The Guatemalan Coup

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

Tags: Interventionism, Cronyism and Corporatism, War and Foreign Policy

09/03/2026 Murray N. Rothbard

After Arbenz nationalized uncultivated United Fruit holdings, Eisenhower assigned the CIA a counter-revolution. Rothbard maps the interlocking boards behind it—Sullivan and Cromwell, the Schroder bank, International Railways of Central America—and the Council on Foreign Relations study group whose report hinted that drastic action would be necessary.

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.