The history uncovered in Caribbean Blood Pacts fits into the latest scholarship that puts the United States into an international context. For decades, examinations of the 1954 coup understandably revolved around the US government’s actions and motives. In contrast, Caribbean Blood Pacts steps back and incorporates the hemispheric dimension. It is only by recovering the contributions of reactionaries, dictators, the British government, and a banana company that we can fully understand the impact and downfall of the Guatemalan Revolution. Numerous forces long tried to end Guatemala’s nascent democracy. Though they launched their own plots, they still solicited the US government’s intervention.

Recovering this international history was only possible thanks to newly available collections, declassified files, and the personal collections shared by descendants of exiles. I started this research by first asking why the region’s dictators backed Operation PBSUCCESS. Beginning with Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, I consulted the latest files at the Archivo General de la Nación in Santo Domingo. There, I found that Trujillo funded a 1947 plot to air-bomb Guatemala City, years before the US government’s covert operations. This discovery led me to refine my investigation. I was no longer identifying how dictators followed the US government’s lead; I was now retracing the contributions of numerous reactionary forces whose efforts preceded Operation PBSUCCESS.

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The biggest surprise was recovering those dictators’ goals. The region’s dictatorships denounced any opposition to their regimes as some communist conspiracy led by the Soviet Union and Mexico. Fortunately, I gained access to the collections of antidictatoral exiles. For example, the Museo Memorial de la Resistencia Dominicana held the writings of exiles who fought Trujillo not as part of some communist design but from a sincerely held belief in democracy. Likewise, the family of Honduran exile Jorge Ribas Montes allowed me to consult his writings. In one letter, Ribas Montes outlined how the fight for democracy in Honduras required fighting for democracy throughout the greater Caribbean. It was this democratic vision that threatened the dictators. Because those exiles found a haven in Guatemala, the dictators came together in order to sabotage the Guatemalan Revolution.

Ongoing thread. More from Aaron Coy Moulton to follow.