“The United States intervened in Guatemala precisely because it was democratic. They wanted to prevent the democratic revolution. We have rich internal records on this. The concern was that the social reforms undertaken by the first democratically elected government in Guatemala—ever—had the overwhelming support of the population, represented the interests and concerns of most of the people of Guatemala, and worst of all, were being looked at by others in the region as a kind of a model that they might want to follow themselves, and therefore it had to be aborted.”
Noam Chomsky, Professor, MIT

In 1951, Jacobo Guzman Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala by a wide margin.

Labelled a "Communist dictatorship"
by the Eisenhower government, in fact Guatemala was asserting economic independence, meaning the idea that the first beneficiaries of a country's economic development should be the people of that country.

Arbenz's programs, among other things, distributed land to half a million landless peasants— what appears in State Department documents labelled as “agrarian reform.”

This simply wouldn't fly with the already deeply established U.S. corporations there, especially United Fruit, which referred to Guatemala as "Banana Land" in a 1950s era promotional film.

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see the full "Journey to Banana Land" clip at archive.org