On this day in 1954, the United States backed a coup against Jacobo Árbenz, the progressive, democratically elected leader of Guatemala, because he sought to restore land to small farmers and Indigenous communities that had been dispossessed by US fruit companies. 
This move ended 10 hopeful years of democracy in Guatemala. The US went on to install and support a series of brutal right-wing dictatorships that ruled for 42 years, and massacred up to 200,000 Indigenous Mayans for resisting land grabs.
US intervention and collusion with right-wing regimes has utterly destabilized Guatemala, and much of the rest of the region. As the Biden administration seeks to discover the "root causes" of migration from central America, they would do well to look in the mirror.
This happened only a year after the US-backed coup in Iran, and was one of many that would be inflicted across the global South over the decades that followed. I summarize this history in The Divide; here is the section that covers Arbenz:
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