1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

Democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz was deposed in Guatemala's 1954 coup, ending the 1944 Revolution. The coup installed Carlos Castillo Armas's dictatorship, the first of U.S.-backed authoritarian rulers, following the CIA's covert Operation PBSuccess; Washington had been alarmed by his land reforms for landless peasants and legalization of the communist Guatemalan Party of Labour.