'The 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état (18–27 June 1954) was the CIA covert operation that deposed President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (1950–54), with Operation PBSUCCESS — paramilitary invasion by an anti-Communist “army of liberation”.

In the early 1950s, the politically liberal, elected Árbenz Government had effected the socio-economics of Decree 900 (27 June 1952), the national agrarian-reform expropriation, for peasant use and ownership, of unused prime-farmlands that Guatemalan and multinational corporations had set aside as reserved business assets. The Decree 900 land reform especially threatened the agricultural monopoly of the United Fruit Company (UFC), the American multinational corporation that owned 42 per cent of the arable land of Guatemala; which landholdings either had been bought by, or been ceded to, the UFC by the military dictatorships who preceded the Árbenz Government of Guatemala.

In response to the expropriation of prime-farmland assets, the United Fruit Company asked the US Governments of presidents Harry Truman (1945–53) and Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61) to act diplomatically, economically, and militarily against Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, which, in 1954, resulted in the Guatemalan coup d’état that provoked the thirty-six-year Guatemalan Civil War, from 1960 to and 1996, in which were killed 140,000 to 250,000 Guatemalans.'

Read more: CIA Covert Op: 1954 Guatemalan Coup D’état