Caribbean Blood Pacts: Guatemala and the Cold War Struggle for Freedom

In Caribbean Blood Pacts, Aaron Coy Moulton argues that the CIA’s Operations PBFORTUNE and PBSUCCESS derived from the longstanding efforts of dictators, reactionaries, the United Fruit Company, and British intelligence to silence calls for antifascism and anticolonialism springing from the Guatemalan Revolution. In 1952, a coalition of dictators and reactionaries in the Caribbean Basin convinced the Truman administration to support a conspiracy that became the CIA’s Operation PBFORTUNE, the first US government-backed plot against Guatemala’s government. As Moulton demonstrates, this operation failed because US officials did not understand the network of forces involved.

In 1953, the Eisenhower administration approved Operation PBSUCCESS. This time, the CIA better understood Caribbean dynamics. The resulting destruction of Guatemalan democracy was the product of the US government applying its resources and the efforts of myriad reactionary forces.

Caribbean Blood Pacts shows how the transnational counterrevolution against the Guatemalan Revolution became a lesson for those who spent the next decades fighting the region’s dictatorships in the shadow of the Cold War, from the Cuban Revolution to the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua.

Aaron Coy Moulton is Associate Professor of Latin American History at Stephen F. Austin State University. His research has been published in various outlets including the Journal of Latin American Studies, The Americas, and Cold War History.