A coup in Guatemala, launched on 18 June 1954, deposed the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz(pictured in mural). The result of a covert operation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it ended the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944–54, a period of representative democracy and liberal reform. The U.S. government was motivated by a Cold War predisposition to assume Árbenz was a communist, and by lobbying from the United Fruit Company for his overthrow. The CIA, authorized in August 1953 by Dwight Eisenhower to carry out the operation, armed, funded, and trained a force of 480 men led by Carlos Castillo Armas. Most of the offensives of the invasion force were repelled, but a heavy campaign of psychological warfare and the possibility of a U.S. invasion intimidated the Guatemalan army, which eventually refused to fight. Árbenz resigned on 27 June, and Castillo Armas became president ten days later, the first in a series of authoritarian rulers in the country. The coup was widely criticized internationally, and contributed to long-lasting anti-U.S. sentiment in Latin America. (Full article...)
... that Cephalotes caribicus worker ants had semitransparent expansions on their bodies, possibly for protection?
... that Jennie Anderson Froiseth, an anti-polygamy crusader during the 1800s, published a book about the experiences of women in polygamous marriages?
A portrait of a red-legged seriema (Cariama cristata), a mostly predatory terrestrial bird in the seriema family (Cariamidae). Found in South America, its range covers grasslands from Brazil to Uruguay and northern Argentina. This bird is also known as the crested seriema for the soft feathers that emerge from the base of the bill to form a fan-shaped crest.
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