Via the BBC: Guatemala electing new president

Guatemalans are voting in presidential and parliamentary elections after one of the bloodiest campaigns in the country’s history.

More than 50 candidates, activists and their relatives have been murdered in the run-up to the elections.

[…]

Guatemala is still suffering the after-effects of the 1960-1996 civil war between leftist rebels and successive military governments, which left nearly a quarter of a million people dead or missing.

Which, sadly, also means that Guatemala is suffering the after-effects of the 1954 coup against the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz–a coup that was sponsored by the CIA in response to fears that Arbenz was too cozy with communists and because his government had expropriated a large amount of land that had been owned by the United Fruit Company (upon whose Board of Directors served Allen Dulles, brother to then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles).

The CIA trained and provided equipment to Guatemalan dissidents who ousted Arbenz and installed a new president. A great deal of instability ensued from that point. While the general instability was not created by the US-sponsored coup, it substantially inflamed it. Arbenz had been the second president freely elected in a row after an earlier coup has ousted a military dictator.

The Guatemalan coup was, by the way, the model for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion to oust Castro.