Caribbean Blood Pacts
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Aaron Coy Moulton
About this book
In Caribbean Blood Pacts, Aaron Coy Moulton argues that the CIA Operations PBFORTUNE and PBSUCCESS derived from the longstanding efforts of dictators, reactionaries, the United Fruit Company, and British intelligence to silence calls for anti-fascism and anti-colonialism 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 US government resources and the efforts of myriad reactionary forces.
Caribbean Blood Pacts shows how the transnational counter-revolution 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.
Author / Editor information
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.
Reviews
An impressive analysis of the web of transnational collaborations and conspiracies that shaped Caribbean Basin politics in the 1940s–1950s, and a significant contribution to the fields of Latin American history and inter-American relations that convincingly challenges dominant trends in the literature.
Jason Colby, author of Business of Empire:
An original and compelling reinterpretation of a critical period in the history not only of Guatemala but of the entire Caribbean Basin. If the mark of a superb piece of scholarship is that it changes our understanding of a topic, then this book succeeds marvelously.
