Sad legacy of 2 U.S.-led coups

Soon after the CIA installed him as president of Guatemala in 1954, Col. Carlos Castillo Armas visited Washington. He was unusually forthright with Vice President Richard M. Nixon. "Tell me what you want me to do," he said, "and I will do it."

What the United States wanted in Guatemala — and in Iran, where the CIA also deposed a government in the early 1950s — was pro-American stability. In the long run, though, neither Castillo Armas nor his Iranian counterpart, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, provided it. Instead, both led their countries away from democracy and toward repression and tragedy.

How did this happen? From the perspective of half a century, what is the legacy of these two coups?

Several dozen scholars, including leading experts on Iran and Guatemala, gathered in Chicago this month to consider those questions. Their conclusions were grim. All agreed that both coups — the first that the CIA carried out — had terrible long-term effects.

"It's quite clear that the 1953 coup cut short a move toward democracy in Iran," said Mark J. Gasiorowski, a historian at Louisiana State University who began studying that coup in the 1980s. "The United States bears responsibility for this."

Iranians wrote a constitution and elected a parliament early in the 20th century. Their progress toward democracy stopped after the Pahlavi dynasty took the throne with British help in the 1920s but resumed after World War II. By the time of the 1953 coup, Iran was more free than at any time before or since.

The verdict on Guatemala was even harsher. Within a few years after the 1954 coup, Guatemala fell into a maelstrom of guerrilla war and state terror in which hundreds of thousands of people died.

"The CIA intervention began a ghastly cycle of violence, assassination and torture in Guatemala," said Stephen G. Rabe, a historian from the University of Texas at Dallas and author of "Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism."

"The Guatemalan intervention of 1954 is the most important event in the history of U.S. relations with Latin America," Rabe said. "It really set the precedent for later interventions in Cuba, British Guiana, Brazil and Chile. The tactics were the same, the mindset was the same, and in many cases the people who directed those covert interventions were the same."

President Harry Truman authorized creation of the CIA in 1947, and during his administration it carried out covert actions. Truman refused, however, to authorize the overthrow of governments. That changed when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953.