The Books the CIA Burned in Guatemala

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.

Anticipating the failure of its own objectives, the agency indicated in its first reports that documents “particularly sensitive” to proving the Guatemalan communists’ relations with Moscow had been destroyed. Despite this “disappointment,” the reports record the compilation of more than 150,000 records without government documentation. A report on this preliminary inventory was presented in Washington on July 20, and a dossier printed by the agency was prepared with information of interest to President Dwight Eisenhower. On August 4, after several meetings, U.S. intelligence structured the new PBHISTORY team with twelve officers: three from the State Department, one from the Information Agency (USIA), and eight from the CIA. Four of them arrived in Guatemala City the following day. A CIA agent with the pseudonym Francis T. Mylkes was put in charge of the operation.

Once in Guatemala, the PBHISTORY team adopted the name Social Research Group. After some disagreements with the government of Carlos Castillo Armas (1914-1957), it began to develop its operations at the headquarters of the National Committee for the Defense Against Communism (CNDC), defined as an executive agency of the new government dedicated to “combating communism in the country.” The members of the PBHISTORY team instructed the members of the CNDC to carry out the work of searching for, classifying, and registering “communist” propaganda, books, and documents, which would later be sent to Washington. The summaries of the declassified documentation note that by Sep. 28, 1954, the PBHISTORY team had collected approximately 500,000 documents, of which 2,095 were photographed, 50,000 microfilmed, and 750 photographs used for propaganda purposes abroad to counter negative opinions about U.S. actions in Guatemala, as statements from British labor and Swedish socialist circles were a cause for concern for U.S. cultural diplomacy.

The CNDC also became the first project to organize the Guatemalan intelligence system under the U.S. intelligence agency’s control, as shown in the report sent by the PBHISTORY team to John Foster Dulles on Feb. 19, 1955. From the arrival of the US agents, it also became an agency for the political persecution of anyone suspected of sympathizing with communism. This persecution was directed not only against activists, but also against university professors and their books, as historian Augusto Cazali Ávila (1929-2008), who witnessed the events, points out: “The burning of books and various publications from the revolutionary period was commonplace in the first months of the Castillo Armas regime, and this was compounded by the purging of libraries, including those of some university faculties.”

El Imparcial, in its evening edition of Dec. 4, 1954, reported on Professor Cazali's remarks in an extensive article entitled: “A purge of books?” The clip discusses the resonance in the newspapers Prensa Libre and Diario de Centroamérica of the activities of the CNDC and the Ministry of Public Education, institutions that formed a commission charged with collecting books from public libraries and other establishments that were considered “dangerous” due to their tendencies and ideology, and should therefore be removed from circulation.

Books such as Ephemeris of Notable Events (1895), a two-decade history of the early 19th century in Central America by Alejandro Marure, or Illustrated Guide to Measuring School Performance (1947), by Hugo Cerezo Dardón, appeared on the commission’s lists. This surprising fact outlines the criteria established by this commission to identify the communist affiliation of works and, at the same time, offers evidence of how intense journalistic debate became one of the first actions to spread the cultural discourse of anti-communism among the middle-class and urban sectors of Guatemala City. According to this article, Diario de Centroamérica, in its Dec. 3, 1954 edition, mentioned that the commission would make a thorough and detailed inventory of the works confiscated for their communist and pro-communist tendencies, keeping one copy of each publication, while the rest would be burned in a public pyre before “all those who wish to attend the burial of communism.”

Although the editors of El Imparcial expressed an unfavorable opinion of these purges and censorship of works of thought, they considered that “such an ungrateful task” should be carried out as soon as possible, suggesting that Marxist scientific works be separated from those that were merely propaganda, which should be destroyed without further ado, but without “making a theatrical display in the public square,” especially in a country with such limited space for culture.

A few years later, the writer and communist leader Huberto Alvarado Arellano pointed out in his book Preocupaciones (1967) that this persecution and censorship constituted one of the most brutal lynchings of culture on the American continent, aimed at preventing the formation of a democratic mentality in Guatemala. Alvarado, another witness to the events, complains in his work that one of the great disadvantages of the CNDC, compared to the Spanish Inquisition, was that its censors had no knowledge whatsoever. Instead of learned friars, those who searched houses for “forbidden books” were veritable gatekeepers who made no distinction and took everything they found.

The seizure and burning of books was no longer the sole task of the government through the CNDC: Many citizens who owned books, faced with a growing atmosphere of suspicion and persecution, took it upon themselves to bury, break, or burn them to avoid problems.

The books The Guatemalan Revolution by Luis Cardoza y Aragón and The Character of the Guatemalan Revolution by Jaime Díaz Rozzotto, published in 1956 and 1958, respectively, had a wide resonance beyond Latin American borders for their criticism of U.S. intervention in Guatemala. The PBHISTORY team immediately made the seized documents available to historian Ronald M. Schneider to write a book, based on his doctoral dissertation, on the presence of communism in Guatemala, as part of the agency’s extensive program of publications to disseminate its view of events.

By 1967, the agency had financed the publication of a thousand books on communist penetration around the world. Its officials were convinced that the publication of books should be part of their efforts to “change attitudes” toward the United States among the middle classes and intellectuals internationally, and so the publication program became part of their covert actions.

Schneider’s book Communism in Guatemala, 1944-1954, published in 1959 in New York, which was also translated into Spanish and published in Buenos Aires the same year with funding from the agency, reached a disconcerting conclusion: The links between Guatemalan communists and Moscow were non-existent. The documentation reviewed was of mostly local significance to Schneider, leading him to conclude that although there were identifiable links between some Guatemalan communists and elements supporting Soviet foreign policy, they acted alone, without any help or support from outside their country.

Although Operation PBHISTORY failed to achieve one of its fundamental objectives, it contributed decisively to the spread of anti-communism in Guatemala, and to the projection of the agency’s editorial policy activities throughout the rest of Latin America. The selection of documents seized in Guatemala in 1954 is held in the U.S. Library of Congress under the name “Guatemalan Documents Collection”, and in the Maryland National Archives in the series “Records Relating to Activities in Guatemala, 1949-1996”. Although these collections have been reviewed by professors Nick Cullather, Aaron Coy Moulton, and journalist Max Holland for studies on the agency’s operations in Guatemala, its content requires new readings such as the one proposed in this work, which aims to characterize the cultural discourse of anti-communism spread by the United States in the country and to consider a critical history of its foreign policy in order to understand how it sought to combat communism in the sphere of ideas.

It was precisely in this sphere that a battle as decisive as the military one was being waged: to defend, from within each political system, one’s own way of life as the best. Evidence shows that the dissemination, implementation, and politicization of anti-communism in a country like Guatemala goes beyond simplistic clichés of “propaganda” and is understood as a sophisticated strategy of “cultural diplomacy.” It is therefore unsurprising that the widespread and derogatory use of the term “communism”, or the adjective “communist”, still present in everyday opinions and in the editorial content of Guatemalan media, is largely the result and reflection of the seizure and destruction of communist literature that marked the beginning of the worst years of civil war.

José Cal is Professor of Guatemalan Historiography at the School of History of the University of San Carlos in Guatemala and Coordinator of the Research Program in the History of Education at the Institute for Educational Research (IIE-USAC). This article is a summary of a paper presented at the 17th Congress of the Association of European Latin Americanist Historians in Berlin.