The end of the Cold War, the collapse
of the Soviet Union as a global power, the increasing political awareness
of the realities of U.S. global hegemony and the 2003 invasion of Iraq by
the United States and its allies have returned the question of imperialism
to the forefront of international relations debate. Central to this debate
is the dichotomy between Marxist theories of economic imperialism and realist
and liberal conceptions of political imperialism. This study will address
these issues by analysing a case study of the 1954 U.S. intervention in Guatemala, which deposed the constitutional president
of that republic, Jacobo Arbenz. The 1954 overthrow of Jacobo
Arbenz provides the ideal model for a case study
of this nature. If empire is defined as the “political control by a dominant
country of the domestic and foreign policies of weaker countries” then the
United States in the period since World War II has
certainly been an empire builder. Nowhere in the world have U.S. imperial policies thus defined been cruder
than in Latin
America.
Guatemala also provides an inimitable basis for
a study of the dichotomy between economic and political imperialism. On the
one hand, we have the United Fruit Company: a U.S. business interest so massive by Guatemalan
standards that it was able for many years to virtually dictate all aspects
of Guatemalan economic, social and political life. On the other, we have the
rise of a domestic Communist Party, which increasingly came to dominate Guatemalan
domestic politics. Analyses of U.S. motivations for the intervention in Guatemala have diverged sharply between Marxist
and realist scholars, who attribute greater weight to one over the other.
The declassification in 2003 of the entirety of U.S. intelligence documentation leading up
to the intervention affords us the chance to evaluate these contending theories
and finally determine the delineations between the underlying and sufficient
causes for intervention in 1950s Guatemala.