The oil on linen addresses the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état that the CIA backed to overthrow the democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. In the center stands a dumbfounded US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, striking a deal with Guatemala's newly installed right-wing president, Castillo Armas, their hands shaking slightly left of a missile held by Foster and bearing the face of the US president Dwight D. Eisenhower.[1] Other American officials surround them, including Allen Dulles, CIA director, and John Peurifoy, US ambassador to Guatemala, as the group is wedged between an armed rebellion on the right and the slave labor of banana plantations on the left. These three events that seem to happen impossibly at a single moment, collapsing years of violence and corruption into one massive event. Rivera's explicit mention of the coup and references to prominent political figures prompted backlash to which he responded directly, defending his work as deserved criticism of current events.[2] However, he completed the painting less than a year after the coup, suggesting that the painting's violence depicts destruction Rivera anticipated would come to Guatemala based on broader experience of US-led violence in Latin America. Rivera uses this piece to highlight the effects of Cold War violence on indigenous communities and continue his career's protest of capitalism.

In short, the terror unleashed by the US in Guatemala decades ago and then cultivated and supported by the US for many years thereafter has not abated. It continues to haunt that poor Central American country in terrible ways. And, instead of trying to make amends for its crimes and to undo some of the damage it has wrought, the main obsession of the powers-that-be in the US is to find ways to keep Guatemalan migrants – and migrants from neighboring countries such as Honduras and El Salvador, which also have been terrorized by US counterinsurgency programs – from finding safe haven in the United States.

This is the height of cruelty and immorality. The US cannot wall itself off from the terror it has unleashed on countries like Guatemala. It must take ownership of this terror and provide assistance and comfort to those who suffer from it.

At least 200,000 Guatemalan civilians, mostly Ixil Mayan Indians, were killed in what is now universally recognized as a genocide carried out by the state. As the Center for Justice and Accountability explains, “the Ixil Maya faced extreme torture, mutilation, sexual violence, and violence against their children.” And the military regimes carried out their war against the Guatemalan people with significant US assistance, particularly during the Reagan years of the 1980s.

On this day in 1954, the United States backed a coup against Jacobo Árbenz, the progressive, democratically elected leader of Guatemala, because he sought to restore land to small farmers and Indigenous communities that had been dispossessed by US fruit companies.