title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Described as the definitive deathblow to democracy in Guatemala, the coup was widely criticized internationally, and strengthened the long-lasting anti-U.S. sentiment in Latin America. Attempting to justify the coup, the CIA launched Operation PBHistory, which sought evidence of Soviet influence in Guatemala among documents from the Árbenz era; the effort was a failure. Castillo Armas quickly assumed dictatorial powers, banning opposition parties, imprisoning and torturing political opponents, and reversing the social reforms of the revolution. Nearly four decades of civil war followed, as leftist guerrillas fought the series of U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes whose brutalities include a genocide of the Maya peoples.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: U.S. President James Monroe's foreign policy doctrine of 1823 warned the European powers against further colonization in Latin America. The stated aim of the Monroe Doctrine was to maintain order and stability, and to ensure that U.S. access to resources and markets was not limited. Historian Mark Gilderhus states that the doctrine also contained racially condescending language, which likened Latin American countries to squabbling children. While the U.S. did not initially have the power to enforce the doctrine, over the course of the 19th century many European powers withdrew from Latin America, allowing the U.S. to expand its sphere of influence throughout the region. In 1895, President Grover Cleveland laid out a more militant version of the doctrine, stating that the U.S. was "practically sovereign" on the continent.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Following the Spanish–American War in 1898, this aggressive interpretation was used to create a U.S. economic empire across the Caribbean, such as with the 1903 treaty with Cuba that was heavily tilted in the U.S.' favor. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt believed that the U.S. should be the main beneficiary of production in Central America. The U.S. enforced this hegemony with armed interventions in Nicaragua (1912–33), and Haiti (1915–34). The U.S. did not need to use its military might in Guatemala, where a series of dictators were willing to accommodate the economic interests of the U.S. in return for its support for their regimes. Guatemala was among the Central American countries of the period known as a banana republic. From 1890 to 1920, control of Guatemala's resources and its economy shifted away from Britain and Germany to the U.S., which became Guatemala's dominant trade partner. The Monroe Doctrine continued to be seen as relevant to Guatemala, and was used to justify the coup in 1954.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Following a surge in global coffee demand in the late 19th century, the Guatemalan government made several concessions to plantation owners. It passed legislation that dispossessed the communal landholdings of the indigenous population and allowed coffee growers to purchase it. Manuel Estrada Cabrera, President of Guatemala from 1898 to 1920, was one of several rulers who made large concessions to foreign companies, including the United Fruit Company (UFC). Formed in 1899 by the merger of two large U.S. corporations, the new entity owned large tracts of land across Central America, and in Guatemala controlled the railroads, the docks, and the communication systems. By 1900 it had become the largest exporter of bananas in the world, and had a monopoly over the Guatemalan banana trade. Journalist and writer William Blum describes UFC's role in Guatemala as a "state within a state". The U.S. government was also closely involved with the Guatemalan state under Cabrera, frequently dictating financial policies and ensuring that American companies were granted several exclusive rights. When Cabrera was overthrown in 1920, the U.S. sent an armed force to make certain that the new president remained friendly to it.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Fearing a popular revolt following the unrest created by the Great Depression, wealthy Guatemalan landowners lent their support to Jorge Ubico, who won an uncontested election in 1931. Ubico's regime became one of the most repressive in the region. He abolished debt peonage, replacing it with a vagrancy law which stipulated that all landless men of working age needed to perform a minimum of 100 days of forced labor annually. He authorized landowners to take any actions they wished against their workers, including executions. Ubico was an admirer of European fascist leaders such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, but had to ally with the U.S. for geopolitical reasons, and received substantial support from this country throughout his reign. A staunch anti-communist, Ubico reacted to several peasant rebellions with incarcerations and massacres.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: By 1930 the UFC had built an operating capital of 215 million U.S. dollars, and had been the largest landowner and employer in Guatemala for several years. Ubico granted it a new contract, which was immensely favorable to the company. This included of public land, an exemption from all taxes, and a guarantee that no other company would receive any competing contract. Ubico requested the UFC to cap the daily salary of its workers at 50 U.S. cents, so that workers in other companies would be less able to demand higher wages.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The repressive policies of the Ubico government resulted in a popular uprising led by university students and middle-class citizens in 1944. Ubico fled, handing over power to a three-person junta which continued Ubico's policies until it too was toppled, by the October Revolution that aimed to transform Guatemala into a liberal democracy. The largely free election that followed installed a philosophically conservative university professor, Juan José Arévalo, as the President of Guatemala. Arévalo's administration drafted a more liberal labor code, built health centers, and increased funding to education. Arévalo enacted a minimum wage, and created state-run farms to employ landless laborers. He also cracked down on the communist Guatemalan Party of Labour ("Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo", PGT) and in 1945 criminalized all labor unions in workplaces with fewer than 500 workers. By 1947, the remaining unions had grown strong enough to pressure him into drafting a new labor code, which made workplace discrimination illegal and created health and safety standards. However, Arévalo refused to advocate land reform of any kind, and stopped short of drastically changing labor relations in the countryside.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Despite Arévalo's anti-communism, the U.S. was suspicious of him, and worried that he was under Soviet influence. The communist movement did grow stronger during Arévalo's presidency, partly because he released its imprisoned leaders, and also through the strength of its teachers' union. Another cause for U.S. worry was Arévalo's support of the Caribbean Legion. The Legion was a group of progressive exiles and revolutionaries, whose members included Fidel Castro, that aimed to overthrow U.S.-backed dictatorships across Central America. The government also faced opposition from within the country; Arévalo survived at least 25 coup attempts during his presidency. A notable example was an attempt in 1949 led by Francisco Arana, which was foiled in an armed shootout between Arana's supporters and a force led by Arévalo's defense minister Jacobo Árbenz. Arana was among those killed, but details of the coup attempt were never made public. Other sources of opposition to Arévalo's government were the right-wing politicians and conservatives within the military who had grown powerful during Ubico's dictatorship, as well as the clergy of the Catholic Church.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The largely free elections of 1950 were won by the popular Árbenz, and represented the first transfer of power between democratically elected leaders in Guatemala. Árbenz had personal ties to some members of the communist PGT, which was legalized during his government, and a couple of members played a role in drafting the new president's policies. Nonetheless, Árbenz did not try to turn Guatemala into a communist state, instead choosing a moderate capitalist approach. The PGT too committed itself to working within the existing legal framework to achieve its immediate objectives of emancipating peasants from feudalism and improving workers' rights. The most prominent component of Árbenz's policy was his agrarian reform bill. Árbenz drafted the bill himself, having sought advice from economists across Latin America. The focus of the law was on transferring uncultivated land from large landowners to poor laborers, who would then be able to begin viable farms of their own.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The official title of the agrarian reform bill was Decree 900. It expropriated all uncultivated land from landholdings that were larger than . If the estates were between and , uncultivated land was to be expropriated only if less than two-thirds of it was in use. The owners were compensated with government bonds, the value of which was equal to that of the land expropriated. The value of the land itself was what the owners had declared it to be in their tax returns in 1952. Of the nearly 350,000 private landholdings, only 1,710 were affected by expropriation. The law was implemented with great speed, which resulted in some arbitrary land seizures. There was also some violence, directed at landowners, as well as at peasants that had minor landholdings.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: By June 1954, of land had been expropriated and distributed. Approximately 500,000 individuals, or one-sixth of the population, had received land by this point. Contrary to the predictions made by detractors, the law resulted in a slight increase in Guatemalan agricultural productivity, and in an increase in cultivated area. Purchases of farm machinery also increased. Overall, the law resulted in a significant improvement in living standards for many thousands of peasant families, the majority of whom were indigenous people. Historian Greg Grandin sees the law as representing a fundamental power shift in favor of the hitherto marginalized.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: By 1950, the United Fruit Company's annual profits were 65 million U.S. dollars, twice as large as the revenue of the government of Guatemala. The company was the largest landowner in Guatemala, and virtually owned Puerto Barrios, Guatemala's only port to the Atlantic Ocean, allowing it to make profits from the flow of goods through the port. Because of its long association with Ubico's government, Guatemalan revolutionaries saw the UFC as an impediment to progress after 1944. This image was reinforced by the company's discriminatory policies against the native population. Owing to its size, the reforms of Arévalo's government affected the UFC more than other companies. Among other things, the new labor code allowed UFC workers to strike when their demands for higher wages and job security were not met. The company saw itself as being specifically targeted by the reforms, and refused to negotiate with the numerous sets of strikers, despite frequently being in violation of the new laws. The company's troubles were compounded with the passage of Decree 900 in 1952. Of the that the company owned, only 15 percent was being cultivated; the rest was idle, and thus came under the scope of the agrarian reform law.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The UFC responded by intensively lobbying the U.S. government; several Congressmen criticized the Guatemalan government for not protecting the interests of the company. The Guatemalan government replied that the company was the main obstacle to progress in the country. American historians observed that "[to] the Guatemalans it appeared that their country was being mercilessly exploited by foreign interests which took huge profits without making any contributions to the nation's welfare". In 1953, of uncultivated land was expropriated by the government, which offered the company compensation at the rate of 2.99 U.S. dollars to the acre (7.39 U.S. dollars per hectare), twice what the company had paid when it bought the property. More expropriation occurred soon after, bringing the total to over ; the government offered compensation to the company at the rate at which the UFC had valued its own property for tax purposes. Since this was a major undervaluation, the company was unhappy with its compensation, resulting in further lobbying in Washington, particularly through U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had close ties to the company.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The UFC also began a public relations campaign to discredit the Guatemalan government; it hired Edward Bernays, who mounted a concerted misinformation campaign for several years which portrayed the company as the victim of a communist Guatemalan government. The company stepped up its efforts after Dwight Eisenhower was elected U.S. president in 1952. These included commissioning a research study from a firm known to be hostile to social reform, which produced a 235-page report that was highly critical of the Guatemalan government. Historians have stated that the report was full of "exaggerations, scurrilous descriptions and bizarre historical theories" but it nonetheless had a significant impact on the members of Congress who read it. Overall, the company spent over half a million dollars to convince lawmakers and the American public that the Guatemalan government needed to be overthrown.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: As the Cold War developed and the Guatemalan government clashed with U.S. corporations on an increasing number of issues, the U.S. government grew increasingly suspicious of the Guatemalan Revolution. In addition, the Cold War predisposed the Truman administration to see the Guatemalan government as communist. Arévalo's support for the Caribbean Legion also worried the Truman administration, which saw it as a vehicle for communism, rather than as the anti-dictatorial force it was conceived as. Until the end of its term, the Truman administration had relied on purely diplomatic and economic means to try to reduce the perceived communist influence. The U.S. had refused to sell arms to the Guatemalan government after 1944; in 1951 it began to block all weapons purchases by Guatemala.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The U.S.'s worries over communist influence increased after the election of Árbenz in 1951 and his enactment of Decree 900 in 1952. In April 1952 Anastasio Somoza García, the dictator of Nicaragua, made his first state visit to the U.S. He made several public speeches praising the U.S., and was awarded a medal by the New York City government. During a meeting with Truman and his senior staff, Somoza said that if the U.S. gave him the arms, he would "clean up Guatemala". The proposal did not receive much immediate support, but Truman instructed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to follow up on it. The CIA contacted Carlos Castillo Armas, a Guatemalan army officer who had been exiled from the country in 1949 following a failed coup attempt against President Arévalo. Believing that Castillo Armas would lead a coup with or without their assistance, the CIA decided to supply him with weapons and 225,000 U.S. dollars. The CIA considered Castillo Armas sufficiently corrupt and authoritarian to be well suited to lead the coup.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The coup was planned in detail over the next few weeks by the CIA, the UFC, and Somoza. The CIA also contacted Marcos Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic; the two U.S.-backed dictators were supportive of the plan, and agreed to contribute some funding. Although PBFortune was officially approved on 9 September 1952, various planning steps had been taken earlier in the year. In January 1952, officers in the CIA's Directorate of Plans compiled a list of "top flight Communists whom the new government would desire to eliminate immediately in the event of a successful anti-Communist coup". The CIA plan called for the assassination of over 58 Guatemalans, as well as the arrest of many others.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The CIA put the plan into motion in late 1952. A freighter that had been borrowed from the UFC was specially refitted in New Orleans and loaded with weapons under the guise of agricultural machinery, and set sail for Nicaragua. However, the plan was terminated soon after: accounts of its termination vary. Some sources state that the State Department discovered the plan when a senior official was asked to sign a certain document, while others suggest that Somoza was indiscreet. The eventual outcome was that Secretary of State Dean Acheson called off the operation. The CIA continued to support Castillo Armas; it paid him a monthly retainer of 3000 U.S. dollars, and gave him the resources to maintain his rebel force.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: During his successful campaign for the U.S. presidency, Dwight Eisenhower pledged to pursue a more proactive anti-communist policy, promising to roll back communism, rather than contain it. Working in an atmosphere of increasing McCarthyism in government circles, Eisenhower was more willing than Truman to use the CIA to depose governments the U.S. disliked. Although PBFortune had been quickly aborted, tension between the U.S. and Guatemala continued to rise, especially with the legalization of the communist PGT, and its inclusion in the government coalition for the elections of January 1953. Articles published in the U.S. press often reflected this predisposition to see communist influence; for example, a "New York Times" article about the visit to Guatemala by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda highlighted his communist beliefs, but neglected to mention his reputation as the greatest living poet in Latin America.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Several figures in Eisenhower's administration, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother CIA Director Allen Dulles, had close ties to the United Fruit Company. The Dulles brothers had been partners of the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, and in that capacity had arranged several deals for the UFC. Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith would later become a director of the company, while Eisenhower's personal assistant Ann C. Whitman was the wife of UFC public relations director Edward Whitman. These personal connections meant that the Eisenhower administration tended to conflate the interests of the UFC with that of U.S. national security interests, and made it more willing to overthrow the Guatemalan government. The success of the 1953 CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran also strengthened Eisenhower's belief in using the agency to effect political change overseas.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Historians and authors writing about the 1954 coup have debated the relative importance of the role of the United Fruit Company and the worries about communist influence (whether or not these were grounded in reality) in the U.S.'s decision to instigate the coup in 1954. Several historians have maintained that the lobbying of the UFC, and the expropriation of its lands, were the chief motivation for the U.S., strengthened by the financial ties of individuals within the Eisenhower administration to the UFC. Others have argued that the overthrow was motivated primarily by U.S. strategic interest; the knowledge of the presence of a small number of communists close to Árbenz led the U.S. to reach incorrect conclusions about the extent of communist influence. Yet others have argued that the overthrow was part of a larger tendency within the U.S. to oppose nationalist movements in the Third World. Both the role of the UFC and that of the perception of communist influence continue to be cited as motivations for the U.S.'s actions today.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The CIA operation to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz, code-named Operation PBSuccess, was authorized by Eisenhower in August 1953. The operation was granted a budget of 2.7 million U.S. dollars for "psychological warfare and political action". The total budget has been estimated at between 5 and 7 million dollars, and the planning employed over 100 CIA agents. In addition, the operation recruited scores of individuals from among Guatemalan exiles and the populations of the surrounding countries. The plans included drawing up lists of people within Árbenz's government to be assassinated if the coup were to be carried out. Manuals of assassination techniques were compiled, and lists were also made of people whom the junta would dispose of. These were the CIA's first known assassination manuals, and were reused in subsequent CIA actions.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The State Department created a team of diplomats who would support PBSuccess. It was led by John Peurifoy, who took over as Ambassador to Guatemala in October 1953. Another member of the team was William D. Pawley, a wealthy businessman and diplomat with extensive knowledge of the aviation industry. Peurifoy was a militant anti-communist, and had proven his willingness to work with the CIA during his time as United States Ambassador to Greece. Under Peurifoy's tenure, relations with the Guatemalan government soured further, although those with the Guatemalan military improved. In a report to John Dulles, Peurifoy stated that he was "definitely convinced that if [Árbenz] is not a communist, then he will certainly do until one comes along". Within the CIA, the operation was headed by Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner. The field commander selected by Wisner was former U.S. Army Colonel Albert Haney, then chief of the CIA station in South Korea. Haney reported directly to Wisner, thereby separating PBSuccess from the CIA's Latin American division, a decision which created some tension within the agency. Haney decided to establish headquarters in a concealed office complex in Opa-locka, Florida. Codenamed "Lincoln", it became the nerve center of operation PBSuccess.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The CIA operation was complicated by a premature coup on 29 March 1953, with a futile raid against the army garrison at Salamá, in the central Guatemalan department of Baja Verapaz. The rebellion was swiftly crushed, and a number of participants were arrested. Several CIA agents and allies were imprisoned, weakening the coup effort. Thus the CIA came to rely more heavily on the Guatemalan exile groups and their anti-democratic allies in Guatemala. The CIA considered several candidates to lead the coup. Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, the conservative candidate who had lost the 1950 election to Árbenz, held favor with the Guatemalan opposition but was rejected for his role in the Ubico regime, as well as his European appearance, which was unlikely to appeal to the majority mixed-race "mestizo" population. Another popular candidate was the coffee planter Juan Córdova Cerna, who had briefly served in Arévalo's cabinet before becoming the legal adviser to the UFC. The death of his son in an anti-government uprising in 1950 turned him against the government, and he had planned the unsuccessful Salamá coup in 1953 before fleeing to join Castillo Armas in exile. Although his status as a civilian gave him an advantage over Castillo Armas, he was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1954, taking him out of the reckoning. Thus it was Castillo Armas, in exile since the failed 1949 coup and on the CIA's payroll since the aborted PBFortune in 1951, who was to lead the coming coup.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Castillo Armas was given enough money to recruit a small force of mercenaries from among Guatemalan exiles and the populations of nearby countries. This band was called the Army of Liberation. The CIA established training camps in Nicaragua and Honduras and supplied them with weapons as well as several bombers. The U.S. signed military agreements with both those countries prior to the invasion of Guatemala, allowing it to move heavier arms freely. The CIA trained at least 1,725 foreign guerillas plus thousands of additional militants as reserves. These preparations were only superficially covert: the CIA intended Árbenz to find out about them, as a part of its plan to convince the Guatemalan people that the overthrow of Árbenz was a "fait accompli". Additionally, the CIA made covert contact with a number of church leaders throughout the Guatemalan countryside, and persuaded them to incorporate anti-government messages into their sermons.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: While preparations for Operation PBSuccess were underway, Washington issued a series of statements denouncing the Guatemalan government, alleging that it had been infiltrated by communists. The State Department also asked the Organization of American States to modify the agenda of the Inter-American Conference, which was scheduled to be held in Caracas in March 1954, requesting the addition of an item titled "Intervention of International Communism in the American Republics", which was widely seen as a move targeting Guatemala. On 29 and 30 January 1954, the Guatemalan government published documents containing information leaked to it by a member of Castillo Armas' team who had turned against him. Lacking in original documents, the government had engaged in poor forgery to enhance the information it possessed, undermining the credibility of its charges. A spate of arrests followed of allies of Castillo Armas within Guatemala, and the government issued statements implicating a "Government of the North" in a plot to overthrow Árbenz. Washington denied these allegations, and the U.S. media uniformly took the side of their government; even publications which had until then provided relatively balanced coverage of Guatemala, such as "The Christian Science Monitor", suggested that Árbenz had succumbed to communist propaganda. Several Congressmen also pointed to the allegations from the Guatemalan government as proof that it had become communist.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: At the conference in Caracas, the various Latin American governments sought economic aid from the U.S., as well as its continuing non-intervention in their internal affairs. The U.S. government's aim was to pass a resolution condemning the supposed spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere. The Guatemalan foreign minister Guillermo Toriello argued strongly against the resolution, stating that it represented the "internationalization of McCarthyism". Despite support among the delegates for Toriello's views, the anti-communist resolution passed with only Guatemala voting against, because of the votes of dictatorships dependent on the U.S. and the threat of economic pressure applied by John Dulles. Although support among the delegates for Dulles' strident anti-communism was less strong than he and Eisenhower had hoped for, the conference marked a victory for the U.S., which was able to make concrete Latin American views on communism.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The U.S. had stopped selling arms to Guatemala in 1951 while signing bilateral defense agreements and increasing arms shipments to neighboring Honduras and Nicaragua. The U.S. promised the Guatemalan military that it too could obtain arms—if Árbenz were deposed. In 1953, the State Department aggravated the U.S. arms embargo by thwarting the Árbenz government's arms purchases from Canada, Germany, and Rhodesia. By 1954 Árbenz had become desperate for weapons, and decided to acquire them secretly from Czechoslovakia, which would have been the first time that a Soviet bloc country shipped weapons to the Americas, an action seen as establishing a communist beachhead in the Americas. The weapons were delivered to Guatemala at the Atlantic port of Puerto Barrios by the Swedish freight ship , which sailed from Szczecin in Poland. The U.S. failed to intercept the shipment despite imposing an illegal naval quarantine on Guatemala. However "Guatemalan army officers" quoted in "The New York Times" said that "some of the arms ... were duds, worn out, or entirely wrong for use there". The CIA portrayed the shipment of these weapons as Soviet interference in the United States' backyard; it was the final spur for the CIA to launch its coup.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: U.S. rhetoric abroad also had an effect on the Guatemalan military. The military had always been anti-communist, and Ambassador Peurifoy had applied pressure on senior officers since his arrival in Guatemala in October 1953. Árbenz had intended the secret shipment of weapons from the "Alfhem" to be used to bolster peasant militias, in the event of army disloyalty, but the U.S. informed army chiefs of the shipment, forcing Árbenz to hand them over to the military, and deepening the rift between him and his top generals.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Castillo Armas' army of 480 men was not large enough to defeat the Guatemalan military, even with U.S.-supplied aircraft. Therefore, the plans for Operation PBSuccess called for a campaign of psychological warfare, which would present Castillo Armas' victory as a "fait accompli" to the Guatemalan people, and would force Árbenz to resign. The propaganda campaign had begun well before the invasion, with the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) writing hundreds of articles on Guatemala based on CIA reports, and distributing tens of thousands of leaflets throughout Latin America. The CIA persuaded friendly governments to screen video footage of Guatemala that supported the U.S. version of events. As part of the psychological warfare, the U.S. Psychological Strategy Board authorized a "Nerve War Against Individuals" to instill fear and paranoia in potential loyalists and other potential opponents of the coup. This campaign included death threats against political leaders deemed loyal or deemed to be communist, and the sending of small wooden coffins, non-functioning bombs, and hangman's nooses to such people.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: "Alfhem"s success in evading the quarantine led to Washington escalating its intimidation of Guatemala through its navy. On 24 May, the U.S. launched Operation Hardrock Baker, a naval blockade of Guatemala. Ships and submarines patrolled the Guatemalan coasts, and all approaching ships were stopped and searched; these included ships from Britain and France, violating international law. However Britain and France did not protest very strongly, hoping that in return the U.S. would not interfere with their efforts to subdue rebellious colonies in the Middle East. The intimidation was not solely naval; on 26 May one of Castillo Armas' planes flew over the capital, dropping leaflets that exhorted people to struggle against communism and support Castillo Armas.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The most wide-reaching psychological weapon was the radio station Voice of Liberation. It began broadcasting on 1 May 1954, carrying anti-communist propaganda, telling its listeners to resist the Árbenz government and support the liberating forces of Castillo Armas. The station claimed to be broadcasting from deep within the jungles of the Guatemalan hinterland, a message which many listeners believed. In actuality, the broadcasts were concocted in Miami by Guatemalan exiles, flown to Central America, and broadcast through a mobile transmitter. The Voice of Liberation made an initial broadcast that was repeated four times, after which it took to transmitting two-hour bulletins twice a day. The transmissions were initially only heard intermittently in Guatemala City; a week later, the CIA significantly increased their transmitting power, allowing clear reception in the Guatemalan capital. The radio broadcasts have been given a lot of credit by historians for the success of the coup, owing to the unrest they created throughout the country. They were unexpectedly assisted by the outage of the government-run radio station, which stopped transmitting for three weeks while a new antenna was being fitted. These transmissions continued throughout the conflict, broadcasting exaggerated news of rebel troops converging on the capital, and contributing to massive demoralization among both the army and the civilian population.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Castillo Armas' force of 480 men had been split into four teams, ranging in size from 60 to 198. On 15 June 1954 these four forces left their bases in Honduras and El Salvador, and assembled in various towns just outside the Guatemalan border. The largest force was supposed to attack the Atlantic harbor town of Puerto Barrios, while the others attacked the smaller towns of Esquipulas, Jutiapa, and Zacapa, the Guatemalan army's largest frontier post. The invasion plan quickly faced difficulties; the 60-man force was intercepted and jailed by Salvadoran policemen before it got to the border. At 8:20 am on 18 June 1954, Castillo Armas led his invading troops over the border. Ten trained saboteurs preceded the invasion, with the aim of blowing up railways and cutting telegraph lines. At about the same time, Castillo Armas' planes flew over a pro-government rally in the capital. The U.S. Psychological Strategy Board ordered the bombing of the Matamoros Fortress in downtown Guatemala City, and a U.S. P-47 warplane flown by a mercenary pilot bombed the city of Chiquimula. Castillo Armas demanded Árbenz's immediate surrender. The invasion provoked a brief panic in the capital, which quickly decreased as the rebels failed to make any striking moves. Bogged down by supplies and a lack of transportation, Castillo Armas' forces took several days to reach their targets, although their planes blew up a bridge on 19 June.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: When the rebels did reach their targets, they met with further setbacks. The force of 122 men targeting Zacapa were intercepted and decisively beaten by a garrison of 30 Guatemalan soldiers, with only 30 men escaping death or capture. The force that attacked Puerto Barrios was dispatched by policemen and armed dockworkers, with many of the rebels fleeing back to Honduras. In an effort to regain momentum, the rebel planes tried air attacks on the capital. These attacks caused little material damage, but they had a significant psychological impact, leading many citizens to believe that the invasion force was more powerful than it actually was. The rebel bombers needed to fly out of the Nicaraguan capital of Managua; as a result, they had a limited payload. A large number of them substituted dynamite or Molotov cocktails for bombs, in an effort to create loud bangs with a lower payload. The planes targeted ammunition depots, parade grounds, and other visible targets.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Early in the morning on 27 June 1954, a CIA Lockheed P-38M Lightning attacked Puerto San José and dropped napalm bombs on the British cargo ship, , which was on charter to the U.S. company W.R. Grace and Company Line, and was being loaded with Guatemalan cotton and coffee. This incident cost the CIA one million U.S. dollars in compensation. On 22 June, another plane bombed the Honduran town of San Pedro de Copán; John Dulles claimed the attack had been conducted by the Guatemalan air force, thus avoiding diplomatic consequences. The handful of bombers that the rebel forces had begun with were shot down by the Guatemalan army within a few days, causing Castillo Armas to demand more from the CIA. Eisenhower quickly agreed to provide these additional planes, bolstering the rebel force. William Pawley had a crucial role to play in the delivery of these aircraft.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The Árbenz government originally meant to repel the invasion by arming the military-age populace, workers' militias, and the Guatemalan Army. Resistance from the armed forces, as well as public knowledge of the secret arms purchase, compelled the President to supply arms only to the Army. From the beginning of the invasion, Árbenz was confident that Castillo Armas could be defeated militarily and expressed this confidence in public. But he was worried that a defeat for Castillo Armas would provoke a direct invasion by the U.S. military. This also contributed to his decision not to arm civilians initially; lacking a military reason to do so, this could have cost him the support of the army. Carlos Enrique Díaz, the chief of the Guatemalan armed forces, told Árbenz that arming civilians would be unpopular with his soldiers, and that "the army [would] do its duty".


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Árbenz instead told Díaz to select officers to lead a counter-attack. Díaz chose a corps of officers who were all regarded to be men of personal integrity, and who were loyal to Árbenz. On the night of 19 June, most of the Guatemalan troops in the capital region left for Zacapa, joined by smaller detachments from other garrisons. Árbenz stated that "the invasion was a farce", but worried that if it was defeated on the Honduran border, Honduras would use it as an excuse to declare war on Guatemala, which would lead to a U.S. invasion. Because of the rumours spread by the Voice of Liberation, there were worries throughout the countryside that a fifth column attack was imminent; large numbers of peasants went to the government and asked for weapons to defend their country. They were repeatedly told that the army was "successfully defending our country". Nonetheless, peasant volunteers assisted the government war effort, manning roadblocks and donating supplies to the army. Weapons shipments dropped by rebel planes were intercepted and turned over to the government.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The Árbenz government also pursued diplomatic means to try to end the invasion. It sought support from El Salvador and Mexico; Mexico declined to get involved, and the Salvadoran government merely reported the Guatemalan effort to Peurifoy. Árbenz's largest diplomatic initiative was in taking the issue to the United Nations Security Council. On 18 June the Guatemalan foreign minister petitioned the council to "take measures necessary ... to put a stop to the aggression", which he said Nicaragua and Honduras were responsible for, along with "certain foreign monopolies which have been affected by the progressive policy of my government". The Security Council looked at Guatemala's complaint at an emergency session on 20 June. The debate was lengthy and heated, with Nicaragua and Honduras denying any wrongdoing, and the U.S. stating that Eisenhower's role as a general in World War II demonstrated that he was against imperialism. The Soviet Union was the only country to support Guatemala. When the U.S. and its allies proposed referring the matter to the Organization of American States, the Soviet Union vetoed the proposal. Guatemala continued to press for a Security Council investigation; the proposal received the support of Britain and France, but on 24 June it was vetoed by the U.S., the first time it did so against its allies. The U.S. accompanied this with threats to the foreign offices of both countries that the U.S. would stop supporting their other initiatives. UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld called the U.S. position "the most serious blow so far aimed at the [United Nations]". A fact-finding mission was set up by the Inter-American Peace Committee; Washington used its influence to delay the entry of the committee until the coup was complete and a military dictatorship installed.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Árbenz was initially confident that his army would quickly dispatch the rebel force. The victory of a small garrison of 30 soldiers over the 180 strong rebel force outside Zacapa strengthened his belief. By 21 June, Guatemalan soldiers had gathered at Zacapa under the command of Colonel Víctor M. León, who was believed to be loyal to Árbenz. León told Árbenz that the counter-attack would be delayed for logistical reasons, but assured him not to worry, as Castillo Armas would be defeated very soon. Other members of the government were not so certain. Army Chief of Staff Parinello inspected the troops at Zacapa on 23 June, and returned to the capital believing that the army would not fight. Afraid of a U.S. intervention in Castillo Armas' favor, he did not tell Árbenz of his suspicions. PGT leaders also began to have their suspicions; acting secretary general Alvarado Monzón sent a member of the central committee to Zacapa to investigate. He returned on 25 June, reporting that the army was highly demoralized, and would not fight. Monzón reported this to Árbenz, who quickly sent another investigator. He too returned the same report, carrying an additional message for Árbenz from the officers at Zacapa—asking the President to resign. The officers believed that given U.S. support for the rebels, defeat was inevitable, and Árbenz was to blame for it. He stated that if Árbenz did not resign, the army was likely to strike a deal with Castillo Armas, and march on the capital with him.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: During this period, Castillo Armas had begun to intensify his aerial attacks, with the extra planes that Eisenhower had approved. They had limited material success; many of their bombs were surplus material from World War II, and failed to explode. Nonetheless, they had a significant psychological impact. On 25 June, the same day that he received the army's ultimatum, Árbenz learned that Castillo Armas had scored what later proved to be his only military victory, defeating the Guatemalan garrison at Chiquimula. Historian Piero Gleijeses has stated that if it were not for U.S. support for the rebellion, the officer corps of the Guatemalan army would have remained loyal to Árbenz because, although they were not uniformly his supporters, they were more wary of Castillo Armas, and also had strong nationalist views. As it was, they believed that the U.S. would intervene militarily, leading to a battle they could not win.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: On the night of 25 June, Árbenz called a meeting of the senior leaders of the government, the political parties, and the labor unions. Colonel Díaz was also present. The President told them that the army at Zacapa had abandoned the government, and that the civilian population needed to be armed in order to defend the country. Díaz raised no objections, and the unions pledged several thousand troops between them. When the troops were mustered the next day, only a few hundred showed up. The civilian population of the capital had fought alongside the Guatemalan Revolution twice before—during the popular uprising of 1944, and again during the attempted coup of 1949—but on this occasion the army, intimidated by the United States, refused to fight. The union members were reluctant to fight both the invasion and their own military. Seeing this, Díaz reneged on his support of the President, and began plotting to overthrow Árbenz with the assistance of other senior army officers. They informed Peurifoy of this plan, asking him to stop the hostilities in return for Árbenz's resignation. Peurifoy promised to arrange a truce, and the plotters went to Árbenz and informed him of their decision. Árbenz, utterly exhausted and seeking to preserve at least a measure of the democratic reforms that he had brought, agreed without demur. After informing his cabinet of his decision, he left the presidential palace at 8 pm on 27 June 1954, having taped a resignation speech that was broadcast an hour later. In it, he stated that he was resigning in order to eliminate the "pretext for the invasion", and that he wished to preserve the gains of the October Revolution of 1944. He walked to the nearby Mexican Embassy, seeking political asylum. Two months later he was granted safe passage out of the country, and flew to exile in Mexico.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Some 120 Árbenz loyalists or communists were also allowed to leave, and the CIA stated that none of the assassination plans contemplated by the CIA were actually implemented. On June 30, 1954 the CIA began a comprehensive destruction process of documents related to Operation PBSuccess. When an oversight committee of the United States Senate in 1975 investigated the history of the CIA's assassinations program and requested information about the CIA's assassination program as part of Operation PBSuccess, the CIA stated it had lost all such records. Journalist Annie Jacobsen states that the CIA claim of no assassinations having taken place is doubtful. In May 1997, the CIA stated it had rediscovered some of its documents that it had said were lost. The names of assassination targets had all been redacted, which made it impossible to verify whether any of the people on the CIA assassination list were actually killed as part of the operation.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Immediately after the President announced his resignation, Díaz announced on the radio that he was taking over the presidency, and that the army would continue to fight against the invasion of Castillo Armas. He headed a military junta which also consisted of Colonels Elfego Hernán Monzón Aguirre and Jose Angel Sánchez. Two days later Ambassador Peurifoy told Díaz that he had to resign because, in the words of a CIA officer who spoke to Díaz, he was "not convenient for American foreign policy". Peurifoy castigated Díaz for allowing Árbenz to criticize the United States in his resignation speech; meanwhile, a U.S.-trained pilot dropped a bomb on the army's main powder magazine, in order to intimidate the colonel. Soon after, Díaz was overthrown by a rapid bloodless coup led by Colonel Monzón, who was more pliable to U.S. interests. Díaz later stated that Peurifoy had presented him with a list of names of communists, and demanded that all of them be shot by the next day; Díaz had refused, turning Peurifoy further against him. On 17 June, the army leaders at Zacapa had begun to negotiate with Castillo Armas. They signed a pact, the "Pacto de Las Tunas", three days later, which placed the army at Zacapa under Castillo Armas, in return for a general amnesty. The army returned to its barracks a few days later, "despondent, with a terrible sense of defeat".


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Although Monzón was staunchly anti-communist and repeatedly spoke of his loyalty to the U.S., he was unwilling to hand over power to Castillo Armas. The fall of Díaz had led Peurifoy to believe that the CIA should make way and let the State Department play the lead role in negotiating with the new government of Guatemala. The State Department asked Óscar Osorio, the dictator of El Salvador, to invite all players for talks in San Salvador. Osorio agreed, and Monzón and Castillo Armas arrived in the Salvadoran capital on 30 June. Peurifoy initially remained in Guatemala City, to avoid the appearance of a heavy U.S. role, but he was forced to travel to San Salvador when the negotiations came close to breaking down on the first day. In the words of John Dulles, Peurifoy's role was to "crack some heads together". Neither Monzón nor Castillo Armas could have remained in power without U.S. support, and thus Peurifoy was able to force an agreement, which was announced at 4:45 am on 2 July. Under the agreement, Castillo Armas and his subordinate Major Enrique Trinidad Oliva joined the three-person junta headed by Monzón, who remained president. On 7 July Colonels Dubois and Cruz Salazar, Monzón's supporters on the junta, resigned, according to the secret agreement they had made without Monzón's knowledge. Outnumbered, Monzón also resigned, allowing Castillo Armas to be unanimously elected president of the junta. The two colonels were paid 100,000 U.S. dollars apiece for their cooperation. The U.S. promptly recognized the new government on 13 July. Soon after taking office as president, Castillo Armas faced a coup from young army cadets, who were unhappy with the army's surrender to him. The coup was crushed, leaving 29 dead and 91 wounded. Elections were held in early October, from which all political parties were barred. Castillo Armas was the only candidate; he won the election with 99% of the vote, completing his transition into power.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The Guatemalan "coup d'état" was reviled internationally. "Le Monde" of Paris and "The Times" of London attacked the United States' coup as a "modern form of economic colonialism". In Latin America, public and official opinion was sharply critical of the U.S., and for many Guatemala became a symbol of armed resistance to U.S. hegemony. Former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee called it "a plain act of aggression". When Allen Dulles described the coup as a victory of "democracy" over communism and claimed that the situation in Guatemala was "being cured by the Guatemalans themselves", a British official remarked that "in places, it might almost be Molotov speaking about ... Czechoslovakia or Hitler speaking about Austria". UN Secretary General Hammarskjöld said that the paramilitary invasion with which the U.S. deposed Guatemala's elected government was a geopolitical action that violated the human rights stipulations of the United Nations Charter. Even the usually pro-U.S. newspapers of West Germany condemned the coup. Kate Doyle, the Director of the Mexico Project of the National Security Archives, described the coup as the definitive deathblow to democracy in Guatemala.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The coup had broad support among U.S. politicians. Historian Piero Gleijeses writes that the foreign policy of both Republican and Democratic parties expressed an intransigent assertion of U.S. hegemony over Central America, making them predisposed to seeing communist threats where none existed. Thus Eisenhower's continuation of the Monroe Doctrine had continued bipartisan support. The coup met with strong negative reactions in Latin America; a wave of anti-United States protests followed the overthrow of Árbenz. These sentiments persisted for several decades afterwards; historians have pointed to the coup as a reason for the hostile reception given to U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon when he visited Latin America four years later. A State Department study found that negative public reactions to the coup had occurred in eleven Latin American countries, including a few that were otherwise pro-American. Historian John Lewis Gaddis states that knowledge of the CIA's role in coups in Iran and Guatemala gave the agency "an almost mythic reputation throughout Latin America and the Middle East as an instrument with which the United States could depose governments it disliked, whenever it wished to do so".


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Operation PBHistory was an effort by the CIA to analyze documents from the Árbenz government to justify the 1954 coup after the fact, in particular by finding evidence that Guatemalan communists had been under the influence of the Soviet Union. Because of the quick overthrow of the Árbenz government, the CIA believed that the administration would not have been able to destroy any incriminating documents, and that these could be analyzed to demonstrate Árbenz's supposed Soviet ties. The CIA also believed this would help it better understand the workings of Latin American communist parties, on which subject the CIA had very little real information. A final motivation was that international responses to the coup had been very negative, even among allies of the U.S., and the CIA wished to counteract this anti-U.S. sentiment. The operation began on 4 July 1954 with the arrival of four CIA agents in Guatemala City, led by a specialist in the structure of communist parties. Their targets included Árbenz's personal belongings, police documents, and the headquarters of the Guatemalan Party of Labour.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Although the initial search failed to find any links to the Soviet Union, the CIA decided to extend the operation, and on 4 August a much larger team was deployed, with members from many government departments, including the State Department and the USIA. The task force was given the cover name Social Research Group. To avoid confrontation with Guatemalan nationalists, the CIA opted to leave the documents in Guatemalan possession, instead funding the creation of a Guatemalan intelligence agency that would try to dismantle the communist organizations. Thus the National Committee of Defense Against Communism ("Comité de Defensa Nacional Contra el Comunismo") was created on 20 July, and granted a great deal of power over military and police functions. The personnel of the new agency were also put to work analyzing the same documents. The document-processing phase of the operation was terminated on 28 September 1954, having examined 500,000 documents. There was tension between the different U.S. government agencies about using the information; the CIA wished to use it to subvert communists, the USIA for propaganda. The CIA's leadership of the operation allowed it to retain control over any documents deemed necessary for clandestine operations. A consequence of PBHistory was the opening of a CIA file on Argentine communist Ernesto Che Guevara.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: In the subsequent decade, the documents gathered were used by the authors of several books, most frequently with covert CIA assistance, which described the Guatemalan Revolution and the 1954 coup in terms favorable to the CIA. Despite the efforts of the CIA, both international and academic reaction to U.S. policy remained highly negative. Even books partially funded by the CIA were somewhat critical of its role. PBHistory failed in its chief objective of finding convincing evidence that the PGT had been instruments of the Soviet Union, or even that it had any connection to Moscow whatsoever. The Soviet description of the coup, that the U.S. had crushed a democratic revolution to protect the United Fruit Company's control over the Guatemalan economy, became much more widely accepted. Historian Mark Hove stated that "Operation PBHistory proved ineffective because of 'a new, smoldering resentment' that had emerged in Latin America over US intervention in Guatemala."


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The 1954 coup had significant political fallout both inside and outside Guatemala. The relatively easy overthrow of Árbenz, coming soon after the similar overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister in 1953, made the CIA overconfident in its abilities, which led to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion to overthrow the Cuban government in 1961. Throughout the years of the Guatemalan Revolution, both United States policy makers and the U.S. media had tended to believe the theory of a communist threat. When Árbenz had announced that he had evidence of U.S. complicity in the Salamá incident, it had been dismissed, and virtually the entire U.S. press portrayed Castillo Armas' invasion as a dramatic victory against communism. The press in Latin America were less restrained in their criticism of the U.S., and the coup resulted in lasting anti-United States sentiment in the region.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Among the civilians living in Guatemala City during the coup was a 25-year-old Che Guevara. After a couple of abortive attempts to fight on the side of the government, Guevara took shelter at the embassy of Argentina, before eventually being granted safe passage to Mexico, where he would join the Cuban Revolution. His experience of the Guatemalan coup was a large factor in convincing him "of the necessity for armed struggle ... against imperialism", and would inform his successful military strategy during the Cuban Revolution. Árbenz's experience during the Guatemalan coup also helped Fidel Castro's Cuban regime in thwarting the CIA invasion.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Within Guatemala, Castillo Armas worried that he lacked popular support, and thus tried to eliminate all opposition. He promptly arrested several thousand opposition leaders, branding them communists, repealed the constitution of 1945, and granted himself virtually unbridled power. Concentration camps were built to hold the prisoners when the jails overflowed. Acting on the advice of Allen Dulles, Castillo Armas detained a number of citizens trying to flee the country. He also created the National Committee of Defense Against Communism, with sweeping powers of arrest, detention, and deportation. Over the next few years, the committee investigated nearly 70,000 people. An insurgency in opposition to the junta soon developed. The government responded with a campaign of harsh suppression. Thousands were imprisoned arbitrarily, with few ever facing trial. Many were executed; "disappeared"; tortured; or maimed. He outlawed all labor unions, peasant organizations, and political parties, except for his own, the National Liberation Movement ("Movimiento de Liberación Nacional", MLN), which was the ruling party until 1957, and remained influential for decades after.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Castillo Armas' dependence on the officer corps and the mercenaries who had put him in power led to widespread corruption, and the Eisenhower administration was soon subsidizing the Guatemalan government with many millions of U.S. dollars. Castillo Armas also reversed the agrarian reforms of Árbenz, leading the U.S. embassy to comment that it was a "long step backwards" from the previous policy. Castillo Armas was assassinated in 1957. The UFC did not profit from the coup; although it regained most of its privileges, its profits continued to decline, and it was eventually merged with another company to save itself from bankruptcy. Despite the influence which some of the local Catholic Church leaders had in the coup, anti-Catholic restrictions which had been enforced under previous governments in Guatemala would resume by the 1960s, as many anti-communist governments felt the Church had too much sympathy towards socialist parties.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: The rolling-back of the progressive policies of the civilian governments resulted in a series of leftist insurgencies in the countryside, beginning in 1960. This triggered the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War between the U.S.-backed military government of Guatemala and the leftist insurgents, who frequently had a large degree of popular support. The largest of these movements was led by the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, which at its largest point had 270,000 members. During the civil war, atrocities against civilians were committed by both sides; 93% of these violations were committed by the U.S.-backed military, which included a genocidal scorched-earth campaign against the indigenous Maya population in the 1980s. The violence was particularly severe during the presidencies of Ríos Montt and Lucas García.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: Numerous other human rights violations were committed, including massacres of civilian populations, rape, aerial bombardment, and forced disappearances. Gleijeses wrote that Guatemala was "ruled by a culture of fear", and that it held the "macabre record for human rights violations in Latin America". These violations were partially the result of a particularly brutal counter-insurgency strategy adopted by the government. The ideological narrative that the 1954 coup had represented a battle against communism was often used to justify the violence in the 1980s. Historians have attributed the violence of the civil war to the 1954 coup, and the "anti-communist paranoia" that it generated. The civil war came to an end in 1996, with a peace accord between the guerrillas and the government of Guatemala, which included an amnesty for the fighters on both sides. The civil war claimed the lives of an estimated 200,000 civilians in all.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: U.S. President Bill Clinton apologized to the nation of Guatemala in March 1999 for the atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed dictatorships. The apology occurred during a meeting in Guatemala which involved leaders from various sectors of the country's society, including indigenous people and women. Clinton stated "For the United States it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake." The apology came soon after the release of a truth commission report that documented U.S. support for the military forces that committed genocide.


title: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

text: In May 2011, the Guatemalan government signed an agreement with Árbenz's surviving family to restore his legacy and publicly apologize for the government's role in ousting him. This included a financial settlement to the family. The formal apology was made at the National Palace by Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom on 20 October 2011, to Jacobo Árbenz Villanova, the son of the former president, and a Guatemalan politician. Colom stated, "It was a crime to Guatemalan society and it was an act of aggression to a government starting its democratic spring." The agreement established several forms of reparation for the next of kin of Árbenz Guzmán.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: The Mongol invasions and conquests took place during the 13th and 14th centuries, creating history's largest contiguous empire: the Mongol Empire (1206-1368), which by 1300 covered large parts of Eurasia. Historians regard the Mongol devastation as one of the deadliest episodes in history. In addition, Mongol expeditions may have spread the bubonic plague across much of Eurasia, helping to spark the Black Death of the 14th century.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: The Mongol Empire developed in the course of the 13th century through a series of victorious campaigns throughout Asia, reaching Eastern Europe by the 1240s. In contrast with later "empires of the sea" such as European colonial powers, the Mongol Empire was a land power, fueled by the grass-foraging Mongol cavalry and cattle. Thus most Mongol conquest and plundering took place during the warmer seasons, when there was sufficient grazing for their herds. The rise of the Mongols was preceded by 15 years of wet and warm weather conditions from 1211 to 1225 that allowed favourable conditions for the breeding of horses, which greatly assisted their expansion.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: As the Mongol Empire began to fragment from 1260, conflict between the Mongols and Eastern European polities continued for centuries. Mongols continued to rule China into the 14th century under the Yuan dynasty, while Mongol rule in Persia persisted into the 15th century under the Timurid Empire. In India, the later Mughal Empire survived into the 19th century.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: Genghis Khan forged the initial Mongol Empire in Central Asia, starting with the unification of the nomadic tribes Merkits, Tatars, Keraites, Turks, Naimans and Mongols. The Uighur Buddhist Qocho Kingdom surrendered and joined the empire. He then continued expansion via conquest of the Qara Khitai and the Khwarazmian dynasty.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: Large areas of Islamic Central Asia and northeastern Persia were seriously depopulated, as every city or town that resisted the Mongols was destroyed. Each soldier was given a quota of enemies to execute according to circumstances. For example, after the conquest of Urgench, each Mongol warrior – in an army of perhaps two tumens (20,000 troops) – was required to execute 24 people, or nearly half a million people per said army.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: Against the Alans and the Cumans (Kipchaks), the Mongols used divide-and-conquer tactics by first warning the Cumans to end their support of the Alans, whom they then defeated, before rounding on the Cumans. Alans were recruited into the Mongol forces with one unit called "Right Alan Guard" which was combined with "recently surrendered" soldiers. Mongols and Chinese soldiers stationed in the area of the former Kingdom of Qocho and in Besh Balikh established a Chinese military colony led by Chinese general Qi Kongzhi (Ch'i Kung-chih).


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: During the Mongol attack on the Mamluks in the Middle East, most of the Mamluk military was composed of Kipchaks, and the Golden Horde's supply of Kipchak fighters replenished the Mamluk armies and helped them fight off the Mongols.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: The decentralized, stateless Kipchaks only converted to Islam after the Mongol conquest, unlike the centralized Karakhanid entity comprising the Yaghma, Qarluqs, and Oghuz who converted earlier to world religions.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: The Mongol conquest of the Kipchaks led to a merged society with a Mongol ruling class over a Kipchak-speaking populace which came to be known as Tatar, and which eventually absorbed Armenians, Italians, Greeks, and Goths on the Crimean peninsula to form the modern day Crimean Tatar people.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: The Mongols conquered, by battle or voluntary surrender, the areas of present-day Iran, Iraq, the Caucasus, and parts of Syria and Turkey, with further Mongol raids reaching southwards into Palestine as far as Gaza in 1260 and 1300. The major battles were the Siege of Baghdad (1258), when the Mongols sacked the city which had been the center of Islamic power for 500 years, and the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 in south-eastern Galilee, when the Muslim Bahri Mamluks were able to defeat the Mongols and decisively hault their advance for the first time. One thousand northern Chinese engineer squads accompanied the Mongol Hulagu Khan during his conquest of the Middle East.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: Genghis Khan and his descendants launched progressive invasions of China, subjugating the Western Xia in 1209 before destroying them in 1227, defeating the Jin dynasty in 1234 and defeating the Song dynasty in 1279. They made the Kingdom of Dali into a vassal state in 1253 after the Dali King Duan Xingzhi defected to the Mongols and helped them conquer the rest of Yunnan, forced Korea to capitulate through nine invasions, but failed in their attempts to invade Japan, their fleets scattered by "kamikaze" storms.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: The Mongols' greatest triumph was when Kublai Khan established the Yuan dynasty in China in 1271. The dynasty created a "Han Army" (漢軍) out of defected Jin troops and an army of defected Song troops called the "Newly Submitted Army" (新附軍).


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: The Mongol force which invaded southern China was far greater than the force they sent to invade the Middle East in 1256.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: The Yuan dynasty established the top-level government agency Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs to govern Tibet, which was conquered by the Mongols and put under Yuan rule. The Mongols also invaded Sakhalin Island between 1264 and 1308. Likewise, Korea (Goryeo) became a semi-autonomous vassal state of the Yuan dynasty for about 80 years.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: By 1206, Genghis Khan had conquered all Mongol and Turkic tribes in Mongolia and southern Siberia. In 1207 his eldest son Jochi subjugated the Siberian forest people, the Uriankhai, the Oirats, Barga, Khakas, Buryats, Tuvans, Khori-Tumed, and Yenisei Kyrgyz. He then organized the Siberians into three tumens. Genghis Khan gave the Telengit and Tolos along the Irtysh River to an old companion, Qorchi. While the Barga, Tumed, Buriats, Khori, Keshmiti, and Bashkirs were organized in separate thousands, the Telengit, Tolos, Oirats and Yenisei Kirghiz were numbered into the regular tumens Genghis created a settlement of Chinese craftsmen and farmers at Kem-kemchik after the first phase of the Mongol conquest of the Jin dynasty. The Great Khans favored gyrfalcons, furs, women, and Kyrgyz horses for tribute.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: Western Siberia came under the Golden Horde. The descendants of Orda Khan, the eldest son of Jochi, directly ruled the area. In the swamps of western Siberia, dog sled Yam stations were set up to facilitate collection of tribute.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: In 1270, Kublai Khan sent a Chinese official, with a new batch of settlers, to serve as judge of the Kyrgyz and Tuvan basin areas (益蘭州 and 謙州). Ogedei's grandson Kaidu occupied portions of Central Siberia from 1275 on. The Yuan dynasty army under Kublai's Kipchak general Tutugh reoccupied the Kyrgyz lands in 1293. From then on the Yuan dynasty controlled large portions of Central and Eastern Siberia.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: The Mongols invaded and destroyed Volga Bulgaria and Kievan Rus', before invading Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and other territories. Over the course of three years (1237–1240), the Mongols razed all the major cities of Russia with the exceptions of Novgorod and Pskov.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, the Pope's envoy to the Mongol Great Khan, traveled through Kiev in February 1246 and wrote:


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: The Mongol invasions displaced populations on a scale never seen before in central Asia or eastern Europe. Word of the Mongol hordes' approach spread terror and panic. The violent character of the invasions acted as a catalyst for further violence between Europe's elites and sparked additional conflicts. The increase in violence in the affected eastern European regions correlates with a decrease in the elite's numerical skills, and has been postulated as a root of the Great Divergence.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: From 1221 to 1327, the Mongol Empire launched several invasions into the Indian subcontinent. The Mongols occupied parts of Punjab region for decades. However, they failed to penetrate past the outskirts of Delhi and were repelled from the interior of India. Centuries later, the Mughals, whose founder Babur had Mongol roots, established their own empire in India.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: Kublai Khan's Yuan dynasty invaded Burma between 1277 and 1287, resulting in the capitulation and disintegration of the Pagan Kingdom. However, the invasion of 1301 was repulsed by the Burmese Myinsaing Kingdom. The Mongol invasions of Vietnam (Đại Việt) and Java resulted in defeat for the Mongols, although much of Southeast Asia agreed to pay tribute to avoid further bloodshed.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: The Mongol invasions played an indirect role in the establishment of major Tai states in the region by recently migrated Tais, who originally came from Southern China, in the early centuries of the second millennium. Major Tai states such as Lan Na, Sukhothai, and Lan Xang appeared around this time.


title: Mongol invasions and conquests

text: Due to the lack of contemporary records, estimates of the violence associated with the Mongol conquests vary considerably. Not including the mortality from the Plague in Europe, West Asia, or China it is possible that between 20 and 57 million people were killed between 1206 and 1405 during the various campaigns of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, and Timur. The havoc included battles, sieges, early biological warfare, and massacres.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment that would hypothetically violate the second law of thermodynamics. It was proposed by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. In his first letter Maxwell called the demon a "finite being", while the "Daemon" name was first used by Lord Kelvin.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: In the thought experiment, a demon controls a small massless door between two chambers of gas. As individual gas molecules (or atoms) approach the door, the demon quickly opens and closes the door to allow only fast-moving molecules to pass through in one direction, and only slow-moving molecules to pass through in the other. Because the kinetic temperature of a gas depends on the velocities of its constituent molecules, the demon's actions cause one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down. This would decrease the total entropy of the two gases, without applying any work, thereby violating the second law of thermodynamics.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: The concept of Maxwell's demon has provoked substantial debate in the philosophy of science and theoretical physics, which continues to the present day. It stimulated work on the relationship between thermodynamics and information theory. Most scientists argue, on theoretical grounds, that no practical device can violate the second law in this way. Other researchers have implemented forms of Maxwell's demon in experiments, though they all differ from the thought experiment to some extent and none have been shown to violate the second law.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: The thought experiment first appeared in a letter Maxwell wrote to Peter Guthrie Tait on 11 December 1867. It appeared again in a letter to John William Strutt in 1871, before it was presented to the public in Maxwell's 1872 book on thermodynamics titled "Theory of Heat".


title: Maxwell's demon

text: In his letters and books, Maxwell described the agent opening the door between the chambers as a "finite being". William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) was the first to use the word "demon" for Maxwell's concept, in the journal "Nature" in 1874, and implied that he intended the Greek mythology interpretation of a daemon, a supernatural being working in the background, rather than a malevolent being.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: The second law of thermodynamics ensures (through statistical probability) that two bodies of different temperature, when brought into contact with each other and isolated from the rest of the Universe, will evolve to a thermodynamic equilibrium in which both bodies have approximately the same temperature. The second law is also expressed as the assertion that in an isolated system, entropy never decreases.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: Maxwell conceived a thought experiment as a way of furthering the understanding of the second law. His description of the experiment is as follows:


title: Maxwell's demon

text: In other words, Maxwell imagines one container divided into two parts, "A" and "B". Both parts are filled with the same gas at equal temperatures and placed next to each other. Observing the molecules on both sides, an imaginary demon guards a trapdoor between the two parts. When a faster-than-average molecule from "A" flies towards the trapdoor, the demon opens it, and the molecule will fly from "A" to "B". Likewise, when a slower-than-average molecule from "B" flies towards the trapdoor, the demon will let it pass from "B" to "A". The average speed of the molecules in "B" will have increased while in "A" they will have slowed down on average. Since average molecular speed corresponds to temperature, the temperature decreases in "A" and increases in "B", contrary to the second law of thermodynamics. A heat engine operating between the thermal reservoirs "A" and "B" could extract useful work from this temperature difference.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: The demon must allow molecules to pass in both directions in order to produce only a temperature difference; one-way passage only of faster-than-average molecules from "A" to "B" will cause higher temperature and pressure to develop on the "B" side.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: Several physicists have presented calculations that show that the second law of thermodynamics will not actually be violated, if a more complete analysis is made of the whole system including the demon. The essence of the physical argument is to show, by calculation, that any demon must "generate" more entropy segregating the molecules than it could ever eliminate by the method described. That is, it would take more thermodynamic work to gauge the speed of the molecules and selectively allow them to pass through the opening between "A" and "B" than the amount of energy gained by the difference of temperature caused by doing so.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: One of the most famous responses to this question was suggested in 1929 by Leó Szilárd, and later by Léon Brillouin. Szilárd pointed out that a real-life Maxwell's demon would need to have some means of measuring molecular speed, and that the act of acquiring information would require an expenditure of energy. Since the demon and the gas are interacting, we must consider the total entropy of the gas and the demon combined. The expenditure of energy by the demon will cause an increase in the entropy of the demon, which will be larger than the lowering of the entropy of the gas.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: In 1960, Rolf Landauer raised an exception to this argument. He realized that some measuring processes need not increase thermodynamic entropy as long as they were thermodynamically reversible. He suggested these "reversible" measurements could be used to sort the molecules, violating the Second Law. However, due to the connection between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy, this also meant that the recorded measurement must not be erased. In other words, to determine whether to let a molecule through, the demon must acquire information about the state of the molecule and either discard it or store it. Discarding it leads to immediate increase in entropy but the demon cannot store it indefinitely. In 1982, Charles Bennett showed that, however well prepared, eventually the demon will run out of information storage space and must begin to erase the information it has previously gathered. Erasing information is a thermodynamically irreversible process that increases the entropy of a system. Although Bennett had reached the same conclusion as Szilard's 1929 paper, that a Maxwellian demon could not violate the second law because entropy would be created, he had reached it for different reasons. Regarding Landauer's principle, the minimum energy dissipated by deleting information was experimentally measured by Eric Lutz "et al." in 2012. Furthermore, Lutz "et al." confirmed that in order to approach the Landauer's limit, the system must asymptotically approach zero processing speed.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: John Earman and John D. Norton have argued that Szilárd and Landauer's explanations of Maxwell's demon begin by assuming that the second law of thermodynamics cannot be violated by the demon, and derive further properties of the demon from this assumption, including the necessity of consuming energy when erasing information, etc. It would therefore be circular to invoke these derived properties to defend the second law from the demonic argument. Bennett later acknowledged the validity of Earman and Norton's argument, while maintaining that Landauer's principle explains the mechanism by which real systems do not violate the second law of thermodynamics.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: Although the argument by Landauer and Bennett only answers the consistency between the second law of thermodynamics and the whole cyclic process of the entire system of a Szilard engine (a composite system of the engine and the demon), a recent approach based on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics for small fluctuating systems has provided deeper insight on each information process with each subsystem. From this viewpoint, the measurement process is regarded as a process where the correlation (mutual information) between the engine and the demon increases, and the feedback process is regarded as a process where the correlation decreases. If the correlation changes, thermodynamic relations as the second law of thermodynamics and the fluctuation theorem for each subsystem should be modified, and for the case of external control a second-law like inequality and a generalized fluctuation theorem with mutual information are satisfied. These relations suggest that we need extra thermodynamic cost to increase correlation (measurement case), and in contrast we can apparently violate the second law up to the consumption of correlation (feedback case). For more general information processes including biological information processing, both inequality and equality with mutual information hold.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: Real-life versions of Maxwellian demons occur, but all such "real demons" or molecular demons have their entropy-lowering effects duly balanced by increase of entropy elsewhere. Molecular-sized mechanisms are no longer found only in biology; they are also the subject of the emerging field of nanotechnology. Single-atom traps used by particle physicists allow an experimenter to control the state of individual quanta in a way similar to Maxwell's demon.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: If hypothetical mirror matter exists, Zurab Silagadze proposes that demons can be envisaged, "which can act like perpetuum mobiles of the second kind: extract heat energy from only one reservoir, use it to do work and be isolated from the rest of ordinary world. Yet the Second Law is not violated because the demons pay their entropy cost in the hidden (mirror) sector of the world by emitting mirror photons."


title: Maxwell's demon

text: In the February 2007 issue of "Nature", David Leigh, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, announced the creation of a nano-device based on the Brownian ratchet popularized by Richard Feynman. Leigh's device is able to drive a chemical system out of equilibrium, but it must be powered by an external source (light in this case) and therefore does not violate thermodynamics.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: Previously, researchers including Nobel Prize winner Fraser Stoddart, created ring-shaped molecules called rotaxanes which could be placed on an axle connecting two sites, "A" and "B". Particles from either site would bump into the ring and move it from end to end. If a large collection of these devices were placed in a system, half of the devices had the ring at site "A" and half at "B", at any given moment in time.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: Leigh made a minor change to the axle so that if a light is shone on the device, the center of the axle will thicken, restricting the motion of the ring. It keeps the ring from moving, however, only if it is at "A". Over time, therefore, the rings will be bumped from "B" to "A" and get stuck there, creating an imbalance in the system. In his experiments, Leigh was able to take a pot of "billions of these devices" from 50:50 equilibrium to a 70:30 imbalance within a few minutes.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: In 2009 Mark G. Raizen developed a laser atomic cooling technique which realizes the process Maxwell envisioned of sorting individual atoms in a gas into different containers based on their energy. The new concept is a one-way wall for atoms or molecules that allows them to move in one direction, but not go back. The operation of the one-way wall relies on an irreversible atomic and molecular process of absorption of a photon at a specific wavelength, followed by spontaneous emission to a different internal state. The irreversible process is coupled to a conservative force created by magnetic fields and/or light. Raizen and collaborators proposed using the one-way wall in order to reduce the entropy of an ensemble of atoms. In parallel, Gonzalo Muga and Andreas Ruschhaupt independently developed a similar concept. Their "atom diode" was not proposed for cooling, but rather for regulating the flow of atoms. The Raizen Group demonstrated significant cooling of atoms with the one-way wall in a series of experiments in 2008. Subsequently, the operation of a one-way wall for atoms was demonstrated by Daniel Steck and collaborators later in 2008. Their experiment was based on the 2005 scheme for the one-way wall, and was not used for cooling. The cooling method realized by the Raizen Group was called "single-photon cooling", because only one photon on average is required in order to bring an atom to near-rest. This is in contrast to other laser cooling techniques which use the momentum of the photon and require a two-level cycling transition.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: In 2006, Raizen, Muga, and Ruschhaupt showed in a theoretical paper that as each atom crosses the one-way wall, it scatters one photon, and information is provided about the turning point and hence the energy of that particle. The entropy increase of the radiation field scattered from a directional laser into a random direction is exactly balanced by the entropy reduction of the atoms as they are trapped by the one-way wall.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: This technique is widely described as a "Maxwell's demon" because it realizes Maxwell's process of creating a temperature difference by sorting high and low energy atoms into different containers. However, scientists have pointed out that it is not a true Maxwell's demon in the sense that it does not violate the second law of thermodynamics; it does not result in a net decrease in entropy and cannot be used to produce useful energy. This is because the process requires more energy from the laser beams than could be produced by the temperature difference generated. The atoms absorb low entropy photons from the laser beam and emit them in a random direction, thus increasing the entropy of the environment.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: In 2014, Pekola et al. demonstrated an experimental realization of a Szilárd engine. Only a year later and based on an earlier theoretical proposal, the same group presented the first experimental realization of an autonomous Maxwell's demon, which extracts microscopic information from a system and reduces its entropy by applying feedback. The demon is based on two capacitively coupled single-electron devices, both integrated on the same electronic circuit. The operation of the demon is directly observed as a temperature drop in the system, with a simultaneous temperature rise in the demon arising from the thermodynamic cost of generating the mutual information. In 2016, Pekola et al. demonstrated a proof-of-principle of an autonomous demon in coupled single-electron circuits, showing a way to cool critical elements in a circuit with information as a fuel. Pekola et al. have also proposed that a simple qubit circuit, e.g., made of a superconducting circuit, could provide a basis to study a quantum Szilard's engine.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: Daemons in computing, generally processes that run on servers to respond to users, are named for Maxwell's demon.


title: Maxwell's demon

text: Historian Henry Brooks Adams in his manuscript "The Rule of Phase Applied to History" attempted to use Maxwell's demon as a historical metaphor, though he misunderstood and misapplied the original principle. Adams interpreted history as a process moving towards "equilibrium", but he saw militaristic nations (he felt Germany pre-eminent in this class) as tending to reverse this process, a Maxwell's demon of history. Adams made many attempts to respond to the criticism of his formulation from his scientific colleagues, but the work remained incomplete at Adams' death in 1918. It was published only posthumously.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: David Drew Pinsky (born September 4, 1958), commonly known as Dr. Drew, is an American media personality, internist, and addiction medicine specialist. He hosted the nationally syndicated radio talk show "Loveline" from the show's inception in 1984 until its end in 2016. On television, he hosted the talk show "Dr. Drew On Call" on HLN and the daytime series "Lifechangers" on The CW. In addition, he served as producer and starred in the VH1 show "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew", and its spinoffs "Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew", "Celebrity Rehab Presents Sober House". Pinsky currently hosts several podcasts, including "The Dr. Drew Podcast", "This Life with Dr. Drew", "Dr. Drew After Dark" on the Your Mom's House network, and "The Adam and Drew Show" with his former "Loveline" co-host Adam Carolla.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: Pinsky is a former staff member at the Department of Chemical Dependency Services at Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena, California, and Huntington Memorial Hospital. He currently maintains a private internal medicine practice in South Pasadena.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: Pinsky was born in 1958 in Pasadena, California, to a Jewish family. His father, Morton Pinsky (1926–2009), was a physician whose parents immigrated to the United States from Ukraine. His mother, Helene Stanton (née Eleanor Mae Stansbury; 1925–2017), was a singer and actress who came from a "highly Victorian upper-middle-class family in Philadelphia".


title: Drew Pinsky

text: After graduating from Polytechnic School in 1976, Pinsky studied biology at Amherst College, graduating in 1980 with a Bachelor of Science. He then attended the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, graduating in 1984 with a Doctor of Medicine degree. He served his residency in internal medicine at USC County Hospital and became chief resident at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, and later moved into private practice.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: As "The New York Times" described it in February 2008, Pinsky's dual career in medicine and the mass media has required him to "navigat[e] a precarious balance of professionalism and salaciousness."


title: Drew Pinsky

text: In 1984, while still a medical student, Pinsky started appearing in "Ask a Surgeon", a segment of a Sunday night KROQ-FM show hosted by Jim "Poorman" Trenton and "Swedish" Egil Aalvik. "Ask the Surgeon" soon combined with "Loveline", another Sunday night segment, into a show of its own, co-hosted by Trenton and Pinsky. "Loveline" went national in 1995, and the television version launched on MTV the following year, hosted by Pinsky and Adam Carolla.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: The exposure on both radio and television made Pinsky the "Gen-X answer to Ruth Westheimer [Dr. Ruth], with an AIDS-era, pro-safe-sex message." The MTV show ran for four years, while the radio show continued until April 2016 with cohost Mike Catherwood.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: On November 27, 2007, Pinsky began "Dr. Drew Live", another nationally syndicated talk radio show where he focused on a wider range of health issues. It originated from KGIL in Los Angeles, originally airing weekdays from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm PT The show was canceled in December 2008.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: On January 5, 2015, Pinsky launched a new weekday program, "Dr. Drew Midday Live with Mike Catherwood," on KABC in Los Angeles. Leeann Tweeden became the co-host of the show starting on January 7, 2019.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: On April 21, 2016, Pinsky announced "Loveline" would wrap up on April 28, 2016. Adam Carolla re-joined him as co-host for the final show.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: Pinsky's first television appearance was as a contestant on "Wheel of Fortune" in 1984, though he did not win. He also served as "health and human relations expert" on the first season of the U.S. TV series "Big Brother" in 2000.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: He has also hosted several shorter educational television series, starting with "Strictly Sex with Dr. Drew", which ran for 10 episodes on the Discovery Health Channel, followed by Strictly Dr. Drew which addressed everyday health issues. He later hosted the MTV series "Sex...with Mom and Dad" (2008–2009).


title: Drew Pinsky

text: In 2008, Pinsky starred in "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew", a reality television show which involves celebrities in a drug rehabilitation facility. The show was filmed at Pasadena Recovery Center, with Pinsky serving as the resident medical expert. The series premiered January 10, 2008 on VH-1 and was renewed for multiple seasons. A follow-up show to "Celebrity Rehab" with many of the same celebrities was "Sober House", which began its first season in January 2009, and included celebrities from the first two seasons of "Celebrity Rehab" continuing their recovery in a sober living facility. In November 2009, Pinsky starred in a spinoff of "Celebrity Rehab", "Sex Rehab with Dr.Drew", which depicted celebrities being treated for sexual addiction over the course of three weeks at the Pasadena Recovery Center.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: In a 2011 episode of Lifechangers, Dr. Drew brought on a 16 year old Courtney Stodden and conducted an on-air ultrasound of her breasts to prove Stodden's claim they didn't have plastic surgery. The ultrasound was conducted by Dr. John Diaz, a plastic surgeon.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: Pinsky makes guest appearances on various news programs where he usually gives his observations on the relationship between controlled substances and high-profile individuals. He has frequently given his views on the deaths of people such as Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson, arguing that their fates should set examples of the seriousness of misusing drugs.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: Pinsky has acted in several TV appearances (either portraying himself or a fictional character), "Space Ghost Coast to Coast", "Dawson's Creek", "Family Guy". "The Adam Carolla Project", "Minoriteam", "Robot Chicken", "My Gym Partner's a Monkey", "Code Monkeys", and "The Midnight Gospel". Pinsky also appeared in the films "New York Minute" and "Wild Hogs".


title: Drew Pinsky

text: In early 2011, Pinsky began hosting his own show, "Dr. Drew On Call" on HLN that focuses on news involving health and addiction topics. On August 26, 2016, HLN and Pinsky announced that the show's last episode would be September 22 of that year.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: Between February to March 2020, Pinsky made a series of statements concerning the COVID-19 outbreak where he downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic, stating that it was not as bad as the flu, and suggested that it was a "press-induced panic". Pinsky apologized in April 2020, and he urged people to follow the advice of Anthony Fauci.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: Pinsky has raised concerns for several years regarding homelessness in Los Angeles County and has been critical of how the government has handled it, stating, "For some reason, the government has taken the position that this is a housing problem, which, of course, housing is a piece of this, but for most—and by most I mean the vast majority of people on the streets—their condition makes them unwilling or unwanting to go indoors. So, even when they correct the housing issue, they’re still going to have the same problem on the streets." He has also been critical of certain aspects of the Lanterman–Petris–Short Act, in that it limits the ability of authorities to intervene when mentally ill persons are at risk of death due to being unable to care for their own needs. Pinsky said in an interview that he had correctly predicted a typhus outbreak in 2019 that occurred in the county as a result of rodents attracted to homeless encampments.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: Pinsky was nominated to a local Los Angeles homeless commission by Kathryn Barger, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in April 2021. He faced criticism from local homeless right advocates and a Twitter campaign. While supervisor appointments to local boards are rarely controversial, more than 100 people submitted public comments asking supervisors not to approve Pinsky. The board received less than five public comments in support of his nomination. Critics claimed that Pinsky had overreported the number of homeless people with mental illnesses or substance abuse disorders. Others, such as homeless advocate and charity leader Rev. Andy Bales, defended Pinsky and called the hashtag campaign and public commenting an "echo chamber". Pinsky's nomination was ultimately withdrawn.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: In 1999, Pinsky co-founded an Internet-based community and advice site for teenagers called DrDrew.com with Curtis Giesen. Among their early backers was Garage.com. DrDrew.com soon ran out of funding, and the company was sold to Sherwood Partners Inc., a corporate restructuring firm, which sold the remnants to DrKoop.com in November 2000. Pinsky re-acquired the site circa 2013 and began using it for general information about his books, radio and TV shows, as well as hosting his independent podcast, "The Dr. Drew Podcast". In September 2012, Pinsky announced on "The Adam Carolla Show" that he will be doing a podcast on the Carolla Digital network.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: In 2003, Pinsky authored "Cracked: Putting Broken Lives Together Again," recounting his experiences as the medical director of the Department of Chemical Dependency Services at the Las Encinas Hospital drug rehabilitation clinic in Pasadena, California. He also contributed to the book "When Painkillers Become Dangerous: What Everyone Needs to Know About OxyContin and Other Prescription Drugs," published in 2004.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: In addition to his media appearances, Pinsky speaks at college campuses and other public venues. When Adam Carolla and Pinsky were teamed as hosts of "Loveline", Carolla and Pinsky spoke at colleges.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: Pinsky was the voice of 1-800-GET-THIN, advocating lap band surgery on radio ads and in a recording played for those who called 1-800-GET-THIN.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: In early 2019, Pinsky started an online podcast "Dr Drew after Dark”. The podcast is hosted at Tom Segura's studio "Studio Jeans".


title: Drew Pinsky

text: On September 10, 2020, it was announced that Dr. Drew Pinsky joined Aditx Therapeutics as Senior Advisor to AditxtScore for Scoring the Immune System. In October, he first appeared on the "Frenemies" podcast, and appeared on the podcast again in December.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: Pinsky was honored with the Larry Stewart Leadership and Inspiration Award at the 12th Annual PRISM Awards in 2008.


title: Drew Pinsky

text: Pinsky married on July 21, 1991, and he and his wife, Susan Sailer, had triplets Douglas, Jordan, and Paulina in November 1992.