Clowns Been around Guatemala there since 1954…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1996/09/25/the-cias-legacy-in-guatemala/
September 25, 1996
A while back, President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board accused the CIA station in Guatemala of paying a number of Guatemalan military officers to be informers, even though they were suspected of involvement in political assassinations, including the deaths of at least one American and a Guatemalan rebel married to a U.S. citizen.
This should not have been a surprise to the Oversight Board. If it had known the full story of the CIA's original bloody intervention in Guatemala in 1954, it might have yanked in that CIA station decades ago. Disclosure of the files on 1954 is long overdue. I've been pushing for it for 19 years.
My original reason for requesting the covert records under the Freedom of Information Act was for background research for a book I was writing, along with Stephen Kinzer, titled "Bitter Fruit," on the CIA coup in Guatemala that ousted a democratically elected government and instituted years of brutal CIA-backed military rule. The CIA operational files, we knew, probably would contain the overall blueprint for the secret strike as well as the CIA stratagems that kept the U.S. press and Congress in the dark about the putsch.
Why was this knowledge of U.S. complicity so significant? Because in establishing beyond any official doubt that the U.S. government had unleashed the CIA to depose a freely chosen regime, we wanted to demonstrate that a crime had been committed surreptitiously against the poorest nation in Latin America simply to protect the corporate interests of an American banana firm that dominated the country, the United Fruit Co. The mistake of President Jacobo Arbenz, a social reformer elected on a New Deal-like platform, was to have had the audacity to seize some untilled holdings of United Fruit, under an agrarian reform bill, for redistribution to impoverished Latinos and Indians who made up almost 85 percent of the Guatemalan population.