Covert Action, Democratic Peace, And The Cold War Mary Lauren ...
COVERT ACTION, DEMOCRATIC PEACE, AND THE COLD WAR
Mary Lauren Lilley
1823 Manor Court
Greenville, NC 27858
(919) 306-0937
marylauren.lilley@gmail.com
Alexander B. Downes
Department of Political Science
Duke University
326 Perkins Library, Box 90204
Durham, NC 27708
(919) 688-2225
downes@duke.edu
Abstract
Recently, critics of the democratic peace (DP) have contended that covert military action by one
democracy against another constitutes an exception the argument that democracies do not fight
one another. Democracies may only rarely settle their differences by resort to open warfare,
according to this view, but in several cases one democratic state has clandestinely engineered the
violent overthrow of the government of another democracy. Proponents of DP have responded
that such covert operations—which we call covert foreign regime change—do not contradict
their arguments for three reasons: (1) the targets of covert intervention were not actually
democratic; (2) because intervention was covert, it in fact offers evidence of institutional
restraints at work because democratic leaders were forced to pursue their interests hidden from
view for fear of public disapproval of overt use of force against another democracy; and (3)
covert interventions fail to cross the threshold of 1,000 battle deaths to qualify as a war. In this
paper, we investigate each of these arguments in the context of three cases of U.S. covert
intervention in the Cold War. Relying primarily on declassified government documents, we trace
the decision-making processes of U.S. elites involved in coups in Guatemala (1954) and Chile
(1973). We find little support for the view that covert action in these cases is consistent with
most theories of DP. U.S. government officials, for example, opined in internal documents that
each of the target regimes was democratically elected. Moreover, fear of domestic disapproval
for taking action against another democracy is not mentioned by key policymakers, but officials
often voiced their concerns regarding the reactions of other states. Finally, despite combat deaths
of less than the requisite 1,000, widespread violence against civilians occurred in the wake of the
intervention in Guatemala and Chile, and repressive dictators were installed in both countries
that set back the cause of democracy in these nations for years. The bulk of the evidence
indicates that covert action in these cases was motivated by preventive logic, to avert the
possibility that presently democratic regimes in Guatemala and Chile might in the future fall to
communist subversion. Covert interventions against other democracies were thus a key strategy
in the U.S. effort to contain the expansion of Soviet power during the Cold War. We explore the
implications of our arguments for the likelihood of U.S. action against popularly elected
governments in the current war on terror.
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INTRODUCTION
“A strong likelihood exists that a secret instrument of power will ultimately corrupt” (Ransom 1992, 127).
Democracies, as is now widely known, rarely if ever go to war with one another. As the
prevalence of democracies in the international system increases, the democratic peace
proposition stipulates that likelihood of war will grow ever smaller until it gradually vanishes
with the disappearance of autocratic regimes. There continues to be a raucous debate over the
sources of democratic peace (DP): one group of scholars champions norms of peaceful conflict
resolution and non-intervention inherent to liberal or democratic states (Doyle 1983, Russett
1993, Dixon 1994, Weart 1998, Fischer 2000), whereas another camp argues for the restraining
effects or incentives created by democratic institutions (Russett 1993, Bueno de Mesquita et al.
1999, Lipson 2003).
Critics have attacked the empirical existence of a democratic peace (Spiro 1994, Oren
1995, Farber and Gowa 1995) as well as the theories adduced to explain it (Layne 1994, Rosato
2003).1 Others have stipulated that once democracies reach a state of maturity they are likely to
remain at peace with one another, but argue that states in transition to democracy are highly
conflict-prone (e.g., Mansfield and Snyder 2005). Reaching a world that is more peaceful in the
long term thus may involve substantial conflict in the short term.
An emerging subject of debate between democratic peace theorists and their critics
concerns the use of covert action by established democracies to overthrow other elected
governments, a phenomenon we label covert foreign regime change. The United States and
Great Britain, for example, engineered the downfall of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadeq in 1953.
1 Few seem to have noticed that the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan was fought when both states were
coded as democratic by the Polity dataset, the standard source for coding regime type in the DP literature.
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The U.S. then helped topple the Guatemalan leader Jacobo Arbenz the following year, and
assisted the Chilean military in deposing the socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973. Rosato
(2003, 590) argues that actions like these by one democracy against another demonstrate that
democracies do not treat each other with trust and respect when their interests clash. Reiter and
Stam (2002, 160) point to this same set of cases as providing ammunition against norms-based
explanations of democratic peace, which predict that “democracies would not use any means,
overt or covert, to subvert or overthrow another democratically elected government.”
Scholars of the democratic peace offer three reasons why covert interventions against
democratic or quasi-democratic governments are consistent with democratic peace. First, they
maintain that the states targeted by democracies for covert intervention were not actually
democratic, and thus the restraints imposed by joint democracy did not operate. Second, DP’s
defenders assert that because intervention was covert, it in fact offers evidence of institutional
restraints at work: democratic leaders were forced to pursue their interests hidden from view for
fear of public disapproval of the overt use of force against another democracy. Third, advocates
of DP argue that covert interventions fail to cross the threshold of 1,000 battle deaths to qualify
as a war, and as a rule do not pit combat forces from the two states against one another.
In this paper, we investigate each of these arguments in the context of two cases of U.S.
covert intervention. Relying primarily on declassified government documents, we trace the
decision-making processes of U.S. elites involved in coups in Guatemala (1954) and Chile
(1973).2 We find little support for the view that covert action in these cases is consistent with
DP. The governmental institutions of these two countries were objectively democratic, for
example, and U.S. government officials repeatedly expressed their belief in internal documents
2 In future work, we plan to add the 1953 CIA-inspired coup in Iran against Premier Mohammed Mossadeq to our
analysis.
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that each of the target regimes was democratically elected. Moreover, fear of domestic
disapproval for taking action against another democracy is nowhere in evidence, but officials
often voiced their concerns regarding the reaction of other states, particularly in Latin America.
Finally, despite combat deaths of less than the requisite 1,000, widespread violence against
civilians occurred in the wake of the interventions in Guatemala and Chile, and repressive
dictators were installed in both countries that set back the cause of democracy in these nations
for years. We conclude from this analysis that covert foreign regime change by democracies
against other democracies is inconsistent with most theories of DP, and that such operations may
provide a loophole whereby democracies can engage in aggression against one another.
Having determined that covert intervention by one democracy against another is largely
inconsistent with DP, we assess the reasons why the U.S. sought to overthrow these regimes. We
argue that although economic motives were strongly present, ultimately regime change in these
cases was a form of preventive action to forestall the possibility that populist, leftist leaders in
Guatemala and Chile would go communist. Whether these were realistic fears is debatable, but
the evidence indicates that the key decision-makers viewed themselves as acting to prevent these
countries from falling into the Soviet camp. This argument has interesting implications for the
common view that democracies do not wage preventive wars (Schweller 1992).
The paper proceeds as follows. First, we define some key terms, including democracy,
democratic peace, and covert action. Second, we summarize the arguments of DP theorists for
why covert action is consistent with the DP, and distill these arguments into testable hypotheses.
Third, we present case studies of covert regime change in Guatemala and Chile using the
process-tracing method to assess the hypotheses regarding what should have happened if the DP
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arguments are right. The final section summarizes our arguments and discusses their
implications.
DEMOCRACY, THEORIES OF DEMOCRATIC PEACE, AND COVERT ACTION
Before proceeding with our argument, several terms require clarification.
DEMOCRACY
Most definitions of democracy converge on several requirements for a regime to be judged
democratic: leaders are chosen through competitive elections, meaning that multiple candidates
or parties participate; some minimum threshold of the population is able to vote; and restraints
on the power of the executive are in place. The widely used Polity index, for example,
establishes three benchmarks to gauge regime type: openness and competitiveness of executive
recruitment, competitiveness and regulation of political participation, and legislative restraints on
the executive. Most definitions given by scholars conform largely to these principles. Russett, for
example, describes democracy as a system of government that “is usually identified with a
voting franchise for a substantial fraction of citizens, a government brought to power in
contested elections, and an executive either popularly elected or responsible to an elected
legislature, often also with requirements for civil liberties such as free speech” (Russett 1993, 14-
15). Similarly, Ray defines democracy “as a form of government in which the identities of the
leaders of the executive branch and the members of the national legislature are determined in
free, competitive elections” in which “at least two different, formally independent political
parties must offer candidates” (Ray 1995, 97). Finally, as Russett notes, “some rather minimal
stability or longevity”—perhaps as short as one year or as many as three—is required for new
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democracies to become solidified. There is some disagreement among scholars regarding
whether civil rights, such as freedom of speech, the press, and religion should be built into the
definition of democracy. Although those who favor a liberal norms-based explanation for
democratic peace (see below) tend to include such rights, most argue that democracy itself is
mainly a set of institutions that regulates political competition. Civil rights tend to accompany
and facilitate the operation of these institutions, but do not define them.
THEORIES OF DEMOCRATIC PEACE
The democratic peace proposition maintains that democracies have never, or rarely, fought each
other. Theories purporting to explain the DP generally fall into two categories depending on
whether they cite institutions or norms characteristic of democracies as explanatory variables.
The first wave of institutional explanations argued that democracies were constrained from
pursuing wars against other democracies by features of democratic government, such as checks
and balances, separation of powers, transparency, and the need to enlist the support of the public.
These institutional facets of democracy make preparing for war a complex, laborious, and time-
consuming process “as the leaders of various institutions are convinced and formal approval is
obtained” (Russett 1993). The mobilization process is not only slow but also very public,
ensuring that other states will not fear a surprise attack by a democracy. Thus, if two
democracies experience a clash of interests, there should be plenty of time to resolve the dispute
via negotiations since neither country can quickly or secretly resort to force.
A second wave of theorizing about the institutional sources of democratic peace de-
emphasizes veto points and slow mobilization in favor of leaders’ accountability to the public. In
democracies, the portion of the citizenry that participates in selecting national leaders in elections
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is typically very large, too large for any leader to reward each individual who votes for him with
money, property, or some other private benefit. Leaders must rely on delivering public policy
successes to keep their supporters happy and prevent them from defecting to an opposition party
or candidate. In non-democracies, by contrast, the absence of elections or legislative processes
means that the number of people whose support is required to keep the leader in power is quite
small, making it possible to buy them off with private goods. Policy success is thus not very
important for autocratic leaders to remain in power. These institutional incentives have
consequences for foreign policy. Losing a war—or fighting a costly, stalemated war—is a public
policy failure that sharply increases leaders’ risk of losing office. To avoid the possibility of this
outcome, democratic leaders exercise extreme caution in the sorts of wars they initiate, choosing
only those conflicts they believe they are likely to win. Moreover, once engaged in a military
conflict, leaders in democracies pour greater resources into the war to ensure that they prevail.
Given that democracies invest large amounts of resources and are highly selective in choosing
their targets, democracies avoid picking fights with other democracies because each knows that
the resulting war is likely to be costly and victory is by no means guaranteed (Bueno de
Mesquita et al. 1999).
Normative models of democratic peace argue that democracies externalize certain
domestic norms in their foreign relations, which leads to peace among democracies but can bring
about conflict between democracies and non-democracies. Scholars have identified two types of
norms that might explain the absence of conflict among democracies. First is the norm of non-
violent conflict resolution, thought to be inherent to the democratic process. It is considered
illegitimate in a democracy, for example, to threaten or use violence against the political
opposition. Instead, conflicts are resolved by negotiation and compromise. Parties agree to leave
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office when defeated in elections provided their opponents do likewise, a facet of democracy
Dixon (1994) calls “contingent consent.” In their dealings with other states, “the culture,
perceptions, and practices that permit compromise and the peaceful resolution of conflicts
without the threat of violence within countries come to apply across national boundaries toward
other democratic countries” (Russett 1993, 33). Given that a democracy can expect the same
diplomatic approach from fellow democracies, it is unlikely that conflicts will escalate to war.
Other scholars, by contrast, maintain that the key norm that keeps the peace among
democracies is the liberal norm of respect for individual autonomy and rights. Liberal institutions
are designed to protect these rights from undue infringement by the state. Just as the basic
postulate of liberal theory domestically is that individuals have the right to be free from arbitrary
authority, the basic postulate of liberal international theory, according to Michael Doyle, is that
states have the right to be free from foreign intervention. “In short, domestically just republics,
which rest on consent, presume foreign republics to be also consensual, just, and therefore
deserving of accommodation” (Doyle 1996, 26). Governments that repress their citizens,
however, are not deserving of trust and respect because they are at war with their own people,
and liberal states may very well find themselves at war with such states.
COVERT INTERVENTION
Finally, covert action is defined by the 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act as “an activity or
activities conducted by an element of the United States Government to influence political,
economic, or military conditions abroad so that the role of the United States Government is not
intended to be apparent or acknowledged publicly.”3 More generally, covert action is “the
attempt by a government to influence events in another state or territory without revealing its
3 Available at http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/congress/1990_cr/900803-ia.htm.
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involvement” (Kim 2002, 63). The Twentieth Century Fund Task Force explained covert
intervention during the Cold War as “plausible deniability,” or “acts from which the chief
officers of government could plausibly dissociate themselves” (Goodman 1992, 3). Covert action
can include a range of activities from “efforts to overthrow certain foreign governments, and to
provide others with economic and military assistance … supporting political parties,
disseminating deceptive propaganda, and organizing strikes, demonstrations, and riots … bribery
or blackmail of foreign officials, to provisions for the physical security of heads of state and
others, and even (until barred by executive order) to assassination plots” (Goodman 1992, 4).
Although, according to Forsythe (1992, 385), “covert interventions, by their very nature, are
difficult to pinpoint in time, place, and detail,” the cases examined in this paper are well-
documented. Large numbers of formerly classified documents have been released confirming
and detailing much of the American role in the ouster of Arbenz and Allende. Several valuable
secondary works have also been written, and thus there is no doubt that these were indeed cases
of U.S. covert action.
This paper focuses on a particular type of covert action: covert attempts by one country to
overthrow the government of another, or what we call covert foreign regime change. These are
cases in which agents of a foreign government—particularly the intelligence services, but also
members of the diplomatic corps, foreign service officers, and the military—work with local
actors in the target state to overthrow the leader and replace him with someone else. The
aggressor rarely employs its own military forces directly against the target, instead inducing
indigenous elements in the targeted state’s military to topple their leader; arming and sponsoring
rebel forces outside the military to launch a rebellion; or hiring mercenaries. The aggressor’s
intelligence assets often invest heavily in producing and spreading anti-regime propaganda in
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order to turn the local population against its leadership, sometimes going so far as to organize
anti-government demonstrations or even riots. The CIA, for example, organized demonstrations
and riots against the government of Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, and set up a phony
radio station in Nicaragua (supposedly located in the Guatemalan jungle) the following year to
warn Guatemalans against the dangers of the Arbenz regime and keep them apprised of rebel
progress and “victories.” Covert foreign regime change is not promulgated by intelligence
agencies run amok, however. In each of these cases, there was a decision at the Presidential level
to depose the targeted regime. In a meeting with top aides on September 15, 1970, for example,
President Nixon directed the CIA “to prevent [Chilean president-elect] Allende from coming to
power or to unseat him.”4 Covert action to topple foreign leaders is thus a policy debated and
decided at the highest levels of government, although it is not shared widely within the
government or with the public. The short-hand terms “covert action” and “covert intervention” in
this paper should be understood to refer to covert foreign regime change.
To some extent, democracy and covert action conflict with each other by definition. The
electoral process of a democracy depends on informed citizens to vote for whom best represents
their interests. Covert action denies citizens and legislators in a democracy the information
needed to assess the effectiveness of their leaders, therefore ultimately damaging the democratic
institution. The ability of democracies to act covertly also violates to a certain extent institutional
constraint arguments that emphasize elections, checks and balances, and separation of powers.
These arguments assume that decisions for war are made openly and the executive must
therefore gain the backing of much of the public. Acknowledging that presidents and prime
4 CIA, Memorandum, “Genesis of Project FUBELT,” September 16, 1970. See also Director of Central Intelligence
(DCI) Richard Helms’s handwritten notes of the President’s directive. Both documents are reproduced in Kornbluh
(2003), which contains many of the declassified documents on Chile referenced in this paper. Other documents
about Chile and Guatemala referenced here are accessible from the National Security Archive’s website
(http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv).
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ministers can act in secret, though, is to admit that democratic institutions simply do not apply in
some undetermined percentage of cases.
The ability to evade checks and balances through covert action also means that
executives are no longer accountable to the voting public or the legislature. “Accountability lies
at the heart of the democratic process. Because covert action is secret, deceptive, and intended as
deniable, it carries an inherent risk: an administration could—without the knowledge of citizens
or even Congress—bypass procedures of accountability in the conduct of foreign policies and
military activities” (Goodman 1992, 10). When acting secretly, furthermore, democratic leaders
need not deliver public goods to benefit the democratic majority, as proposed by Bueno de
Mesquita et al. (1999). The public remains unaware of covert intervention while it is taking
place, so democratic leaders can act without the threat of losing office if their interventions are
unsuccessful. Given this protection from the voting public, democratic leaders can essentially act
in the interest of private actors.
COVERT ACTION: CONSISTENT WITH THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE?
Because democracy and covert action are seemingly inconsistent, and yet there exist cases of
democracies covertly toppling the governments of fellow democracies, it is important to review
the reasons scholars have cited for how to reconcile the two. Arguments for how covert action is
consistent with DP roughly fall into three groups, which imply several hypotheses regarding
democracies’ choice of targets for covert intervention, the decision to undertake intervention
covertly as opposed to openly, and the outcome of covert intervention.
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HYPOTHESES ON DEMOCRACY AND COVERT INTERVENTION
The Nature of the Target. The first argument maintains that covert intervention by one
democracy against other seemingly democratic states in the past does not contradict the DP
because the states targeted by democracies have either been non-democracies, or—at best—
weak, unconsolidated democracies (Forsythe 1992, Kinsella 2005, Doyle 2005). According to
Russett, targets of covert action by democracies have not been “fully democratic according to the
criteria that have been applied here for late twentieth-century regimes; rather, they were all
anocracies” (Russett 1993, 121). Similarly, Doyle (2005, 465) notes that while many of the
regimes targeted for intervention by the U.S. during the Cold War “were more progressive and
popular than any previous regime in those countries (and, in some cases, since),” that fact “did
not make them well-established liberal democracies. Many U.S. officials doubted their stability
as democracies.” For this reason, scholars claim that covert action does not undermine DP,
which does not require democracies to refrain from aggression against non-democratic states.
Based on this argument, we would expect to see democracies respect the autonomy of
other democracies; this means that only non-democracies should be targeted for covert
intervention. Surely the fact that democracies “practice the norm of compromise with each other
that works so well within their own borders” (Owen 1996, 119) implies that resorting to
aggression would not be an option for conflict resolution. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to
expect that democracies would adhere to “the fundamental international legal principles of
political independence and territorial integrity [that] forbid states from operating to overthrow
foreign governments” or “supplying aid to insurgent movements in other states” when that state
is a democracy (Joyner 1992, 233).
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In claiming that covertly targeted states have not been legitimate democracies, however,
we encounter a general problem with DP, that is, the objectivity of judgments of regime type.
According to John Owen (1996), for example, decision-makers will only treat a foreign state as a
democracy if they perceive it to be a democracy. Moreover, as Rosato (2003) shows, leaders’
perceptions sometimes deviate from the “objective” reality, and thus it is important to examine
how key policymakers judged another state’s regime type.5 In the case of covert intervention, we
should observe policymakers clearly articulating the view that the target of intervention is a non-
democracy to reinforce the assertion that “target states were not democratic enough to be trusted
and respected” (Rosato 2003, 591). Evidence that decision-makers believed that the target was a
democracy would undermine the argument that democracies only go after non-democracies.
Hypothesis 1: The targets of covert intervention by democracies are not
democratic.
Hypothesis 2: Democratic policymakers should describe targets of covert
intervention as non-democratic.
The Reason for Acting Covertly. The second argument—known as the “internal
constraint” view—assumes the existence of some interventions by democracies against other
elected governments, and seeks to explain why these interventions take the form that they do.
The internal constraint argument claims that the covert nature of the intervention is proof of DP
because an overt attack on another democracy would provoke a public furor. Democratic leaders
5 Ido Oren questions the objectivity of judgments of democracy, claiming that they are determined by “normative
benchmarks” rather than institutions and that “what is special about the benchmarks represented by the coding rules
of ‘democracy’ is that they are American. They represent ‘our kind’” (Oren 1996, 267). He goes on to argue that
“our kind” also varies over time: the U.S. is constantly redefining itself to remain close to its friends and different
from its enemies. When relations with another country take a turn for the worse, in other words, as they did with
Germany in the years prior to World War I, leaders emphasize the differences rather than the similarities between us
and them, inevitably assigning the new adversary to the non-democratic camp. This argument implies that it is
difficult to determine whether a country targeted for covert intervention is really an autocracy, or has simply been
labeled as such as relations soured.
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are thus acting strategically by going behind the backs of the public to avoid disapproval.
According to Jaechun Kim, for example “the ‘internal constraint’ explanation of covert action
asserts that elites in a democracy may resort to the covert use of force to skirt constraints
imposed by domestic political participants … When the elites are confronted with popular
objections to the overt use of force or anticipate the domestic political repercussions of that
action … they may opt to use covert actions to skirt this domestic opposition” (Kim 2002, 68).
Similarly, Russett (1993, 124) argues that covert action is actually evidence of democratic
processes at work: “The normative restraints of democracy were sufficient to drive the
operations under-ground amid circumstances when the administration otherwise might well have
undertaken an overt intervention.” According to these arguments, the leadership’s need to
undertake intervention covertly validates the normative and institutional constraints posited by
DP theorists. Liberal and democratic norms make it illegitimate to take military action against
another democracy, and the public would likely oppose such a move. The checks and balances of
democratic institutions would also restrict an open attack on a fellow democracy, forcing such
aggression underground. Moreover, an overt attack on a democracy might very well fail, which
would leave the elites who initiated such action vulnerable to electoral defeat.
If this argument is correct, we should observe in the empirical record vigorous debate
regarding the wisdom of undertaking covert regime change, and the primary source of hesitation
should be decision-makers’ fear of an adverse reaction from their domestic population. Leaders
should cite the danger that the public would oppose open aggression against another democracy
as a key reason for seeking to achieve their goals by clandestine means. Moreover, given the risk
of angering the public should it discover the operation, we further expect that the motivations
behind a decision to intervene in another democracy should be to pursue important national
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interests, such as self-defense or promoting democracy, motives with which a democratic public
could sympathize. Importantly, because the voting public in democracies is so large, recent
institutional arguments maintain that democratic elites seek reelection by rewarding their
supporters with public policy success rather than private benefits (Bueno de Mesquita et al.
1999). Interventions undertaken to salvage the investments of private corporations in foreign
countries would be incompatible with this view of democracy.
Hypothesis 3: Democratic leaders target other democracies covertly because they
fear that the public would oppose overt intervention.
Hypothesis 4: Covert intervention by one democracy against another should be in
pursuit of important national interests, not to protect the economic interests of
private actors.
Of course, the decision to use clandestine action may also result from pressures other
than domestic constraints. For example, leaders could decide to act covertly based on
international rather than domestic pressures. Kim explains that “the external constraint
explanation of covert action asserts that the objects of secrecy lie outside the territorial boundary
of the states that initiate action” (Kim 2002, 67). Policymakers may worry about the reaction of
third parties to their actions. Kinzer (2006, 5), for example, argues that the presence of another
superpower in the international system during the Cold War that could respond militarily to its
actions explains Washington’s penchant for acting covertly. Leaders may also fear for their
state’s reputation abroad should they violate norms of non-intervention in general or particular
non-intervention pacts. Internal U.S. government documents reflect policymakers’ concern that
revelations of American involvement in overthrowing elected governments in the Western
hemisphere would harm the U.S. reputation in the wider world as well as in Latin America,
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where Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy and the Rio Pact of 1947 ruled out intervention in
other states’ internal affairs. Acting covertly thus provides democratic leaders with deniability
and the opportunity to preserve their reputations abroad for peaceful and upright behavior (Kim
2002).
Outcomes of Intervention. Finally, a third viewpoint contends that covert intervention is
consistent with DP because even if the targets were democratic, the outcome of the action was
not war as it is commonly defined: “these were not wars, openly fought by military units of the
United States. They were low-cost operations designed to minimize public attention” (Russett
1993, 123). Russett makes it clear that in past covert operations, “American military units did not
fight in an organized fashion” (Russett 1993, 123). The claim here is that regardless of what
policies the U.S. pursued, in the end no large-scale war resulted; soldiers of the democratic state
did not participate in any direct combat on the ground, thereby generating little risk of casualties
for the democracy.
The absence of large-scale war as a result of covert intervention does not necessarily
vindicate DP’s defenders. Most theories of DP, for example, have implications for conflict
resolution processes as well as outcomes. Some theories predict that democracies will be able to
resolve conflicts with other democracies diplomatically via negotiations, concessions, and
accommodation. In fact, Layne—in a critique primarily leveled at norms arguments—contends
that “policymaking elites should refrain from making military threats against other democracies
and should refrain from making preparations to carry out threats” (Layne 1996, 165).
Furthermore, even small-scale aggression among democracies is unacceptable to normative
explanations of the DP in two ways. First, Doyle argues that “the basic postulate of liberal
international theory holds that states have the right to be free from foreign intervention” (Doyle
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1996, 10). Democracies clearly violate this liberal injunction if they pursue covert action,
especially against other democratic states. Second, normative theories of DP rely heavily on
externalization of domestic norms. Russett points out in reference to democracies that “the same
structures and behaviors that ‘we’ assume will limit our aggression, both internally and
externally, may be expected similarly to limit similarly governed people in other polities”
(Russett 1993, 31). Layne likewise explains that “democratic peace theory explicitly holds that it
is the very nature of democratic political systems that accounts for the fact that democracies do
not fight or threaten other democracies” (Layne 1996, 160). Covert action against other
democracies fails to respect their rights to autonomy and also fails to resolve conflicts in a non-
violent manner.
These reservations about the compatibility of covert intervention with predictions of DP
theories about conflict resolution processes aside, however, we can make predictions about
outcomes of covert action other than war/no war. For example, large-scale persecution,
detention, torture, disappearances, or murder of civilians that often followed in the wake of
forced regime change is incompatible with liberal and democratic values (Rummel 1995;
Davenport 1999; Harff 2003; Merom 2003; Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay 2004). We
therefore expect that covert intervention by democracies should not result in widespread violence
against civilians within the target state.
Hypothesis 5: Democratic covert interventions should not be accompanied by
widespread violence, particularly violence against civilians.
Another outcome of covert intervention by democracies concerns the regime type of the
government that results in the target state. Because spreading democracy in the international
system decreases the likelihood of war, one would anticipate that the regimes installed by
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democratic intervention be at a minimum more democratic than their predecessors, if not full-
fledged democracies. Democratic leaders know that establishing autocratic regimes will simply
lead to trouble down the road since such governments are inherently aggressive. States governed
by democratic institutions are peaceful towards other democracies, and thus democratic
interveners should leave new democracies in their wake.
Hypothesis 6: New regimes established in the wake of democratic covert
intervention should at a minimum be more democratic than their predecessors,
and at a maximum be full democracies.
Some institutionalist theories of DP, however, contend that rather than leaving new
democracies in their wake, democratic interveners install autocracies instead. No two states have
exactly the same interests. The difference between democracies and autocracies is that leaders in
the former have no choice but to be responsive to the wishes of their electorates if they hope to
remain in power, whereas autocrats are under no such compulsion and may act as they wish
since their rule does not depend on meeting public demands. In the wake of war or intervention,
the victorious state wants its defeated adversary to follow policies dictated by the intervener
rather than its own preferences. In order to assure that the defeated state follows orders,
democratic victors will place dictators in power who are not bound by the will of their citizens
(Morrow et al., 2006). This logic implies the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 7: New regimes established in the wake of democratic covert
intervention should be less democratic than the previous regime.
What is left unclear by this argument is why democracies would install the type of government
they sometimes fight as opposed to the type with which they remain at peace. It is true that a
pliable dictator would be more likely to implement policies compatible with the intervener’s
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national interests, but it is also more likely that any dispute between the two countries would
escalate to war. A democratic regime might be less likely to do precisely what the intervener
wants, but disputes should not escalate to a level where force is threatened or used. Why a
democracy would create a potential threat to its own security is not readily clear or explained.6
The remainder of the paper is devoted to testing these hypotheses in a series of case
studies of covert foreign regime change in Guatemala and Chile. Each case is broken down into
three parts corresponding to the three major defenses of DP. The evidence by-and-large
contradicts Hypotheses 2, 3, 5, and 6, supports Hypothesis 7, and is mixed for Hypotheses 1 and
4. The governments overturned by the U.S. were perceived by American policymakers as
democratic, there was no concern for domestic restraints when choosing to act covertly, the
coups resulted in major human rights abuses, and the regimes that took power in their aftermath
were dictatorial, not democratic. Only Allende’s regime in Chile judged as objectively
democratic by political science datasets, but there is a fair bit of evidence that Guatemala was
just as democratic as Chile. Finally, in each case the plight of private corporations helped
instigate U.S. involvement, but the main reason articulated by policymakers for intervening was
the threat of communism and Soviet influence in crucial regions. Whether this was in fact a real
danger in retrospect, however, is debatable.
GUATEMALA, 1952-1954: OPERATION PBSUCCESS
In December 1945, Juan José Arévalo was elected President of Guatemala, ending over one
hundred years of dictatorial rule in that country. A year and a half earlier, a popular uprising had
ousted Guatemala’s latest strongman, General Jorge Ubico, and then his handpicked successor
6 The answer could have to do with short- vs. long-term time horizons. Democratic leaders focus on short-term
consequences, since that is what matters for their political survival. The threat created by installing a dictator in
another country may only be realized over the longer term, though, and thus will be someone else’s problem.
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was toppled by a military coup a few months later. The officers who led the “October
Revolution,” however, Captain Jacobo Arbenz and Major Francisco Araña, were determined to
hand the country over to civilian rule. They embraced as their candidate Arévalo, a professor
who had recently returned from exile in Argentina, who was elected with 85 percent of the vote.
According to Schlesinger and Kinzer (1999, 32), Arévalo’s “statements revealed him to be a
modern liberal of socialist bent who believed that government could play a vital role in
improving the lives of people.” Arévalo was “quick to distance himself from radical ideologies,”
particularly communism, which he argued was “contrary to human nature.” Most officials in the
U.S. State Department thought that Arévalo “desired a moderately liberal and constitutionally
stable form of government” that would be compatible with U.S. interests (quoted in Immerman
1982, 86).
The years of Arévalo’s rule were an era of moderate reform. His first major
accomplishment was passing the Social Security Law, the first of its kind in Guatemala. By far
his most important piece of legislation, however, was the Labor Code, which became law on
May 1, 1947. The Labor Code attempted to redress the massive imbalance of power in
Guatemala in favor of employers, mostly large landholders given that agriculture was the main
source of employment for the country’s workers. The Code guaranteed a number of rights to
workers, including the right to unionize and strike, protection against arbitrary termination,
established a 48-hour work week, and set rules to prevent the exploitation of female and
adolescent workers. Guatemala’s largest landowner, the American banana producer United Fruit
Company (UFCO), charged that foreign communist influences were behind the new law, but a
U.S. embassy official in Guatemala replied that the legislation was modeled on a similar (non-
communist) Costa Rican law and downplayed its significance: “The final document cannot be
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considered radical or revolutionary in any sense, except that no coordinated labor legislation
existed in this country previously” (quoted in Gleijeses 1991, 97). Another contemporary
assessment of Arévalo’s reforms stated that they were “not as radical as those of the New Deal in
the U.S. or the Labor Government in Great Britain.”7 Still, the Labor Code convinced many in
the U.S. government that communist influence in Guatemala was growing.
In the next general elections in 1951, Jacobo Arbenz—one of the heroes of the October
Revolution, now resigned from the Army—won an easy victory with 65 percent of the vote.
Arbenz quickly took two steps that raised American suspicions. First, he legalized the
Guatemalan Communist Party (PGT) in December 1952 and made some of the party’s members
his closest advisers. The PGT’s influence countrywide was severely limited, however: in 1954
the party had between 4,000 and 5,000 members in a country of 3 million, the vast majority of
whom knew nothing of Marx or Lenin. The PGT never held a Cabinet post, and had only four
deputies in Congress in 1953-54. Second, Arbenz continued and extended Arévalo’s nascent
attempts at land reform by introducing Decree 900, which was passed by Congress on June 17,
1952. This measure allowed the government to expropriate all uncultivated land on estates larger
than 672 acres, and land on estates between 224 and 672 acres that were less than two-thirds
cultivated. Given the highly skewed distribution of land ownership in Guatemala—in 1945, 72
percent of agricultural land was owned by 2 percent of the landowners—only 1,710 of
Guatemala’s 341,191 private holdings were affected by the law, but those affected lost large
amounts of land. UFCO alone lost 386,901 of its 550,000 acres to expropriation by February
1954 (Schlesinger and Kinzer 1999, 76). The government compensated all those who lost
property with 3 percent bonds maturing in 25 years, but only reimbursed the owners for the value
they had declared on their tax returns. UFCO, like many other large landowners in Guatemala,
7 Samuel Inman, writing in 1951, quoted in Jonas (1991, 25).
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radically undervalued its land so as to avoid paying high taxes, and thus stood to get only about
$1.1 million. Roughly 100,000 Guatemalan families received some of the 1.4 million acres
expropriated by June 1954.
American officials unanimously viewed Decree 900 as further opening Guatemala to
communist influence. In the summer of 1953, the Eisenhower administration decided that
Arbenz had to go, and the President authorized PBSUCCESS, a covert operation by the CIA to
topple the Guatemalan leader. The plan involved two parts. First, the CIA began a massive
propaganda and psychological warfare campaign designed to convince Guatemalans—but
particularly the officer corps—that the U.S., as the new ambassador to Guatemala John Peurifoy
put it, might have to “take some measures to prevent Guatemala from falling into the lap of
international Communism. We cannot permit a Soviet republic to be established between Texas
and the Panama Canal” (quoted in Gleijeses 1991, 257). Second, the CIA armed and trained a
small invasion force under the leadership of former Guatemalan army officer Carlos Castillo
Armas, and provided pivotal air support to the invaders which helped demoralize the
government. Although the invasion itself posed only a small military threat, Arbenz resigned ten
days after it began when he lost the support of the Army leadership, which became convinced
that defeating Castillo Armas would trigger an attack by the U.S. Castillo Armas was eventually
installed in power, and Guatemala’s short experiment with democracy ended.
DEMOCRACY OR NON-DEMOCRACY?
Guatemala’s Institutions. While Guatemala had a long history of dictatorship, the time between
the overthrow of General Ubico in 1944 and the coup against Arbenz ten years later marked
Guatemala’s longest period of democracy and showed promise for continued improvement. The
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Polity IV project ranks Guatemala prior to 1950, during the administration of Arévalo, at a 5 (on
a scale of -10 to +10), a rating which Guatemala did not exceed until the late 1990s. Arévalo was
elected in free and fair elections, although the new Guatemalan constitution fully enfranchised
only literate men and women, who voted by secret ballot. Illiterate men could cast their votes
publicly, but illiterate women could not vote at all (Jonas 1991, 23).8 The 1945 constitution,
however, established a highly democratic set of institutions complete with extensive rights for
citizens. Government was divided into the familiar three branches (executive, legislative, and
judicial); “Individual rights were guaranteed in no less than thirty-four separate articles and the
Jeffersonian principle of popular sovereignty was dominant” (Schlesinger and Kinzer 1999, 33).
Freedom of the press and freedom of speech flourished under Arévalo and Arbenz, even when
opposition publications virulently attacked the regime. As Gleijeses (1991, 215) remarks, “Even
unsympathetic American journalists were struck by the degree of freedom that existed in
Guatemala” under Arbenz.9
Polity’s rating of Guatemala’s regime type drops to 2 (non-democratic) at the end of
Arévalo’s administration, but a close look at the factors that contributed to this decline show that
it stemmed from illegal violent opposition to the regime rather than government repression or
institutional change. Arévalo lacked a coherent political agenda, and Guatemala’s new parties—
which had united around his candidacy—agreed on little else and soon began squabbling among
themselves. Liberals faulted Arévalo for not implementing land reform quickly enough, and
labor unrest—much of it directed against UFCO—proliferated in 1948-49. Meanwhile,
conservatives criticized the President for threatening business interests. Right-wing parties
8 It should be noted that the U.S. receives scores of 8, 9, or 10 on the Polity index during the time when women and
blacks were unable to vote.
9 Civilian control of the military, however, was not firmly established by the constitution, which granted the military
great autonomy (Schirmer 1998, 9-13).
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“resorted to their traditional ploy: they sought a military caudillo who would seize power and
protect them. To this end they plotted, while raising their monotonous and shrill refrain. The
government, they claimed, had fallen into the hands of communists” (Gleijeses 1991, 49).
Arévalo declared a state of emergency in late 1948 when a shipment of arms was discovered at
Puerto Barrios, the end of the rail line in Guatemala owned by UFCO.
The probable cause of the drop in Guatemala’s Polity score, however, is the unsuccessful
coup launched by Major Araña in 1949. Arbenz and Araña were jockeying for position to replace
Arévalo in the next election when Araña gave up on the democratic process and decided to seize
power in a coup. On July 16, 1949, Araña demanded that Arévalo dismiss the Cabinet as well as
Arbenz and his supporters from the Army or else be overthrown. Arévalo alerted Arbenz, and the
Permanent Committee of the Guatemalan Congress voted the next day to dismiss Araña. Arbenz
then sent the police to arrest Araña, who was killed in a shootout while resisting arrest. Araña’s
death triggered an uprising by his followers in the Guardia de Honor, but the rebellion was
quickly defeated by government forces. Castillo Armas, having failed to join Araña’s revolt
despite his sympathy with it, then launched his own uprising five days before the Presidential
election in November 1950. This insurrection was also snuffed out. Castillo Armas was arrested,
but later escaped. The campaign itself, according to one of the defeated candidates, was “‘fair,’
and the elections were free, ‘as free as they could be in Guatemala’” (Marroquin Rojas, quoted in
Gleijeses 1991, 84).
The decline in Guatemala’s democracy score recorded by Polity IV thus does not appear
to have been caused by a change in Guatemala’s institutions nor by undemocratic actions taken
by Arévalo or unfair elections. Rather, conservative forces centered around Araña attempted to
overthrow the government, which led to unrest, instability, and violence that brought into
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question whether Guatemala could survive as a democracy. Nor did Guatemala’s governing
institutions and the extent of its political freedoms regress under Arbenz. As one Guatemalan
political commentator noted in the wake of the January 1953 congressional elections, “Now that
this most recent election is behind us, we can state with confidence that democracy has taken
root” (quoted in Gleijeses 1991, 215). Historians largely endorse this view. According to
Schlesinger and Kinzer (1999, 49), by the time Arbenz took office “democracy had been
introduced, and the country’s political leadership had publicly committed itself to altering
existing economic structures.” In his previously classified history of the Guatemalan coup, CIA
historian Nicholas Cullather notes that “the overthrown Arbenz government was not, many
contend, a Communist regime but a reformist government that offered perhaps the last chance
for progressive, democratic change in the region” (Cullather 2006, 8). Similarly, Gleijeses (1991,
223) argues that while democracy had been on the rise in Latin America when Arévalo came to
power, by March 1952, “Only two democracies remained in the Caribbean: Guatemala and Costa
Rica.”
Additionally, all evidence indicates that far from controlling Guatemala, the communists
lacked a serious following in the country and had no ties to the Soviet Union. It is true that
Arbenz was deeply sympathetic to communist ideals, but he believed that Guatemala first had to
pass through a capitalist phase and that communism could not take root in the country in the near
future. As noted above, the PGT had few members, a tiny representation in Congress, and no
Cabinet posts. There is no indication that Arbenz or the PGT were preparing to subvert the
coming elections. Moreover, an investigation of Guatemalan government documents seized
immediately following the overthrow of Arbenz showed no evidence of PGT ties to foreign
communist parties: “Few of the papers concerned ‘the aspects that we are most interested in,
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namely the elements of Soviet support and control of Communism in Guatemala.’ Nor did the
documents identify individuals vulnerable to exploitation. Ronald M. Schneider, an outside
researcher who later examined the PBHISTORY documents, found no traces of Soviet control
and substantial evidence that Guatemalan Communists acted alone, without support or guidance
from outside the country” (Cullather 2006, 82).
U.S. Perceptions of Guatemala’s Regime Type. More importantly, documents and
correspondence by American policymakers and officials knowledgeable about Guatemala and/or
involved in Operation PBSUCCESS demonstrate that they believed themselves to be toppling a
democratic regime. U.S. officials, for example, never questioned the procedural fairness of
Guatemalan elections. Reports compiled by the U.S. embassy in Guatemala cited by Gleijeses
(1991, 215) “highlighted the lack of violence in the elections that were held under Arbenz; these
reports include no allegations of government pressure on the people or of restrictions on the
opposition’s freedom to campaign in the rural areas.” Nor did the U.S. assert (until after
American actions had forced Arbenz to act) that Arbenz’s regime repressed its political
opponents. Although the Guatemalan opposition cried foul when the government arrested dozens
in 1953, the embassy reported the truth: “Most of the people arrested subsequent to the [Salamá]
uprising were actually involved in the group seeking to overthrow the Government” (quoted in
Gleijeses 1991, 216). A CIA assessment of Arbenz’s political orientation made in October 1952
noted his moderate goals, which seemed extreme only in the context of Guatemala’s acute
backwardness:
Rather than setting up a Communist state, Arbenz desires to establish a ‘modern
democracy’ which would improve the lot of its people through paternalistic social
reforms. Arbenz’ [sic] personal idol is FDR and his reforms are patterned after New Deal
reforms and adjusted to the backward economy and social structure of Guatemala. None
of the reforms is substantially extreme as compared to many of those in the US, Europe,
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and even in other Latin American countries. The extremities are relative and seem radical
in Guatemala only because of the backward feudal situation they are meant to remedy.10
American officials clearly feared the spread of communism in Guatemala, but they seem
to have understood that “the communists were not in control of Guatemala. Neither the CIA nor
embassy officials ever claimed that the Guatemalan army was infiltrated by communists—and
the army, they noted, was Guatemala’s key institution. But they were worried about the future”
(Gleijeses 1991, 365). Indeed, a March 1952 CIA report on the political situation in Guatemala
expressed exactly these sentiments:
In present circumstances the Army is loyal to President Arbenz, although increasingly
disturbed by the growth of Communist influence. If it appeared that the Communists
were about to come to power in Guatemala, the Army would probably prevent that
development. In the longer view, continued Communist influence and action in
Guatemala will gradually reduce the capabilities of the potentially powerful anti-
Communist forces to produce a change. The Communists will also attempt to subvert or
neutralize the Army in order to reduce its capability to prevent them from eventually
taking full control of the Government.11
This trepidation about future trends lends the U.S. intervention in Guatemala a preventive
quality, a recurring theme in America’s Cold War interventions. As in Iran and Chile, it was not
that the Arbenz regime was itself communist, but the growing influence of communists and the
possibility that they would take power eventually drove the U.S. to intervene. As the State
Department’s Bureau of Inter-American Affairs noted in a 1953 memo, “Communist strength
grows, while opposition forces are disintegrating … Ultimate Communist control of the country
and elimination of American economic interests is the logical outcome, and unless the trend is
reversed, is merely a question of time (quoted in Cullather 2006, 35).
10 “Personal Political Orientation of President Arbenz/Possibility of a Left-Wing Coup,” Central Intelligence
Agency Information Report No. 00-B-57327, October 10, 1952. Individual U.S. agents also expressed a belief in
Guatemala’s democratic status. Upon learning of the CIA’s intention to support General Castillo Armas in an
overthrow of Arbenz, for example, CIA agent David Atlee Phillips responded, “but Arbenz became President in a
free election … What right do we have to help someone to topple his government and throw him out of office?”
(Phillips 1977, 34).
11 Central Intelligence Agency, “Present Political Situation in Guatemala and Possible Development During 1952,
NIE-62, March 11, 1952.
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WHY WAS INTERVENTION IN GUATEMALA COVERT?
International, not Domestic, Constraints. If Hypothesis 3 is correct, documentation concerning
U.S. motives for pursuing intervention in Guatemala covertly should reflect anxiety regarding
the public’s disapproval of more overt action against another democracy. American
policymakers, however, appear not to have worried about U.S. domestic opinion in deciding to
act secretly. Repeatedly, these officials focused their attention on the international repercussions
for the U.S. of publicly working to overthrow the Guatemalan government.
The anxiety of American officials regarding international discovery of their efforts
against Guatemala surfaced in the midst of an earlier attempt to bring down the Arbenz regime.
In response to overtures from Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, President Truman
authorized Operation PBFORTUNE in September 1952, in which the CIA provided arms and
support to an invasion by Guatemalan exiles intended to topple Arbenz.12 Secretary of State
Dean Acheson, whose department had not been consulted about the operation, discovered
PBFORTUNE and demanded it be canceled because of the damage that exposure of U.S.
involvement would do to U.S. relations in Latin America. Under President Roosevelt, CIA
historian Nick Cullather writes, “The United States had pledged not to intervene in the domestic
affairs of any American state … The appearance that the United States was supporting the
invasion of an OAS member state in retaliation for expropriating American property would set
US policy back 20 years” (Cullather 2006, 31).
PBFORTUNE was canceled, but anti-Arbenz plotting continued once the new
Eisenhower administration took office in 1953. In late March, Adolph Berle, a former diplomat
and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, passed a 16-page memo to White House
official C.D. Jackson in which he contended: “The United States cannot tolerate a Kremlin-
12 Ironically, Castillo Armas was also the leader of this effort.
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controlled Communist government in this hemisphere.” Berle argued that direct intervention
with U.S. military forces was undesirable “except as an extremely bad last resort, because of the
immense complications which it would raise all over the hemisphere.”13 Although Berle received
no response to his note, it turned out Eisenhower and his top associates were already thinking
along these lines. According to Gleijeses, “President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles wanted to
protect the image of the United States abroad, particularly in Latin America … NSC 144/1 stated
that the United States must ‘avoid the appearance of unilateral action’ in the internal affairs of
the Latin American republics” (Gleijeses 1991, 247).
Once Eisenhower gave the go-ahead for removing Arbenz in August 1953, U.S. officials
were concerned to keep PBSUCCESS quiet for fear of the ramifications its discovery would
have in Latin America. According to a declassified report on the March 1954 Organization of
American States (OAS) conference in Caracas, “many of the Latin American countries are more
afraid of the possibility of American intervention than they are of what they consider the vague
threat of international communism … That is why Mr. [excised] is so concerned about the
possible disastrous effect on our Latin American relations if PBSUCCESS is pinned on the
United States government.”14 Another report from about the same time also expressed concern
for U.S. anonymity: “if it [PBSUCCESS] is the way to handle it are we using all possible means
not attributable to the United States to carry the operation to a successful conclusion. If
attributable to the United States, it should not be done. High level State thinking is that an act
which can be pinned on the United States will set up back in our relations with Latin American
countries by fifty years.”15 Moreover, as President Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs, Henry F.
Holland, then Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs and “a real expert in Latin
13 Adolph Berle, “Memo to Jackson Committee,” March 31, 1953, quoted in Gleijeses (1991, 241).
14 “Report by Mr. [excised] on OAS Conference,” March 29, 1954.
15 “Weekly PBSUCCESS Meeting with [excised],” March 9, 1954, 3.
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American affairs” according to Eisenhower, “made no secret of his conviction that the United
States should keep hands off, insisting that other Latin American republics would, if our action
became known, interpret our shipment of planes as intervention in Guatemala’s internal affairs”
(Eisenhower 1963, 425). Indeed, Holland objected strenuously to any public acknowledgment of
U.S. involvement in coup-plotting in Guatemala because it would contradict his campaign of
diplomatic deception: “I have reiterated … again and again to every Latin American Ambassador
… that the United States is undertaking to solve the problem [of communism in Guatemala]
without unilateral intervention, whether political or economic, in Guatemalan affairs.”16 U.S.
elites were clearly worried that overt intervention in Guatemala ran “the risk of turning all of
Latin America against the United States and patently violating the Good Neighbor policy of
Franklin Roosevelt as well as the OAS and UN charters … (Schlesinger and Kinzer 1999, 111).17
As the coup against him drew nearer, it became increasingly clear to Arbenz that
American public opinion would not restrain the U.S. government and protect his regime. On
January 29, 1954, the Guatemalan government published several documents it had intercepted
detailing Castillo Armas’s plot and the involvement of Somoza and the “Government of the
North.” Rather than investigate the veracity of these allegations, “Every American publication
within the liberal-conservative arc blithely dismissed the charge that the United States was
plotting against Arbenz.” The New York Times haughtily warned the Guatemalans that in “railing
against ‘Yankee Imperialism’ it is fighting a ghost of the dead past, resurrected only in the
imagination of extreme nationalists and Communists.” Senator William Fulbright accused the
16 Holland memo to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, June 15, 1954, quoted in Gleijeses (1991, 247).
17 The U.S. also attempted to obtain external political endorsement for actions against Guatemala. For example, in a
memorandum to the Director of Central Intelligence, a plan for proposed operations against Guatemala stated:
“Real, or when necessary fabricated evidence re. aggression and subversion, will be used at an OAS conference to
obtain approval of the American States for multilateral economic action against Guatemala, particularly with respect
to coffee.” “Guatemala – General Plan of Action,” September 11, 1953. The U.S. also went all-out to obtain a
resolution at the Tenth Inter-American Conference in March 1954 declaring communist control of any state in the
Americas a threat to peace in the region.
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“Communist-dominated Government of Guatemala” of conducting a “vicious propaganda
attack” (Gleijeses 1991, 262). Other members of Congress demanded the removal of the U.S.
military mission in Guatemala, the implementation of economic sanctions, and a coffee boycott.
According to Gleijeses (1991, 266), “the threats and abuse of the United States press and
Congress in response to the plot revelations dashed the hope that American public opinion might
restrain Eisenhower’s hand.” During the coup, Arbenz could only hope that “the formidable
mobilization of the peoples of Latin America and the outcry of the whole world”—not pacific
public opinion in the U.S.—“would stop the United States from intervening in an even more
flagrant manner” (quoted in Gleijeses 1991, 323).18
Private Economic Interests or National Security? Most scholars who have closely
studied why the U.S. sponsored the coup against Arbenz conclude that the most important factor
was communist infiltration in Guatemala and the danger that the Soviet Union would gain a
foothold in the Western hemisphere, thereby undermining U.S. security. The role of private
American economic interests—most importantly the deleterious effect on United Fruit of the
Labor Code under Arévalo and land expropriation under Arbenz—played a relatively minor role.
According to the CIA’s own history of PBSUCCESS, for example, “American commercial
interests, particularly United Fruit, intensified conflict between the United States and the Arbenz
regime … but played only a contributing role in shaping policy. Truman and Eisenhower saw
18 This is not to say that public opinion in general did not matter, only that supposedly pacific American public
opinion did not matter. Policymakers were interested in both Guatemalan and Latin American opinion. Public
attitudes in Guatemala were important because they determined whether the climate was right for a coup to succeed.
CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, for example, the mastermind of Project AJAX—the CIA-engineered overthrow of
Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran—warned that “future coups wouldn’t work unless the people and the army in the
country ‘want what we want’” (Schlesinger and Kinzer 1999, 101). Roosevelt claims in his memoirs that he was
offered command of PBSUCCESS, but declined because he believed the situation was not ripe for a coup, but others
doubt he was ever offered the job (Immerman 1982, 135). Latin American opinion mattered because the U.S.
wanted to avoid the perception that it was acting unilaterally and interfering in the internal affairs of much weaker
states in the region. President Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that in the face of a Communist threat in Guatemala,
“something had to be done quickly. The first task was to marshal and crystallize Latin American public opinion on
the issue” (Eisenhower 1963, 423).
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Guatemala as succumbing to Communist pressures emanating ultimately from Moscow. The
threat to American business was a minor part of the larger danger to the United States’ overall
security” (Cullather 2006, 37). Similarly, Gleijeses (1991, 362) views UFCO’s complaints about
supposed persecution under the Arévalo regime as the factor that initially brought Guatemala to
the attention of the Truman administration, but he argues that economic factors receded in
importance under Arbenz and fear of communism rose to the fore. “After studying the
Guatemalan primary sources and juxtaposing them with U.S. reports, it becomes clearer and
clearer that while the U.S. embassy’s concern with communism under Arevalo owed much to
UFCO’s smoke and mirrors, its concern with communism under Arbenz owed little to the
company.” Gleijeses notes that during the lone meeting between Arbenz and U.S. Ambassador
Peurifoy on December 16, 1953, the subject of their six-hour conversation was communist
influence in the Guatemalan government, not UFCO (Gleijeses 1991, 364). According to
Peurifoy’s summary of the conversation, when Arbenz tried to depict the problem as being
between UFCO and his government, Peurifoy “interrupted the President at this point to tell him
that I thought we should consider first things first and that it seemed to me that as long as the
Communists exercised the influence which they presently do in the Government, I did not see
any real hope of bringing about better relations” (quoted in Schlesinger and Kinzer 1999, 137).
Richard Immerman (1982, 82) concurs with these assessments, arguing that the “United States
did not ultimately intervene in Guatemala to protect United Fruit. It intervened to halt what it
believed to be the spread of the international communist conspiracy.” As Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles put it in a news conference shortly before the coup began, “If the United Fruit
matter were settled, if they gave a gold piece for every banana, the problem would remain just as
it is today as far as the presence of communist infiltration in Guatemala is concerned. That is the
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problem, not United Fruit” (quoted in Immerman 1982, 82). In short, communism, not UFCO
profits, motivated the U.S. to move against Arbenz. As former PGT leader José Manuel Fortuny
put it years later, “They would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas” (quoted in
Gleijeses 1991, 366).
Some scholars, however, attribute a stronger role to private U.S. economic interests,
namely those of the United Fruit Company. Jonas (1991) and Schlesinger and Kinzer (1999), for
example, note the extensive ties between UFCO and the highest levels of the U.S. government.
The company’s pleas for help in Guatemala thus fell on receptive ears. UFCO also hired Edward
Bernays, a public relations expert, to launch a propaganda blitz to burnish the company’s image
and damage Guatemala’s. Bernays enlisted journalists to travel to Guatemala and report on
communist infiltration. These efforts had by early 1954 “created an atmosphere of deep
suspicion and fear in the United States about the nature and intentions of the Guatemalan
government” (Schlesinger and Kinzer 1999, 90). UFCO went further and hired ex-Roosevelt
staffer Thomas Corcoran, former Senator Robert La Follette, and Spruille Braden, a Truman
administration State Department official, to lobby their powerful friends in Washington. As
Schlesinger and Kinzer (1999, 97) summarize, “With intimidating financial resources and
shrewd planning, the United Fruit Company thus deployed a platoon of lobbyists and publicists
at the cost of over a half million dollars a year to convince Americans that something evil was
afoot in Guatemala … This campaign … had a remarkable impact on the U.S. government.”
Jonas, without fully accepting the economic argument, still maintains that “[t]he overthrow of
Arbenz is one of the clearest examples in modern history of U.S. policy being affected by direct
ties of public officials to private interests” (Jonas 1991, 32).19
19 Possible further evidence pointing to the influence of UFCO on U.S. plans for covert intervention is found in the
memoirs of E. Howard Hunt, a former OSS/CIA agent. In 1952, Hunt submitted a report on communist activity in
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This evidence raises the possibility that U.S. assertions about communism and national
security were in fact driven by the economic interests of a private U.S. corporation. Schlesinger
and Kinzer, for example, point out that there was little actual security threat emanating from
Guatemala, and that the PGT had no ties to Moscow. In fact, Schlesinger and Kinzer argue that
the U.S. government essentially acted as “an agent for the private corporation [UFCO]” in its
dispute with the Guatemalan government (1999, 105). To the extent that the U.S. acted to protect
the private economic interests of a few influential constituents, the overthrow of Arbenz would
contradict the electoral accountability argument, which maintains that democracies rely on the
provision of public goods owing to the large size of winning coalitions in democracies.
OUTCOMES
Post-Coup Violence. The ouster of Jacobo Arbenz was accomplished with little bloodshed.
There were few actual battles between the “liberation forces” and the Army before the latter—
convinced that the U.S. would send troops if Castillo Armas failed—betrayed Arbenz; battle
deaths numbered approximately 150. Despite a great deal of planning by the CIA and Castillo
Armas before the invasion for assassinations of communist leaders, few executions are known to
have occurred. CIA officers compiled “hit lists” during Operations PBFORTUNE and
Guatemala that he felt warranted immediate attention. The CIA, however, found his intelligence reports less urgent
and did not act on them (Hunt 1974, 84-85). A year and a half later, Hunt was assigned to PBSUCCESS. Hunt’s first
question was “why it was that after my unproductive presentation to General Smith [then Director of Central
Intelligence] a year and a half before the climate was suddenly right for a political-action effort in Guatemala” (Hunt
1974, 97). Hunt was told that the “difference had to do with domestic politics,” referring to Washington lawyer
Thomas G. Corcoran’s lobbying for UFCO. Hunt explained that following this “special impetus our project had
been approved by the National Security Council and was already under way” (Hunt 1974, 97). Given the CIA’s
indifference to Hunt’s earlier report on Communist activity, he inferred that U.S. interests in Guatemala were
focused on economic issues rather than issues of national security stemming from a Communist threat: covert
intervention was not undertaken until UFCO made its voice heard by the right people. Immerman contests Hunt’s
inference, however, noting that Hunt overlooks other explanations for the delay, including the ascension to power of
an administration that believed in covert action and the successful precedent set by Project AJAX (Immerman 1982,
135).
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PBSUCCESS of individuals to be eliminated in an anti-communist coup.20 None of these plans
were implemented, however, and most Guatemalan leaders—including Arbenz and his top
advisors—were granted safe passage out of the country in a deal with the new regime. In
addition to assembling assassination lists, the CIA employed a variety of scare tactics to
intimidate supposed communist leaders. According to CIA records, its operatives in Guatemala
City dispatched “death notices” to top communist leaders 30 days in a row in April and May of
1953. During PBSUCCESS itself, the CIA sent “new mourning cards to top Communist leaders”
which “mourned the imminent purge or execution of various Communists throughout the world
and hinted of the forthcoming doom of the addressee.” Other agency ploys “included sending
wooden coffins, hangman’s nooses, and phony bombs to selected individuals.”21
After Arbenz fell, Castillo Armas’s administration embarked on an immediate communist
witch hunt in which thousands of people were detained and as many as 1,000 killed (Streeter
2000, 31; Schirmer 1998, 14).22 These mass arrests were “inevitably made without careful
investigation with result that many peasants with no ideas of Communism suddenly found
themselves in jail.”23 Prisons were soon filled beyond capacity, causing “overcrowding,
difficulties in food supply, and the resultant sanitary problems raised the danger of an
epidemic.”24 Of the numerous campesino leaders arrested, it appeared that “few of them were in
any sense indoctrinated Communists” and most were unable to distinguish photos of supposed
communist leaders from Castillo Armas, the new president. When these wrongly-arrested
20 Gerald K. Haines, “CIA and Guatemala Assassination Proposals 1952-1954,” June 1995.
21 “CIA and Guatemala Assassination Proposals,” 5.
22 Arbenz’s regime in its final days cracked down hard on suspected conspirators, arresting several hundred. Some
were tortured, and at least 75 were killed (Gleijeses 1991, 317).
23 “Foreign Service Dispatch,” July 29, 1954.
24 “Foreign Service Dispatch,” July 29, 1954.
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campesinos returned to work, it was “a fairly common practice for those so cleared and released
to be evicted from the farms on which had worked.”25
Although the coup and its immediate aftermath were not accompanied by truly massive
violence, the end of democracy in Guatemala had disastrous long-term human rights effects.
Within a few years, armed resistance to Guatemala’s military-dominated regime began, and the
country began its descent into hell. A succession of U.S.-backed governments assassinated,
murdered, and massacred civilians in the hope of crushing the rebellions. Roughly 200,000
people died in 36 years of war; the military was responsible for over 90 percent of the deaths
(Schlesinger and Kinzer 1999, 265; see also Schirmer 1998, Falla 1994).
One final important point is worth noting. The ouster of Arbenz was relatively bloodless
only because PBSUCCESS was a success. If it had failed, however, odds are that the U.S. would
have intervened in a more forceful manner that might very well have led to war. PBSUCCESS
was a gambit in psychological warfare: there was no way that Castillo Armas’s puny exile force
could defeat the Guatemalan Army. “The purpose of the invasion,” writes Gleijeses (1991, 246),
“was to confront the Guatemalan officers with the stark choice: they could defeat the rebels and
face the wrath of the United States, or they could turn against Arbenz and save themselves.” The
CIA official leading the operation “warned that, as a last resort, the United States might have to
send in the Marines,” but everyone involved hoped it could be avoided. Still, a dozen U.S. Navy
ships, a battalion of Marines, and transport aircraft were placed on alert during the operation
(Schlesinger and Kinzer 1999, 111). The evidence that the Eisenhower administration might
have invaded Guatemala to depose Arbenz if PBSUCCESS failed undermines the contention that
covert interventions are not wars between democracies. They are mechanisms whereby
25 “Foreign Service Dispatch,” Sept. 24, 1954.
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democracies may overturn foreign governments on the cheap, but if they fail, real war may
result.
From Democracy to Dictatorship. Although no large-scale war resulted from covert
action in Guatemala, Guatemala’s Polity IV rating plummeted from a 2 to a -6 following the
overthrow of Arbenz. In public, American officials claimed they were intervening to save
Guatemalan democracy from the danger of communist dictatorship, but this was transparently
false. The U.S. fully expected the democratic Arbenz administration to be replaced by
authoritarian rule. A State Department memo from October 1952 noted that “the Department
must … face up to the probability that an ‘undemocratic’ regime is the only one which in the
near future could hope to succeed the present one. There will be no immediate ‘salvaging of the
original aims of the revolution’” (quoted in Gleijeses 1991, 382). The main qualification that
American policymakers looked for in a successor to Arbenz was fervent anti-communism, not
commitment to democracy. This is the main quality Castillo Armas possessed. The evidence thus
supports the institutional hypothesis that democracies prefer to install dictatorships when they
overthrow foreign governments because autocratic leaders are more pliable and likely to
implement the democratic intervener’s policy preferences.
In sum, Guatemala under Arévalo and Arbenz was quite democratic, and was perceived as such
by U.S. officials, who understood that communists were not yet in control but might take over in
the future. Hypotheses 1 and 2 are thus not supported. Furthermore, there is no evidence that
policymakers decided to act covertly because they feared a domestic backlash. Rather, they
worried that overtly overthrowing an elected regime in Latin America would have tremendous
consequences for the reputation of the U.S. abroad. Hypothesis 3 is thus disconfirmed. The
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weight of the evidence supports Hypothesis 4, that the U.S. was pursuing important national
interests in Guatemala, but if the intervention was not undertaken directly to benefit United Fruit,
it was that company’s plight and lobbying that originally drew U.S. attention to Guatemala.
Concerning Hypothesis 5, although little bloodshed accompanied Castillo Armas’s coup,
thousands were subsequently arrested and detained, and the restoration of military rule opened
the door to the massive repression and violence that followed starting in the 1960s. The evidence
is thus mixed here. Clearly, however, the U.S. cared little about spreading democracy, thus
lending support to Hypothesis 7 and undercutting Hypothesis 6.
CHILE: THE OVERTROW OF SALVADOR ALLENDE
The CIA intervened in Chile in three varying stages of intensity from 1963 to 1973. In the first
stage, the U.S. sought to support Christian Democrat Party candidate Eduardo Frei in the 1964
presidential elections against his socialist adversary, Salvador Allende. Frei won in 1964, but
presidents in Chile are limited to one six-year term, and Allende entered the race again in 1970.
Allende received the largest number of votes in the September election but did not obtain a
majority, which required the Chilean Congress to choose between the top two vote-getters. There
was a strong norm in Chile that Congress should select the winner of the popular vote; however,
the second stage of U.S. intervention used various propaganda and persuasion techniques to try
to delay or block Allende’s formal election by Congress. When the second stage efforts proved
ineffective, the U.S. finally moved to phase three, which was to organize a military coup against
Allende. On September 11, 1973, Allende was overthrown by General Agosto Pinochet. Allende
died in midst of the coup.
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CHILE: DEMOCRACY OR AUTOCRACY?
Perhaps the most popular argument raised in support of covert action’s consistency with DP is
that the countries the U.S. targeted for covert action were not truly democracies. This argument
as applied to Chile, however, is belied by the facts. During the time leading up to the coup on
September 11, 1973, for example, Chile was categorized as a democratic state along numerous
measures. The Polity IV Project ranks Chile as a 6 on its 11-point scale of democratic institutions
from 1965 to the coup in 1973 (Marshall and Jaggers 2005), meaning Chile met the same
democratic requirements under Allende that it did under the administration of Frei, the previous
president favored by the U.S. Chile had a history of more than a century of democratic rule, and
public participation tended to be high because voting was compulsory (turnout in 1964 was 88
percent; Sigmund 1977, 5, 35). According to Paul Sigmund, Chile “had a long history of
democracy and a tradition of social reform going back to the 1920s, when it first adopted social
security programs and a labor code” (Sigmund 1993, 15). Chile, in other words, was a
democracy in objective terms.
The process by which Allende was elected confirms the strength of both democratic
norms and institutions in Chile. As noted above, Allende received only a plurality of the popular
vote (36.6 percent), and thus it fell to Congress to choose among the candidates. In such
circumstances, the Congress always ratified the public’s choice by electing the candidate who
received the largest share of the popular vote. Radomiro Tomic, the candidate of the Christian
Democrats, outgoing President Eduardo Frei’s party, quickly recognized Allende as president-
elect based on his vote share, and the party decided to support Allende’s election in Congress. In
fact, the day after the election, Tomic visited Allende and said “I have come to greet the
President-elect of Chile, my grand old friend, Salvador Allende” (quoted in Sigmund 1977, 110).
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The second-leading vote-getter, former President Jorge Alessandri, planned at first to mount a
challenge to Allende, but changed his mind after the Christian Democrats’ decision to back
Allende, asking his supporters not to vote for him. The Christian Democrats rejected an overture
from Alessandri that would have resulted in new elections (and a probable Christian Democratic
victory) because it would in effect disenfranchise socialist voters. “This would amount to telling
35 percent of the electorate that you may participate in elections, but you cannot win,” remarked
Sen. Benjamin Prado, president of the Christian Democrats. “You can come in second or third,
but not first” (quoted in Sigmund 1977, 118). When Congress met on October 24, 1970, Allende
received 153 votes out of 195 cast (seven were abstentions, 35 were for Alessandri), 74 of which
came from the Christian Democrats.26 The Chilean system thus exemplifies one of the hallmark
norms of democracy, what Dixon (1994) has called “contingent consent,” whereby losing parties
agree to leave office and form a loyal opposition because the winners agree to respect their rights
and vacate office should they be defeated.
In confirmation of Chile’s democratic status, and in contradiction to Hypothesis 2,
several documents circulating within the U.S. government at the time suggest that American
policymakers perceived Chile to be a long-standing democracy. Anticipating a split election (like
that which occurred in 1970) in 1964, J.C. King, chief of the Western Hemisphere Division of
the CIA, sent a memorandum on January 3, 1964, to Director of Central Intelligence John
McCone regarding the possibility of persuading the Chilean Congress to vote for the runner-up
candidate instead of Allende if the latter were to receive the most votes. In this memorandum,
however, King acknowledged that persuading the Chilean Congress would be difficult because
of Chile’s democratic tradition: “… it is unlikely that many parliamentarians will conclude that
their reelection will be best assured by going against the will of the people by flouting Chile’s
26 CIA, Briefing by Richard Helms for the National Security Council, “Chile,” November 6, 1970.
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proud democratic spirit and by assuming the responsibility for the civil unrest that would follow
such a decision.”27 Ironically, Chile’s strong democratic principles stood in the way of the U.S.
attempt to interfere with the electoral process in supposedly non-democratic Chile.
Shortly after Allende’s victory in 1970, President Nixon’s National Security Advisor
Henry Kissinger wrote a memorandum on the Chilean situation to the President on November 5,
1970. In that memo, Kissinger acknowledged Chile’s democratic status: “Allende was elected
legally … He has legitimacy in the eyes of the Chileans and most of the world; there is nothing
we can do to deny him that legitimacy or claim that he does not have it.”28 Even at this high level
of decision-making, key political figures acknowledged that pursuing their plans to intervene
would undermine a legitimate democracy. In the same memorandum, Kissinger went on to
explain to the President the dilemma the U.S. would face by intervening in the Chilean
democratic process:
We are strongly on record in support of self-determination and respect for free election;
you are firmly on record for non-intervention in the internal affairs of this hemisphere
and of accepting nations “as they are.” It would therefore be very costly for us to act in
ways that appear to violate those principles, and Latin Americans and others in the world
will view our policy as a test of the credibility of our rhetoric.29
Later that month, on November 16, the CIA Chilean task force reported on the progress
of their propaganda campaign to promote concern for Chile’s future under Allende’s rule among
the “Chilean political equation,” consisting of former President Frei, the Chilean political elite,
and the Chilean military. In this memo, the task force reported that each of these Chilean
political figures “hastened to rationalize its acceptance of an Allende presidency” because of “the
built-in checks and balances of Chile’s demonstrated reverence for democracy and
27 “Memorandum from the Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division (King) to Director of Central Intelligence
McCone,” January 3, 1964.
28 “Memorandum for the President from Kissinger, Subject: NSC Meeting, November 6 – Chile,” November 5,
1970.
29 Ibid.
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constitutionality, sweetened by Allende’s promise to honor these traditions.”30 Specifically, with
regard to the Chilean military, “anti-Allende currents did exist in the military and the
Carabineros [riflemen], but were immobilized by … the tradition of military respect for the
Constitution” as well as “the public and private stance of General Schneider, Commander in
Chief of the Army, who advocated strict adherence to the Constitution.”31 Once again, the irony
resurfaces of the U.S., the model of democracy, having difficulty persuading political actors in
supposedly non-democratic Chile to undermine the tradition of Chilean democracy.
Based on these documents, there is little doubt that American policymakers perceived
Chile to be a democracy. In fact, there was great concern among Chilean political elites and the
Chilean military about violating long-standing democratic norms. Moreover, widely used
databases in political science code Chile as a democracy. The evidence thus contradicts
Hypotheses 1 and 2 because Chile is considered a democracy by objective sources as well as in
the subjective estimates of U.S. officials. The U.S. intervention in Chile does not qualify as the
U.S. intervening in a non-democracy or quasi-democracy. Based on the conversations taking
place at the highest levels of U.S. government, it is clear that policymakers and intelligence
officials were fully aware that they were handling relations with a fellow democracy in a non-
diplomatic, aggressive manner. This diplomatic approach does little to refute the assertion that
“American leaders have favored democracy only when it has produced governments that support
American policy. Otherwise they have sought to subvert democracy” (Van Evera 1990, 76).
30“Report on CIA Chilean Task Force Activities, 15 September to 3 November 1970,” November 16, 1970.
31 Ibid.
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WHY WAS INTERVENTION IN CHILE COVERT?
International, not Domestic, Constraints. According to Hypothesis 3, intervention against other
democracies is undertaken covertly because policymakers understand that public opinion would
oppose more explicit action. If this proposition were true, we should expect key government
documents to reflect democratic elites’ fear of domestic public disapproval when making their
decisions regarding intervention in Chile. The documents, in fact, show no such thing; instead,
they are filled with discussions of the negative repercussions for the U.S.’s reputation in Latin
America and the wider world of openly working to overthrow the Allende regime.
A memorandum from Kissinger to Nixon in November 1970, for example, references a
variety of concerns motivating the U.S. to act covertly, none of which include the American
domestic population:
What all of this boils down to is a fundamental dilemma and issue … Do we wait and try
to protect our interests in the context of dealing with Allende because … we do not want
to risk turning nationalism against us and damaging our image, credibility, and position
in the world … Do we decide to do something to prevent him from consolidating himself
… AND thereby risk: … damaging our credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world as
interventionist … turning nationalism and latent fear of US domination in the rest of
Latin America into violent and intense opposition to us.32
A memo prepared at about the same time by the State Department’s Bureau of Inter-American
Affairs echoed many of these concerns. Its authors cautioned that if the administration were to
contravene its official policy of “respect for the outcome of democratic elections,” the
consequences could be to
Reduce our credibility throughout the world … increase nationalism directed against us
… be used by the Allende Government to consolidate its position with the Chilean people
and to gain influence in the rest of the hemisphere … and move the Allende Government
to seek even closer relations with the USSR than it might have initially contemplated
(quoted in Kornbluh 2003, 81).
32 “Memorandum for the President from Kissinger, Subject: NSC Meeting, November 6 – Chile,” November 5,
1970.
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Clearly, many officials in the U.S. government understood that moving forcefully against
Chile could backfire, serving “Allende’s purpose of rallying the Chilean people around him in
the face of the ‘foreign devil.’”33 An October 1970 CIA memo entitled “The Coup That Failed”
was dedicated to assessing the possible negative consequences in Chile of an unsuccessful coup
by the leading candidate at that time, retired General Roberto Viaux. The document concluded
that a failed coup would greatly strengthen Allende’s hold on power. Not only would “U.S.
prestige in Chile, Latin America, and the free world … be diminished,” but the “Communist
power-base would increase significantly” as “Allende would attempt to consolidate his position
within the military” and “exploit this situation by pressuring the political opposition … to
support his nationalization program.”34
Moreover, according to a National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM 97) dated
November 3, 1970, the prospects for success of any potential intervention were highly uncertain,
and failure could have negative consequences. “There is almost no way to evaluate the likelihood
that such an attempt would be successful even if it were made. An unsuccessful attempt,
involving as it probably would revelation of U.S. participation, would have grave consequences
for our relations with Chile, in the hemisphere, in the United States and elsewhere in the world”
(quoted in Kornbluh 2003, 9). Although this passage references domestic consequences of failure
and revelation of American involvement, elsewhere NSSM 97 notes that opinion in the U.S. at
the time was more of a spur to intervene than a restraint:
To date, coast to coast editorial comment has generally supported the manner in which
the United States has handled developments in Chile. As the actions of the Allende
government become more overtly hostile to U.S. interests, however, we may expect
adverse reaction to some sectors of the U.S. public, press, and Congress to the
33 Briefing paper for Kissinger, quoted in Kornbluh (2003, 81).
34 CIA, “The Coup That Failed: The Effects on Allende and his Political Posture, With Special Emphasis on his
Stance Before U.S. Positions, Moderate or Tough,” October 15, 1970, reproduced in Kornbluh (2003).
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“establishment of another communist government in the hemisphere,” which consequent
pressures on U.S. policy.35
In deciding whether to pursue intervention against Allende, therefore, it is apparent that
domestic public opinion did not act as a restraint on U.S. decision-makers causing them to use
covert as opposed to overt methods. This evidence does not square with Russett’s explanation
that “the normative restraints of democracy were sufficient to drive the operations underground
amid circumstances when the administration might otherwise have undertaken an overt
intervention” (Russett 1993, 124). In fact, it seems it was not normative pressure at all, but
concern for how the global audience would perceive U.S. intervention in Chile that drove U.S.
intervention underground. On the domestic front, if anything leaders worried that they would
face public pressure to act openly to prevent a communist regime from emerging in the Western
hemisphere. Hypothesis 3 is thus not supported by the evidence.
What Was at Stake? Hypothesis 4 leads us to expect that important national interests like
self-defense or spreading democracy would play prominent roles in the decision-making process
regarding whether to pursue covert intervention. In fact, the documents show what appears to be
a genuine concern for U.S. security in planning actions in Chile. NSSM 97, for example,
discussed the security threat the U.S. perceived from a possible communist takeover in Chile;
officials were concerned that Allende would “bring all significant economic activity under state
operation including nationalization of basic industries … gain control over the security and
armed forces …” and “dominate public information media.” Furthermore, “A Marxist-Allende
government in power would represent a potential danger to Western Hemisphere security, to the
extent that it develops military ties with Communist powers, and is actively hostile to inter-
American security organizations. Full realization of these potentials could threaten U.S. security
35“Options Paper on Chile (NSSM 97),” November 3, 1970.
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interests specifically.”36 Indeed, Kissinger seemed fully convinced that Allende’s ascension to
power spelled impending doom for the U.S. when he told President Nixon in November 1970
that “the election of Allende as President of Chile poses for us one of the most serious challenges
ever faced in this hemisphere … for what happens in Chile over the next six to twelve months
will have ramifications that will go far beyond just US-Chilean relations.”37 These documents
point to a strong preoccupation with the security threat, whether inflated or not, posed to the U.S.
if Allende was to take office.
Objectively, however, the threat to U.S. interests posed by Allende’s rise was negligible.
The authors of NSSM 97, for example, concluded: “The U.S. has no vital national interests
within Chile … The world military balance of power would not be significantly altered by an
Allende government.” Similarly, a memo for Kissinger written by his top aide for Latin America,
Viron Vaky, while pointing out how felling Allende violated American moral values, also
deprecated the stakes involved in Chile: “What we propose is patently a violation of our own
principles and policy tenets. Moralism aside, this has practical operational consequences … If
these principles have any meaning, we normally depart from them only to meet the gravest threat
to us, e.g., to our survival. Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.? It is hard to argue this.”38
The costs to the U.S. were more psychological than material, and officials worried more
about the message that a socialist state in Latin American might send to onlookers than the actual
present security threat posed by Allende’s regime. This concern is reflected in President Nixon’s
remarks in a meeting of the NSC on November 6, 1970. Nixon worried about the effect that the
successful establishment of a leftist regime would have on other states in the region. “If Chile
36“Options Paper on Chile (NSSM 97),” November 3, 1970.
37 “Memorandum for the President from Kissinger, Subject: NSC Meeting, November 6 – Chile,” November 5,
1970.
38 Vaky to Kissinger, NSC Action Memo [Non Log], “Chile—40 Committee Meeting, Monday—September 14,”
September 14, 1970, quoted in Kornbluh (2003, 11).
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moves as we expect and is able to get away with it,” the President remarked, “… it gives courage
to others who are sitting on the fence in Latin America,” important countries like Brazil and
Argentina. “If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and
have it both ways, we will be in trouble … Latin America is not gone, and we want to keep it.”39
Nixon thus subscribed to a version of the domino theory, whereby the fall of one country to
communism in South America would inexorably lead to more, and the U.S. had to head off that
eventuality by preventing the first domino from falling. Again, as in the Guatemalan case, the
preventive motive is present.
Amid these security concerns, however, economic concerns also surfaced as a possible
motivating factor for U.S. covert intervention. The very fear of Allende nationalizing basic
industries could be considered a concern of private U.S. corporations, therefore not reflecting a
democratic regard for national security interests above all. Regarding Chile’s ability to repay
U.S. multinational corporations following nationalization of several industries, NSSM 97 also
mentioned economic doubts: “It is unlikely, however, that it [the Allende government] can
complete its announced program of nationalization with ‘fair compensation’ to U.S. investors.”
Indeed, the assertion has been made elsewhere that “at least some of the impetus for
intervention” in Chile was a response to the fact that “Allende’s efforts to nationalize the copper
industry fueled demands that the Nixon administration destabilize his government” (Rosato
2003, 591).
Protection of U.S. private economic interests, however, was probably not the main reason
that the Nixon administration decided to overthrow Allende. The president, as noted, was much
more fixated on the effect that a communist regime in Latin America would have on other
countries in the region. The evidence indicates that rather than corporate interests driving
39 The White House, Memorandum of Conversation, “NSC Meeting—Chile (NSSM 97),” November 6, 1970.
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administration policy, after Allende’s victory in the popular vote on September 4, 1970,
government officials began to pressure U.S. businesses with interests in Chile to curtail their
operations to cause an economic crisis in the country. The American ambassador to Santiago,
Edward Korry, recommended putting pressure on companies like Ford, Anaconda Copper, and
Bank of America to pull out of Chile, and the State Department met with executives from some
of these companies “to enlist their support” (Kornbluh 2003, 18). Officials from International
Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), one of the largest foreign companies operating in Chile,
volunteered to provide $1 million in a meeting with Kissinger and DCI Richard Helms on
September 11, 1970, “for the purpose of assisting any [U.S.] government plan … to stop
Allende.”40 Once the president had decided that Allende had to go, in other words, ITT offered to
help implement the policy, and policymakers started to lean on other businesses as well. The
main impetus thus seems to have come from the government side rather than the private sector.
OUTCOMES
It is true that no U.S. military forces were used to oust Salvador Allende, and thus the 1973 coup
does not constitute a war between democracies. U.S. government documents, however,
demonstrate that policymakers were aware of the widespread violence and repression that
followed the coup, yet top U.S. leaders quickly recognized Pinochet’s regime, resumed economic
and military aid that had been discontinued under Allende, and provided cover for Pinochet by
downplaying the human rights issue.
The U.S. government began to receive reports early on about the extent of the bloodshed
in the coup and its aftermath. Initial CIA reports in the two weeks after Allende’s overthrow
40 The Report of the Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations, The International Telephone and Telegraph
Company in Chile, 1970-1971, quoted in Kornbluh (2003, 18). Former DCI John McCone happened to be on ITT’s
board of directors.
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estimated deaths variously at 4,000 or between 2,000 and 10,000 (Kornbluh 2003, 153). A
CIA report dated October 27, 1973, stated that “the most accurate number” of civilians killed by
the new regime in its first four weeks in power was “approximately 1,500,” and that a total of
13,500 people had been arrested.41 A memorandum on Chilean executions prepared for Kissinger
a month later included a fact sheet on human rights in Chile that repeated these figures and also
cited higher estimates reported in the press of 2,000 to 3,000. This report also described the state
of violence in Chile at the time:
Our best estimate is that the military and police units in the field are generally complying
with the order to desist from summary executions. At least the rather frequent use of
random violence that marked the operations of these units in the early post-coup days has
clearly abated for the time being … Their code of military justice permits death by firing
squad for a range of offenses, including treason, armed resistance, illegal possession of
arms and auto theft … 42
This human toll did not appear to bother the Secretary of State. At a Secretary’s staff meeting,
for example, Kissinger said “I agree that we should not knock down stories that later prove to be
true, nor should we be in the position of defending what they’re doing in Santiago. But I think
we should understand our policy—that however unpleasant they act, the government is better for
us than Allende was.”43 Not only does this statement testify to the knowledge of the atrocities
taking place in Chile following the coup, it affirms that blatant violations of human rights were
preferable to the socialist threat posed by Allende’s regime. During Pinochet’s 17-year
dictatorship, a total of 3,197 people were killed, died of torture, or disappeared, “with thousands
more subjected to savage abuses such as torture, arbitrary incarceration, forced exile, and other
forms of state-sponsored terror” (Kornbluh 2003, 154). This violence—and knowledge and
acceptance of it at the highest levels of the U.S. government—tends to undermine Hypothesis 5
41 CIA, Intelligence Report [Executions in Chile Since the Coup], October 27, 1973.
42 Department of State, Memorandum for Henry Kissinger, “Chilean Executions” and “Fact Sheet-Human Rights in
Chile,” November 27, 1973.
43 “Secretary’s Staff Meeting, October 1, 1973,” October 4, 1973.
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that covert interventions by democracies should not be the occasion for widespread violence
against civilians.
Furthermore, far from helping Chile to become a stronger democracy, the wide-scale
repression carried about by U.S.-backed Gen. Pinochet in his new role as president did little to
promote the “cultural norms conducive to democracy, such as traditions of tolerance, free
speech, and due process of law” essential for the foundation of democracy (Van Evera 1990, 76).
To express numerically the negative effect installing Pinochet had on democracy, Chile went
from a Polity IV score of 6 during Allende’s administration to -7 under Pinochet. U.S. leaders
knew that Pinochet’s coup would bring an end to Chilean democracy. As the CIA reported on
September 21, 1973, “Severe repression is planned … There is no indication whatever that the
military plans any early relinquishment of full political power in Chile” (quoted in Kornbluh
2003, 154). Yet the Nixon administration rushed to embrace the military junta, writing in a cable
two days after the coup: “The USG wishes to make clear its desire to cooperate with the military
Junta and to assist in any appropriate way.” Almost immediately the U.S. resumed economic and
military aid to Chile that had been interrupted under Allende, extending agricultural credits and
food aid, allowing lucrative loans to pass through international lending institutions, and selling
the military regime $100 million worth of American weaponry. Kissinger’s State Department
then ended all covert financial support to Chile’s political parties, while the CIA helped establish
the Directorate of National Intelligence, the new regime’s secret police. The U.S. also used both
overt and covert means to defend Pinochet against charges of human rights abuses. All of this
evidence supports the view that the U.S. government cared far more about securing a pliable
regime in Santiago than promoting democracy.
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To summarize, Chile during the time of U.S. covert intervention was an established democracy
and was recognized as such by the American officials who directed the coup against the Allende
government. Intervention was covert because these policymakers feared the international
repercussions of overthrowing another democratic regime, not the domestic political backlash in
the U.S. that might ensue. The main factor that motivated the U.S. to move against Allende was
not so much the actual security threat posed by a communist regime in the Western hemisphere,
but rather the fear that further dominoes might fall should the U.S. allow Allende to remain in
power. Finally, there was no concern for democracy promotion in U.S. actions in Chile.
CONCLUSION
A close examination of two cases of covert foreign regime change by the United States offers
little support for arguments proposed by democratic peace scholars suggesting that covert
operations to overthrow the Guatemalan and Chilean governments were consistent with the
democratic peace. In contradiction to Hypotheses 1 and 2, Guatemala and Chile in large part met
the objective institutional requirements for democracy, and American leaders perceived Arbenz
and Allende to be democratically elected. Hypothesis 3 fared very poorly, as we were unable to
find any evidence that policymakers were constrained from taking explicit action against the
Guatemalan or Chilean governments by dovish American public opinion. Instead, officials cited
fears of an international backlash, particularly in Latin America. Hypothesis 4 regarding
intervention being undertaken for reasons of national security was largely supported, although
we were unable to rule out economic motivations completely. These probably played only a
supporting role, however. The Chilean coup was accompanied by substantial human rights
violations which continued for the life of the Pinochet regime, in contrast to Hypothesis 5.
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Operation PBSUCCESS was somewhat less bloody, but helped open the floodgates for massive
violence by U.S.-supported military regimes in later years. On balance, then, the evidence is
mostly inconsistent with Hypothesis 5. Finally, both coups installed dictatorial regimes, lending
support to Hypothesis 7 (and contradicting Hypothesis 6) that democracies care little about
fostering their own regime type when they undertake regime change; what they care most about
is installing pliable governments that will follow the intervening democracy’s national interests.
Our findings are more damaging to normative and first-wave institutional explanations of
democratic peace than later institutional ones. Norms arguments contend that democracies
externalize their internal norms of peaceful conflict resolution and/or respect for individual
autonomy and rights. Especially if leaders in one democracy recognize another country as
democratic, it is hard to reconcile aggressive and violent actions by one against the other with
norms arguments. Furthermore, democracies should not replace the foreign governments they
overthrow with repressive dictators. Nor is knowledge of and acquiescence in large-scale human
rights violations compatible with liberal or democratic norms.
The institutional constraints argument about checks and balances flunks an early test
because covert intervention demonstrates that democratic institutions do not always constrict the
actions of democratic governments. If leaders can simply do an end-run around institutional
limitations whenever they want to act secretly and avoid discovery by the voters or their elected
representatives, then it is hard to argue that checks and balances are very constraining. The
number of covert actions undertaken by the U.S. alone during the Cold War supports this view.
Moreover, the evidence from Guatemala and Chile shows that U.S. leaders were not worried
about the domestic consequences of discovery when choosing to act covertly. Fear that the
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public would disapprove of targeting another democracy, in other words, did not prevent U.S.
elites from taking action nor did it force them to act secretly.
Matters are more complicated with the selectorate model of democratic institutions
(Bueno de Mesquita et al., 1999). On the one hand, the evidence from Guatemala and Chile
surely supports the argument that democracies may actually prefer to install autocrats when they
overthrow foreign governments. The only constraint on choices to use force by democratic
leaders in this model is that the likelihood of prevailing must be high. That would have been true
had the U.S. acted overtly against Arbenz or Allende, whose nations had small militaries that
could have been easily crushed by American military might. But the U.S. did not act overtly; it
chose to overthrow these regimes by covert means, with a much smaller likelihood of success.
Policymakers in neither case were confident their coups would succeed, yet they went ahead
with them anyway. One CIA officer involved in PBSUCCESS, for example, estimated that the
likelihood of the plan working was about 50 percent (Gleijeses 1991, 335). Eisenhower
reportedly approved the plan even though DCI Allen Dulles told him the odds of triumph were
between 40 and 50 percent (Schlesinger and Kinzer 1999, 108). After several of the CIA’s
aircraft were shot down during the operation, Dulles told Eisenhower that if the planes were
replaced the odds of success were about 20 percent; without them, failure was certain. The
president agreed to provide more aircraft (Immerman 1982, 168; Schlesinger and Kinzer 1999,
177; Cullather 2006, 98). Similarly, President Nixon ordered the CIA to attempt to foment a
coup to prevent Allende from assuming office in autumn 1970 despite widespread opinion in the
administration that the odds were heavily against success.44
44 Kissinger’s aide Viron Vaky, for example, wrote to his boss on September 14, 1970, that “We have no capability
to motivate or instigate a coup … any covert effort to stimulate a military takeover is a nonstarter” (quoted in
Kornbluh 2003, 11).
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Proponents of the selectorate model would respond that because covert intervention is
hidden from public view, policymakers need not be highly confident in success to authorize
these actions since they will not affect leaders’ prospects for reelection. While it is true that
acting covertly short-circuits the electoral accountability argument, this is only true if the
operation remains a secret. Given that failed coup attempts against other governments are sure to
be widely publicized by the intended victim, the intervening state must be either very confident
that its involvement will not be discovered if the operation fails, or very confident that the
operation will work. We have just seen that those who implemented the coups against Arbenz
and Allende were far from certain these operations would succeed. Preliminary evidence also
indicates that U.S. officials were skeptical that failed covert operations could be kept secret.
Frank Wisner, the CIA official in charge of PBSUCCESS, doubted that U.S. involvement in
Guatemala would remain hidden: “Several categories of people—hostile, friendly, and
‘neutral’—either know or suspect or believe that the United States is directly behind this one
and, assuming that it proceeds to a conclusion, would be able to tell a very convincing story.”45
The authors of NSSM 97 similarly opined that an “unsuccessful attempt” to topple Allende
would probably reveal American participation (quoted in Kornbluh 2003, 9). This evidence cuts
against the compatibility of covert overthrow with the selectorate model of DP.
Finally, the selectorate model predicts that democratic leaders should seek to deliver
public goods, not act to further the economic interests of private actors. Our evidence shows
clear involvement of private U.S. corporations in drawing attention to “communist infiltration”
in Guatemala and Chile. The bulk of the evidence, though, points to security motives, if not to
the physical security of the United States in the short-term, then concern about the message that
45 “Ways and Means of Improving Cover and Deception for SUCCESS Operation,” April 28, 1954, quoted in
Cullather (2006, 59).
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failing to oppose the spread of communism in the Western hemisphere would send to other
countries in the region, which could threaten U.S. security in the long-term as more countries fell
to communism.
Our findings also have implications for arguments about democracy and preventive war.
To date, the debate about whether democracies refrain from acting preventively has focused on
interstate wars. Schweller (1992), for example, found no instances of democracies launching
preventive wars in the historical record through the 1980s, and argued that attacking a country
now because it might develop into a threat later violated the moral norms in democracies and
could also be tremendously costly if the adversary was relatively powerful. The U.S. attack on
Iraq in 2003 sparked a reevaluation of Schweller’s argument because it appeared to be a
preventive war initiated by a democracy. Silverstone (2004), for example, contends that there is
no universal moral disapproval of preventive war in democracies, and finds that party
identification/political ideology and respondents’ beliefs about Saddam Hussein’s complicity in
the 9/11 terrorist attacks determined support for war against Iraq. Levy and Gochal (2003),
moreover, argue that Israel’s attack on Egypt in 1956 was a preventive war, and explore the
conditions under which a democracy might act preventively. They maintain that democracies are
not constrained from starting such wars when the costs promise to be low. In the case of the
Sinai War, Israel entered into an alliance with two powerful states, Britain and France, and
obtained guarantees that these allies would attack Egypt a few days after Israel did as well as
provide air defenses against Egyptian bombers which might attack Israel.
What is striking about the cases of U.S. covert regime change examined in this paper is
the degree to which policymakers expressed preventive motivations for overthrowing Arbenz
and Allende. On the one hand, U.S. officials understood that communists were not yet dominant
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in these countries, but worried that they would take over in the future. On the other hand, leaders
feared that more and more countries would go communist if the U.S. did not act to stop it. In
other words, the U.S. acted to avert the possibility of communist takeovers in currently
democratic countries and the longer-term possibility that more regimes might go communist and
possibly threaten American security. These cases provide further evidence against the view that
democracies do not act preventively. Moreover, they were undertaken despite low confidence in
success, and if they had failed, more costly U.S. invasions might have resulted.
Although we have criticized the notion that covert foreign regime change is consistent
with theories of democratic peace and argued that cases of democratic covert intervention are
akin to democracies waging preventive wars against other democracies, we are not opposed to
covert action per se. Acting secretly is sometimes necessary for democracies to neutralize threats
and maintain security, but covert interventions are in tension with democracy because they are
concealed from the body politic. The immediate and long-term consequences of covertly
overthrowing foreign governments have also been troubling, involving democratic support for
murderous dictators. For these reasons, democratic elites should think long and hard before
authorizing the use of covert methods, and such operations need to be carefully monitored by
officials outside the executive branch.
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