1954 Guatemalan Coup d’état

The 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état was a covert operation organized by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the democratically-elected President of Guatemala.

Árbenz’s government put forth a number of new policies, such as seizing and expropriating unused, unfarmed land that private corporations set aside long ago and giving the land to peasants. The U.S. intelligence community deemed such plans communist in nature. This led CIA director Allen Dulles to fear that Guatemala would become a “Soviet beachhead in the western hemisphere”. Dulles’ concern reverberated within the CIA and the Eisenhower administration, in the context of the anti-communist fears of the McCarthyist era.

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Operation 40

Operation 40 was a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored undercover operation in the early 1960s, which was active in the United States and the Caribbean (including Cuba), Central America, and Mexico. It was created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in March 1960, after the January 1959 Cuban Revolution, and was presided over by Vice-president Richard Nixon. The group included Frank Sturgis (who would later become one of the Watergate burglars); Felix Rodriguez (a CIA officer who later was involved in the capture and summary execution of Che Guevara); Luis Posada Carriles (held in the US in 2010 on charges of illegal immigration, he is demanded by Venezuela for his key role in the execution of the 1976 Cubana Flight 455 bombing); Orlando Bosch (founder of the counterrevolutionary Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, that organized the 1976 murder of Chilean former minister Orlando Letelier); Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero; Virgilio Paz Romero; Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz; Bernard Barker; Porter Goss; and Barry Seal. Members took part in the April 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion directed against the government of Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.

Operation 40 had 86 employees in 1961, of which 37 were trained as case officers.

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Tutelary Spirit

A tutelary (also tutelar) is a deity or spirit who is a guardian, patron or protector of a particular place, geographic feature, person, lineage, nation, culture or occupation. Both tutelary and tutelar can be used as either a noun or an adjective. An analogous concept in Christianity is the patron saint, or to a lesser degree guardian angel.

One type of tutelary deity is the genius, the personal deity or daimon of an individual from birth to death. Pierre A. Riffard defines a tutelary spirit as either the genius (present since birth) or a familiar spirit.

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