Guatemala, 1953 — military coup attempt
Event Summary
At dawn on 29 March 1953 roughly 100 anticommunist rebels assaulted the town of Salama, capital of Baja Verapaz, and neighboring San Jeronimo in a poorly organized attempt to spark an uprising against the reformist government of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala. The raid was crushed by around six in the morning by army forces that arrived from Coban, and the government captured weapons and prisoners. Coming just as Arbenz was pressing the Decree 900 agrarian reform that had begun expropriating idle United Fruit Company land, the Salama incident triggered a wave of government prosecution of anticommunist elements.
Arbenz publicly charged that the United States was complicit in the affair, a claim dismissed in the American press; scholars have since identified the raid as an early CIA linked operation, and its planner Juan Cordova Cerna later fled to join Castillo Armas before the 1954 overthrow.
Researched Details
Researched
Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.
Sources
Editorial Note
Cross-Reference
Only one dataset carries it. One of the three reference datasets we check against carries this event; the others do not list it. That is not a contradiction — the datasets cover different periods and use different thresholds — but it means the record has had less outside corroboration.
Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:
- Cline Center id
09003291953
How the match is made is described in crossref-report.md.
Outcome and Target
Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: President Jacobo Arbenz survived the Salama assault unharmed; he was overthrown only in the 1954 coup.
Baseline coding: Coup attempt failed to remove the incumbent. Recorded leader fate: remained in office; not physically harmed. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.
Baseline Dataset Citation
Baseline Source-Document Entries
South China Morning Post
New York Times
Chicago Daily Tribune
This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →