communist Guatemalan Party of Labour. The U.S. government feared that Guatemala's example could inspire nationalists wanting social reform throughout Latin America.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q976887. The Library of Congress control number is sh85057646. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 1944 and 1951.
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This entry incorporates text from “1954 Guatemalan coup d'état” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.